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Asocena - Short story
Literature (L00001)
Ateneo de Zamboanga University
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ASOCENA
By Antonio Enriquez Like most of the boys in Labuan, a coastal barrio in Zamboanga, Chu had a farm dog. He called him Leal, which in the Chabacano dialect means loyal. It was always fun to watch Leal chase the big monkeys in the cornfield, for as the dog passed under the low branches of the trees on the slope of a small hill above the kaingin, the monkeys hanging by their tails from the low branches would reach out and pull Leal’s tail. This always enraged the dog and he would bark at the foot of the hill until the monkeys, bored, left for higher branches. Chu could not think of anything funnier happening to a farm dog. Early one morning Leal is missing, and Chu goes up to the kaingin to look for him. “Have you seen Leal, Pa?” “No,” said his father. “I thought he was with you when I left the house.” “I hope nothing has happened to him,” the boy said. The father noted real worry in his son’s voice. His boy was taking it badly. He was too young to worry like this. He said, “Maybe he’s in the house.” “Don’t worry, Chu,” said the father. “He is just around somewhere.” “Do you think, Pa,” Chu said, “that anything has happened to him?” There was that worry in his voice again, the father noticed. Chu looked bad trying to hide his worry, not knowing how to handle it. “You are a big worrier,” he said. “Why don’t you look for him at the river? He loves to flush those wild palomas, pigeons, along the river bank.” The sun was still very young in the morning. Chu walked barefoot along the footpath, coming down the slope of the hill through the meadow in front of the house. The path was smooth and the dew was cool under his bare feet. He passed the house and went around the back and on to the long bank of the river, his feet wet in the mud clay, and then went up the river to a clearing below the woods where the wild pigeons comes down every morning. But the palomas were quietly feeding in the black sand, pecking at the small pebbles, lumping low and short-legged on the river bed. If Leal were here, he would come between them and the clearing, and once they flushed they would come whirring at him, some rising steep, others skimming by his head, before they angleds back down into the brush. And so Chu went on around the clearing, taking the longer route back to the house. At lunch Chu would not eat anything. He sat at the table staring at the food on his plate. He had that worried look again, the same one as at the kaingin, staring at his food without touching it. His father said, “Don’t you want to eat?”
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“I’m not hungry.” “The tapa is wonderful.” The father picked up Chu’s plate, put a piece of fried sun-dry venison on it, and, setting the plate down in front of the boy, he said, “You try it, hijo.” Chu’s mother reached for a knife on the table and cut the venison into slices. Then she set the knife down beside the meat. She said, “Try a tiny piece, Chu.” “I don’t want to eat anything,” said the boy. “Chu,” said his father, “that’s not the way to talk to your mama.” “It’s alright, Ingo,” the woman says. “He did not mean it. Did you, hijo?” “No,” says Chu, without looking up from his plate. “What is really the matter, Chu?” the father asked. “Nada, Pa,” he said. “Nothing.” “Go on, tell me,” says the father. “You can always tell your papa.” Chu kept gazing at the food on his plate. He was trying hard not to cry, his face strained and looking sadder every minute. “They killed Leal, Pa.” “Who killed your dog?” “Tomas and his friends,” Chu answered. “No!” said his mother. “How could anyone be so beastly?” “They are beasts!” said the boy. “Are you sure of this?” said the father. He had not gone with the boy to search for his dog earlier that morning. He had thought nothing of it then. Anyway, the plowing of his kaingin had to be done first, for he had seen signs in the sky that told him the rainy season was coming earlier this year. “Tomas always bragged they’d kill my dog for asocena,” says Chu. “Oh, no!” Chu’s mother cried, imagining that maybe now the dog was already on someone’s plate as asocena. Chu sprang up from the table, tilting over his chair, and ran out of the house. The farmer stood up, and his wife said to him, “Don’t do anything rash, Ingo.” “I’ll just see if Chu is alright.” His wife said, “Remember, Ingo, that you won’t gain anything quarreling with that sort of man.”
He was a huge man, dark and nearly bald, with broad shoulders, and his idea of fun was to get into a fight. He was an Ilocano, one of the few who has come south to this small coastal barrio in Zamboanga. The other men at the table had stopped drinking. They were watching Chu’s father. “I am not calling you a liar, Tomas,” said Ingo. “Wow, wow, wow!” said one of the men who sat by the big man, imitating a dog’s bark. “Then eat it,” said Dayrit. “You’re not going to make me eat my own son’s dog.” “What?” Dayrit exclaimed. “What? What?” The big man stood up from the table and, laughing quietly inside, his eyes became red coals in their sockets. He got his glass of tuba, his hand going all the way around. He had big hands. And fighting, to him, was like a hot cup of black coffee steaming in the half-light of dawn. The other men, sitting there at the table, watched Ingo like jackals. “Alright,” says Ingo, “it’s goat meat.” “Wow, wow, wow!” said the men at the table. Ingo turned away and walked quickly out of the store. He was very mad and went out through the door without looking back. Dayrit sat back on his chair and his laughter rolled out from deep in his chest. The men at the table watched Ingo as he walked off down the long shoreline toward the inlet. They saw that he was very mad. They saw it in the way he walked, his heavy steps making imprints on the sand. In the meantime the boy who had followed the quarrel with his eyes went down toward the autobus. He did not follow his father to their house. At home Ingo climbed the stairs, his feet heavy on the wooden steps. He walked into the sala and hooked his buri hat on a deer’s horn hanging on the wall by the window. His wife was crocheting a doily in the sala. She was very fond of crocheting. “What’s wrong, Ingo?” “I had a quarrel with Tomas,” he said. “The liar!” “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” his wife said, looking up from her work. The sunlight came through the half-drawn curtains of the window and slanted on the floor scrubbed clean with water and rag. She put her open hands in her lap, saying, “Ingo, you must not lie to me. Tell me, were you responsible for this quarrel you had with Tomas?” “No,” he said. “He just wouldn’t admit that he had killed Chu’s dog for asocena. Anyone could tell he was lying.”
“What did Tomas say?” his wife asked. “He did not say anything,” said Ingo. “He was only looking for an excuse to quarrel.” “You know, Ingo, I really don’t see how anyone can eat dog meat,” she said. “It’s detestable!” “Ilocanos don’t think so,” says Ingo. “They’ll eat anything.” “Ingo!” shrieked his wife. “Ingo, please don’t say that of people. Not even of Tomas and his gang.” “No?” said Ingo, recalling suddenly and very clearly how it had really been. His wife replied, “No, it isn’t good to talk that way.” Ingo turned away from the window and took his buri hat off the hook. He tramped across the length of the sala, putting his hat on as he passed through the door. His wife picked up her crochet again. Her eyes flitted for a moment toward the door and then returned to her work. Without looking up, she said, “Are you going out again?” “I’m going over to see `Ñor Pedro,” said her husband. “He promised me a puppy.” He walked to the porch and put a hand on the wooden railing of the stairs. He did not look back, but he ceased walking and seemed about to return. His wife said, loud, fast, “You taking Chu along with you?” “Si,” said Ingo doing down the stairs, the worn-out steps smooth under his feet, and on to the sandy ground. He found the boy alone under the house. He said, “Don’t you want to come along with me?” “I’ll stay here,” said Chu. He shuffled his feet on the sandy ground; as the dust lifted up around his shanks, it settled on his perspiring legs. It made smudges of dark dirt on his brown limbs, like maps drawn recklessly in the dust with a finger or a stick. “Oh, Pa. Papa, Papa.” I wish his legs would stop sweating, his father thought. But I could not stop that just as I could not bring back his dog for him. “What?” said Ingo. “What’s it, hijo?” But Chu was quiet for a while, the beads of sweat running onto his feet. Then he said, “Never mind, Pa.” “Is it about your dog, hah?” “Yes, Pa.” “I’m sorry about it. Truly I am, hijo,” the father said. I wished he hadn’t been there, he thought. I wished to God he hadn’t come along to see it. Now Chu said, “Couldn’t you have done something for him?”
“Indeed, I’m lucky.” “I envy you very much, Ingo.” Ñor Pedro has no son of his own, a rare thing, for the people of the barrios were usually blessed with eight or ten children. Somewhere in the squat nipa house is his barren wife. Chu’s father said then, “That’s why I came here.” “What is it?” Ñor Pedro asked. Ingo told him, speaking slowly, although the veins in his neck swelled as though he was shouting again to his son. “I’m quite worried about him. Really, I am.” “Es nada,” said Ñor Pedro. “He’s just a boy.” “He must have been terribly hurt,” said Ingo, “when he saw his own father being bullied in front of Tomas and his barcada.” The other farmer, squatting on his wiry legs, said, “Maybe it wasn’t as bad as you see it now, Ingo.” But Ingo shook his head, then jerked it suddenly toward the farmer, and says, “Tell me frankly, Ñor Pedro. Does my son think I’m maybe a coward? I mean, because I didn’t stand up to Tomas.” “No, I don’t think so, Ingo,” said Ñor Pedro. He paused for a moment, shifted his weight to one leg, and his sinewy muscles rippled up his limbs. “But what can I do to help the boy?” He did not want anything to hurt the boy. He knew that if he had a son he would not want him hurt. “Could I now get the puppy you promised me?” The two of them rose and walked around the house. Underneath, in a dust hole, the little puppies lay with their paws pressed against the bitch’s swollen paps. Once in a while, their small, fluff-covered heads jerked back as they made suckling sounds with their tongues. Now the two farmers bent down under the low bamboo floor of the house. Ñor Pedro said, “The puppies are too young to wean yet.” “It’s important that I have the puppy now,” saidIngo. “You understand, of course.” “Si,” said Ñor Pedro. “Maybe it’ll help the boy to forget, hah?” “He’s a very sensitive boy, Ñor Pedro.” Then the father looking toward the orchard called, “Oh, Chu, come over here. I’ve a surprise for you.” The boy came over from the orchard. He went under the house and looked down into the dust hole where the puppies were suckling.
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Ñor Pedro said, “Which one do you want, Chu?”
The boy said nothing.
“Do you want that brownish one?” his father asked.
Still he said nothing.
Ñor Pedro leaned down and took one of the small puppies. The bitch rose, and the puppies
hanged desperately on to her paps and some fell back into the hole. The bitch watched Ñor Pedro
for a while and then lay down, and the puppies scrambled back and began suckling again. Setting
the puppy in the boy’s arms, Ñor Pedro said, “It’s a male.” “Are they eating already?” asked Ingo. “Not yet,” Ñor Pedro replied. “You can give him milk with boiled rice.”
“Chu will take care of him,” he said. “Won’t you, hijo?” Ingo passed a hand down the puppy’s
back. The puppy was soft and small under his calloused hand. “He’s nice, no?” Then, “Say thank you
to your Tio.”
“Muchas gracias, Tio,” said Chu.
Then the three of them went back to the front yard, the boy following behind with the puppy in
his arms. Ingo stood beside the empty cart in the yard. Behind it, Ñor Pedro’s carabao was tied to
the scarred trunk of an old guyabano fruit tree. And beside the tree an old dung which was caked
dry on the top and lay on the ground like tiny crusted anthills.
“You must come more often,” says Ñor Pedro. “And Chu, you also.”
“Si,” said the boy. “I’ll come with Papa.”
“Come here any time you want another puppy.”
Ñor Pedro smiled at the boy. But there was nothing in the boy’s face to tell what’s now going on
in his little head. He wished he could help him.
“We will go now,” said the father. “Say good-bye, Chu.”
“Adios, Tio Pedro.”
“Take good care of your puppy, Chu,” said Ñor Pedro.
“Yes,” said the boy. Still there was nothing in his face, not even in his voice.
The father and his son left the yard, smelling the fresh, warm dung, and then went down the hill
the same way they had come. Then the father felt it. He felt it, somehow, without the boy saying
anything. He felt it while going down the slope and turning around the mountain and going easily
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Asocena - Short story
Course: Literature (L00001)
University: Ateneo de Zamboanga University
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