MikeLigalig.com

Gensan Made: White Vinegar

Soy Sauce Gensan Made
by Genrev Products

Healthy Sugar: Muscovado Sugar

Nata De Coco

Banana Catsup Made in General Santos City
by Genrev Products

Philippine Vinegar: Hot and Spicy

By Bohol STandard

Regional director Modesto Membreve of the National Irrigation Administration based here fires back at his detractors by filing civil case before the Metropolitan Trial Courts, Quezon city against a construction firm for “sum of money and damages.”

In his four-page complaint, Membreve asked the court to order the defendant MD Biliran Construction represented by Engr. Petronilo Sarigumba “to pay the sum of P246,973.10 and liquidated damages in the amount of P24,697.29, plus charges, accrued interest, collection charges, service and handling fees.”

Membreve also urged the court to order the defendant to pay Attorney’s fees and other legal fees and filing fees in the amount to be determined by the court.

Earlier, Sarigumba, who, together with Concerned Citizens of Bohol and a certain Josephus Gaviola of Alburquerque town, sued Membreve before the Ombudsman for the alleged nepotism.

Sarigumba and Gaviola asked the Ombudsman to suspend Membreve for infringement of RA 3019 also known as Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act and Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Officials and Employees or RA 6713. They also asked the Ombudsman to conduct a thorough investigation on the anomalies of a public official in Membreve.

Membreve alleged that the defendant “failed to pay his obligation” in assuming the responsibility of the irrigator’s association’s 10% equity share to the project. The corporation won the project under Contract Number BPIO-LMC-02-2009 for the barangay Guinsularan, Duero, Bohol communal irrigation system (CIS) Project with a winning bid price of P2, 469,730.95.

“On March 11, 2010, the plaintiff thru personal service sent a Demand Letter to the defendant indicating that the defendant was not able “to pay the equity participation of subject project in the amount of P246,973.10, ” said Membreve in his complaint through legal counsel lawyer Salvador Diputado.

“Despite demand, and clear provisions of the Contract, the defendant refused to pay his obligation” and the defendant has removed or disposed of his property or is about to do so with clear intention to defraud the plaintiff,” Membreve claimed.

Membreve filed the said case in Quezon City because under the Contract, the parties likewise agreed that “the venue for any cause(s) of action that may arise from this Contract shall be at the proper Court of Quezon City.” (RVO)

Philippine Tawas Powder Can Restore Virginity?
Hubag Bohol, please elaborate your report. 

Pinoy Food: Genrev Gisadong Bagoong

A construction for a monastery on top of Himontagon Hill in Loay, Bohol with no environmental clearance from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) and building permits from the local government has caused rift with the church and local officials.

“I did not stop the project, it was the DENR for environmental reasons,” Loay Mayor Rosemarie Lim-Imboy clarified.

During the consultative meeting with Gov. Edgar Chatto with provincial heads and mayors held last January 7, 2010 at Bohol Tropics Resorts in the city, Loay Mayor Imboy cleared herself of the issue “that it was DENR who ordered the stoppage of the construction not her.”

This was confirmed by Provincial Environment Officer Nestor Canda when he was asked by the Governor to comment.

PENRO Canda said as of to date he did not issue any clearance for the monastery. And the matter has been brought to the regional office and from there the sisters were given 60 days to complete the necessary papers but 60 days have lapsed and the sisters didn’t come back as promised and agreed for the deadline for submission.

NO PERMIT

The monastery construction for the Carmelites Sisters, a Catholic religious congregation, was first reported to Provincial Environment Officer Nestor Canda who wasted no time to investigate the matter.

He recommended a cease and desist order after an ocular inspection. It was also further found that the construction had no building permit from the local government of Loay.

Every time it rains, the mud flow goes down and covers a rice fields in Barangay Tocdog Ilaya and the mud from the mountain erodes and flows down the river and the seashore of the town.

On the other hand the proponent now claimed they have CNC (Certificate of None Coverage) issued for the project but hey did not present a copy of the clearance. Considering that the hill is a critical deep steep slope area, the CNC issuance had become questionable. A geological study is necessary to determine the base stability of the soil if it is stable to ensure the safety of life and property considering that they are going to put a big building on top of the hill.

CHURCH vs. LGU

The Mayor also expressed disappointment of church officials, specifically their parish priest, Fr. Blair Sabaricos who falsely attacked her during his homilies regarding the monastery and other issues.

Mayor Imboy confided that she brought the matter to Bishop Medroso, regarding the negative attitude of the priest using his homilies as a medium to malign her. Mayor Imboy said asked Fr. Sabaricos for an open discussion with him if there are issues he wants to clarify regarding her administration.

Things, however, worsened. During the Simbang Gabi Mass different priest from other municipalities officiated the early dawn masses alternately. Before start of the mass the priest include as among their Intentions for the Local Government, particularly the Mayor, praying for the issuance of permit. They alleged that only the signature of the Mayor is now lacking for the construction permit.

WRONG INFORMATION

Mayor Imboy said she just wish the church feed the correct information to the visiting priests and not mislead people.

“All I just wanted is truth and fairness on my part,” Mayor Imboy said.

As of now, there are no pertinent papers to secure permit or nothing is filed or processed in the municipal office of Planning Coordinator (MPDC), Engineers office and the Mayor’s Office regarding the monastery project.

“I am brought up by my mother to give much respect especially to church officials, she (my mother) being a very religious woman. If abiding with the law to protect the interest and safety of our town and our people and the environment is wrong in the eyes the church, then Go forgive me,” Mayor Imboy said. - published by the Bohol STandard

BPI Free Life Insurance
Securing your family's future has never been this easy.
Get Started Peso Savings is an interest-earning savings account that offers you the following benefits:

Free life insurance of up to 2 million pesos
Your Get Started Peso Savings Account automatically comes with free life insurance from BPI-Philam Life.

Yeah Notebooks are artistically designed and creatively handcrafted to suit the needs of every individual. Yeah Journals are soft and light, with premium quality paper and come in different designs, each having its own nifty feature such as elastic bands and penholders made to reinvent the experience of writing. Use these blank pages as platforms for your imagination, and fill them up with visions, thoughts, and memories that inspire you to live, to love, and to be just you.

Durian Jam

Philippine Herbal Tea Health Drink
Golden Spoon Pito-pito, only handpicked leaves are chosen
Ingredients: Anise (Pimpinella Anisum) seeds, Banaba (Lagerstroemia Speciosa) leaves, Guava (Psidium Guajava) leaves, Pandan (Pandanus Amarylifolius) leaves, Malunggay (Moringa Oleifera), Sambong (Blumea Balsamifera) leaves, Tanlad (lemon grass).

When it becomes available, will you go for it?

Ilongga: Sweet pero Maldita? - true or not?

If this is not a product of Photoshop, this picture is worth a million dollars.

Can You Predict the Past?

Why Some Women Don't Like to Wear Bra?

how much?

Tawas: More than Good Enough as Deodorant?

Filipino Food: Lumpia

Philippine Food: Vegetable with Meat

Philippine Cuisine

Philippines Food: Lechon Baboy

Philippine Food: Barbeque

Filipino Food: Shrimp

Philippines Food: Cholesterol Loaded

Philippines Food: Pinakbet

Philippines Food: Sabaw-sabaw

Eat All You Can Filipino Food

Pinoy Food

Tinapa: Ready to Eat

555 Sardines vs Young's Town
which is better?

(Philippine Poetry)
Landscape With Figures
by Carlos Bulosan

Homeward again under foreign stars,
history was a strange gush of wind from memory
that came to echo waterfalls of those years:
home to find the place lost among
galaxies of signs.  The hills were gone.  The river
trail was forgotten. . . Trying to remember meadowlark
and those who perished in the vanishing land
(bones in the earth where our parents died poor),
the journey fell into heavy tides of flowing
scorn that echoed and reechoed time there.

The sun was most unkind to the place:
history: names of men: patterns of life:
all that distant floodtide heaved and moved,
breaking familiar names that immortal tongues
clipped for the heart to cry, "Home is a foreign address,
every step toward it is a step toward three hundred years
of exile from the truth. . ."
        It was not homeward
to the first known land, nor escape
to white sea sprays blossoming on inland shore,
nor love leaping the boundaries naked in the soul,
but a vast heritage of war and destruction breaking
too soon for the living and willing to die.

Life is a foreign language.  Every man mispronounced it . . .

Please help build the Family Tree of Alangilan in Bohol.

Please help build the Timado Family Tree in Bohol.

Jadraque Family Tree
Please help build the Jadraque Family Tree

Please help build the Arcaya Family Tree

Free BPI Express Credit Gold Mastercard
Automatically yours for all your housing needs.
Move into the house you've always wanted using your Free BPI Express Credit Gold Mastercard - a true total solution you can only experience with BPI Family Savings Build Your Dream Housing Loan.

(Philippine Poetry)
Gabu
by Carlos A. Angeles

The battering restlessness of the sea
Insists a tidal fury upon the beach
At Gabu, and its pure consistency
Havocs the wasteland hard within its reach.

Brutal the daylong bashing of its heart
Against the seascape where, for miles around,
Farther than sight itself, the rock-stones part
And drop into the elemental wound.

The waste of centuries is grey and dead
And neutral where the sea has beached its brine,
Where the split salt of its heart lies spread
Among the dark habiliments of Time.

The vital splendor misses.  For here, here
At Gabu where the ageless tide recurs
All things forfeited are most loved and dear.

It is the sea pursues a habit of shores.

(Philippine Literature)
The Secret Language
by Maria Luisa B. Aguilar-Carino

I have learned your speech,
Fair stranger; for you
I have oiled my hair
And coiled it tight
Into a braid as thick
And beautiful as the serpent
In your story of Eden.

For you, I have covered
My breasts and hidden,
Among the folds of my surrendered
Inheritance, the beads
I have worn since girlhood.

It is fifty years now
Since the day my father
Took me to the school in Bua,
A headman's terrified
Peace-gift.  In the doorway,
The teacher stood, her hair
The bleached color of corn,
Watching with bird-eyes.

Now, I am Christina.
I am told I can make lace
Fine enough to lay upon the altar
Of a cathedral in Europe.
But this is a place
That I will never see.

I cook for tourists at an inn;
They praise my lemon pie
And my English, which they say
Is faultless.  I smile
And look past the window,
Imagining father's and grandfather's cattle
Grazing by the smoke trees.
But it is evening, and these
Are ghosts.

In the night,
When I am alone at last,
I lie uncorseted
Upon the iron bed,
Composing my lost beads
Over my chest, dreaming back
Each flecked and opalescent
Color, crooning the names,
Along with mine:
Binaay, Binaay.

I Teach My Child by Gemino H. Abad

I.
I teach my child

To survive.

I begin with our words,

           The simple words first

And last.

They are hardest to learn.

          Words like home,

Or friend, or to forgive.

These words are relations.

They are difficult to bear;

Their fruits are unseen.

          Or words that promise

Or dream.

Words like honor, or certainty,

Or cheer.

Rarest of sound,

Their roots run deep;

These are words that aspire,

They cast no shade.

          These are not words

To speak.

These are the words

Of which we consist,

Indefinite,

Without other ground.



II.

         My child

Is without syllables

To utter him,

Captive yet to his origin

In silence.

          By every word

To rule his space,

He is released;

He is shaped by his speech.

           Every act, too,

Is first without words.

There's no rehearsal

To adjust your deed

From direction of its words.

           The words are given,



But there's no script.

Their play is hidden,

We are their stage.

           These are the words

That offer to our care

Both sky and earth,

           These same words

That may elude our acts.

If we speak them

But cannot meet their sound,

They strand us still

In our void,

Blank like the child

With the uphill silence

Of his words' climb.

           And so,

I teach my child

To survive.

I begin with our words,

           The simple words first

And last.

(Philippine Poetry)
First, A Poem Must Be Magical
By Jose Garcia Villa

First, a poem must be magical,
Then musical as a seagull.
It must be a brightness moving
And hold secret a bird’s flowering
It must be slender as a bell,
And it must hold fire as well.
It must have the wisdom of bows
And it must kneel like a rose.
It must be able to hear
The luminance of dove and deer.
It must be able to hide
What it seeks, like a bride.
And over all I would like to hover
God, smiling from the poem’s cover.

(Philippine Poetry)
And If the Heart Can Not Love
By Jose Garcia Villa

And if the heart can not love
death can not cure it nor sleep
no splendor of wound the heart
had no sound

Bloom has escaped it and
birth the miraculous flower
and music and speech leave
it unbewitched

God it can not spell nor sun
nor lover the beautiful word
and it has no sound no sound
nor wound

(Philippine Poetry)
When I Was No Bigger Than A Huge
By Jose Garcia Villa

When, I, was, no, bigger, than, a, huge,
Star, in, my, self, I, began, to, write,
My,
Theology,
Of, rose, and,

Tiger: till, I, burned, with, their
Pure, and, Rage. Then, was, I, Wrath-
Ful,
And, most,
Gentle: most,

Dark, and, yet, most, Lit: in, me, an,
Eye, there, grew: springing, Vision,
Its,
Gold, and,
Its, wars. Then,

I, knew, the, Lord, was, not, my, Creator!
--Not, He, the, Unbegottenâ€"but, I, saw,
The,
Creator,
Was, Iâ€"and,

I, began, to, Die, and, I, began, to, Grow.

Philippine Poetry
The Rural Maid
By Fernando M. Maramag

1.
Thy glance, sweet maid, when first we met,
Had left a heart that aches for thee,
I feel the pain of fond regretâ€"
Thy heart, perchance, is not for me.

2.
We parted: though we met no more,
My dreams are dreams of thee, fair maid;
I think of thee, my thoughts implore
The hours my lips on thine are laid.

3.
Forgive these words that love impart,
And pleading, bare the poet’s breast;
And if a rose with thorns thou art,
Yet on my breast that rose may rest.

4.
I know not what to name thy charms,
Thou art half human, half divine;
And if I could hold thee in my arms,
I know both heaven and earth were mine.

How My Brother Leon Brought Home A Wife
By Manuel E. Arguilla
(Philippine Literature

She stepped down from the carretela of Ca Celin with a quick, delicate grace. She was lovely. SHe was tall. She looked up to my brother with a smile, and her forehead was on a level with his mouth.

"You are Baldo," she said and placed her hand lightly on my shoulder. Her nails were long, but they were not painted. She was fragrant like a morning when papayas are in bloom. And a small dimple appeared momently high on her right cheek.  "And this is Labang of whom I have heard so much." She held the wrist of one hand with the other and looked at Labang, and Labang never stopped chewing his cud. He swallowed and brought up to his mouth more cud and the sound of his insides was like a drum.

I laid a hand on Labang's massive neck and said to her: "You may scratch his forehead now."

She hesitated and I saw that her eyes were on the long, curving horns. But she came and touched Labang's forehead with her long fingers, and Labang never stopped chewing his cud except that his big eyes half closed. And by and by she was scratching his forehead very daintily.

My brother Leon put down the two trunks on the grassy side of the road. He paid Ca Celin twice the usual fare from the station to the edge of Nagrebcan. Then he was standing beside us, and she turned to him eagerly. I watched Ca Celin, where he stood in front of his horse, and he ran his fingers through its forelock and could not keep his eyes away from her.

"Maria---" my brother Leon said.

He did not say Maring. He did not say Mayang. I knew then that he had always called her Maria and that to us all she would be Maria; and in my mind I said 'Maria' and it was a beautiful name.

"Yes, Noel."

Now where did she get that name? I pondered the matter quietly to myself, thinking Father might not like it. But it was only the name of my brother Leon said backward and it sounded much better that way.

"There is Nagrebcan, Maria," my brother Leon said, gesturing widely toward the west.

She moved close to him and slipped her arm through his. And after a while she said quietly.

"You love Nagrebcan, don't you, Noel?"

Ca Celin drove away hi-yi-ing to his horse loudly. At the bend of the camino real where the big duhat tree grew, he rattled the handle of his braided rattan whip against the spokes of the wheel.

We stood alone on the roadside.

The sun was in our eyes, for it was dipping into the bright sea. The sky was wide and deep and very blue above us: but along the saw-tooth rim of the Katayaghan hills to the southwest flamed huge masses of clouds. Before us the fields swam in a golden haze through which floated big purple and red and yellow bubbles when I looked at the sinking sun. Labang's white coat, which I had wshed and brushed that morning with coconut husk, glistened like beaten cotton under the lamplight and his horns appeared tipped with fire.


He faced the sun and from his mouth came a call so loud and vibrant that the earth seemed to tremble underfoot. And far away in the middle of the field a cow lowed softly in answer.

"Hitch him to the cart, Baldo," my brother Leon said, laughing, and she laughed with him a big uncertainly, and I saw that he had put his arm around her shoulders.

"Why does he make that sound?" she asked. "I have never heard the like of it."

"There is not another like it," my brother Leon said. "I have yet to hear another bull call like Labang. In all the world there is no other bull like him."

She was smiling at him, and I stopped in the act of tying the sinta across Labang's neck to the opposite end of the yoke, because her teeth were very white, her eyes were so full of laughter, and there was the small dimple high up on her right cheek.

"If you continue to talk about him like that, either I shall fall in love with him or become greatly jealous."

My brother Leon laughed and she laughed and they looked at each other and it seemed to me there was a world of laughter between them and in them.

I climbed into the cart over the wheel and Labang would have bolted, for he was always like that, but I kept a firm hold on his rope. He was restless and would not stand still, so that my brother Leon had to say "Labang" several times. When he was quiet again, my brother Leon lifted the trunks into the cart, placing the smaller on top.

She looked down once at her high-heeled shoes, then she gave her left hand to my brother Leon, placed a foot on the hub of the wheel, and in one breath she had swung up into the cart. Oh, the fragrance of her. But Labang was fairly dancing with impatience and it was all I could do to keep him from running away.

"Give me the rope, Baldo," my brother Leon said. "Maria, sit down on the hay and hold on to anything." Then he put a foot on the left shaft and that instand labang leaped forward. My brother Leon laughed as he drew himself up to the top of the side of the cart and made the slack of the rope hiss above the back of labang. The wind whistled against my cheeks and the rattling of the wheels on the pebbly road echoed in my ears.

She sat up straight on the bottom of the cart, legs bent togther to one side, her skirts spread over them so that only the toes and heels of her shoes were visible. her eyes were on my brother Leon's back; I saw the wind on her hair. When Labang slowed down, my brother Leon handed to me the rope. I knelt on the straw inside the cart and pulled on the rope until Labang was merely shuffling along, then I made him turn around.

"What is it you have forgotten now, Baldo?" my brother Leon said.

I did not say anything but tickled with my fingers the rump of Labang; and away we went---back to where I had unhitched and waited for them. The sun had sunk and down from the wooded sides of the Katayaghan hills shadows were stealing into the fields. High up overhead the sky burned with many slow fires.

When I sent Labang down the deep cut that would take us to the dry bed of the Waig which could be used as a path to our place during the dry season, my brother Leon laid a hand on my shoulder and said sternly:

"Who told you to drive through the fields tonight?"

His hand was heavy on my shoulder, but I did not look at him or utter a word until we were on the rocky bottom of the Waig.

"Baldo, you fool, answer me before I lay the rope of Labang on you. Why do you follow the Wait instead of the camino real?"

His fingers bit into my shoulder.

"Father, he told me to follow the Waig tonight, Manong."

Swiftly, his hand fell away from my shoulder and he reached for the rope of Labang. Then my brother Leon laughed, and he sat back, and laughing still, he said:

"And I suppose Father also told you to hitch Labang to the cart and meet us with him instead of with Castano and the calesa."

Without waiting for me to answer, he turned to her and said, "Maria, why do you think Father should do that, now?" He laughed and added, "Have you ever seen so many stars before?"

I looked back and they were sitting side by side, leaning against the trunks, hands clasped across knees. Seemingly, but a man's height above the tops of the steep banks of the Wait, hung the stars. But in the deep gorge the shadows had fallen heavily, and even the white of Labang's coat was merely a dim, grayish blur. Crickets chirped from their homes in the cracks in the banks. The thick, unpleasant smell of dangla bushes and cooling sun-heated earth mingled with the clean, sharp scent of arrais roots exposed to the night air and of the hay inside the cart.

"Look, Noel, yonder is our star!" Deep surprise and gladness were in her voice. Very low in the west, almost touching the ragged edge of the bank, was the star, the biggest and brightest in the sky.

"I have been looking at it," my brother Leon said. "Do you remember how I would tell you that when you want to see stars you must come to Nagrebcan?"

"Yes, Noel," she said. "Look at it," she murmured, half to herself. "It is so many times bigger and brighter than it was at Ermita beach."

"The air here is clean, free of dust and smoke."

"So it is, Noel," she said, drawing a long breath.

"Making fun of me, Maria?"

She laughed then and they laughed together and she took my brother Leon's hand and put it against her face.

I stopped Labang, climbed down, and lighted the lantern that hung from the cart between the wheels.

"Good boy, Baldo," my brother Leon said as I climbed back into the cart, and my heart sant.

Now the shadows took fright and did not crowd so near. Clumps of andadasi and arrais flashed into view and quickly disappeared as we passed by. Ahead, the elongated shadow of Labang bobbled up and down and swayed drunkenly from side to side, for the lantern rocked jerkily with the cart.

"Have we far to go yet, Noel?" she asked.

"Ask Baldo," my brother Leon said, "we have been neglecting him."

"I am asking you, Baldo," she said.

Without looking back, I answered, picking my words slowly:

"Soon we will get out of the Wait and pass into the fields. After the fields is home---Manong."

"So near already."

I did not say anything more because I did not know what to make of the tone of her voice as she said her last words. All the laughter seemed to have gone out of her. I waited for my brother Leon to say something, but he was not saying anything. Suddenly he broke out into song and the song was 'Sky Sown with Stars'---the same that he and Father sang when we cut hay in the fields at night before he went away to study. He must have taught her the song because she joined him, and her voice flowed into his like a gentle stream meeting a stronger one. And each time the wheels encountered a big rock, her voice would catch in her throat, but my brother Leon would sing on, until, laughing softly, she would join him again.

Then we were climbing out into the fields, and through the spokes of the wheels the light of the lantern mocked the shadows. Labang quickened his steps. The jolting became more frequent and painful as we crossed the low dikes.

"But it is so very wide here," she said. The light of the stars broke and scattered the darkness so that one could see far on every side, though indistinctly.

"You miss the houses, and the cars, and the people and the noise, don't you?" My brother Leon stopped singing.

"Yes, but in a different way. I am glad they are not here."

With difficulty I turned Labang to the left, for he wanted to go straight on. He was breathing hard, but I knew he was more thirsty than tired. In a little while we drope up the grassy side onto the camino real.

"---you see," my brother Leon was explaining, "the camino real curves around the foot of the Katayaghan hills and passes by our house. We drove through the fields because---but I'll be asking Father as soon as we get home."

"Noel," she said.

"Yes, Maria."

"I am afraid. He may not like me."

"Does that worry you still, Maria?" my brother Leon said. "From the way you talk, he might be an ogre, for all the world. Except when his leg that was wounded in the Revolution is troubling him, Father is the mildest-tempered, gentlest man I know."

We came to the house of Lacay Julian and I spoke to Labang loudly, but Moning did not come to the window, so I surmised she must be eating with the rest of her family. And I thought of the food being made ready at home and my mouth watered. We met the twins, Urong and Celin, and I said "Hoy!" calling them by name. And they shouted back and asked if my brother Leon and his wife were with me. And my brother Leon shouted to them and then told me to make Labang run; their answers were lost in the noise of the wheels.

I stopped labang on the road before our house and would have gotten down but my brother Leon took the rope and told me to stay in the cart. He turned Labang into the open gate and we dashed into our yard. I thought we would crash into the camachile tree, but my brother Leon reined in Labang in time. There was light downstairs in the kitchen, and Mother stood in the doorway, and I could see her smiling shyly. My brother Leon was helping Maria over the wheel. The first words that fell from his lips after he had kissed Mother's hand were:

"Father... where is he?"

"He is in his room upstairs," Mother said, her face becoming serious. "His leg is bothering him again."

I did not hear anything more because I had to go back to the cart to unhitch Labang. But I hardly tied him under the barn when I heard Father calling me. I met my brother Leon going to bring up the trunks. As I passed through the kitchen, there were Mother and my sister Aurelia and Maria and it seemed to me they were crying, all of them.

There was no light in Father's room. There was no movement. He sat in the big armchair by the western window, and a star shone directly through it. He was smoking, but he removed the roll of tobacco from his mouth when he saw me. He laid it carefully on the windowsill before speaking.

"Did you meet anybody on the way?" he asked.

"No, Father," I said. "Nobody passes through the Waig at night."

He reached for his roll of tobacco and hithced himself up in the chair.

"She is very beautiful, Father."

"Was she afraid of Labang?" My father had not raised his voice, but the room seemed to resound with it. And again I saw her eyes on the long curving horns and the arm of my brother Leon around her shoulders.

"No, Father, she was not afraid."

"On the way---"

"She looked at the stars, Father. And Manong Leon sang."

"What did he sing?"

"---Sky Sown with Stars... She sang with him."

He was silent again. I could hear the low voices of Mother and my sister Aurelia downstairs. There was also the voice of my brother Leon, and I thought that Father's voice must have been like it when Father was young. He had laid the roll of tobacco on the windowsill once more. I watched the smoke waver faintly upward from the lighted end and vanish slowly into the night outside.

The door opened and my brother Leon and Maria came in.

"Have you watered Labang?" Father spoke to me.

I told him that Labang was resting yet under the barn.

"It is time you watered him, my son," my father said.

I looked at Maria and she was lovely. She was tall. Beside my brother Leon, she was tall and very still. Then I went out, and in the darkened hall the fragrance of her was like a morning when papayas are in bloom.

BPI Family Ka-Negosyo Business Loans
Sa Ka-Negosyo, may financing na aboy-kaya, may Pamasko pang kasama
Get a free refrigerator, netbook, or 32 inches LCD TV when you apply for a BPI Family Ka-Negosyo Business Loan.

Had the final word been said? He wondered. It had. Yet a feeble flutter of hope trembled in his mind though set against that hope were three years of engagement, a very near wedding, perfect understanding between the parents, his own conscience, and Esperanza herself--Esperanza waiting, Esperanza no longer young, Esperanza the efficient, the literal-minded, the intensely acquisitive.

He looked attentively at her where she sat on the sofa, appraisingly, and with a kind of aversion which he tried to control.

She was one of those fortunate women who have the gift of uniformly acceptable appearance. She never surprised one with unexpected homeliness nor with startling reserves of beauty. At home, in church, on the street, she was always herself, a woman past first bloom, light and clear of complexion, spare of arms and of breast, with a slight convexity to thin throat; a woman dressed with self-conscious care, even elegance; a woman distinctly not average.

She was pursuing an indignant relation about something or other, something about Calixta, their note-carrier, Alfredo perceived, so he merely half-listened, understanding imperfectly. At a pause he drawled out to fill in the gap: "Well, what of it?" The remark sounded ruder than he had intended.

"She is not married to him," Esperanza insisted in her thin, nervously pitched voice. "Besides, she should have thought of us. Nanay practically brought her up. We never thought she would turn out bad."

What had Calixta done? Homely, middle-aged Calixta?

"You are very positive about her badness," he commented dryly. Esperanza was always positive.

"But do you approve?"

"Of what?"

"What she did."

"No," indifferently.

"Well?"

He was suddenly impelled by a desire to disturb the unvexed orthodoxy of her mind. "All I say is that it is not necessarily wicked."

"Why shouldn't it be? You talked like an--immoral man. I did not know that your ideas were like that."

"My ideas?" he retorted, goaded by a deep, accumulated exasperation. "The only test I wish to apply to conduct is the test of fairness. Am I injuring anybody? No? Then I am justified in my conscience. I am right. Living with a man to whom she is not married--is that it? It may be wrong, and again it may not."

"She has injured us. She was ungrateful." Her voice was tight with resentment.

"The trouble with you, Esperanza, is that you are--" he stopped, appalled by the passion in his voice.

"Why do you get angry? I do not understand you at all! I think I know why you have been indifferent to me lately. I am not blind, or deaf; I see and hear what perhaps some are trying to keep from me." The blood surged into his very eyes and his hearing sharpened to points of acute pain. What would she say next?

"Why don't you speak out frankly before it is too late? You need not think of me and of what people will say." Her voice trembled.

Alfredo was suffering as he could not remember ever having suffered before. What people will say--what will they not say? What don't they say when long engagements are broken almost on the eve of the wedding?

"Yes," he said hesitatingly, diffidently, as if merely thinking aloud, "one tries to be fair--according to his lights--but it is hard. One would like to be fair to one's self first. But that is too easy, one does not dare--"

"What do you mean?" she asked with repressed violence. "Whatever my shortcomings, and no doubt they are many in your eyes, I have never gone out of my way, of my place, to find a man."

Did she mean by this irrelevant remark that he it was who had sought her; or was that a covert attack on Julia Salas?

"Esperanza--" a desperate plea lay in his stumbling words. "If you--suppose I--" Yet how could a mere man word such a plea?

"If you mean you want to take back your word, if you are tired of--why don't you tell me you are tired of me?" she burst out in a storm of weeping that left him completely shamed and unnerved.

The last word had been said.


III

AS Alfredo Salazar leaned against the boat rail to watch the evening settling over the lake, he wondered if Esperanza would attribute any significance to this trip of his. He was supposed to be in Sta. Cruz whither the case of the People of the Philippine Islands vs. Belina et al had kept him, and there he would have been if Brigida Samuy had not been so important to the defense. He had to find that elusive old woman. That the search was leading him to that particular lake town which was Julia Salas' home should not disturb him unduly Yet he was disturbed to a degree utterly out of proportion to the prosaicalness of his errand. That inner tumult was no surprise to him; in the last eight years he had become used to such occasional storms. He had long realized that he could not forget Julia Salas. Still, he had tried to be content and not to remember too much. The climber of mountains who has known the back-break, the lonesomeness, and the chill, finds a certain restfulness in level paths made easy to his feet. He looks up sometimes from the valley where settles the dusk of evening, but he knows he must not heed the radiant beckoning. Maybe, in time, he would cease even to look up.

He was not unhappy in his marriage. He felt no rebellion: only the calm of capitulation to what he recognized as irresistible forces of circumstance and of character. His life had simply ordered itself; no more struggles, no more stirring up of emotions that got a man nowhere. From his capacity of complete detachment he derived a strange solace. The essential himself, the himself that had its being in the core of his thought, would, he reflected, always be free and alone. When claims encroached too insistently, as sometimes they did, he retreated into the inner fastness, and from that vantage he saw things and people around him as remote and alien, as incidents that did not matter. At such times did Esperanza feel baffled and helpless; he was gentle, even tender, but immeasurably far away, beyond her reach.

Lights were springing into life on the shore. That was the town, a little up-tilted town nestling in the dark greenness of the groves. A snubcrested belfry stood beside the ancient church. On the outskirts the evening smudges glowed red through the sinuous mists of smoke that rose and lost themselves in the purple shadows of the hills. There was a young moon which grew slowly luminous as the coral tints in the sky yielded to the darker blues of evening.

The vessel approached the landing quietly, trailing a wake of long golden ripples on the dark water. Peculiar hill inflections came to his ears from the crowd assembled to meet the boat--slow, singing cadences, characteristic of the Laguna lake-shore speech. From where he stood he could not distinguish faces, so he had no way of knowing whether the presidente was there to meet him or not. Just then a voice shouted.

"Is the abogado there? Abogado!"

"What abogado?" someone irately asked.

That must be the presidente, he thought, and went down to the landing.

It was a policeman, a tall pock-marked individual. The presidente had left with Brigida Samuy--Tandang "Binday"--that noon for Santa Cruz. Señor Salazar's second letter had arrived late, but the wife had read it and said, "Go and meet the abogado and invite him to our house."

Alfredo Salazar courteously declined the invitation. He would sleep on board since the boat would leave at four the next morning anyway. So the presidente had received his first letter? Alfredo did not know because that official had not sent an answer. "Yes," the policeman replied, "but he could not write because we heard that Tandang Binday was in San Antonio so we went there to find her."

San Antonio was up in the hills! Good man, the presidente! He, Alfredo, must do something for him. It was not every day that one met with such willingness to help.

Eight o'clock, lugubriously tolled from the bell tower, found the boat settled into a somnolent quiet. A cot had been brought out and spread for him, but it was too bare to be inviting at that hour. It was too early to sleep: he would walk around the town. His heart beat faster as he picked his way to shore over the rafts made fast to sundry piles driven into the water.

How peaceful the town was! Here and there a little tienda was still open, its dim light issuing forlornly through the single window which served as counter. An occasional couple sauntered by, the women's chinelas making scraping sounds. From a distance came the shrill voices of children playing games on the street--tubigan perhaps, or "hawk-and-chicken." The thought of Julia Salas in that quiet place filled him with a pitying sadness.

How would life seem now if he had married Julia Salas? Had he meant anything to her? That unforgettable red-and-gold afternoon in early April haunted him with a sense of incompleteness as restless as other unlaid ghosts. She had not married--why? Faithfulness, he reflected, was not a conscious effort at regretful memory. It was something unvolitional, maybe a recurrent awareness of irreplaceability. Irrelevant trifles--a cool wind on his forehead, far-away sounds as of voices in a dream--at times moved him to an oddly irresistible impulse to listen as to an insistent, unfinished prayer.

A few inquiries led him to a certain little tree-ceilinged street where the young moon wove indistinct filigrees of fight and shadow. In the gardens the cotton tree threw its angular shadow athwart the low stone wall; and in the cool, stilly midnight the cock's first call rose in tall, soaring jets of sound. Calle Luz.

Somehow or other, he had known that he would find her house because she would surely be sitting at the window. Where else, before bedtime on a moonlit night? The house was low and the light in the sala behind her threw her head into unmistakable relief. He sensed rather than saw her start of vivid surprise.

"Good evening," he said, raising his hat.

"Good evening. Oh! Are you in town?"

"On some little business," he answered with a feeling of painful constraint.

"Won't you come up?"

He considered. His vague plans had not included this. But Julia Salas had left the window, calling to her mother as she did so. After a while, someone came downstairs with a lighted candle to open the door. At last--he was shaking her hand.

She had not changed much--a little less slender, not so eagerly alive, yet something had gone. He missed it, sitting opposite her, looking thoughtfully into her fine dark eyes. She asked him about the home town, about this and that, in a sober, somewhat meditative tone. He conversed with increasing ease, though with a growing wonder that he should be there at all. He could not take his eyes from her face. What had she lost? Or was the loss his? He felt an impersonal curiosity creeping into his gaze. The girl must have noticed, for her cheek darkened in a blush.

Gently--was it experimentally?--he pressed her hand at parting; but his own felt undisturbed and emotionless. Did she still care? The answer to the question hardly interested him.

The young moon had set, and from the uninviting cot he could see one half of a star-studded sky.

So that was all over.

Why had he obstinately clung to that dream?

So all these years--since when?--he had been seeing the light of dead stars, long extinguished, yet seemingly still in their appointed places in the heavens.

An immense sadness as of loss invaded his spirit, a vast homesickness for some immutable refuge of the heart far away where faded gardens bloom again, and where live on in unchanging freshness, the dear, dead loves of vanished youth.

(End)

Just before Holy Week, Don Julian invited the judge and his family to spend Sunday afternoon at Tanda where he had a coconut plantation and a house on the beach. Carmen also came with her four energetic children. She and Doña Adela spent most of the time indoors directing the preparation of the merienda and discussing the likeable absurdities of their husbands--how Carmen's Vicente was so absorbed in his farms that he would not even take time off to accompany her on this visit to her father; how Doña Adela's Dionisio was the most absentminded of men, sometimes going out without his collar, or with unmatched socks.

After the merienda, Don Julian sauntered off with the judge to show him what a thriving young coconut looked like--"plenty of leaves, close set, rich green"--while the children, convoyed by Julia Salas, found unending entertainment in the rippling sand left by the ebbing tide. They were far down, walking at the edge of the water, indistinctly outlined against the gray of the out-curving beach.

Alfredo left his perch on the bamboo ladder of the house and followed. Here were her footsteps, narrow, arched. He laughed at himself for his black canvas footwear which he removed forthwith and tossed high up on dry sand.

When he came up, she flushed, then smiled with frank pleasure.

"I hope you are enjoying this," he said with a questioning inflection.

"Very much. It looks like home to me, except that we do not have such a lovely beach."

There was a breeze from the water. It blew the hair away from her forehead, and whipped the tucked-up skirt around her straight, slender figure. In the picture was something of eager freedom as of wings poised in flight. The girl had grace, distinction. Her face was not notably pretty; yet she had a tantalizing charm, all the more compelling because it was an inner quality, an achievement of the spirit. The lure was there, of naturalness, of an alert vitality of mind and body, of a thoughtful, sunny temper, and of a piquant perverseness which is sauce to charm.

"The afternoon has seemed very short, hasn't it?" Then, "This, I think, is the last time--we can visit."

"The last? Why?"

"Oh, you will be too busy perhaps."

He noted an evasive quality in the answer.

"Do I seem especially industrious to you?"

"If you are, you never look it."

"Not perspiring or breathless, as a busy man ought to be."

"But--"

"Always unhurried, too unhurried, and calm." She smiled to herself.

"I wish that were true," he said after a meditative pause.

She waited.

"A man is happier if he is, as you say, calm and placid."

"Like a carabao in a mud pool," she retorted perversely

"Who? I?"

"Oh, no!"

"You said I am calm and placid."

"That is what I think."

"I used to think so too. Shows how little we know ourselves."

It was strange to him that he could be wooing thus: with tone and look and covert phrase.

"I should like to see your home town."

"There is nothing to see--little crooked streets, bunut roofs with ferns growing on them, and sometimes squashes."

That was the background. It made her seem less detached, less unrelated, yet withal more distant, as if that background claimed her and excluded him.

"Nothing? There is you."

"Oh, me? But I am here."

"I will not go, of course, until you are there."

"Will you come? You will find it dull. There isn't even one American there!"

"Well--Americans are rather essential to my entertainment."

She laughed.

"We live on Calle Luz, a little street with trees."

"Could I find that?"

"If you don't ask for Miss del Valle," she smiled teasingly.

"I'll inquire about--"

"What?"

"The house of the prettiest girl in the town."

"There is where you will lose your way." Then she turned serious. "Now, that is not quite sincere."

"It is," he averred slowly, but emphatically.

"I thought you, at least, would not say such things."

"Pretty--pretty--a foolish word! But there is none other more handy I did not mean that quite--"

"Are you withdrawing the compliment?"

"Re-enforcing it, maybe. Something is pretty when it pleases the eye--it is more than that when--"

"If it saddens?" she interrupted hastily.

"Exactly."

"It must be ugly."

"Always?"

Toward the west, the sunlight lay on the dimming waters in a broad, glinting streamer of crimsoned gold.

"No, of course you are right."

"Why did you say this is the last time?" he asked quietly as they turned back.

"I am going home."

The end of an impossible dream!

"When?" after a long silence.

"Tomorrow. I received a letter from Father and Mother yesterday. They want me to spend Holy Week at home."

She seemed to be waiting for him to speak. "That is why I said this is the last time."

"Can't I come to say good-bye?"

"Oh, you don't need to!"

"No, but I want to."

"There is no time."

The golden streamer was withdrawing, shortening, until it looked no more than a pool far away at the rim of the world. Stillness, a vibrant quiet that affects the senses as does solemn harmony; a peace that is not contentment but a cessation of tumult when all violence of feeling tones down to the wistful serenity of regret. She turned and looked into his face, in her dark eyes a ghost of sunset sadness.

"Home seems so far from here. This is almost like another life."

"I know. This is Elsewhere, and yet strange enough, I cannot get rid of the old things."

"Old things?"

"Oh, old things, mistakes, encumbrances, old baggage." He said it lightly, unwilling to mar the hour. He walked close, his hand sometimes touching hers for one whirling second.

Don Julian's nasal summons came to them on the wind.

Alfredo gripped the soft hand so near his own. At his touch, the girl turned her face away, but he heard her voice say very low, "Good-bye."


II

ALFREDO Salazar turned to the right where, farther on, the road broadened and entered the heart of the town--heart of Chinese stores sheltered under low-hung roofs, of indolent drug stores and tailor shops, of dingy shoe-repairing establishments, and a cluttered goldsmith's cubbyhole where a consumptive bent over a magnifying lens; heart of old brick-roofed houses with quaint hand-and-ball knockers on the door; heart of grass-grown plaza reposeful with trees, of ancient church and convento, now circled by swallows gliding in flight as smooth and soft as the afternoon itself. Into the quickly deepening twilight, the voice of the biggest of the church bells kept ringing its insistent summons. Flocking came the devout with their long wax candles, young women in vivid apparel (for this was Holy Thursday and the Lord was still alive), older women in sober black skirts. Came too the young men in droves, elbowing each other under the talisay tree near the church door. The gaily decked rice-paper lanterns were again on display while from the windows of the older houses hung colored glass globes, heirlooms from a day when grasspith wicks floating in coconut oil were the chief lighting device.

Soon a double row of lights emerged from the church and uncoiled down the length of the street like a huge jewelled band studded with glittering clusters where the saints' platforms were. Above the measured music rose the untutored voices of the choir, steeped in incense and the acrid fumes of burning wax.

The sight of Esperanza and her mother sedately pacing behind Our Lady of Sorrows suddenly destroyed the illusion of continuity and broke up those lines of light into component individuals. Esperanza stiffened self-consciously, tried to look unaware, and could not.

The line moved on.

Suddenly, Alfredo's slow blood began to beat violently, irregularly. A girl was coming down the line--a girl that was striking, and vividly alive, the woman that could cause violent commotion in his heart, yet had no place in the completed ordering of his life.

Her glance of abstracted devotion fell on him and came to a brief stop.

The line kept moving on, wending its circuitous route away from the church and then back again, where, according to the old proverb, all processions end.

At last Our Lady of Sorrows entered the church, and with her the priest and the choir, whose voices now echoed from the arched ceiling. The bells rang the close of the procession.

A round orange moon, "huge as a winnowing basket," rose lazily into a clear sky, whitening the iron roofs and dimming the lanterns at the windows. Along the still densely shadowed streets the young women with their rear guard of males loitered and, maybe, took the longest way home.

Toward the end of the row of Chinese stores, he caught up with Julia Salas. The crowd had dispersed into the side streets, leaving Calle Real to those who lived farther out. It was past eight, and Esperanza would be expecting him in a little while: yet the thought did not hurry him as he said "Good evening" and fell into step with the girl.

"I had been thinking all this time that you had gone," he said in a voice that was both excited and troubled.

"No, my sister asked me to stay until they are ready to go."

"Oh, is the Judge going?"

"Yes."

The provincial docket had been cleared, and Judge del Valle had been assigned elsewhere. As lawyer--and as lover--Alfredo had found that out long before.

"Mr. Salazar," she broke into his silence, "I wish to congratulate you."

Her tone told him that she had learned, at last. That was inevitable.

"For what?"

"For your approaching wedding."

Some explanation was due her, surely. Yet what could he say that would not offend?

"I should have offered congratulations long before, but you know mere visitors are slow about getting the news," she continued.

He listened not so much to what she said as to the nuances in her voice. He heard nothing to enlighten him, except that she had reverted to the formal tones of early acquaintance. No revelation there; simply the old voice--cool, almost detached from personality, flexible and vibrant, suggesting potentialities of song.

"Are weddings interesting to you?" he finally brought out quietly

"When they are of friends, yes."

"Would you come if I asked you?"

"When is it going to be?"

"May," he replied briefly, after a long pause.

"May is the month of happiness they say," she said, with what seemed to him a shade of irony.

"They say," slowly, indifferently. "Would you come?"

"Why not?"

"No reason. I am just asking. Then you will?"

"If you will ask me," she said with disdain.

"Then I ask you."

"Then I will be there."

The gravel road lay before them; at the road's end the lighted windows of the house on the hill. There swept over the spirit of Alfredo Salazar a longing so keen that it was pain, a wish that, that house were his, that all the bewilderments of the present were not, and that this woman by his side were his long wedded wife, returning with him to the peace of home.

"Julita," he said in his slow, thoughtful manner, "did you ever have to choose between something you wanted to do and something you had to do?"

"No!"

"I thought maybe you had had that experience; then you could understand a man who was in such a situation."

"You are fortunate," he pursued when she did not answer.

"Is--is this man sure of what he should do?"

"I don't know, Julita. Perhaps not. But there is a point where a thing escapes us and rushes downward of its own weight, dragging us along. Then it is foolish to ask whether one will or will not, because it no longer depends on him."

"But then why--why--" her muffled voice came. "Oh, what do I know? That is his problem after all."

"Doesn't it--interest you?"

"Why must it? I--I have to say good-bye, Mr. Salazar; we are at the house."

Without lifting her eyes she quickly turned and walked away.

Dead Stars
By Paz Marquez Benitez
(Philippine Literature)

THROUGH the open window the air-steeped outdoors passed into his room, quietly enveloping him, stealing into his very thought. Esperanza, Julia, the sorry mess he had made of life, the years to come even now beginning to weigh down, to crush--they lost concreteness, diffused into formless melancholy. The tranquil murmur of conversation issued from the brick-tiled azotea where Don Julian and Carmen were busy puttering away among the rose pots.

"Papa, and when will the 'long table' be set?"

"I don't know yet. Alfredo is not very specific, but I understand Esperanza wants it to be next month."

Carmen sighed impatiently. "Why is he not a bit more decided, I wonder. He is over thirty, is he not? And still a bachelor! Esperanza must be tired waiting."

"She does not seem to be in much of a hurry either," Don Julian nasally commented, while his rose scissors busily snipped away.

"How can a woman be in a hurry when the man does not hurry her?" Carmen returned, pinching off a worm with a careful, somewhat absent air. "Papa, do you remember how much in love he was?"

"In love? With whom?"

"With Esperanza, of course. He has not had another love affair that I know of," she said with good-natured contempt. "What I mean is that at the beginning he was enthusiastic--flowers, serenades, notes, and things like that--"

Alfredo remembered that period with a wonder not unmixed with shame. That was less than four years ago. He could not understand those months of a great hunger that was not of the body nor yet of the mind, a craving that had seized on him one quiet night when the moon was abroad and under the dappled shadow of the trees in the plaza, man wooed maid. Was he being cheated by life? Love--he seemed to have missed it. Or was the love that others told about a mere fabrication of perfervid imagination, an exaggeration of the commonplace, a glorification of insipid monotonies such as made up his love life? Was love a combination of circumstances, or sheer native capacity of soul? In those days love was, for him, still the eternal puzzle; for love, as he knew it, was a stranger to love as he divined it might be.

Sitting quietly in his room now, he could almost revive the restlessness of those days, the feeling of tumultuous haste, such as he knew so well in his boyhood when something beautiful was going on somewhere and he was trying to get there in time to see. "Hurry, hurry, or you will miss it," someone had seemed to urge in his ears. So he had avidly seized on the shadow of Love and deluded himself for a long while in the way of humanity from time immemorial. In the meantime, he became very much engaged to Esperanza.

Why would men so mismanage their lives? Greed, he thought, was what ruined so many. Greed--the desire to crowd into a moment all the enjoyment it will hold, to squeeze from the hour all the emotion it will yield. Men commit themselves when but half-meaning to do so, sacrificing possible future fullness of ecstasy to the craving for immediate excitement. Greed--mortgaging the future--forcing the hand of Time, or of Fate.

"What do you think happened?" asked Carmen, pursuing her thought.

"I supposed long-engaged people are like that; warm now, cool tomorrow. I think they are oftener cool than warm. The very fact that an engagement has been allowed to prolong itself argues a certain placidity of temperament--or of affection--on the part of either, or both." Don Julian loved to philosophize. He was talking now with an evident relish in words, his resonant, very nasal voice toned down to monologue pitch. "That phase you were speaking of is natural enough for a beginning. Besides, that, as I see it, was Alfredo's last race with escaping youth--"

Carmen laughed aloud at the thought of her brother's perfect physical repose--almost indolence--disturbed in the role suggested by her father's figurative language.

"A last spurt of hot blood," finished the old man.

Few certainly would credit Alfredo Salazar with hot blood. Even his friends had amusedly diagnosed his blood as cool and thin, citing incontrovertible evidence. Tall and slender, he moved with an indolent ease that verged on grace. Under straight recalcitrant hair, a thin face with a satisfying breadth of forehead, slow, dreamer's eyes, and astonishing freshness of lips--indeed Alfredo Salazar's appearance betokened little of exuberant masculinity; rather a poet with wayward humor, a fastidious artist with keen, clear brain.

He rose and quietly went out of the house. He lingered a moment on the stone steps; then went down the path shaded by immature acacias, through the little tarred gate which he left swinging back and forth, now opening, now closing, on the gravel road bordered along the farther side by madre cacao hedge in tardy lavender bloom.

The gravel road narrowed as it slanted up to the house on the hill, whose wide, open porches he could glimpse through the heat-shrivelled tamarinds in the Martinez yard.

Six weeks ago that house meant nothing to him save that it was the Martinez house, rented and occupied by Judge del Valle and his family. Six weeks ago Julia Salas meant nothing to him; he did not even know her name; but now--

One evening he had gone "neighboring" with Don Julian; a rare enough occurrence, since he made it a point to avoid all appearance of currying favor with the Judge. This particular evening however, he had allowed himself to be persuaded. "A little mental relaxation now and then is beneficial," the old man had said. "Besides, a judge's good will, you know;" the rest of the thought--"is worth a rising young lawyer's trouble"--Don Julian conveyed through a shrug and a smile that derided his own worldly wisdom.

A young woman had met them at the door. It was evident from the excitement of the Judge's children that she was a recent and very welcome arrival. In the characteristic Filipino way formal introductions had been omitted--the judge limiting himself to a casual "Ah, ya se conocen?"--with the consequence that Alfredo called her Miss del Valle throughout the evening.

He was puzzled that she should smile with evident delight every time he addressed her thus. Later Don Julian informed him that she was not the Judge's sister, as he had supposed, but his sister-in-law, and that her name was Julia Salas. A very dignified rather austere name, he thought. Still, the young lady should have corrected him. As it was, he was greatly embarrassed, and felt that he should explain.

To his apology, she replied, "That is nothing, Each time I was about to correct you, but I remembered a similar experience I had once before."

"Oh," he drawled out, vastly relieved.

"A man named Manalang--I kept calling him Manalo. After the tenth time or so, the young man rose from his seat and said suddenly, 'Pardon me, but my name is Manalang, Manalang.' You know, I never forgave him!"

He laughed with her.

"The best thing to do under the circumstances, I have found out," she pursued, "is to pretend not to hear, and to let the other person find out his mistake without help."

"As you did this time. Still, you looked amused every time I--"

"I was thinking of Mr. Manalang."

Don Julian and his uncommunicative friend, the Judge, were absorbed in a game of chess. The young man had tired of playing appreciative spectator and desultory conversationalist, so he and Julia Salas had gone off to chat in the vine-covered porch. The lone piano in the neighborhood alternately tinkled and banged away as the player's moods altered. He listened, and wondered irrelevantly if Miss Salas could sing; she had such a charming speaking voice.

He was mildly surprised to note from her appearance that she was unmistakably a sister of the Judge's wife, although Doña Adela was of a different type altogether. She was small and plump, with wide brown eyes, clearly defined eyebrows, and delicately modeled hips--a pretty woman with the complexion of a baby and the expression of a likable cow. Julia was taller, not so obviously pretty. She had the same eyebrows and lips, but she was much darker, of a smooth rich brown with underlying tones of crimson which heightened the impression she gave of abounding vitality.

On Sunday mornings after mass, father and son would go crunching up the gravel road to the house on the hill. The Judge's wife invariably offered them beer, which Don Julian enjoyed and Alfredo did not. After a half hour or so, the chessboard would be brought out; then Alfredo and Julia Salas would go out to the porch to chat. She sat in the low hammock and he in a rocking chair and the hours--warm, quiet March hours--sped by. He enjoyed talking with her and it was evident that she liked his company; yet what feeling there was between them was so undisturbed that it seemed a matter of course. Only when Esperanza chanced to ask him indirectly about those visits did some uneasiness creep into his thoughts of the girl next door.

Esperanza had wanted to know if he went straight home after mass. Alfredo suddenly realized that for several Sundays now he had not waited for Esperanza to come out of the church as he had been wont to do. He had been eager to go "neighboring."

He answered that he went home to work. And, because he was not habitually untruthful, added, "Sometimes I go with Papa to Judge del Valle's."

She dropped the topic. Esperanza was not prone to indulge in unprovoked jealousies. She was a believer in the regenerative virtue of institutions, in their power to regulate feeling as well as conduct. If a man were married, why, of course, he loved his wife; if he were engaged, he could not possibly love another woman.

That half-lie told him what he had not admitted openly to himself, that he was giving Julia Salas something which he was not free to give. He realized that; yet something that would not be denied beckoned imperiously, and he followed on.

It was so easy to forget up there, away from the prying eyes of the world, so easy and so poignantly sweet. The beloved woman, he standing close to her, the shadows around, enfolding.

"Up here I find--something--"

He and Julia Salas stood looking out into the she quiet night. Sensing unwanted intensity, laughed, woman-like, asking, "Amusement?"

"No; youth--its spirit--"

"Are you so old?"

"And heart's desire."

Was he becoming a poet, or is there a poet lurking in the heart of every man?

"Down there," he had continued, his voice somewhat indistinct, "the road is too broad, too trodden by feet, too barren of mystery."

"Down there" beyond the ancient tamarinds lay the road, upturned to the stars. In the darkness the fireflies glimmered, while an errant breeze strayed in from somewhere, bringing elusive, faraway sounds as of voices in a dream.

"Mystery--" she answered lightly, "that is so brief--"

"Not in some," quickly. "Not in you."

"You have known me a few weeks; so the mystery."

"I could study you all my life and still not find it."

"So long?"

"I should like to."

Those six weeks were now so swift--seeming in the memory, yet had they been so deep in the living, so charged with compelling power and sweetness. Because neither the past nor the future had relevance or meaning, he lived only the present, day by day, lived it intensely, with such a willful shutting out of fact as astounded him in his calmer moments.

Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas executive director Noli Eala announced on Wednesday that FIBA Asia has officially awarded the hosting rights of the 22nd FIBA Asia Champions Cup to the Philippines tentatively scheduled middle of May.

Eala said the notice was transmitted by FIBA Asia secretary general Dato Yeoh to the SBP.

FIBA Asia has assigned deputy secretary-general Hagop Khajirian to hold formal talks with SBP officials, led by president Manny V. Pangilinan, on January 19 and inspect the venues, hotels and other facilities, which will be used in the tournament featuring the best club teams in Asia.

Smart Gilas finished outside of the medal rankings the past two years.

The Philippine five, whose core is made up of former collegiate standouts, wound up fifth in the 2009 edition held in Jakarta, Indonesia, with former naturalization candidate CJ Giles as import.

In 2009, the Nationals lost some of their key players to injuries and ended up seventh in the Doha, Qatar, edition.

Mahram of Iran, composed of players from 2007 and 2009 FIBA Asia champion Iran, is seeking a third straight crown. - PDI

BPI Express Credit
Earn rewards points for every 100 spent using BPI Express Credit at any Robinson Store.
Robinsons Department Store, Robinsons Supermarket, Handyman, Robinsons Appliances, Topshop Topman, Warehouse Trucco, ToysRus, TrueValue, Saizen, and Howards Storage World.

Mura man ni ug embodo sa tuba. Gikan sa sugong paingon sa gallon.

Maayo pud ug naay robotic hand nga maoy moilo sa lubot.

Surrender ang David's Salon ani.

By Judy Flores Partlow and Juancho Gallarde

DUMAGUETE CITY, Jan. 12 (PNA) - Thousands of people in Dumaguete City and the province of Negros Oriental on Wednesday afternoon took time out from their busy schedules to attend the funeral services of the late Governor Agustin Perdices.

Although it was not a special non-working holiday due to time constraint, as only the President can declare such, many offices and schools issued their own directives to go on skeletal force so people can attend the requiem Mass and send off the late governor to his final resting place at the Dumaguete Memorial Park.

Archbishop Angel Lagdameo, former bishop of the Diocese of Dumaguete, officiated the Holy Mass at the St. Catherine of Alexandria Cathedral, with Dumaguete Bishop John F. Du and several priests concelebrating.

The funeral mass started at exactly 2 p.m. with the church packed to the brim with many more people standing outside the Cathedral and at the nearby Quezon Park during the entire service.

A conservative estimate of 5,000 people was seen in church, with thousands more lining up the streets and joining the funeral procession later to the cemetery, with the number of mourners believed to have increased to about 8,000.

In his homily, Archbishop Lagdameo paid tribute to the man whom he considered to have left a number of legacies for his predecessors to emulate.

Lagdameo, who was former president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, said the late Gov. Perdices left a legacy of genuine public service without any taint of corruption in his whole career as a politician.

Like his best friend, the late Governor Emilio Macias II, Gov. Agustin Perdices also died at 76, only a little over six months apart from when Macias died last June 13.

Lagdameo considered the two great leaders of the province as inseparable twins, saying that only death had parted them but only temporarily because they are now reunited in heaven.

Lagdameo quoted one of the late Gov. Perdices' last words, which goes, "Lord, you made me governor and now that I am governor, you are in a hurry to take me. But I am leaving my faith to God”.

Lagdameo also cited what the late governor's city legal officer for 10 years, Atty. Neil Ray Lagahit said, that Perdices had “fought a good fight”.

In attendance during the funeral and burial were Governor Roel Degamo, Vice Governor Apolinario Arnaiz, Jr., Dumaguete Mayor Manuel Sagarbarria, Rep. George Arnaiz, Rep. Pryde Henry Teves, other city and municipal mayors and officials, local and national government officials, and even Bacolod Mayor Evelio Leonardia who motored all the way from the other side of Negros Island to attend the services.

The Provincial Board, headed by Vice Gov. Arnaiz, and the Dumaguete City Council, headed by Atty. Alan Gel Cordova, read their respective resolutions citing the late Gov. Perdices for his contributions to the city and the province.

Mayor Leonardia, meanwhile, had earlier authored General Assembly Resolution GARES No. 2011-01 of the League of Cities of the Philippines (LCP) expressing deep sympathy and heartfelt condolences to the family of the late Gov. Perdices.

The LCP resolution states that it “joins the Perdices family, constituents and all those who hold him in high esteem on this sad occasion in mourning over the passing away of a man who gave the best years of his life in serving his people”.

Shortly after 3 o’clock in the afternoon, the funeral procession started from the Cathedral, with majority of the mourners walking along with the family members in what many describe as the longest funeral march in Dumaguete in decades.

As the hearse passed by the house of the late governor, supporters threw yellow confetti on the funeral car while all the street lights in the city were also turned on to give due respect to the passing away of Perdices.

Interment at the Dumaguete Memorial Park included full military honors accorded to him by the Philippine National Police and the Armed Forces, including a 21-gun salute and the playing of the melancholic Taps, a traditional military bugle call during funeral ceremonies.

The Philippine flag, which was draped over Perdices’ coffin, was folded and handed over by provincial police director Sr. Supt. Rey Lyndon Lawas, to Agustin Miguel Perdices, the only son of the late governor.

Perdices was laid to rest next to the grave of his late wife, Eugenia Araneta.

The late Gov. Perdices succumbed to stomach cancer last January 5, after having served a little over six months as governor of Negros Oriental. He was 76.

Perdices served as mayor of Dumaguete for 19 years before he was elected last May 10 as the vice governor of Negros Oriental, but served in that position very briefly after he assumed the governorship following the death of re-elected Gov. Macias. (PNA)

Why does a round pizza come in a square box?

What level of importance must a person have, before they are considered assassinated instead of just murdered?

If our body temperature is normally 98.6 degrees, how come when it's 98 degrees outside, no one is comfortable?

If you were a genie and a person asked you this wish, "I wish you would not grant me this wish", what would you do?

Why is it that it’s good to score under par in golf but its bad to be "under par" in any thing else?

Why do people say, "You can't have your cake and eat it too"? Why would someone get cake if they can't eat it?

Did Noah have woodpeckers on the ark? If he did, where did he keep them?

Why is "Charlie" short for "Charles" if they are both the same number of letters?

Why is snow white and ice clear? Aren't they just different forms of water?

Why is it called a TV set when there is only one?

Why is the 0 on a phone after 1 and not before 1?

Why is a square meal served on round plates?

Why do companies offer you "free gifts?" Aren't gifts by definition free?

Why do you go "back and forth" to town if you really must go forth before you go back?

Why isn't chocolate considered a vegetable, since chocolate comes from cocoa beans, and all beans are a vegetable?

If a fork were made of gold would it still be considered silverware?

How come you play at a recital, but recite at a play?

Why is it that when things get wet they get darker, even though water is clear?

If it's zero degrees outside today and it's supposed to be twice as cold tomorrow, how cold is it going to be?

Can you get cornered in a round room?

Isn't Disney World just a people's trap operated by a mouse?

Are marbles made of marble?

What does it mean to you to allow another person to fully love you?

If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?

If you think you’re a hypochondriac, then are you one or not?

Why does ‘dyslexia’ have to be so hard to spell?

If dawn breaks, does dusk come together?

What would a burger of ham be called?

If you get a beer belly by drinking beer, do you get a pot belly by smoking pot?

Why do we never hear of people coming from ‘left west’ or ‘right east’?

Why are there seeds in seeded grapes, but no bones in a boned fillet?

Why is Friday 13th considered unlucky, considering that the Last Supper was on Thursday?

There are many transport trailer options, the most popular among these types is the open carrier transport. The open carrier transport, aside from being popular, is the least expensive mode of transporting automobiles. Usually, your automobile will be transported on haulers like the ones used to deliver new cars. These trailers have a capacity of eight to ten cars. They are around 80 feet long and 14 feet high. With their immense size they are limited to traveling on major roads that are free of possible obstacles such as trees and such. They are also limited to traveling on roads that can support its weight. These trailers cannot maneuver easily on tight turns. - read more here

In the pilot for this popular seventies cop show, the show's protagonist, Dan Tanna drove a bright yellow Corvette. Somewhere along the way the car was destroyed in the desert and Robert Urich's character ended up with a bright red 1957 Thunderbird convertible. The T-Bird was, in essence, the co-star of Vega$. Urich commented that the sports car received more fan mail than he did. The show aired 67 episodes and through the entire production, only two of the 1957 Thunderbirds were used. The cars later appeared, painted an aquamarine hue, in the Richard Gere movie, Breathless. One cannot think of Vega$ without thinking of Tanna in his T-Bird cruising down the strip. - read more here

Seven more deaths in heavy flooding in the Philippines have brought the toll from a fortnight of heavy rains to 40.

Disaster officials said that more than one million people have been affected by heavy monsoon rains across the country.

The latest deaths occurred when flash floods hit Samar Island on Tuesday.

The government has estimated the cost of the damage at more than $20m (£12.8m); new heavy downpours are due over Bicol and the Eastern Visayas.

The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council said many more people were missing after being swept away by floods or buried by landslides.

Their latest bulletin said that soldiers and government personnel were evacuating more people in Samar and nearby Leyte island.

Two six-year-old children, and one nine-year-old were among the victims of the Samar flash floods. - BBC

Unsay inyong ikasulti?

Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (Data Release zoom
Digital Sky, a picture of the universe

Nestle Coffee-mate Lite 50% Less Fat
Great Creamy Taste

I haven't seen corn coffee being sold in malls and stores in Bohol.
Jojie's Painiting Bol-anon in Tagbilaran is selling it in hot liquid form, ready to drink.

Manila Hotel: A Historical Landmark
A venue for big events and grand aspirations
One Rizal Park, Manila, Philippines
Tel: 632-527-0011
email: resvn@manila-hotel.com.ph

Globe Blackberry Social
P300/30 days
Unlimited Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, IM and BBM

Text BB SOCIAL ON to 8888

Mobile Browsing not included

Globe Blackberry Messaging
P300/30 days
Unlimited Email, IM and BBM

Text BB MSG ON to 8888