ENGLISH

• 5. Eleven times a muzale
• 6 Raul
• my was Father in his room when
• Maria, and Baldo amived?
• ds to Know
• assumed, guessed
• hideous giant of fairy
• klore that feeds on
• "Does that worry you still, Maria?" my brother Leon said.: '"From the way you talk, he might be an ogre, for the entire world. Except when his leg that was wounded in the Revolution is troubling him, Father is the mildest-tempered, gentlest i 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 held back 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 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.
• Manuel E. Arguilla


  • Born in La Union
  • One of the best Filipino short story writers
  • His collection of short stories, "How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife, and Other Stories", won first prize in the Commonwealth Literary Contest in 1940
  • This short story in English is one of the very few Philippine stories reprinted in the internationally-recognized Story magazine and was cited by Edward O'Brien in the yearbook of the American Short Story