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Allos, the Word Thief: Channeling Carlos Bulosan

Allos, the Word ThiefChanneling Carlos Bulosan

I HAVE to confess again, or perhaps you may have already guessed: My eldest brother and his wife were never stoned and horsewhipped by an angry mob from our barrio on their wedding night. No one in Barrio Mangusmana owned a horse, much less a whip. Barrio Mangusmana, where I was born, is just another insignificant pocket of humanity and aridity in the equally obscure town of Binalonan, Pangasinan. Its poverty was all too common and made it further indistinguishable from other dusty hells. What possessed me to claim that our wedding customs were unique to this Godforsaken place? But then in art as in the circus, cruelty and absurdity are preferable to the dull and the ordinary.

For the American readers who can afford to buy books, want to see savages with thorns embedded in their foreskins and barbarous customs that just affirmed how very primitive we are after all. They longed for local color and so I obliged. I saw their secret shameful desires in those watery blue eyes that flinched every time I opened my mouth to speak, unless it was just to say “Yes, Ma’am” or “Right away, Sir.” Anything more evinced wary embarrassed surprise, even distaste.

—Heavens to Betsy—it speaks English.

—Where did you pick up that vocabulary, you uppity Flip?

—You mean the public library is open to goo-goos?

—You better watch your black tongue, boy.

—You savages better go back where you came from—after you clean the toilets and take out the trash.

At the very least, I was a curiosity: It was almost as amazing as having a talking dog, or better yet, a chimpanzee. After all, we come from a race of monkeys that have no tails. Here was a servant who had aspirations, God forbid, who might not know his place. What a bore! It was the white man’s burden all over again to put him back in it—his place, I mean.

Because like a good servant, I always aimed to please, on my brother’s wedding night, I decreed that our entire barrio would surround the humble grass hut where he and his bride would consummate their marriage. Outside the rough shelter, everyone in Barrio Mangusmana watches and waits. They are so enraptured by the joining of two of their ilk, that they forget everything else. They forego further merry-making, music and dance. They leave the last crisps of steamed rice, softened by the succulent drippings of a vinegary pork stew, untouched at the bottoms of clay pots. They give up such rarely tasted gustatory pleasures for the privilege of standing outside the newlyweds’ hut. They have not grown inured to the couplings of farm animals, or even of their own kith and kin, entangled beneath a thread-bare blanket, on the same banig. I am one of eight children myself, so I know of what I speak. Our nipa hut had only one room and our parents always slept in our midst. Privacy is such a Western concept. Is it only for the faint-of-heart, for the overly cultivated and pallid milquetoasts who cannot look upon the nakedness and naturalness of life without feeling the shame of those who have been cast out of Eden? Fig leaves don’t grow in the Philippines.

And so I have turned these rude wedding guests of Barrio Mangusmana to stone. They stand stock still and strain to catch the faintest sigh of pleasure or of pain, escaping through the flimsy sawali walls. Further, I have ordained that after the first penile thrust, the avid bridegroom must interrupt his conjugal exertions. It is his social obligation, in Barrio Mangusmana alone, to announce to the waiting busybodies outside, the condition of his wife’s hymen.

My brother does this with smoke signals, just like that other kind of Indian. Indio or Indian, we all look alike to the white man anyway—mga tonto, as my Bisayan kababayan would say. Black smoke meant he had deflowered an obscure peasant girl—hurray for him! No smoke meant that she had come without her maidenhead intact, to their marriage mat. For deceiving him, we could return her to her parents, like so much damaged goods. She was doomed thereafter to eternal dishonor and spinsterhood.

In my false memory of things that never were, the stolid neighbors of Barrio Mangusmana storm my brother’s hut. They drag his false bride out and tie her to a guava tree. The sunburned women spit in her eyes and tear off her clothes, calling her shameful names. My father, a feckless bystander, awake long past his bedtime, is knocked down and trampled upon too. My brother, with bloodied face, impassionedly flings himself upon his frail bride. He covers her bruised body with his own, and the whips fall upon him instead.

And again if you were paying attention, you might wonder, why would anyone in Barrio Mangusmana own a whip? To flog the phantom horses? But the frenzied mob’s shouting becomes deafening, drowning out the duplicitous bride’s cries. Then suddenly, the crowd goes away, angry but spent. Perhaps they were sated with the unaccustomed feasting. They might have been drunk on tuba or basi.

Except that none of this ever happened. No one in Barrio Mangusmana ever cared about a lowly peasant girl’s hymen glory. She could have lost that expendable membrane while straddling a carabao or playing luksong tinik. It’s a silly conceit to believe that such an obviously popish ritual, with smoke and collective anticipation, would involve the lusty, but more often perfunctory animal intertwinings of our kind. We are not the salt of the earth but its dust.

Still we like to remind those thin-lipped Presbyterian preachers and Conservative Southern Baptists that we are the only Catholic country in Asia. God bless them for bringing sewer lines and the Queen’s English to the Philippines, but not to Barrio Mangusmana, not in my time at least. Our excretory processes like our copulatory practices were so natural as not to be deserving of comment or of fanfare, except on the pages of the New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post. What a hoot that they paid me good money to write about such things!

My brother and his sweetheart did marry after a fashion, but there was no feasting for three days and nights with the entire village, as I had claimed with anthropological sounding jibber-jabber and a sweetly primitive literary style. And I got away with it for a while.

We had no property in the town of Binalonan except for a little wooden house with a thatched roof and a few hectares of rice land. My parents’ homestead was so meager that after they died, there was not even one hectare to leave to each child, for their offspring far outnumbered their small holdings. Like so many peasants, they were more fecund than provident.

My sister-in-law was from a poor village too and had hired herself out to one of the more prosperous farmers in the valley. Her parents had delivered her to our doorstep. They had walked, taking turns carrying her small bundle of belongings amongst the three of them. There were no horses in their village either. There was no public feast to speak of for the joining in matrimony of two mere farm-hands, which was all that my brother and his sunburned, sinewy bride were. There was no money for them to face the parish priest of Binalonan, much less to make it worth his while to come over to Barrio Mangusmana so they could be wed in Catholic rites.

My new sister-in-law helped my mother to cook the tinolang manok and dingengdeng for that one meal that we shared with her parents as two families. Two scraggly chickens—that was all the celebration we had. Like Padre Damaso in Rizal’s novel, the neck was my portion. I was the youngest son and a fall from a coconut tree had nearly crippled me. The little labor I did on our farm did not entitle me to much meat. It was a quiet meal eaten in near silence. Peasants are not much for scintillating conversation, the bon mot or even the mot just. How I wish I could even pronounce those words, but at least I can spell them. I write better than I speak.

The morning after her first night as my brother’s wife, my sister-in-law swept the yard and washed our clothes. Tedium and drudgery, punctuated by the ever present pangs of hunger and terrifying bouts of illness caused by the unseen, were our daily lot. These would not have made a worthwhile story at all. No one would pay to read about them then. It was necessary to draw blood and create a spectacle.

One writer has described our existence as the idiocy of peasant life—the sameness repeated over and over, and to what end? He was not to the peasantry born, but for the exception of the hours I spent reading while I waited to die in the county hospital ward, after having half of my tuberculous lungs excised, the peasant’s and his alter ego, the factory worker’s existence are the only lives I have ever known.

Is this why characters in my memoir come and go with the persistence and fungibility of mushrooms after a rain? Note that last attempt at a pun. As numerous and insignificant as spores, we were blown about hither and thither, wherever the harvests and the farm labor recruiters were: from San Bernardino to Glendale to Stockton. Our earth brown skin turned the color of mud so that we were indistinguishable even to one another and in my imagination, I fancied every man was my brother.

“HERE is a little Pinoy who looks just like a rabbit.”

Those peach-fuzzed American ladies with their lightly furred limbs, they thought I was so cute. I smelled good too, even better than many of them in our natural state, though this heightened sensitivity to odors has been considered another indication of our primitiveness as a race.

In my prime, I stood all of five feet tall in my Florsheim shoes and was a trim 85 pounds which was twelve pounds less than Charles Atlas’s proverbial 97-pound weakling. Still I cut a dashing figure in my blue serge suit, bought in the boys’ section, that is true. But I was not less of a man for being miniscule in size as my peach-fuzzed, fur-haloed ladies would attest. A boyhood fall from a coconut tree had left me lame. I walked with a limp but on Saturday nights, this did not matter.

All the grace had moved to my fingertips, which flew as they picked asparagus, oranges, cauliflower, sugar beets. The grocery list of all the good things that are in the white man’s larder, that feed his corpulence, passed through my quick brown hands. I had never seen so much food in my entire boyhood in the Philippines. For I was only a boy when I left, and it was in America that I came into manhood.

To eat with one’s fingers at a diner meant to risk being thrown out. Even the coloreds who we shared the lunch counters with, despised this Malay practice. In our shared quarters though, on the rare days when we had rice, we honored our far away country’s memory with every bolus of sticky grains and fried fish. With what relish did I crunch the anchovy and herring heads. They were all the more delicious as they came for free since the white man considered them offal, just more trash for the houseboy to carry out.

A reason many landlords don’t want to rent to Filipinos is because of the way we eat. The other tenants complained about the pervasive odor of fried fish and shuddered to think that we ate the heads, not only of fish, but also of shrimps. The makings of our feasts belonged in the refuse heap of the farmer’s market of what passed for civilization. I have eaten some mighty fine peaches in the United States and not all of them grew on trees.

There were nights that I was so tired from working in the fields, my hands trembled and it was all I could do to grip the hard spoon and bring the tasteless mush that fueled our bodies for yet another day’s labor to my lips. But to hold a pen meant to hold on to life. Even with half my lungs cut out, I wanted to keep on breathing.

On such nights, as I lay in my cot, I longed for the salt and tang of my boyhood boggoong and dreamt of my mother teaching my little sister how to pick out the tiny pebbles and bits of chaff from the slender rice grains that would make up most of our meal. This was rice that my brothers and my father had grown and harvested. The flavorful boggoong my mother had so presciently prepared and stored in earthen jars, would flavor the rice and satisfy our hunger during the many days when there was nothing else to complete our meal. At times, I awakened smelling the fragrance of my father’s rice, but the salt taste in my mouth was not of boggoong but of tears, for I would never see my mother again, or ever taste my father’s rice, except in my dreams.

In America, I too learned to wield a knife and fork like one to the manor born. What would my parents have made of me, delicately eating snow peas in this alien way? How would their own gnarled, twisted hands, the fingers splayed and blunted, worn shiny smooth with toil, have managed such a cunning trick? My poor mother would have marveled at me. Her simple soul had always longed for beauty and refinement, throughout her lowly labors, and the many humiliations that she had endured. Would she have smiled at my skill in feeding myself like a white man, her dark lips trembling with joy and sorrow?

A knife and a fork kept us even farther apart. To her, joy and sorrow had so often been one and the same thing, each coming so closely after the other that they might as well be together. This shifting uncertainty and unspeakable intermingling, touches all my memories of her, though I was a mere boy when I last saw her and we would probably have little to speak of together if we were ever to meet again. Her dull recitations of relatives birthed, sickened, wedded, then dead, would be as meaningless as the Book of Numbers, my least favorite book in the Bible which neither of my parents had ever read. Religion belonged to the rich of Barrio Mangusmana, who could dress up to go to church.

My childish promises to my mother still grate on my ear and make my heartstrings twist in shame: I would become a doctor so she need never fear that she would lose one of her children again; I would buy a big house in America and take her and my father and my younger sisters there to live with me; some day, all my mother’s sons and their children would come home again to be with her and we would never be hungry again till the end of our days.

My father’s unwitnessed death was the turning point of my life. I had tried to keep my faith in America but now I could do so no longer. It was broken, trampled upon, driving me out into the dark nights with a gun in my hand. I was silent, but not for lack of words. My folks in Barrio Mangusmana have been silent too, never ever having learned to read, and barely able to write their names.

I can never go back home to that dreary, shrunken shack on a stony plot, irrigated with my father’s blood, sown with the betrayal of our social betters. Theirs was a bitter harvest of seasonal abasement and disappointment and magnifying dearth. Here in America, I was as tiny and as insignificant as a louse living in the shallow fissure of a skyscraper.

Sometimes, I grow sentimental through the distance of those years, but I know that my life in Barrio Mangusmana, had been too small to float the vessel of my desires. In America, I can dream. I can dream as big as I want to.

There were those rare Saturday nights, when in a borrowed white sharkskin suit, I ruled the dancehalls with the best of them. I was as suave and as graceful as Fred Astaire with his brilliantined hair. The limp was an added syncopation to my own dance, as charming as my accent. Ten cents a dance when you earn less than a dollar a day might seem a fortune but it is a small price to pay for a moment’s fleeting glory. As you dance for the first time, the world is like a cradle on the biggest ocean in the universe. There are no other sounds except the beating of your hearts. But when the wild blaring of the trumpets and the savage boom boom of the drums bring you back to reality, you get scared and begin to misstep and falter. My fear was born of my early poverty, but it was also the nebulous force that drove me frantically towards my goal.

Still there was a tenderness in the smile of the strawberry blonde poised elegantly in my arms. I was her son, brother and lover under the heated strings of colored lights. In the daylight, we might not even know each other. We would pass each other by on the streets. It was better that way. If she read, she might read my poetry some day, recognize me and remember my name. You must remember my name.

For Discussion

The writer Carlos Bulosan was one of the first Filipino overseas contract workers. It was almost 100 years ago when he worked as a farm laborer and a factory worker in the United States. What do you think are the difficulties for Filipinos who must live and work in foreign countries? Is it better to be jobless or under-employed but living with your family in the Philippines or to be lonely but employed in a strange land?