Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The Distance To Andromeda
The Distance To Andromeda
Wilna Bantay
HUM16/C1
He leans back and lights a cigar. Let's sit on the porch, shall we? It's warm in here.
THE BOY follows his father and mother to the porch: his father switches off the overhead
bulb, and in the soft-toned light, the night is lucid and palpable around the house, the stars sprayed
distinctly above the rooftops. Nimble, cowboy-like, Ben straddles the rail: he is on a white stallion,
galloping across a starlit prairie, flying. He rests back against the corner-post and glances about
him, waiting.
An upstairs window in the next house is a moon captured in a net of santol leaves. A group
passes by, chattering, wooden shoes scuffing, rustling away gradually down the street.
His father and mother sit together on the sofa, talking gently: Remy and Pol come to the
veranda and Ben listens to their voices, near and familiar in the night. The coal of his father's cigar,
tracing slow arcs in the pale darkness, reminds the boy of the time the power failed in their section
of the town and they had supper by candlelight, and he had thought the shadows alive and friendly,
only a magic spell removed from speech.
The street is quiet now but for the faint crooning of a radio somewhere down the block, and a
cricket stitching its tiny whir upon the warm restful breathing of Earth. From the far edge of town
blow the last whistles of a train: now the travelers would be looking out their lighted windows,
watching the receding glow of the town, and then only the night and the stars over the summer
fields.
He catches the streak of a shooting star from the corner of his eye.
Instantly his waiting becomes a sharp alertness: he holds his breath, and the strangeness
comes into him once more, the echo of an endless vibration. But it is no longer an abstract ache
straining for the relief of words: it speaks within him, in a language full of silence, becoming one
with his breathing, his being, and the night, and the turning of Earth: incomprehensible, a wordless
RAMOS, Chester Jericho O. Prof. Wilna Bantay
HUM16/C1
thought, an unthought-of Word: like the unseen presence of One who loves him infinitely and
tenderly. The fear has gone, the lonely helpless shrinking he felt on the bridge, walking home: love
surrounds him, and no evil can touch him here, in his father's house.
With confident imagination, he sees a vision of Earth, whole and entire, the globe revolving
on its axis, journeying around the sun, through October and December and the months of the
summertime. Earth: he pronounces the word to himself, as if to savor its taste upon his tongue.
Third planet from the sun. . . Asia, and Europe, and America, westward. . . the cities and
the towns and the villages, and all the people, millions of them, living now on Earth. . . And all the
stars in the sky. . . .
Someday, far away from this night in this town, his boyhood the remotest of remembrances
and dreams, he may feel this vibration again, this hum like the echo of an eternal name: then he
may come to understand a portion of the mystery at last, although humanly unutterable: revealing,
in time, not the terror of the universe, but its purpose and glory. But that would still be years away
from this night, perhaps a whole lifetime and more; perhaps, through his most grievous fault, never.
Now the boy looks up at the lights of the encircling night: the constellations of the southern sky,
the mists of the Milky Way, and beyond, unseen, the galaxies ablaze with their myriad suns: while
Earth moves like a ship through space and night toward dawn and morning, and his father and
mother and Remy and Pol talk gently in the soft darkness, and Luz is helping Pining with the
dishes, and Tia Dora is in the living room reading her interminable serials, and Baby is sleeping a
w child's untroubled sleep, and the street and the houses are quiet now in the peaceful night.
It's getting late, Ben.
Early Mass tomorrow.
Go up to bed now, son, a growing boy needs his sleep.
His father is home, all of them are safe and home in the night, in the long summer of the
year. Tomorrow, Sunday, they will go to Mass, all of them together. Then, he will go swimming
with Tito and Pepe in San Miguel, in the clear wide morning, and in the afternoon, he will see the
film again, perhaps with his father: the ruined, poisoned countries of man, and the new world, the
hills green in the light of another sun.”
Excerpt From: Gregorio C. Brillantes. “The Distance to Andromeda, and Other Stories.” Apple
Books.