1. Short Story - The Tomato Game By Nvm Gonzales La
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• His family founded the NVM Gonzalez Awards for the short story in his honor. Carlos Palanca Memorial Award (Short Story), First Prize for 'The Tomato Game,' 1971. The tomato game by n v m gonzales. Poetry - the march of death by bienvenido santos - to my native land by tarrosa subido short story - my father's.
• “As in myth,” the writer in “The Tomato Game” says, the signs were all over. The wooden bridge, the fork of the road, the large track all around us which earlier had been a tomato field, the rich crop as indicated by the harvesting machine to one side of the field, a menacing hulk. You can see how hard I try.

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The following is Part 2 of an article that originally appeared in The Virginia Quarterly, Vol. 60:1 (Winter 1984): 102-118. (Read Part 1.) Widely considered one of the best single articles on Gonzalez and Philippine culture, it has been widely reprinted, including in a University of the Philippines commemorative box-set of Gonzalez’s work, and in Asian American Writers, a collection by Yale University’s Harold Bloom of what he considered the best 15 contemporary articles on Asian American writing. For more on Philippine culture from a widely different angle, one that contradicts some of Gonzalez’s efforts, go to an article featuring the pop duo of Pops Fernandez and Martin Nievera.

II

A Season of Grace revolves around the contrasting of two couples who live on the island of Mindoro. One couple is Epe and Tiaga Ruda, the establishment, the supervisors, the people of means to whom others become beholden. The other couple is Doro and Sabel Agnas, poor folk who leave the Rudas’ employ to seek a life for themselves on a frontier farm, or kaingin. Their life is hard. Crops often fail: “There was a week when they lived on nothing but mushrooms; and there was the week of the bamboo shoots, which tasted quite all right, pickled in vinegar that Blas Marte’s wife sent over. Still, can one go on that way? The thought was like a temptation. It said further: Leave the clearing for once! And, mouse-like, it gnawed at Sabel’s mind.”

Gonzalez does not at all romanticize their hard lives, yet it is impossible not to sense that, because of the sharing among the poor folk and because of their closeness to the earth, people like Doro and Sabel maintain vital connections to those elemental rhythms

of life that sustain communion and make them more whole. For the Rudas, especially Tiaga, the story is different. They are not portrayed as villains. Rather, because they are unconnected with the earthy rhythms of planting and harvest, they also partake only superficially in real sharing with people. They are lonely, and one notices in Tiaga a growing paranoia which is accompanied by an increasingly frantic rhythm in her movements and speech. In the end, in contrast to Sabel, we also confirm the fact of Tiaga’s physiological infertility as we learn, sadly, of her third miscarriage. A Season of Grace—which consists of a prologue, epilogue, and three long, unnumbered chapters—follows the Rudas, Agnas, and others through just over one cycle of planting and harvest. Yet the feeling of time is expansive, so much so that the Philippine Free Press reviewer described the book as, “…a poem about an island—and so full of myth-making images that it recovers for Mindoro, poor island with a wondrous name—something of the mystery…with which the conquistadores and the early navigators saw it.” This feeling of expansive mythmaking comes largely from those things previously mentioned: Gonzalez’ handling of time, his constant recourse to the memories and dreams and reflections of his characters. It comes, too, from a lyricism in the narrative voice and the speech of the Philippine peasant which laces the story with poetry. Thus the first chapter begins:

“Man and woman were walking one morning in the sun down a trail that cut across the bed of the empty river Alag. The woman carried a baby, using a hammock slung over her shoulder. The cloth was the same piece of chatcha which last night had served as her little one’s blanket. The baby whimpered inside the hammock-pack: the woman couldn’t seem to make him quiet. The man said: ‘Why don’t you fix it, Sabel, so that it will not hurt?’ He wanted to add: ‘Is it heavy like a yoke?’ But he realized that she looked pretty enough with that hammock-pack; it was quite an ornament. ‘Doro,’ the woman said, ‘please have the kindness to wait for us.’ Whereupon Doro stopped and looked back. Without either slowing down or hurrying, Sabel lifted her hammock-pack a little and began rubbing the back of her neck with her palm, hoping is some way perhaps to relieve the strain there. Doro was all the more reminded of the yoke. This had been a carabao’s trail. Now it was a man’s trail. Ferns raised their arched fronds on all sides and a patch of cogon stood now a little way off to the right, waving bright tassels in the sun.”

Or, when Sabel first arrives at a harvest site, we read: “Sabel was about to go when she saw a girl in the hut, seated in the middle of the floor. The girl’s dress had been dyed with tanbark so that it was dark brown, like the thatched wall behind her. Without any shyness, the girl asked: ‘You are Manang Sabel?’ Surprised, Sabel said: ‘Yes. How did you know my name?’ ‘Someone will come from over across the dry bed of the Alag, I was told. Someone with a baby, and she will be called Sabel, they said.’ Sabel pondered for a moment. She liked the girl for being talkative.”

In the first passage the near-Biblical tone quickly gives way to a scene of domestic friction, which in turn alternates with Doro’s reflections, some selfish (“she looked pretty enough”), some which ponder the mythic yoke. We have, too, a restatement of the man-animal-plant hierarchy which Gonzalez had established early in the prologue to give us the feeling, present here, that man and animal make their way through life by the grace of the earth and its vegetation. The color of dress and thatch in the second passage suggests again the man-earth bond, but more noteworthy is the tone of the girl’s reply to Sabel. That tone itself, one feels, might send Sabel searching through her memory. Indeed, she does just this shortly. For now, though, she pauses—ponders—on the verge and is quickly called back by a commonplace: she likes the girl’s “talkativeness.” Such passages abound in A Season of Grace, and most (like the scene of a dream and lovemaking following a day of clearing the fields in chapter three) weave together the domestic and mythic, the memorial and mundane in extraordinarily beautiful and complex ways. In such a stylistic atmosphere so many images become mythmaking, become—or seem on the verge of becoming—transmuted upward into timeless signs that give meaning to history. Whether it is an object (like a coconut), an action (the weaving of buri mats), or a relation (between Filipino manual labor and American mechanical harvesters, for example), one feels in Gonzalez’ work a subtle, gentle, yet monumental retooling of signs for different ends. Let us take, for example, the coconut.

For a multitude of historical, commercial, and geothermal reasons the coconut has long been associated with the Islands. My brother, Jose Enrado, was given (for reasons I could not then fathom) the nickname “Coconut Joe.” And a recent TV commercial tells us that company X is bringing the coconut halfway around the world—“From the Philippines!”—as a guarantor of moist skin. In A Season of Grace its function is less cosmetic. Early in the novel a coconut is found and planted, and though there are other references to it throughout, it is only near the end of the book that its full meaning becomes apparent.

“[Nay Kare] was standing, her feet wet, not more than ten yards from him. The coconut she had picked up looked small in the crook of her arm. Its husk glistened more than ever now that it was out of the water, a rich dark brown that was the color of one’s skin. Doro walked up to her. ‘Will that ever grow, Nay Kare?’ he asked, although what really crossed his mind was: ‘What wind and wave have sent it to this shore?’ ‘Why, yes, of course. You can ask Sabel.’ Her patadiong wet against her breast and hips and legs, Sabel stepped out of the water, saying: ‘Yes, I remember. The one you picked up last time—why, it has sprouts already, I believe. And Doro,’ she assured him, ‘we planted it at once and it grew.’ ‘Soaked in salt water as it was?’ Doro could not believe her…. ‘How else do you think can coconuts go from island to island?’ Nay Kare said. ‘Oh, well, let’s be on our way.'”

Because so much of the book has concerned the poor folk going from clearing to clearing, island to island, working in the saltwater sweat of their brows for whatever the earth will yield, one realizes that the coconut is a metaphor for the Philippine peasant’s survival and growth—but not only that. It is a sign meant to re-vision history by joining together certain qualities of a people with certain other historical facts about that people’s creation. Except for the Negritos (themselves relatives of the natives of the Australian bush), the Philippine people are an amalgam of travelers. A Philippine village, in fact, is called by a name that suggests not settlement, but journey: it is barangay, the name of a coconut-tough little boat on which many arrived from Polynesia, Malaysia, Micronesia, China, the Indian subcontinent. Philippine history, then, is shaped largely by those who arrive. This includes the white man, too, and thus A Season of Grace begins with an epigraph from New Voyage Around the World by the English seaman and pirate William Dampier (1652—1715). “The 18 Day of Feb.” it begins, “we anchored at the N.W. end of the island of Mindora, in 10 Fathom-Water, about 3 quarters of a Mile from the Shore. Mindora is a large island. . . .” “Will that ever grow?” asks Doro. Some travelers come, plant themselves, and grow—some do not, either because they do not really plant, or because, like the corrupt officials in A Season of Grace who take buri mats from Sabel in the beginning and Clara at the end, they are flagrant robbers. Those qualities which do spur growth Gonzalez wants to identify as the spine of Philippine character, the essence of a genuinely native past. They show most clearly, though certainly not without a great deal of tarnish, in the generosity, patience, and nobility of the Philippine peasant. The coconut becomes a mythic sign as it links the qualities of peasant life and the historical origins of Philippine society to its own immemorial travel and endurance of the salty sea. In many quarters of the Southeast Asian world the coconut is, of course, an already sacred sign; what Gonzalez adds to it is a new, pointed historicity. He uses it, that is, to reshape subtly, but significantly, an old story; and thus the fruit of the palm goes beyond even its more significant meanings, to say nothing of the way it surpasses its other familiar function as a sign of the carefree, exotic tropics, of Coconut Joes and luscious complexions. It helps make “natural” that generosity, patience, and nobility which makes more likely the overcoming of the hardships of travel, landing, and growth—or, more important here, the overcoming of colonialism. In a recent lecture at the University of Hawaii, Gonzalez speculated that in terms of the literary imagination the Comic Rhythm might be the best way for the Third World to deal with the historical circumstances of imperialism; for the Comic Rhythm celebrates community, integration, the overcoming of fragmenting alien spirits. A Season of Grace leaves the Rudas inclining toward the Tragic Rhythm, toward loneliness and disintegration. The poor folk, for all their faults and the often desperate straits of their lives, incline toward the comic. In fact, the novel ends with a joke which involves not only a sailing ship but rice, one of the book’s most crucial, mythic signs. In the epilogue Tata Pablo, the first villager we meet in the book’s prologue, is slowly going blind, and his wife, Nay Rosa, searches an old almanac to find an appropriate saint to pray to:

“Nay Rosa, unused to the weight of paper in her hand, could not keep her arm from trembling. ‘Tiempo variable, it says,’ she said. ‘And after the first quarter of the moon, clear skies with light winds from the southwest.’ Tata Pablo blinked his eyes and leaned forward, turning his head a little to one side. ‘Louder.’ ‘I need better light,’ Nay Rosa said moving toward the door. ‘All right. Go on, though. What does it say about the southwest monsoon?’ ‘Nothing more, it seems,’ Nay Rosa said. ‘Can I look now for a name of that saint?’ ‘It’s now a week since the batel came and loaded Epe Ruda’s rajitas.’ ‘Exactly a week. Don’t you think it’s San Juan?’ ‘I don’t know. San Jaun for the blind?—that doesn’t sound familiar,’ the old man said. ‘Was it a big batel?’ ‘With two masts,’ said Nay Rosa. ‘Maybe, it’s San Pablo.’ ‘It seems I can still hear the sound of the pulleys when the men hoisted up their sails,’ Tata Pablo said. ‘It was painted white?’ ‘White, like boiled rice,’ Nay Rosa said, putting down the Almanaque Panayana. ‘Maybe, it’s San Lorenzo.’ ‘You make me hungry—thinking of rice,’ Tata Pablo said. ‘Try another saint.'”

Against the failing of crops, of dreams, even of eyesight, such an attitude is strangely powerful. At its best, Gonzalez’ mythmaking moves to this comic rhythm. It is one of the most steady, hopeful rhythms in Third World literature. The native culture will survive, it seems to say, and by an inner strength that antedates colonialism.

III

Until some enlightened U. S. publisher takes it on, A Season of Grace is available as an inexpensive import from The Cellar Bookshop (in Detroit at 18090 Wyoming). Now at least the University Press of Hawaii is making available Gonzalez’s latest book, Mindoro and Beyond: 21 Stories. In part, the book is a retrospective collection culled from 40 years’ work. It contains some of the Third World’s finest short stories—“Lupo and the River,” “Children of the Ash Covered Loam,” “The Sea Beyond,” “On the Ferry,” “The Wireless Tower,” “The Tomato Game”—and Gonzalez has arranged them not only to reflect a growing range of concern (symbolized by the distance between Mindoro and the U.S.) but also to parallel his abiding interest in the act of storytelling itself. (Coincidentally—or maybe not—the stories also fall roughly in chronological order.) In the book’s preface Gonzalez reproduces this passage from one of his notebooks: “It is because of our access to storytelling that the confusions and the incomprehensible realities round and about do not overwhelm us with despair. We find in due course a way of ordering the experience we go through (as, indeed, others do), and somehow come to understanding Reality as we live it—until swamped once more by fresh confusions and perplexities. Then comes a new surge of hope, and, again for him who must give an account of how things are, a search for form.”

Several of Gonzalez’s characters can be taken as symbols of the artist, the storyteller. Twenty-five years ago Francisco Arcellana singled out this passage from “Lupo and the River” in order to praise Gonzalez’s own craftsmanship: “Lupo taught him [Pisco] how to work the rattan this way and that, never sacrificing pattern for strength, never losing your purpose, and yet taking care to make out of something ordinary a beautiful thing.” Significantly, Sabel, in A Season of Grace, is a mat maker whose habit it is to weave the word Recuerdo—“Remember”—into the center of her design. As she works with buri, so Gonzalez the writer can be seen working words, weaving on the warp and woof of myth and detail stories which declare to his people that there is indeed some unique past, something worth remembering.

Most stories discussed here are available in the U.S. in this book.

Mindoro and Beyond, then, begins with the semiautobiographical “On the Eve,” about a young man’s decision to become a writer, and the book ends with an historical essay on Philippine storytelling, followed by an often whimsical glossary of Philippine terms. As “On the Eve” begins, Greg Padua is a proofreader for Commonwealth Publishing Co. His father is a salesman. Says Padua: “As proofreader, with lines of type before my eyes, or galleys in my hand, my commitment was to the present. It is now rather easy to see things in this light. I stood for the text of the day, Father the pages of tomorrow.” As he moves toward the literary life, however, he realizes, as he says, that “I was transgressing my commitment to the present, that I was in fact making a dubious step to the future, a territory of promises….” One Mr. Campo, as the editor of a company named “Commonwealth” might be expected to do, rebukes Padua’s poetic ambitions. Padua quits his job, as well as his nighttime study of law, and as the story ends is handing his father a folder of his short stories and poems. His father is uncomprehendingly silent, and Padua tells us: “The Chinese fiddle across the street began once more to wring its heart out. Father and I had changed places.” Very early in the story Padua had listened to that fiddle and told us: “My untrained ear could not grasp the melody, which resembled tortured cries and yearnings; but I imagined that it told some enchanting story inspired by the exotic aroma of narra wood and the unarticulated patience of the lives round and about….” It seems as if, in this 1970 story, Gonzalez were summarizing the inspiration, mission, and pattern of growth of virtually his entire literary output. The stories in Mindoro and Beyond, which are grouped in six sections, may in fact be seen as growing in melodic complexity and evocativeness, “On the Eve” comprises Part One. In Part Two are pieces from the late thirties, some of which are more sketches than full-bodied stories. As melodies they are simple, with a folk songlike depth and transparency. In Part Three, given the growing complexity of Gonzalez’ handling of time, the stories begin to resemble a kind of frozen music. And the music darkens. One critic has pointed out that “The Sea Beyond,” which ends Part Three, shows how man, though he may overcome the evil in nature, cannot overcome the evil within himself. Part Four consists of the long story “Serenade,” which ends with the main character, Pilar, contemplating her new piano, “a brooding presence that made the moment alive once more with the music that Pilar knew by heart—‘Love and Devotion,’ ‘Flower Song,’ ‘Poet and Peasant’—music with which she must learn to woo the world into being less harsh and, perhaps, less rude.” (The songs here are highly appropriate to themes which span Gonzalez” entire work.) In Part Five, tensions between and within individuals begin merging more noticeably with the theme of tensions between cultures, especially the culture based more upon the Philippine peasant as opposed to one based upon the Americanized, Hispanized “city.” Yet Part Five ends with “The Wireless Tower,” which paradoxically images both a total breakdown of communication (the tower, a radio tower, has been struck by lightning) and a celebration of the light and dark sides of life—both personal life, and, one presumes, cultural life as well. It is by striving to understand the inextricable entanglements of light and dark, good and evil, victory and concession, that communication might one day be restored. Yet this must surely be the hardest of human tasks.

“Dear Greg” (Greg Padua?), begins “The Tomato Game,” the first story in Part Six: “You must believe me when I say that I’ve tried again and again to write this story.” Two of the six stories in Part Six take place in America, and this setting accentuates virtually every conflict that has appeared thus far in the book. Clearly Gonzalez has had to struggle hard for the momentary victories afforded by art. “As in myth,” the writer in “The Tomato Game” says, “the signs were all over. The wooden bridge, the fork of the road, the large track all around us which earlier had been a tomato field, the rich crop as indicated by the harvesting machine to one side of the field, a menacing hulk…You can see how hard I try.”

This passage puts us in direct contact with Gonzalez’ effort to re-vision history by creating alternate mythic possibilities. Here the mechanical harvester, so devastating to the manual labor in which Filipinos played so large a part, is reshaped into a sign of technology’s inability to eliminate the human factor. It does a bad harvesting job, finally. It is also linked metaphorically to certain unscrupulous Filipinos who engage in bride-selling schemes. Their victim this time is an elderly Filipino who, though victim, rises in character above his conniving compatriots. His generosity, patience, and nobility clearly link him to those people and ancient qualities celebrated in A Season of Grace. It has been Gonzalez’ aim to foster such links through art; and he has realized that one of the greatest obstacles to establishing a nourishing relationship with the past is that that past is, in Robert Frost’s words, so “unstoried, artless, unenhanced.” Or, perhaps, it is just wrongly storied. The problem with the main character in “In the Twilight,” the last story in the book, is that he has lived so long remembering a key incident in his life incorrectly. He literally has the wrong story. A fiddle player in his youth in the Philippines, he is now, in America, “Dan,” a jazz saxophonist. The character through whom he inadvertently learns the truth was a Philippine guerrilla. Now he is a security guard—Union Carbide, night shift—hoping for U.S. citizenship in three years. Such transformations are jarring; they seem too forced for a story otherwise so delicately crafted. Yet such changes, especially in music, seem common among Filipinos in America. “In the Twilight” is a somber echo of “On the Eve,” but even amid darkening sounds and shadows Gonzalez seems to suggest that a more accurate memory of the past would help his people define who they are as a people and thus be less prone to such far strayings and cultural pessimisms. His message is still Recuerdo. But facts take us only so far: we live in a world of contending stories, of myth and counter-myth. What a writer ultimately says is, Remember my vision of our past. This is the great artist’s privilege and obligation. “Unhappily, the spiritual welfare of this country depends upon the fate of its creative minds,” wrote Van Wyck Brooks of the American situation in 1918. “If they cannot grow and ripen, where are we going to get new ideals…Discover, invent a usable past we certainly can, and that is what a vital criticism always does.” Thoughts like these reach obsessive proportions in the Third World, for there artists and critics face baldly redemptive and recreative relationships to native pasts which have been pressed so hard, sometimes so nearly annihilated, by the colonial experience. Fortunately for the Philippines, Gonzalez’ vision—even in its twilight, somber hues—is strong, complex, and daringly hopeful.

Short Story - The Tomato Game By Nvm Gonzales La

—This is the end of the essay. Read Part 1.—

♦ Go HERE for a list of all writings on the Philippines.

Usually I was in bed by ten and up by five and thus was ready for one more day of my fourteenth year. Unless Grandmother had forgotten, the fifteen centavos for the baker down Progreso Street – and how l enjoyed jingling those coins in my pocket!- would be in the empty fruit jar in the cupboard. I would remember then that rolls were what Grandmother wanted because recently she had lost three molars. For young people like my cousins and myself, she had always said that the kind called pan de sal ought to be quite all right.

The bread of salt! How did it get that name? From where did its flavor come, through what secret action of flour and yeast? At the risk of being jostled from the counter by early buyers. I would push my way into the shop so that I might watch the men who, stripped to the waist worked their long flat wooden spades in and out of the glowing maw of the oven. Why did the bread come nut-brown and the size of my little fist? And why did it have a pair of lips convulsed into a painful frown? In the half light of the street and hurrying, the paper bag pressed to my chest I felt my curiosity a little gratified by the oven-fresh warmth of the bread I was proudly bringing home for breakfast.

Well l knew how Grandmother would not mind if I nibbled away at one piece; perhaps, l might even eat two, to be charged later against my share at the table. But that would be betraying a trust and so, indeed, I kept my purchase intact. To guard it from harm, I watched my steps and avoided the dark street comers.

For my reward, I had only to look in the direction of the sea wall and the fifty yards or so of riverbed beyond it, where an old Spaniard’s house stood. At low tide, when the bed was dry and the rocks glinted with broken bottles, the stone fence of the Spaniard’s compound set off the house as if it were a castle. Sunrise brought a wash of silver upon the roofs of the laundry and garden sheds which had been built low and close to the fence. On dull mornings the light dripped from the bamboo screen which covered the veranda and hung some four or five yards from the ground. Unless it was August when the damp, northeast monsoon had to be kept away from the rooms, three servants raised the screen promptly at six-thirty until it was completely hidden under the veranda eaves. From the sound of the pulleys, l knew it was time to set out for school.

It was in his service, as a coconut plantation overseer, that Grandfather had spent the last thirty years of his life. Grandmother had been widowed three years now. I often wondered whether I was being depended upon to spend the years ahead in the service of this great house. One day I learned that Aida, a classmate in high school, was the old Spaniard’s niece. All my doubts disappeared. It was as if, before his death. Grandfather had spoken to me about her. concealing the seriousness of the matter by putting it over as a joke, if now l kept true to the virtues, she would step out of her bedroom ostensibly to say Good Morning to her uncle. Her real purpose. I knew, was to reveal thus her assent to my desire.

Short Story - The Tomato Game By Nvm Gonzales Video

On quiet mornings I imagined the patter of her shoes upon the wooden veranda floor as a further sign, and I would hurry off to school, taking the route she had fixed for me past the post office, the town plaza and the church, the health center east of the plaza, and at last the school grounds. I asked myself whether I would try to walk with her and decided it would be the height of rudeness. Enough that in her blue skirt and white middy she would be half a block ahead and, from that distance, perhaps throw a glance in my direction, to bestow upon my heart a deserved and abundant blessing. I believed it was but right that, in some such way as this, her mission in my life was disguised.

Her name, I was to learn many years later, was a convenient mnemonic for the qualities to which argument might aspire. But in those days it was a living voice. “Oh that you might be worthy of uttering me,” it said. And how l endeavored to build my body so that l might live long to honor her. With every victory at singles at the handball court the game was then the craze at school -I could feel my body glow in the sun as though it had instantly been cast in bronze. I guarded my mind and did not let my wits go astray. In class I would not allow a lesson to pass unmastered. Our English teacher could put no question before us that did not have a ready answer in my head. One day he read Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Sire de Maletroits Door, and we were so enthralled that our breaths trembled. I knew then that somewhere, sometime in the not too improbable future, a benign old man with a lantern in his hand would also detain me in a secret room, and there daybreak would find me thrilled by the sudden certainty that I had won Aida’s hand.

It was perhaps on my violin that her name wrought such a tender spell. Maestro Antonino remarked the dexterity of my stubby fingers. Quickly l raced through Alard-until l had all but committed two thirds of the book to memory. My short, brown arm learned at last to draw the bow with grace. Sometimes, when practising my scales in the early evening. I wondered if the sea wind carrying the straggling notes across the pebbled river did not transform them into Schubert’s “Serenade.”

At last Mr. Custodio, who was in charge of our school orchestra, became aware of my progress. He moved me from second to first violin. During the Thanksgiving Day program he bade me render a number, complete with pizzicati and harmonics.

“Another Vallejo! Our own Albert Spalding!” I heard from the front row.

Aida, I thought, would be in the audience. I looked around quickly but could not see her. As I retired to my place in the orchestra I heard Pete Saez, the trombone player, call my name.

“You must join my band,” he said. “Look, well have many engagements soon, it’ll be vacation time.”

Pete pressed my arm. He had for some time now been asking me to join the Minviluz Orchestra, his private band. All I had been able to tell him was that l had my schoolwork to mind. He was twenty-two. I was perhaps too young to be going around with him. He earned his school fees and supported his mother hiring out his band at least three or four times a month. He now said:

“Tomorrow we play at the funeral of a Chinese-four to six in the afternoon; in the evening, judge Roldan’s silver wedding anniversary; Sunday, the municipal dance.”

My head began to whirl. On the stage, in front of us, the principal had begun a speech about America. Nothing he could say about the Pilgrim Fathers and the American custom of feasting on turkey seemed interesting. I thought of the money I would earn. For several days now l had but one wish, to buy a box of linen stationery. At night when the house was quiet I would fill the sheets with words that would tell Aida how much l adored her. One of these mornings, perhaps before school closed for the holidays, I would borrow her algebra book and there, upon a good pageful of equations, there l would slip my message, tenderly pressing the leaves of the book. She would perhaps never write back. Neither by post nor by hand would a reply reach me. But no matter, it would be a silence full of voices.

That night l dreamed l had returned from a tour of the world’s music centers; the newspapers of Manila had been generous with praise. I saw my picture on the cover of a magazine. A writer had described how, many years ago, I used to trudge the streets of Buenavista with my violin in a battered black cardboard case. In New York, he reported, a millionaire had offered me a Stradivarius violin, with a card that bore the inscription: “In admiration of a genius your own people must surely be proud of.” I dreamed l spent a weekend at the millionaire’s country house by the Hudson. A young girl in a blue skirt and white middy clapped her lily-white hands and, her voice trembling, cried “Bravo!”

What people now observed at home was the diligence with which l attended to my violin lessons. My aunt, who had come from the farm to join her children for the holidays, brought with her a maidservant, and to the poor girl was given the chore of taking the money to the baker’s for rolls and pan de sal. I realized at once that it would be no longer becoming on my part to make these morning trips to the baker’s. I could not thank my aunt enough.

I began to chafe on being given other errands. Suspecting my violin to be the excuse, my aunt remarked:

“What do you want to be a musician for? At parties, musicians always eat last.”

Perhaps, I said to myself, she was thinking of a pack of dogs scrambling for scraps tossed over the fence by some careless kitchen maid. She was the sort you could depend on to say such vulgar things. For that reason, I thought she ought not to be taken seriously at all.

But the remark hurt me. Although Grandmother had counseled me kindly to mind my work at school, l went again and again to Pete Saez’s house for rehearsals.

She had demanded that l deposit with her my earnings; I had felt too weak to refuse. Secretly, I counted the money and decided not to ask for it until l had enough with which to buy a brooch. Why this time I wanted to give Aida a brooch, I didn’t know. But I had set my heart on it. I searched the downtown shops. The Chinese clerks, seeing me so young, were annoyed when I inquired about prices.

At last the Christmas season began. I had not counted on Aida’s leaving home, and remembering that her parents lived in Badajoz, my torment was almost unbearable. Not once had l tried to tell her of my love. My letters had remained unwritten, and the algebra book unborrowed. There was still the brooch to find, but I could not decide on the sort of brooch l really wanted. And the money, in any case, was in Grandmothers purse, which smelled of Tiger Balm.” I grew somewhat feverish as our class Christmas program drew near. Finally it came; it was a warm December afternoon. I decided to leave the room when our English teacher announced that members of the class might exchange gifts. I felt fortunate; Pete was at the door, beckoning to me. We walked out to the porch where, Pete said, he would tell me a secret.

It was about an asalto the next Sunday which the Buenavista Women’s Club wished to give Don Esteban’s daughters, Josefina and Alicia, who were arriving on the morning steamer from Manila. The spinsters were much loved by the ladies. Years ago, when they were younger, these ladies studied solfeggio with Josefina and the piano and harp with Alicia. As Pete told me all this, his lips ash-gray from practising all morning on his trombone, I saw in my mind the sisters in their silk dresses, shuffling off to church for the evening benediction. They were very devout, and the Buenavista ladies admired that. I had almost forgotten that they were twins and, despite their age, often dressed alike. In low-bosomed voile bodices and white summer hats, l remembered, the pair had attended Grandfather’s funeral, at old Don Esteban’s behest I wondered how successful they had been in Manila during the past three years in the matter of finding suitable husbands.

“This party will be a complete surprise,” Pete said, looking around the porch as if to swear me to secrecy. They’ve hired our band.”

I joined my classmates in the room, greeting everyone with a Merry Christmas jollier than that of the others. When I saw Aida in one comer unwrapping something two girls had given her. I found the boldness to greet her also.

“Merry Christmas,” I said in English, as a hairbrush and a powder case emerged from the fancy wrapping, it seemed to me rather apt that such gifts went to her. Already several girls were gathered around Aida. Their eyes glowed with envy, it seemed to me, for those fair cheeks and the bobbed dark-brown hair which lineage had denied them.

I was too dumbstruck by my own meanness to hear exactly what Aida said in answer to my greeting. But I recovered shortly and asked:

“Will you be away during the vacation?”

“No, I’ll be staying here,” she said. When she added that her cousins were arriving and that a big party in their honor was being planned, l remarked:

“So you know all about it?” I felt I had to explain that the party was meant to be a surprise, an asalto.

And now it would be nothing of the kind, really. The women’s club matrons would hustle about, disguising their scurrying around for cakes and candies as for some baptismal party or other. In the end, the Rivas sisters would outdo them. Boxes of meringues, bonbons, ladyfingers, and cinnamon buns that only the Swiss bakers in Manila could make were perhaps coming on the boat with them. I imagined a table glimmering with long-stemmed punch glasses; enthroned in that array would be a huge brick-red bowl of gleaming china with golden flowers around the brim. The local matrons, however hard they tried, however sincere their efforts, were bound to fail in their aspiration to rise to the level of Don Esteban’s daughters. Perhaps, l thought, Aida knew all this. And that I should share in a foreknowledge of the matrons’ hopes was a matter beyond love. Aida and l could laugh together with the gods.

Short Story - The Tomato Game By Nvm Gonzales Youtube

At seven, on the appointed evening, our small band gathered quietly at the gate of Don Esteban’s house, and when the ladies arrived in their heavy shawls and trim panuelo, twittering with excitement, we were commanded to play the Poet and Peasant overture. As Pete directed the band, his eyes glowed with pride for his having been part of the big event. The multicolored lights that the old Spaniard’s gardeners had strung along the vine-covered fence were switched on, and the women remarked that Don Esteban’s daughters might have made some preparations after all. Pete hid his face from the glare. If the women felt let down, they did not show it.

The overture snuffled along to its climax while five men in white shirts bore huge boxes of goods into the house. I recognized one of the bakers in spite of the uniform. A chorus of confused greetings, and the women trooped into the house; and before we had settled in the sala to play “A Basket of Roses,” the heavy damask curtains at the far end of the room were drawn and a long table richly spread was revealed under the chandeliers. I remembered that, in our haste to be on hand for the asalto, Pete and I had discouraged the members of the band from taking their suppers.

“You’ve done us a great honor!” Josefina, the more buxom of the twins, greeted the ladies.

“Oh, but you have not allowed us to take you by surprise!” the ladies demurred in a chorus.

There were sighs and further protestations amid a rustle of skirts and the glitter of earrings. I saw Aida in a long, flowing white gown and wearing an arch of sampaguita flowers on her hair. At her command, two servants brought out a gleaming harp from the music room. Only the slightest scraping could be heard because the servants were barefoot As Aida directed them to place the instrument near the seats we occupied, my heart leaped to my throat. Soon she was lost among the guests, and we played The Dance of the Glowworms.” I kept my eyes closed and held for as long as l could her radiant figure before me.

Alicia played on the harp and then, in answer to the deafening applause, she offered an encore. Josefina sang afterward. Her voice, though a little husky, fetched enormous sighs. For her encore, she gave The Last Rose of Summer”; and the song brought back snatches of the years gone by. Memories of solfeggio lessons eddied about us, as if there were rustling leaves scattered all over the hall. Don Esteban appeared. Earlier, he had greeted the crowd handsomely, twisting his mustache to hide a natural shyness before talkative women. He stayed long enough to listen to the harp again, whispering in his rapture: “Heavenly. Heavenly …”

By midnight, the merrymaking lagged. We played while the party gathered around the great table at the end of the sala. My mind traveled across the seas to the distant cities l had dreamed about. The sisters sailed among the ladies like two great white liners amid a fleet of tugboats in a bay. Someone had thoughtfully remembered-and at last Pete Saez signaled to us to put our instruments away. We walked in single file across the hall, led by one of the barefoot servants.

Behind us a couple of hoarse sopranos sang “La Paloma” to the accompaniment of the harp, but I did not care to find out who they were. The sight of so much silver and china confused me. There was more food before us than I had ever imagined. I searched in my mind for the names of the dishes; but my ignorance appalled me. I wondered what had happened to the boxes of food that the Buenavista ladies had sent up earlier. In a silver bowl was something, I discovered, that appeared like whole egg yolks that had been dipped in honey and peppermint The seven of us in the orchestra were all of one mind about the feast; and so. confident that I was with friends, l allowed my covetousness to have its sway and not only stuffed my mouth with this and that confection but also wrapped up a quantity of those egg-yolk things in several sheets of napkin paper. None of my companions had thought of doing the same, and it was with some pride that I slipped the packet under my shirt. There. I knew, it would not bulge.

“Have you eaten?”

I turned around. It was Aida. My bow tie seemed to tighten around my collar. I mumbled something, l did not know what.

“If you wait a little while till they’ve gone, I’ll wrap up a big package for you,” she added.

I brought a handkerchief to my mouth. I might have honored her solicitude adequately and even relieved myself of any embarrassment; I could not quite believe that she had seen me, and yet l was sure that she knew what I had done, and I felt all ardor for her gone from me entirely.

I walked away to the nearest door, praying that the damask curtains might hide me in my shame. The door gave on to the veranda, where once my love had trod on sunbeams. Outside it was dark, and a faint wind was singing in the harbor.

With the napkin balled up in my hand. I flung out my arm to scatter the egg-yolk things in the dark. I waited for the soft sound of their fall on the garden-shed roof. Instead, I heard a spatter in the rising night-tide beyond the stone fence. Farther away glimmered the light from Grandmother’s window, calling me home.

Short Story - The Tomato Game By Nvm Gonzales Youtube

But the party broke up at one or thereabouts. We walked away with our instruments after the matrons were done with their interminable good-byes. Then, to the tune of “Joy to the World.” we pulled the Progreso Street shopkeepers out of their beds. The Chinese merchants were especially generous. When Pete divided our collection under a street lamp, there was already a little glow of daybreak.

He walked with me part of the way home. We stopped at the baker’s when l told him that I wanted to buy with my own money some bread to eat on the way to Grandmother’s house at the edge of the sea wall. He laughed, thinking it strange that I should be hungry. We found ourselves alone at the counter; and we watched the bakery assistants at work until our bodies grew warm from the oven across the door, it was not quite five, and the bread was not yet ready.

With the permission of NVM Gonzalez’s family