Tell Me In Darkness by Julian E. Dacanay, Jr
To be a man, you ought to know your father, no matter how much you hate the idea, or no matter how much you want to be different from him and to set that difference as if you hated him. My brothers went and got themselves married—to women who looked kind and all right—but every time I'd talk with them, I could feel there was something unfulfilled about them, something missing which I could see in their eyes. For their eyes looked like unfinished dreams that shaped a knowledge to me: it is not a woman who makes you a man, there is more to it than all that.
But, I don't know--that's the whole trouble-I'm not sure that I know. If I talk of my father now, it is not because I know him, the way one knows oneself perhaps. I know him less than my brothers ever did whatever that amounted to, anyway. For while they lived, after their marriages, in houses built in the old family compound where my father's house still stood-which my married sister now occupied, reserving only a private room for my father's frequent stay in the city-I went away and lived on my own, sometimes with an unknown address.
In the years I was away, I rarely saw the family; once or twice in half a year perhaps, during family reunions, like Christmas. And when I was in the family compound, the communication-a brother here, my sister there, not all of them at once-was more of small talk and the usual greetings than anything else. On my last visit, however, I left an address. Perhaps it was this address that brought my father and my brother-in-law to the place where I worked. They found me in a depressing crisis: I was thin and pale and trying hard to run an automatic machine that had broken down. It was a printing shop they had come upon; I was living behind a screen in the next room, within a space just enough for a bed; alone.
My father took a good look at the small shop, at the space, I slept in, at my three assistants occupied in their tasks here and there, and turned to me.
"How's business?" he asked bluntly.
I was holding a screw driver in my right hand, grimy with heavy oil and printer's ink, and I felt there was more to that question and that look that weighed me down and ground out a dry smile. Yes, he was me as I saw myself; a young man who once was studying to be a school teacher but there I was, besides a dead machine, holding a screw driver.
"It's bad," I said frankly, looking him in the eye, my attention now distracted from the machine. "Actually, my associate wants to sell it and close shop.
"You better take a rest," he said. "Come home."
Home, of course, meant the old compound and the old house that was where I found myself several days later after my father's visit. My associate sold the press, and since it was a losing affair, I didn't get much from it, except enough money to transfer my belongings-the old bed, principally to my sister's care until after I could get away again on my own. I was given to share the private room of my father.
It was-now I can stare at the cold facts-almost like old times, staying in my father's house in the old compound. Almost, because it wasn't like old times. The old times had my mother in their every day, within the rooms of the old house, within the breath of the compound. Now my mother was dead and my father had taken residence in a faraway southern town called Ligao, train riding to the city only on business trips, and my brothers and my sister had married and I had gone away and now come back, older, changed, and could look straight at the way life went: my father married the woman who had brought my mother so much grief until she died from a broken heart.
My father's private room in the old house was bare, except for a bed. When I moved in, I put in my bed and placed a desk against the window. With nothing to do the first week, I built a cabinet for my clothes and fixed several shelves for my books. The second week, I devoted myself to reading. Staying in the old house stirred the ashes of an old dream: perhaps if I went back to school to complete my studies in education and then teach somewhere in the city… But at night, when I lay awake to my father's sturnings on the other bed, I would think that, after a few weeks, I should get another job in another printing house in the city. After all, the years had made a printer out of me and there was now, as the wise put it, printer's ink pulsing darkly in my veins.
My sister's children two of them-Celine and Lilibeth-provided a welcome change. Being around the house most of the time, I became known to them and they became attracted to me. They would climb all over me in my room and throw my books about; the only way to stop them was to lead them away into the garden, where I played children's games with them. Soon, even in the mornings, the moment they woke up, they would look for me; and on days when I would come home from Mass, they would demand the two packages of raisins I brought them, digging into my pockets if I pretended to have forgotten.
My nieces, too, enjoyed my father's presence. They called him "Dads" instead of "Lolo" because that was the way my sister called my father. My sister's husband was "Daddy" to them; "I'm Lolo," my father would tell Celine and Lilibeth but they would cry out simultaneously: "Dads!" It was easy enough to see that he was fond of them, as he often brought them apples or oranges or fascinating toys brought from the sidewalks in Avenida. They reminded him so much of his own children by his second wife in Ligao. His second wife's name was Nomera and they had, between them, three children. My eldest half-brother was six years old.
The first three weeks, just sitting around, eventually brought flesh and color to my pale health. I would wander, now and then, into the houses of my brothers and talk, if not with them, with their wives, and I would browse around in their libraries. On Sundays, there were reunions in the old house, at lunchtime. My father, at such moments, was again the head of the family, grown big with grandchildren. But such moments never stayed too long, for he would disappear early in the mornings, and sometimes never appear at night. For three days he stayed, in Ligao, with his own family. Everybody took his manner of life for granted and his absence was never a cause for anxious pain. I stayed and read in our room and slept a good night's sleep every night, with or without him. But if he was around, he would ask me to massage his head and his back before he went to sleep.
And I never got to know things about him, things known by asking questions, for I never asked questions and he never drew them. Nothing much, or nothing added to what I already saw and knew.
Yes, one day.
It was past ten o'clock and I was in bed, reading. Father was arcund the whole week, working on something somewhere, I supposed, and that morning he must have left the house while I was attending Mass. But he came back, I knew his footsteps on the floor. And when he was not yet in our room, I already heard him calling my name.
He looked excited-but it was excitement fixed with smiles. He told me to get dressed. "We're going somewhere."
"Where're we going?" I asked.
"Just get dressed quickly," he said. He was all over the room now, looking for something I didn't know what, and he looked funny in a meaningless search. "I'll take care of you," he was saying awkwardly, like a mistaken phrase. "Get dressed-you hurry up!"
I got dressed as quickly as his excitement flushed and pushed him uselessly about the room and out the door. "I'm cashing a check."
Inside the taxi, he kept talking about a deal which I never understood but to which I kept the pretense by nodding. One thing was clear, though: he got a check out of it and he showed it to me.