31 Underground Spirit Always he said his ear, they had destroyed his ear. Now he looks at me, hearing, and answers. Puta, he says, Galleons, papa, Spain! Do you remember? She only wanted animals to live and you bought her bangles instead, you taught her to lilee the pretty, not the dead. She cried when animals died, she liked to smell and drinle and you made her believe pretty was good, you made her drink the preity ‘rater, why did you lie? Better the bed, better che whore, papa. She would have still been here. Eyes closed, old man turns away The child says: Look, dragonfly with ho wings. A name now, mama! The green unwinged worm crawling up her arm, ‘Old man spits, Leave. Leave my house. Mama, look! Is it not breathing? Make it not stop breathing, put back wings, make it live again sich wings, mama? Not looking at old skin, I gather wings and worm and child. ‘We will leave, 1 tell her, the old man wacching, shaking, his eyes too shivelled for tears, {hate ugly things. Ugly wet men with wrinkled bellies and purple eyelids To your father, do you remember? He is there again, staring. 1 put her down on cold stone, ‘Six years, he says, Six years I knelt and begged, but no one gave, no one goes. There was.no church, papa. You sac in its ruins. He cannot hear. ‘Years ago, the Americans called him a traitor, his name scrawled across every ee that followed him in the streets, Collaborator, they sid, The enemy {ook him and tortured him and ripped out his nails and then let hin. 20 free, He stayed alive, they said, he has betrayed us all The child sits on the floor, head on lap, singing to herself, Noanitnals, o skips, no treasure, papa. Maybe my sister is still waiting, Ido not know, I cannot wait, there is no time to climb the watchtowen do not know what Socorro wanted, My father sits in the darkened room, shadows on the crevices of his face, a blanket over the impotent, dangling legs. Old servant-girls have withered with waiting, we no longer touch, He has taken every picture of the ivory mask and turned them upside down, In the Beginning of the War Resil B. Mojares We entrar the village at dusk. We worked on the shacks near the road, moving towards the barrio chapel at the foot of the hill. The men we flushed out atfered to resistance as though they had long resigned themselves to our coming We found them set for supper, squatting on the floor, in shacks sour with habitation; or lighting wicks, pumping kerosene lamps. The women began to weep. In the dim yards, the children’ throttled laughter We led the men up the toad. We met others on the way, herded by the policemen who had entered the barrio from the south, The villagers shuffled on the lusty road and not one spoke to another. The whole business bugged ‘me. I set my tind on just one thing: to have it done with quick. I joined in the cursing when one of che policemen fet out an oath and whacked one of the villagers on the site of the head. We pushed all of them into the small kapilya anc I could see that we hhad quartered some stxty men, varied in age from thirteen to sixty. There were twenty-two of us, three of us PCs, the town policemen, and those of the mayor's security Taba was standing at the chapels doorway, cradling his Armalite. He is tov here, he safdl as we came Up, We ordered the villagers crammed inside the chapel to keep to one side, to squat on the ground, Someone had brought in a petromax and naw itwas burning. The sound made me conscious, for the first time since we entered the village, that the darkness had indeed descended, 375316 Underground spirit ‘Seeing that there was nothing more to be done except to wait for Taba to finish what it was that he had to say, I slid to the ground near the door, the carbine I carried resting on the shoulder. From where I sat I could see the shacks of the barrio, and it was very quiet. Taba had sent eight of the men to scout the perimeters, ‘The chapel itself was nothing but an oversized box set on the earthen floor. At its end was a crude wooden altar, stripped of images. In its shadows milled a couple of scrawny goats, wide-awake, excited by the thickening human presence. I, too, was bothered by the smell, You know why we are here, Taba began to address the villagers. Their faces, glistening with sweat, betrayed nothing, It was a blankness with which {was familiar I had seen it in other places, There is only one thing we want, one thing only. The invisible fumes of odor and sweat began to fill the trapped space. Looking at the men, I could almost hear, sliding into a kind of unseeing, the blind collective will whirring. I had heard it in Pikit, in Isulan, in other places. This defense, a fencing-in. The secret is never to appear knowledgeable, different, so no one comes to pluck you out. I know these people, Wealll know, Taba went on, what happened to Inting Crug, the secretario. We found him on the municipal road, looking like a slaughtered pig. The flies were there ahead of us. He smirked, and then dropped to a low voice, We know who did it His listeners offered no sign. They kept the same stolid silence, inoffensive but unyielding, Taba went on to say that it was only the man they called ‘Tukog we wanted, and that there was no sense hiding the man because we knew that everyone of them knew him. You would be crazy to believe in the man, Fanatic, Taba spat out the word. HeS a fanatic! We know that he has a few arms. Springfields, he snorted, We also know that some in this village have been foolish enough to join him. They won't go very far. As you can see, the PC is with us, Those men are ‘wanted, Wanted, he said. I could see that it was going to be a useless evening. There was too much talking. Taba wanted to play mayor with his audience. So long as they were massed there inside the chapel, nothing could be gotten out of Inthe Beginning ofthe War arr them, The thing to do is to drag some of them singly out of the place and have them vomit, where no one could see, what we wanted. That way, it ‘would be quick. I could tell that to Taba, But I was in no mood to play the leader. have had enough of that. Supercilious, that was the term the captain used. False attitudes towards the service. And they sacked me. Supercilious, hell. They could not find a more abiding man. It was only that the whole thing was peasant-hunting. I did not enlist in the army to carry some stupid officers baggage, to wield a spade and plant trees. The pointlessness showed in my ‘eyes and they did not like that. So they sacked me. Taba was still at it, hammering, I could see Godi the Tagalog leering from a comer, Taba threw one more question and still there was no answrer. I stniled, seeing how Taba’s face darkened. He went off into a huddle with the other men of the mayor. Then Godi, the Tagalog from Davao, came forward and dragged one villager out of the group. He was smiling, Godt never tried to hide the fact that he had served time at Munti, for a string of cases, and that someone important (Amo, he was proud of declaring) had plucked him out of that hell because he was, as the man himself never tired of repeating, useful. ‘There was this streak in the man I did not like. A damaged sense somewhere in his head. He enjoyed his work. He was now working on the villager he had picked out, giving the man short, economical blows from the hip. He was good, He did not even pant when it was all over. Stretching up, he signaled at two villagers to carry the heap away, Taba stepped forward and addressed the villagers once more. He asked therm not to tire themselves, or us, out. I stopped listening to what it was he said. I could see that Taba himself no longer relished the part that had becomea simple matter of form. When there was still no response, he loudly spat out his indifference and motioned to Godi. Watching Godi work, I realized how tired I was. Nights with very little sleep reduced movements to painfully slow, mesmeric motions. In the cleared area of the chapel, I could see nothing but so much body, raising dust, disturbing, in that hot and crowded place, waves of human stench. I could feel the drumming in my brain,378 Unierground spite When L made the motion to leave the chapel, Taba turned towartls me, Ltold him 1 wanted some air. He gave me one of his slack smiles and said, Yes, you look pale. My ears faintly burned but I let it pass, Outside, it was as quiet as death itself. From behind me I could hear the thuds, the harrowed moans of someone trying to keep down a scream. Nothing could be gotten out of the lot, I said to myself. The thing to do is to separate them, take them on one by one, in the dark, where no one’ listening or watching to mark one’s weakness. Singly, they are afraid. Together you can never tell the vast reserves of patience these people can summon to tide them over, Most of the shacks had snuffed out their lights. I could feel the eyes of the women and the aged peering out of slats. On the road, I passed one of the policemen standing guard. He had his booty hanging from a string wound around his neck, two chickens, their throats slit. When he saw me his face lit up and he started giggling, He was shaking with his secret malice as I passed him on the road. I stopped where the tilled fields began. These was no wind, the day's staleness hugged the earth. Looking across the wide fields, 1 was seized by a sudden inspiration, of walking off, telling no one, just walking off. 1 had had the feeling before, The mind would race forward, free as ina dream yet as strangely bound, for, as always, somewhere, in some vague, indefinite place, it would come toa stop. One grows heavy with the dreamed exertions of flight, and the towns, the bald plains, the same old towns, the dust- streaked stores, the ambiguous crowds, the strange familiar towns, And then ‘one stops, It was always nowhere, and I stopped. ‘We were in drought-ravaged country, The fields looked like nothing sgreen and fat would grow on them, There was something diseased in the air, there was too little of it to breathe, On the way back, I realized how thirsty I was. I made my way to the nearest hut. I called out and when there was no answer, I ascended a ladder and kicked the flimsy door open, With the carbine, 1 kept it open. There was a light somewhere inside the hut. Stepping in, I was met again by the same thick human smell, dull yet hostile. On the floor, the children slept. Huddled in a corner, three women stared, open-mouthed, at my presence. No one moved. Everything was so still that it was only after a while that I Inthe Beginning of the Wir 379 became aware ofa fine metallic whispering from somewhere inside the house. ‘The sound came from behind a curtained partition. I pointed my gun at the women in warning and moved towards the sound. For the briefest moment, fear touched me, like darkness passing ~ the sounds blacked out, and then as they came back, I stepped forward. I swept the curtain back with a hand, In what seemed the family’s kitchen, a wasted old man was squatting before a whetstone, He had nothing on but a dirty tag around his loins, Near him was a flickering kerosene lamp. The blade he carried was thin and ong and his long withered hands gripped it firmly as he sweptit rhythmically, back and forth, on the whetstone. Shick, shicck, shick, shtick, it went. Not once did the old man turn his head from his labor and neither did he give any sign that he noticed my presence. Shitick, shick, the blade went. I cocked the gun. It did not break the rhythm of the old man’s movements. I looked at the women in the corner but they met my eyes with the same dumb, terrified stare. I looked back at the old man, Taking one more step, the frail floor creaked. The old man turned his face full towards me. It was only then that [ realized he was blind, His eyes were full, glazed in the weak light. I stood still, feeling the sick sweat on my forchead. For a ‘moment, I could not escape his eyes. The spell broke and he went back to his rhythmic work, shiick, shick, shitick I retreated into the sala. Without once casting glance at the women in the corner, I went out of the house. Outside, the cold air made me feel slightly dizzy. | paused for a moment on the road but still, in my ears, was the measured slide of metal wet on stone. (On the way back, I met the same policeman I had met on the way out. ‘When he saw me, he started once more to laugh in a way soundless, diseased. Dead fowl’ blood streaked a side of his shirt. I could feel the ticking at my temple, | laid the barrel of my gun on his shaking shoulder and, pressing down, I made him stop. He pointed towards where the trees began not far from the road, I asked him what he meant but he did not answer. He started iggling again, Pushing him aside, I made my way towards the trees. 1 ‘could feel the drumming again and I could not explain to myself as to why J was suddenly angry. The dim sounds drifted towards me in the dark. Before I came upon the men, L already had a strange foretaste of violence.380 Underground Spirit There were three of them gathered about the body on the ground, In the dark of the trees, squatting, stripped from the waist down to reveal pale hairy legs, they looked like unearthly beasts gathered for a feast. Hairless legs, a womans, stuck out in the grass, I could not see the face, The whole scene was so quiet I had the strange feeling I had lost my sense of hearing, Was it the drumming in my head drowning out all sounds? They did not immediately notice my approach. Possessed by a blind anger, I kicked the man bending over the woman out of the way. He sputtered with curses, as the others stood back, the glaze of their lust a film on their eyes, but 1 was not listening. The woman looked dead. Hi, hi, hi, one of the men was Jiggling up and down on his toes, giggling like a sated goat. The men were standing now, looking from me to the woman, their members bared. Stripped from the waist down, their legs looked stuck to the earth like pale abnormal growths, One of them knelt down to slap the woman awake. The woman’ head lolled, moaning. The man looked up at me, You want, ent, he said. My head was clear of the anger now. All I felt was a sick fatigue. You want, ‘ent, he repeated, smiling, seeing how I had suddenly fallen quiet. 1 did not answer. In the dark, their faces were livid blotches, Back on the road, the old policeman met me, How, he asked, his mouth slack, How is it? | brushed him aside. Up the road, I could still see nothing but his sotted face, hounding, sunk in mirth. In the kapilya, Godi was still at work. Taba threw me a glance when I entered. They had worked up to the sixth, he said. ‘The sixth was a young man. His arms were pinned back as Godi worked on him, Godi was now wet with sweat. A cigarette dangled from his lips as he worked, They made an odd pais, Gudi and the young man, In the clearing, they stared at each other’ eyes. Godi was smiling, ‘The heat had grown oppressive, Everyone glistened with sweat. Except for the three men in the cleared area, no one moved. The stale air, smelling of exhausted earth, was like a bodied presence, a thing growing within walls The young man dropped to the ground. Godi kicked him once, twice. The lengthening ash from his cigarette fell. felt I heard a rib crack. Godi squinted in the smoke. The man lifted his bloodied face and where I sat | caught his empty stare. In the Beginning of the War 381 ‘Taba announced we were bringing back with us four suspects. There ‘was nothing more to be done. ‘We did not talk much on the way back. We clambered aboard the truck that waited for us and soon we were on our way back to the town. 1 was seated out front with Taba and he said to me, Tough work, isnt it? vaguely nodded iy assent. Well get him next time. I was not too sure I shared his appetite. Scouring the countryside for a couple of illiterate peasants armed with bolos and Springfields was a drab prospect. Looked back towards where the four villagers were seated on the floor of the moving truck. T wondered as to what they were thinking. There was not much I knew about the man we were hunting, except that he had a way with the poor and was known to have a gift of speech, saying strange things about anger sweeping over the land like a forest fire. twas a dark road on which we traveled. In the distance, the mountains were a dull mass against the sky. Somewhere was the spark of the mountain fire and I thought of the man who waited for our coming. What did he look like? Days ago, we had ringed his camp and in the firefight that followed he had eluded us. We picked up some of the things they left behind them, bundles of old clothing, worn pamphlets, crude maps, nothing much; we had placed all of them in a flour sack for the mayor. Somehow, I felt sorry for hhim, them, huddled in the dark; but somewhere something had been set into motion and there was nothing else to do but to finish the task, He was still out there, For many of us, he was a fixed point and that was something. ‘We entered the town at way past nine. We made for the jail, a rundown stone house that had once served as the municipio. When the new modemistic hhall was built in front of it, they turned it into a prison, connecting it to the new building with a passageway. The jailer came down muttering something in a mixture of Tagalog and Maranao, something about how the students in Manila were at it again, He ‘was carrying a transistor radio that crackled with static. I wondered how anyone could possibly decipher something out of the sharp stuttering noises. With the jailer, Taba and 1 marched the prisoners down the cell block. The stench of urine was like a clammy hand across my face and beneath it was the heavy, clinging stain of massed bodies.382 Underground Spirit As the jailer closed the door behind the prisoners, I looked, squarely, for the firs time, at the men we had brought in. One of them started weeping, Here, the fire ends, I said to myself. ‘Taba and the jailer laughed over a joke I did not catch, Two months in the province and still the mix of dialects never failed to stump me. One walked into the babel of strange words in a crowded marketplace and, so often, because one was a stranger, there was, somewhere, gathering, in the sharp edge of words, a menace with no definite object. We broke up in front of the municipio. Someone told us the mayor had gone to the capital. Whatever it was Taba had to say had to wait till morning, Tewas ten and we could hear that the dance near the marketplace was still in progress. With Taba and Godi, I decided it was still much too early to turn in. I had that queasy feeling I wanted to burn away with one good bottle of rum, We found our way to one of the stores in the marketplace. On the way, we took a look at the dancing couples on the street they had cleared for the festivity. People slowly pulled away at our approach, The phonograph was playing a slow drag and locked couples on the bright street looked strangely tormented in the invisible fumes of human sweat. Taba shouted something obscene, and everyone tittered uncertainly. We left the crowd. In the store, we settled down in one of the stalls. We started drinking in earnest. The store had emptied and we were the only ones left. An old woman pored over a battered notebook, counting coins on a table behind the counter. Somewhere, behind a partition, a radio crackled with noises. US a hell of a ie, isnt 7 Taba looked at me. He had fallen into one of his philosophical moods. He was acting out a role he privately relished. Godi, beady-eyed, was looking at us with the slack-mouthed attention of an animal, The talk turned to the man who was boloed to death. The man had gone to the barrio to explain why the people could not get the land titles they sought, that there were certain provisions that had to be complied with. But you know how difficult it is to make these people understand such things. In my minds eye, T again saw the people, a livid herd inside the cramped chapel. I could not keep the pictures still, they moved like frames In the Beginning of he War 383 ina wobbly movie, And behind it all there was this man whose face I had not seen. A fanatic, Taba snapped and repeated a sketchy story I had heard told a number of times, It was a story that did not tell much. Hes nobody, one of those EDCOR Hules who gave up their lands and just drifted. Some went back to Luzon. He stayed on, then shacked up with a Manobo woman. He dabbles in religion, anting-anting, that sort of thing, and proclaims himself komunista, Taba snorted. He’ illiterate. He doesn't know anything. There was nothing to be seen in his eyes except for a thin film of hate I did not like. Once, he gathered the people at Salaman, in the marketplace, and holding out a gun asked somebody to shoot him. One man did and he was not felled ... The Manobos and Tirurays worship him now. He laughed. You really have to give these people a good whack on the head to make them come to their senses. Godi was peering at us in rapt attention. There were times when his eyes would slide off to mark a fly alighting on a table or cockroach scurrying on the floor. I knew he was bored. He drank in dead earnest. was feeling dangerously light and was only hal-listening to Tabas ‘monologue. I found myself thinking of other things, unbidden images that came back with almost miraculous ease, that fell away before 1 could even start to divine their deeper sense. I fixed myself again on what Taba was saying. This is a place where you can be a man, he said. This country is wide open, I tell you. I was here already when Magsaysay came and spoke in the days of EDCOR ... you remember those farms they cut out of the forest, where they deposited those Hulk from Luzon. I was already with the mayor then, he was a councilor stil, and we followed Magsaysay through all those places he visited. Ah, that was a man ... Magsaysay, a fighter, a General! Thave seen the Man. Near the town market, they had constructed a stage that night and it was all lit with bulbs, decorated with palms, the wide streamers with names I could not now remember, and I had awakened from where I slept on the pavement beside my father when the waiting crowd rose in a thunderous murmur when the Man arrived. He was lost amid the people on stage and then he was there standing before us, a big man, raising his arms, smiling, and the crowd shouting its approval as the band struck384 Underground Spirit up a marching song. I could not catch what it was he said but my father, open-mouthed, was taut with pride, his eyes shining ... We had pushed through the crowd, my father murmuring he wanted to shake the Man's hand, and everywhere the blind joy in everyone’ faces ... 1 cannot now remember whether we came close enough to touch the Man, But when the Man died, my father had set us all to working, snipping newspaper, photographs, clippings and pasting them on a huge scrapbook on which we had written all our names, my father, my mother, my sisters, my brothers, all of us. And we sent it to the Man's wife in Manila. In his florid prose, my father had written something I could not now recall Hope, Pride, Grief. And we sent it. In the dim cubicle in the post office where he worked, my father languished with the frustrations of his age, and the times that did not change, until he died and nobody even noticed. When we emerged from the marketplace, the street was already deserted. The colored bulbs strung out across the road were still it, The dogs scrounged around for something to eat amid the refuse the dancers left. The roiled air stank of human breath and sweat. We walked down the darkly lit roads of the town, now and then raising drunken voices to the wind. As we walled past the silent houses, Taba started up once more, He tlked of the town, the coming elections, saying he could hardly wait, thumping Godi on the back, spreading his arms like some strange bird embracing fields of kill, He knew all the tricks of the game, he knew politics like nobody's business, he said. Inside-out, he said Inside-out. Godi, too, had started to be voluble, He boasted about how, once in Munti, he had seen a man die of suffocation, his head in a plastic bag, How does it feel, dying by suffocation? 1 dropped the image, remembering the stench in the chapel, in other places, not being able to breathe. ‘Walking towards the beach, the whole town was suddenly plunged into darkness, Taba cursed. The lights came on again, dimmed, sputtered briefly, and then went out, The town’ rundown electric plant had faltered again, 1 had this sudden vision of the other towns in the province sunk in darkness, cut off from each other, while in the countryside, strange men with eyes trained for seeing in the dark freely roamed. There was this town mayor in the south, gunned down at his town’s boundary. There were other things In the Beginning ofthe War 385 ‘gathering in the air, massing, and one can only wonder as to who kept the key to it all. Soon, we passed into the dingy waterside section. The sea was near and in the humid night { could smell human waste and, fainter, silt and salt air Going through sleeping houses, we came upon a lighted tienda where some men were gathered around a small table. They watched our passing and Godi threw an oath in the dark. Looking up, I saw a man at a darkened window, watching. Now and then we caught the stench of wasting refuse and outhouses. In the dark presided an onion-domed mosque, a wooden structure, glum and dilapidated. But soon we were at the large unpainted framehouse they called Celo's, We walked up a dark flight of stairs and found ourselves in a small sala, brightly lit but deserted. The wooden chaits, shiny with dirt and rubbing, were covered with stiffly laundered doilies. 1 picked up and dropped the smudgy vernacular magazines on the table. There was a paper, not so old, on the table. Two dead in new PC-Huk clash, it read. Somewhere in Tarlac. I was filled with a deep sense of weariness. No images paraded before my head except for the vague memory of photographed bodies, peasant-garbed, bullet-riddled on the ground. In the blurred fluorescence of the room, I felt sick, depressed by an unpleasantly wet kind of heat. Taba was drunkenly poking into the rooms, calling out a woman's name, Sprawled before me, Godi was grinning obscenely. I closed my eyes, wiping his image away. J must have fallen into a short fitful sleep. 1 was conscious of my sweat when I woke up. Yawning, I was assailed by foulness, of alcohol and something deeper in the gut, an exhalation of rot. I had to hold back @ sudden wave of nausea, Somewhere in the house, I could hear Taba break ut into a stream of profanities. There was the crackling sound of radio, a high excited voice, sudden oaths, and a vaguely human roar like a fire rising, breaking, It came from a room nearby. Seeing that the door to the room was open, I stood and stumbled toward it A large woman, in plain housedress, was in bed, looking up at the ceiling, I could not tell whether she was listening to the transistor radio on the table beside her bed. Without turning, she said that they had told her to wake me up but that she had decided to wait. It was a bad night and she had all the time in the world. In the same flat voice, she asked, You want now?386 Underground Spirit 1 did not answer. And it was only when I drew myself up to her that I saw there was something wrong with her eyes. She must have sensed my tensing for she said, in the same flat voice, that that should not render her unserviceable or something, and, without breaking once in her movement, she prepared herself for me. She had large strong arms and when I suggested that we turn the radio off, she said that she wanted it on. Working, I found it difficult to hold on. I was always slipping off, conscious of the sweat dripping down my back, my face, dropping on hers, faint hair on her armpits, the defective fan whirring somewhere in the room, the crackling voices of panic, her look, her eyes, her look. Come in, Come in 4, Come in 4. There ‘was a roar of anger from an undefined crowd. She started heaving breath beneath me, drawing in, and again I was swamped with nausea, smelling flesh, the closeness, hearing sounds, arising roar like fire, a broken hissing, this haze before my eyes. I had a brief glimpse of her face, absorbed, and her eyes slid full towards mine, unseeing. Arms wedded to flesh pulled me deeper inwards, deeper into darkness without air, as over us roared another darkness, a menace of twisted sounds like a crackling forest fire. They're massing on Claro Recto now. They've thrown planks, wooden signs against traffic post. Its burning! Its burning! No, I said. No, no: my mind registered the panic for, suddenly, 1 found it difficult to breathe, suffocating in flesh, the serpentine arms around my neck, around me, the eyes staring. Dimly, 1 heard the roar, the crack of rifle fire, O my God, its happening again. They're at it again! Breathing heavily, working with sweat, sinking, what passed before my eyes were more familiar images, a closer threat: goats in a forest swaying in leprous light, faces against a wall, many faces, anda tide of odor running over, blind couples dancing on a street, and through it all the frightened memory of a child waking up, shivering in the knowledge of that strange game to which one’s soul is tied as prize: the blind man in the darkness with his thin, thin blade going Shick, shitich, shiif, When I woke up the following day it was as though I had just been spat out of a grave. Thad the vague memory ofa dark flood of men moving across a field. 1 knew it to be the beginning of a strange dream of violence that implicated ‘me in ways could not clearly remember. I tensed for the feel of steel, the {iI In the Beginning of Oie War 387 smell of lethal powder, but what | felt instead was giddiness. As I slowly walked about the room, I fet like I was different, sucked of soul, weightless. ‘Only, Iwas sweating, I stood before the mirror and passed a hand across my face. It was well past noon. When T arrived at the municipal hall late that afternoon, the news had already spread across the whole town. They've brought in Tukog, the news spread like wildfire, And when I arrived at the municipio, the place was already crawling with onlookers. As I approached, I could see the crowd, strangely excited, moving towards where the mayor and some men, Taba among them, were gathered in a circle, Taba looked up as I came up and smiling said: Sorry, we didn't let you in on the chase. You were plastered, he said in a low voice, but I was not listening, inched closer and looked down on the man who was squatting, with hands and legs in irons, on the spittle-streaked floor. He was, as his name indicated, gaunt and thin. It sharpened my sense of tallness. I did not realize ‘he was so old. I thought of my father, The tattered, dirt-streaked clothes, worn-denim, revealed a body ravaged bya disease that was not merely physical. I could see it like the muted fire in the old, bloodshot eyes that he lifted to fix the faces that were gathered around him. A policeman did not like the old man's way of using his eyes and gave him a short kick against the ribs. The old man did not cry out, he just bundled himself with his manacled hands and I could hear, racing down my nape, his breathing. I wondered whether he was weeping, ‘The mayor raised a restraining hand. Let’ leave this to the courts, he calmly said. He turned towards the gathered people a well-composed face, appropriate with the calculated sadness of one whi fully knew the burden ofa difficult office. A lesson, a lesson, he murmured, looking at the people ‘who were gathered, as he walked away trailed by his aides. Godi and one other man dragged the prisoner down the passageway towards the jail. I followed, smelling, with the man so near, the rank violence of his presence like the exhalation of torn fieids. The jailer appeared from nowhere. He was murmuring something I did not catch. No one was listening. We passed the cell where we had deposited the peasants we picked up the previous night. They were standing at the bars and as we passed I was conscious, though I did not look, of their gazes.388 Underground Spire ‘One of them said something 1 did not catch ~ my mind, displaced, was heady with the swirl of events — and one of the policemen struck the bars with the butt of his gun, All of us entered the cell into which Godi had led the prisoner. 1 could see that some boys, strays, had climbed up to the small window which Tooked out on the dusty yard in order to get a look at the prisoner we had brought in. The cell, empty except for us, stank ofall the collected smells of previous inhabitants, of bodies decaying, unaired. They led the prisoner to a corner. And then Godi started to pummel the ‘man with blows, Taba looked on with lidded eyes. The policeman beside ‘me was smiling to himself. The prisoner had curled up, cradling his pain, against an old dented pail that smelled thickly of urine. A question was asked. When the man gave no answer, Godi gave hima sharp kick in the groin, Another question went unanswered. Godi pulled him up and slammed him against the wall. His head lolled as though it was 100 heavy for him to carry, bloated now with its store of pain. But when he brought his head up, I saw that he was smiling. I knew he was not really looking but | involuntarily shuddered, remembering once again the whet of metal, seeing his glazed eyes fast on mine, Godi, cursing, pushed the man back with a violent thrust of his foot and the man slammed against the cement wall. The pail, clattering, rolled towards where I sat, my head in my hands, The smell rose and I felt like throwing up. I could not pull myself away, out of that foul room with the sweating bodies crossed with voices of menace, grief, I could not tell which, Thad a passing image of the man, his face swimming in his own vomit. Within me, I could feel a deep, lost voice worming for release. I had another image of Taba, Godi and the rest, their backs moving down the hallway, as the steel door clanged shut, Withdrawn in a dark corner of the cell, disembodied by fever, I had the sudden feeling that, perhaps, 1 was not there, It was something I had dreamed up. For, indeed, they had not seen me and had closed the door on me and the man. I looked up the small ‘window beyond which the afternoon died, and there were no faces watching. 1 turned towards the floor and 1 saw him, and he was looking, and it was only then that I knew I was there, with him, in that cell. In Ghe Beginning of ie War 389) ‘That evening, I wandered through the town, feeling ghostly, until 1 found ‘myself at the mayor's residence at the town’s cutskitts, looking through the gate at the wide, cool lawn and the clean trees. ‘Through the window, in the deep cushioned sala, I saw him, with a tall glass in his hand, talling to a man I could not see. I watched his lips move swith words I could not hear, his hand moving with his words. And, all at once, Iwas very tired. I knew that if walked through that door { would see their mouths moving and they would be saying nothing, nothing at all. That night, | packed my things, my gun, and left town. ‘Things are different now. Hounded, we have to move from sitio to sitio, clearing to clearing, But everywhere we go, through the villages, we move among the people. We are moving among people, with them, and this is what matters.