Two weeks already she had stayed in the
hunt on the precipice, alone except for the visits of her husband. Carlos came
regularly once a day and stayed three or four hours, but his visits seemed to
her too short and far between. Sometimes, after he had left and she thought she
would be alone again, one or the other of the neighbors came up unexpectedly, and right away those
days became different, or she became different in a subtle but definite way.
For the neighbors caused a disturbed balance in her which was relieving and
necessary. Sometimes it was one of the women, coming up with some fruits,
papayas, perhaps, or wild ink berries, or guavas. Sometimes the children, to
grind her week’s supply of corn meal in the cubbyhole downstairs. Their chirps
and meaningless giggles broke the steady turn of the stone grinder, scraping to
a slow agitation the thoughts that had settled and almost hardened in the
bottom of her mind. She would have liked it better if these visits were longer,
but they could not be; for the folks came to see her, yet she couldn’t come to
them, and she, a sick woman, wasn’t really with her when they sat there with
her. The women were uneasy in the hut and she could say nothing to the
children, and it seemed it was only when the men came to see her when there was
the presence of real people. Real people, and she real with them.
As when old
Emilio and Sergio left their carabaos standing in the clearing and crossed the
river at low tide to climb solemnly up the path on the precipice, their faces
showing brown and leathery in the filtered sunlight of the forest as they
approached her door. Coming in and sitting on the floor of the eight-by-ten hut
where she lay, looking at her and chewing tobacco, clayey legs crossed easily,
they brought about them the strange electric of living together, of showing one
to another lustily across the clearing, each driving his beast, of riding the
bull cart into the timber to load dead trunks of firewood, of listening in a screaming
silence inside their huts at night to the sound of real or imagined shots or
explosions, and mostly of another kind of silence, the kid that bogged down
between the furrows when the sun was hot and the soils stony and the breadth
for words lay tight and furry upon their tongues. They were slow of words even
when at rest, rousing themselves to talk numbingly and vaguely after long
periods of chewing.
Thinking to
interest her, their talk would be of the women’s doings, soap-making and the
salt project, and who made the most coconut oil that week, whose dog has caught
sucking eggs from whose poultry shed, show many lizards and monkeys they
trapped and killed in the corn fields and yards around the four houses.
Listening to them was hearing a remote story heard once before and strange
enough now to be interesting again. But it was last two weeks locatable in her
body, it was true, but not so much a real pain as a deadness and heaviness
everywhere, at once inside of her as well as outside.
When the far
nasal bellowing of their carabaos came up across the river the men rose to go,
and clumsy with sympathy they stood at the doorstep spiting out many casual
streaks of tobacco and betel as they stretched their leave by the last remarks.
Marina wished for her mind to go on following them down the cliff to the river
across the clearing, to the group of four huts on the knoll where the smoke
spiraled blue glints and grey from charcoal pits, and the children chased
scampering monkeys back into forested slopes only a few feet away. But when the
men turned around the path and disappeared they were really gone, and she was
really alone again.
From the
pallet where she lay a few inches from the door all she could set were the tops
of ipil trees arching over the damp humus soil of the forest, and a very small
section of the path leading from her hut downward along the edge of the
precipice to the river where it was a steep short drop of fifteen or twenty
feet to the water. They used a ladder on the bushy side of the cliff to climb
up and don the path, let down and drawn up again, and no one from the outside
the area could know of the secret hut built so close to the guerilla
headquarters. When the tide was low and then water drained toward the sea, the
river was shallow in some parts and the ladder could be reached by wading on a
pebbly stretched to the base of the cliff. At high tide an outrigger boat had
to be rowed across. They were fortunate to have the hiding place, very useful
to them whenever they had to flee from their hut on the knoll below, every time
a Japanese patrol was reported by the guerillas to be prowling around the
hills.
Two weeks
ago, in the night, they had fled up to the forest again, thinking a patrol had
penetrated. Marina remembered how she and Flavia and
Flavia’s daughter had groped their way up to the precipice behind their faster
neighbors, how the whole of that night the three of them had cowered in this
dark hut while all around monkeys gibbered in the leaves, and pieces of voices
from the guerillas on the river pieced into the forest like thin splintered
glass. And all the time the whispered talk of their neighbors crouched in the
crevices of the high rocks above them floated down like echoes of the whispers
in her own mind. Nobody knew the reason for the harm sounded by headquarters
unto the next morning when Carlos and two other guerillas paddled around the
river from camp and had told everyone to come down from their precipice and
return to the huts; it was not enemy troops but the buys chasing after the
Japanese prisoner who had escaped.
Following
the notice of Carlos, old Emilio and others went back to the knoll the day
after the alarm. She had stayed, through two weeks now. Sick and paralyzed on
one side, she had to stay where she was a liability to no one in case of
danger. She had to stay until the Japanese prisoner was caught, and if he had
been able to slip across the channel to Cebu and a Japanese invasion of this guerilla
area was instigated, she would be safe in this hideout.
Listening
closely for several nights, she had learned to distinguish the noises made by
the monkey in the tree nearest her door. She was sure the tree had only one
tenant, a big one, because the sounds it made were unusually heavy and
definite. She would hear a precise rustle, just as if it shifted once in its
sleep and was quiet again, or when the rustling and the grunts were continuous
for a while, she knew it was looking for a better perch and muttering at its
discomfort. Sometimes there were precipitate rubbing sounds and a thud and she
concluded it accidentally slipped and landed on the ground. She always heard it
arrive late at night, long after the forest had settled down. Even now as she lay
quietly, she knew the invisible group of monkeys had begun to come, she knew
from the coughing that started from far up to the slope, sound like wind on the
water, gradually coming downward.
She must
have been asleep about four hours when she awoke uneasily, aware of movements
under the hut. Blackness had pushed into the room, heavily and moistly, sticky
damp around her eyes, under her chin and down the back of her neck, where it
prickled like fine hair creeping on end. Her light had burned out. Something
was fumbling at the door of the compartment below the floor, where the supply
of rice and corn was stored in tall bins. The door was pushed and rattled
cautiously, slow thuds of steps moved around the house. Whatever it was, it
circled the hut once, twice and stop again to jerk at the door. It sounded like
a monkey, perhaps the monkey in the tree, trying to break in the door to the
corn and rice. It seemed to her it took care not to pass the stairs, retracing
its steps to the side of the hut each time so she could not see it through her
open door. Hearing the sounds and seeing nothing, she could not see it through
her open door. Hearing the sounds and seeing nothing, she felt it imperative
that she should see the intruder. She set her face to the long slit at the base
of the wall and the quick chilly wind came at her like a whisper suddenly flung
into her face. Trees defined her line vision, merged blots that seemed to
possess life and feeling running through them like thin humming wires. The
footsteps had come from the unknown boundary and must have resolved back into
it because she could not hear them anymore. She was deciding the creature had
gone away when she saw a stooping shape creep along the wall and turn back,
slipping by so quickly she could deceive herself into believing she imagined
it. A short, stooping creature, its footsteps heavy and regular and then
unexpectedly running together as if the feet were fired and sore. She had
suspected the monkey but didn’t feel sure, even seeing the quick shaped she
didn’t feel sure, until she heard the heavy steps turn toward the tree. Then
she could distinguish clearly the rubbing sounds as it hitched itself up the
tree.
She had a
great wish to be back below with the others. Now and then the wind blew momentary
gaps through the leaves and she saw fog from the river below, fog white and
stingy, floating over the four huts on the knoll. Along about ten in the
morning the whole area below would be under the direct that of the sun. The
knoll was a sort of islet made by the river bending into the horseshoe shape;
on this formation of the two inner banks they had made their clearing and built
their huts. On one outer bank the guerilla camp hid in thick grove of
madre-de-cacao and undergrowth and on the other outer bank, the other arm of
the horseshoe, abruptly rose the steep precipice where the secret hut stood.
The families asleep on the knoll were themselves isolated, she thought; they
were as on an island cut off by the water and mountain ranges surrounding them;
shut in with it, each one tossing his thought to the others, no one keeping it
privately, no one really taking a deliberate look at it in the secrecy of his
own mind. In the hut by herself it seemed she must play it out, toss it back
and forth.
Threads of
mist tangled under the trees. Light pricked through the suspended raindrops;
the mind carried up the sound of paddling from the river. In a little while him
distinctly. Neena! Neena! Her name thus exploded through the air by his voice
came like a shock after hours of stealthy noises.
He took the
three rungs of the steps in one stride and was beside her on the floor. Always
he came in a flood of size and motions and she couldn’t see all of him at once.
A smell of stale sun and hard walking clung to his clothes and stung into her;
it was the smell of many people and many places and the room felt even smaller
with him in it. In a quick gesture that had become a habit he touched the back
of his hand on her forehead.
“Good,” he
announced, “no fever.”
With Carlo’s
presence, the room bulged with the sense of people and activity, pointing up
with unbearable sharpness her isolation, her fears, her helplessness.
“I can’t
stay up here,” she told him, not caring anymore whether he despised her
cowardice. “I must go down. There is something here. You don’t know what’s
happening. You don’t know, or you won’t take me stay.”
He looked at
her and then around the room as though her fear squatted there listening to
them.
“It’s the
monkey again.”
“Man or
monkey or devil, I can’t stay up here anymore.”
“Something
must be done,” he said, “this can’t go on.”
“I’ll go
down and be with the others.”
He raised
his head, saying wearily, “I wish that were the best thing, Neena, God knows I
wish it were. But you must go down only when you’re ready. These are critical
days for all of us in this area. If something breaks–the Jap, you know, think
what will happen to you down there, with me at headquarters. You’ve known of
reprisals.”
He looked at
her and his sooty black eyes were like the bottom of a deep drained well. “I
wish I could be here at night. What I’m saying is this: it’s a job you must do
by yourself, since nobody is allowed out of headquarters after dark. That
monkey must be shot or you’re not safe here anymore.”
“You know I
can’t shoot.”
“We are
continuing our lessons. You still remember, don’t you?”
“It was long
ago and it was not really in earnest.”
He inspected
the chambers of the rifle. “You didn’t need it then.”
He put his
life into her hands.
She lifted
it and as its weight yielded coldly to her hands, she said suddenly, “I’m glad
we’re doing this.”
“You
remember how to use the sight?”
“Yes,” and
she could not help smiling a little. “All the o’clock you taught me.”
“Aim it and
shoot.”
She aimed at
a scar on the trunk of the tree near the door, the monkey’s tree. She pressed
on the trigger. Nothing happened. She pressed it again. “It isn’t loaded.”
“It is.”
“The trigger
won’t move. Something’s wrong.”
He took it
from her. “It’s locked, you forgot it as usual.” He put it aside. “Enough now,
you’ll do. But you unlock first. Remember, nothing can ever come out of a
locked gun.”
He left
early in the afternoon, about two o’clock.
Just before
the sundown the monkey came. It swung along the trees along the edge of the
precipice, then leaped down on the path and wandered around near the hut. It
must be very, very hungry, or it would not be so bold. It sidled forward all
the time eying her intently, inching toward the grain room below the stairs. As
it suddenly rushed toward her all the anger of the last two years of war seemed
to unite into one necessity and she snatched up the gun, shouting and
screaming, “Get out! Thief! Thief!”
The monkey
wavered. It did not understand the pointed gun she brandished and it came
forward, softly, slowly, its feet hardly making any sound on the ground. She
aimed, and as it slipped past the stairs and was rounding the corner to the
grain room she fired again and once again, straight into its back.
The loud
explosions resounded through the trees. The birds in the forest flew in
confusion and their high excited chatter floated down through the leaves. But
she did not hear them – the only reality was the twisting, grunting shape near
the stairs and after a minute it was quiet.
She couldn’t
help laughing a little, couldn’t help feeling exhilarated. The black monkey was
dead, it was dead, she had killed it. Strangely, too, she was thinking of the
escaped prisoner that she strangely feared him but was curious about him, and
that now she could think of him openly to herself. She could talk about him
now, she thought. Shoe could talk of him to Carlos and to anybody and not hide
the sneaky figure of him with the other black terrors of her mind.
She realized
that she was still holding the gun. This time, she thought, she had unlocked
it. And with rueful certainty, she knew she could do it again, tonight
tomorrow, whenever it was necessary. The hatter of some monkeys came to her
from a far up in the forest. From that distance, it was vague, a lost sound;
hearing it jarred across her little triumph, and she wished, like someone
lamenting a lost innocence, that she had never seen a gun or fired one.
