The Mid-Career Short Stories of Linda Ty-Casper
By Lynn M. Grow
Linda Ty-Casper's short stories, for the most part, do not belong to specific chronological periods on the basis of subject matter or style. Instead, they originate and then evolve over time, sometimes over decades, because of Ty-Casper's ongoing and often substantial revisions of them. For this reason, I classify as early short stories those appearing in her first collection, The Transparent Sun and Other Stories,1 or in her second collection, The Secret Runner and Other Stories,2 but not in her third collection, Common Continent: Selected Stories,3 or in her fourth collection, A River, One-WomanDeep: Stories.4 The mid-career stories are those appearing in Common Continent but not in A River or in anthologies published after 1991. The late-career stories I consider those first appearing in book form in A River or in subsequent anthologies in which the story has been revised from its early or mid-career form.
"The Longer Ritual"5 is the first of two stories derived from The Transparent Sun. It is, unsurprisingly considering its 1950's origin, a quintessential existentialist depiction in the form of a bildungsroman. The first-person point of view intensifies the genre focus: " I had so much to learn, before becoming a man." (14) The narrator, however, does not set out on a geographical journey in order to transition from adolescence. Instead, at the nine-day wake following his father's death, he undertakes "...a longer ritual ahead, for me" (20), eschewing the traditional ritual of keeping watch with his relatives over his father's body, not only because the ritual of watching "was unknown to me" (14) but also because "... my father was only another stranger dying.” (13) He "could only sit apart unable to conjure up sorrow for want of any image of my father whose loss I could mourn.... I never even knew if he had cried at my mother's burial, at my birth." He has never even been allowed to see his mother's grave, so “how could I attach real meaning to death and dying?... the dead were only so many whitewashed crosses, so many crooked candles and stiffened flowers." (15)
The narrator's incapacity to grasp the significance of death is the internal symptom of existential angst. The external symptom is his sense of alienation, the sense that the coffee house beatniks of the 1950's attached to it. Concretely, at his late father's house, he is "very uncomfortable." It seemed that every movement I made was being measured and commented upon." (14) "... I was there... and felt nothing..." "... I suffered... from a feeling of being left out of their conversations..." (16) "My brother's wife came out onto the porch with another woman...they refused to notice me." (17) Even in his mother's house, where he was reared, "...I did not really belong there either. .Where was my place?" (16) Understandably, “Shame and anger, and hatred for myself settled over me like a melting wax," (19) the engulfing effect of these emotions conveyed by the of the tactility of the simile. In fact, he declined into the nadir of nada: "To be young here was to be nothing." (14) But also "To be old was to be nothing." (18)
That the neglect and disdain the narrator's relatives show him was not mere oversight or preoccupation is revealed by his sister-in-law's callous revelation that "your father...wanted to see you several days ago but we decided it might not be good for him." (17) In fact, Pedro, the older brother, and Pedro's wife did not want the narrator to see his father while the latter was still alive so that they could steal. The sister-in-law is wearing "a large diamond ring set in a filigree shell....it was the very ring my mother had been wearing when she died....'It will be with your mother forever,' my grandmother said." The sister-in-law's husband, Pedro, claims that "Father's dead. I was not able to talk to him and there is no will." (18) Tio Milio exposes this lie: "' There is a will.' I made it for your father. There is a will.'" (19) Pedro's lie is obviously devised so that he and his wife can take whatever they like of the father's possessions. They are like the sound of the servants' bare feet: "the quiet suck of river leeches." (16)
"Unleavened flesh"6 is the other Common Continent story carried over from The Transcendent Sun. It centers around the predicament of Don Alfonso, who at 70 feels the depredations of advancing age. He feels "...two calesas7 rattling through the marrow of his bones..." (21) In fact,"... his bones limped." (22) "And then one night he dreamt that their old house was on fire and when he ran, tumble-legged, to Don Miguel's for water, he tripped, could not rise." He is already thinking about his own death: " After five years, he would ask only for a funeral procession...and un rincon para morir 8 simple stone sepulchre....he was ready now to die." (23)
Not only is Don Alfonso beset by age and thoughts of death, but his one-time prosperity has significantly waned. He remembers his "credit list that lengthened every day." About five steps from the estero9 crossing he paused and looked back at their age-notched house and the bare azotea.10 The early century birthmark showed in every crooked post." (22) His in-laws "knew nothing and cared to know nothing of Don Alfonso's straits." (25) When he visits the art gallery of his supposed friend Don Miguel, who is prosperous, Don Alfonso "lets himself be drawn to an almost poster-like oil painting of a beggar, poised lean and lungless on a crooked cane and extending an empty can to the onlooker. Even the lighting was stingy and yellowish, heightening the poverty of the subject. Behind the beggar leaned a blind old house frayed at the eaves and too familiar." (26) The portrait is an Oscar Wilde Dorian Gray-like depiction of art mirroring life. The "blind old house frayed at the eaves" is Don Alfonso's own "age notched house," "too familiar" for comfort as he looks at the painting.
Because of his troubling inability to feel compassion for the even worse plights of other people, however, Don Alfonso does not elicit reader sympathy. At the outset of the story, in early morning, a twitch of his shoulders "asserted his supremacy over the street people on R. Hidalgo. When the riddled army-brown sweater of the gaunt street sweeper caught his eye, for a moment he stood gratefully buttoning his own khaki jacket." (21) When Don Alfonso leaves his house, he encounters the street sweeper “carelessly pushing dried manure and soiled paper like a ground fog, poison-colored, towards him. The word Canalla12 formed like a spit on his tongue. In his youth he knew that his father, Don Lorenzo, had caned many an insolent indio."13 (22)
At the nearby Chinese store, the proprietor, Lim, is ready for business. He has pan de sal, 14 ground Batangas coffee, and queso de bolas,15 mouthwatering breakfast items, lined up. Yet Don Alfonso's only thought is "did the children's hands have to be so filthy!" (22) He even resents his own three children's comfortable situations; each has married well. He recalls one occasion when a "fish-smelling vendor" in a jeep had come too close to him. He “shouted to the driver to stop and then, out of his hurt pride, threw away the ten-centavo fare." (23). A boy selling sweepstakes tickets annoys him. (25)
The night he has the terrifying dream of his house burning down, he "woke up swearing to go to Quiapo.”16 (23) Yet when he does go to church in Quiapo, “Much to his annoyance, he became aware of the surge of elbows and female hips and corner store brilliantine.
"Don Alfonso shook his head down past ranks of women insisting on their saint-shaped candles. Inside the church as well, he ignored other women selling prayers on their outstretched beads.... A tall woman flicked her heels brassily near his pew, making him sneer at her flat nose and deep brown skin. A waste of a veil, he thought..." (24) "He...sat back, troubled by the sniffling of a doubled-up old man.... It was bad taste to cry in church." When "the detached arm of the Black Nazarene... was being passed around by a squat pock-marked man, Don Alfonso held his breath as the man passed." (25)
All told, "Unleavened Flesh" is among the lugubrious Ty-Casper works, whereas the first story, of four in revised form, from The Secret Runner but not in A River, One Woman Deep, or later anthology, is both a troubling and heartwarming parable: "The Outside Heart."17 It centers around the traditional Good Friday self-flagellations by devout participants who suffer from crowns of thorns and lashes from whips to replicate, as celebration, the Passion of Christ. The specific focus is on the three generations of one family, whose surname we are not told. The protagonist is the seven-year-old girl Marita, whose mother had become crippled a week after her birth. This circumstance has no doubt contributed to the decision of Marita's father, who is not up to the task, of joining other flagellants on the ritual walk to the sea while being flagellated. Eloy, the family's manservant, tries to mitigate the effects for the father by removing thorns in the crown he is wearing, but the leather lash he makes still contains bottle caps and broken pieces of glass, and he ends up carrying the father on the last part of the walk to the sea. Earlier, the grandmother has told Marita about the experience of churchgoers to the Black Nazarene: "The hours of sermons we had to endure, the relay of priests, the stand of acolytes with wooden clappers for bells...Once a priest fell over dead in the pulpit as he came to the final word... Inside there was no place left to stand...our fans could not stir the air and we gagged..." (80-81)
Is this extreme level of self-imposed agony and deprivation really a celebration or even
an affirmation of the Christianity Jesus' sacrifice symbolizes? Or is it an attempt to expiate by self-mutilation a sense of shortfall, even guilt, residing in unsure consciences? The story certainly provokes the question of whether it is requisite to take literally physical externalizations to be metaphorically washed in the blood of the lamb. Or is the simple, intuitive, unobtrusive act of a seven-year-old girl the true affirmation of faith? The beggar who comes to the family's gate has shaking hands, is unable to bend his knees, and has saliva running down his chin and throat. He cannot even bend over to pick up a piece of caramel he has clumsily knocked to the ground. Marita without trepidation touches his arm and places her pearl earring in his hand. As she returns to the house, "...she carried the feel of the cold, trembling hand like an outside heart."18 (90) The beggar's suffering is unavoidable, not a ritual self-mutilation. Marita's externalization of Christianity is to wear her heart on her mother's earlier exasperated sleeve, and she has resoundingly answered her grandmother's question "Will you not be able to do one good thing today?" (80)
The ending is the beauty of this masterful story, which is enhanced throughout by striking figurative language. For instance, images of light and sound are embedded with tactility: "Her eyes picked the slivers of light caught on the tufts of marquisette. A quick wind blew in from the sea, tangling the lines of sunlight”...."the stiff pieces of sound." (79); "the sky...was a hard blue....The light about the room toppled all over her." (82) Simile is equally imaginative: "dust spun around them and floated like glass wings falling from a flight of evening ants....rice birds balanced like dark balls of sun." (85) Metaphor is another contribution to the concreteness needed to maintain the unwavering empiricism of Ty-Casper's prose: "people were spilling around the flagellants"; "On the trail the unpainted crosses borne by the flagellants reminded Marita of bones exposed in grass-erupted graveyards"; "The sun sprouted all around her..." (86) The vivid and innovative figurative language is not merely decorative, however. Its function of reinforcing the undercurrent of doubt about the appropriateness of the flagellation, even though it is Good Friday, is apparent throughout the story and near the end culminates with a scene of the "small altar with a tin roof. Inside people were kneeling in various attitudes of grief. Suspended from the ceiling, a stark electric bulb like an old coin shone dully, unable to break the darkness of the walls." (87)
"A Wine of Beeswings"19 is another carryover from The Secret Runner. Like " The Outside Heart," its setting is a Catholic environment, centered around an aging Monsignor and his relatives. The locale is not quite claustrophobic, but it is very confined: to one church and one house in a seaside fishing village. The ambiance is almost total stasis: "Everything--houses, trees and grass--were ashgray, locked in dust as if a volcano had erupted and flowed over them." (39) This description could apply to the characters as well. Except for the boy, a young seminarian who has come to prepare for his apostleship of service and who is the Monsignor's nephew--and a servant girl, the characters are all suffering the debilitation of advancing age. The Monsignor, whose now-deceased father had married one of the Monsignor's sisters, has "looseness of the flesh." He sits passively in his chair, "assuming the position of somnolent, resting hives" (33) of the bees he keeps. Although he moves around some, his predominant passivity is reflected in his visage: "Drained of color, the Monsignor's face reflected an indifference which inhibited life instead of celebrating it in joy." (32) Ironically, he has been assigned to the very parish situation that "in the convent he thought he would be mercifully spared." (30) Equally ironically, the hives he has inherited from his father are the opposite of his own proclivity; they are literally "busy as a bee," of course.
The three living sisters are quarrelsome and easily provoked. Paz, the first one we meet, is forgetful, has "hair the color of dried flesh," (28) and has limited mobility: "at the foot of the long stone steps" she is "unable to climb up again," (31) all indications of old age. Her name, meaning "peace," is obviously ironic, considering that between Paz and her sisters "no one could mediate. It would have to await the second coming." (35) The other two sisters' names are also ironic, granted the story's context. Felicia means "happy" or "lucky"-- neither of which she is--and often connotes a positive outlook on life--which she certainly doesn't have. In fact, "she dropped a tear" when thinking about what she could have had: a “senator, governor, commissioner....she had married a dark, flat-faced man so that she could be sure of his fidelity. Hers had been a lifetime of errors." (35) She rears her husband's illegitimate children but has none of her own. Marta, the eldest sister, is decrepit enough that her eyes are puffy just from coming up the stairs. Her name, in literal translation, means "lady" or "mistress of the house" and thus might seem straightforward, but "Marta" can also carry the sense of "dedicated to Mars," the Roman god of war, which, though hyperbolic in a family setting, ironically blends with her sisters' combativeness. The sisters not only squabble among themselves over who gets how many bottles of honey--again, ironically a substance associated with sweetness and smoothness--but each day they approach Filemon,20 the Monsignor, "with new evidence of each other's deceit." (31)
The stasis of the locale and its aging inhabitants conduces to life-denying stultification, the more pathetic because it is largely self-inflicted but now irreversible. "The miniature cathedral that Filemon's father “nailed to the santol tree for his bird shelter was only briefly occupied. Old people said animals deserted houses filled with dissension, deceit..." (29) But people need not be dissentious or deceitful; they choose to be. Filemon chooses to take religious orders because "his faith protected him from life," (38) not because of a commitment to enhance the lives of his parishioners and in this way to partake of life. His bunker mentality results in quietude, but it is not "the peace of God, which passeth all understanding."21 Instead, it is akin to the "shiny dark wetness of the inside well which reached into the ground twice the height of the convent. Sometimes, when he stared inside, knowing that nothing that fell in could be retrieved, he saw light enough to drown in." (29) "The water from the well, loose with moss, would taste stale, darker than old wine covered with beeswings." (39)
This vivid, innovative metaphor evokes the ceremonial function of wine--the sacramental communion especially celebrated in Catholicism. The beehive, due to its structure, features in a number of places in the Christian Bible to represent the Body of Christ. The efficiency of the hive's operation is achieved by all members contributing their unique abilities, a concrete exemplification of the ideal of harmonious interactions within the Christian society. The honey that results from these skills and their industrious employment symbolizes the nourishment and sweet satisfaction of God's bounty. Thus the beekeeping of Filemon and his father constitute a paradigm for a human community--and it is in plain sight of the characters in the story--ironically not perceived for what it is-- by the fractious and somnolent inhabitants of this seaside community.
"A Wake for Childbearers,” 22 the end story in The Secret Runner, is a compelling, plangent tale with a more dynamic flow to the narrative than some other Ty-Casper stories have, surprising granted the amount of interior monologue, but it does have the kind of barren, inhospitable setting that many other Ty-Casper stories do. The opening sentence acquaints us with "the stretch of the provincial road...harshly turned to summer dust." (49) The residents here "occupy the part of the land without hills..." (50) The ground is "bare." (51) Sisa, the protagonist, "could smell the slow rising of the dust which dried her throat." (53) "The dust was incessant. It refused to settle; blew about like wings dropped by mating ants." (58)
The dreariness of the setting sets the tone, which is as pessimistic as the story's title signals that it will be. Defeat and death, not hope and life renewal, are the overarching motifs, as the plural "Childbearers" being funneled into a singular "Wake" suggests. The protagonist's name, Sisa, contributes to the story's lugubrious atmosphere--in Jose Rizal's iconic novel Noli Me Tangere (1887) Sisa (meaning "remainder" or "leftover") represents the suffering of the Filipinos during the Spanish colonial period. Though the atmosphere is not repressive--Sisa is self-confined to her bedroom--the atmosphere is redolent of French philosopher Michel de Montaigne's dictum that each passing moment is a step closer to death. Thus, the story's closing sentence is unsurprising: "fiercely the earth itself started to come out of her darkened sun." (61)
This is the climax of the interiority so vividly established by interior monologue taking place in a darkened bedroom with its door closed, the plot centered around a foetus in the confines of the mother's womb. The presence of the neighbors, though drawn from a village that "altogether... formed no more than a cluster of twenty houses," (50) prevents the story from lapsing into claustrophobia. The neighbors in fact function like the chorus of a classical Greek play, external to the interiority of the main narration. The neighbors' commentary ranges from Delphic oracular opacity (e.g., "We cannot account for the way we cannot see what is to be seen, but cannot escape what is not there."--51) to the prophetic but insensitive (e.g.,"' Do you remember Caridad? Her first born was pulled out of her almost black, bursting with strangled life.'"--58) All of the comments are nosey and intrusive, in one case blatantly so. When Sisa's younger brother comes to the bedroom door to let her know he's going to town, "'Let her alone, the women called in one voice.'" (54)
The sadness in the story is exacerbated by its agrarian proletarianism, a usual feature of Ty-Casper's fiction: "The children would all leave, when the youngest sons, both of whom preferred a shared room in the city when their father paid for this house with his life, because he wanted them to grow up in a house with wooden floors not bamboo. They would abandon the land as if it had already failed, when they would not touch it, would not plant a single seedling to the sky." (53)
In spite of the stasis of the plot, "A Wake for Childbearers," one of her longest short stories, does not bog down because its intensity is unflagging. As is the norm in Ty-Casper's work, there is nothing superficial, casual, or even lighthearted here. Ty-Casper's seriousness of purpose is as evident as it is from her earliest work to her culminating memoir Lives Remembered, and that seriousness of purpose has established her as one of the greatest fictionists of the Philippines.
"A Standing Sun"23 is one of the most overtly proletarian yet pessimistic stories Ty-Casper has written. In fact, movie aficionados are probably reminded of the 2013 Robert Redford vehicle All Is Lost, a title that would fit "The Standing Sun" perfectly. The stone fence surrounding the house in the story is the "height of two men and is topped with glass fragments that glint furiously in the sun." (44) The fence has a gate, but "the gate is locked" (45) and apparently the protagonist has no key; she is imprisoned. Her husband is in Manila, awaiting the job the landowner has promised but not delivered. Ironically, in a house surrounded by rice fields, she is running out of food for herself and Ine,24 her nine-month-old daughter, the only named character. "They have only enough rice left for supper, there is almost no wood left for cooking.... She takes a can of dog food.... It is good.... She is tempted to take a spoonful for her child, to mix with softened rice, but cannot take even that little of what was not meant for them."25 (45)
Before long, a busload of activists drives up with placards charging the owner of the subdivision with "evading land reform by turning his land into a fake subdivision." (47) This is true, but then the students from the bus demand to be let in and start blaming the protagonist for complicity in the fake subdivision scheme. Although they see the woman holding Ine, they light their placards on fire, throw them over the fence, and wave to her from the bus, "waiting for the many small fires that crackle sharply to enter the house and join the windows and doors in one fierce burning." (48) The supposed do-gooder students commit arson and murder of a defenseless woman and her infant. The woman cannot even call for help; the house has no telephone.
This horrific ending has been foreshadowed earlier. The barrio from which the poor woman has come "is no longer there. The houses of nipa were set on fire, according to some, by the Huks26 who wanted to force contributions from them; according to others, men paid by the landowner to force them out of their land.... Soldiers watched their houses burning, turned their backs when asked to help." (46) Even earlier in the story, more foreshadowing, less immediately ominous but still chilling, has been introduced. When the highway running past the house was being built, skeletons had been found. "Apparently the Death March from Bataan to Capas passed there. Soldiers who had been cut down along the way were buried upright with their guns." (43) In "A Standing Sun" innocence and goodness are slaughtered; depravity and mayhem prevail. All is indeed lost.
"Two"27 may be the longest Ty-Casper story with the shortest title, appropriately so granted its linear plot and minimum number of characters (three, but one, the driver of the two sisters' car, makes only a cameo appearance). The story's title may bring to mind F. Sionil Jose's title Three Filipino Women,28 but the similarity is only coincidence. "Two" is a quest story. Two aging sisters set out to find their brother, who has received their inheritance but sends them as little as one sack of rice per month. He "now and then" sends the younger sister, Sion, some money—how much we don't know, but probably not much, granted that he previously had sent the sisters' share of their parents' inheritance in the form of Japanese Occupation money "when a million could not buy a guava because the Americans were already crossing the Pasig to liberate Manila." (66) When the sisters reach what they think is their brother's house on Callejon de la Fe (ironically, in Spanish meaning "alleyway of the faith"), they are unsure which house is their brother's. The door of the house they choose is unlocked and swings open. Sion climbs flight after flight of stairs, sometimes slipping and falling. The climb is arduous; she is 77 years old, but she climbs because her older sister has been partially crippled in an automobile accident. Along the way she passes a locked room filled with sacks of rice enough "to supply an entire street," (73), but the house is empty.
The surface quest for the brother, however, is only the external manifestation of Sion's search for religious faith, which is why the alleyway's name is ironic and becomes even more so in light of "Callejon” having a secondary meaning: in bullfighting a refuge or runway for the bullfighter to escape the bull. The very name Sion (which would be" Zion" in English) connotes "heaven" or "holy place," something or someone with a special connection to Divine intervention. Sion suffers from low self-esteem: "she is so ugly she's not even fit to serve in her sister's house." Her sister's crippling weighs on her because the sisters had just changed places in the car before the accident. But "something else is imperfect in her: her belief, her love for Him and His Son." (67) In fact, she says to her older sister (whose name we never know): " I find myself unable to believe." (68) The older sister, whom she calls only "diche" (second oldest sister) is also disaffected, but not to the same degree: "The pain no longer comes and goes, but always stays, more powerful than prayer.... The accident.... ended all her happiness; her life became a grave." (69) But Sion even contemplates committing an unforgivable sin in Christianity: suicide. The fruitless physical quest for the brother is emblematic, then, of the spiritual quest underlying the overt plot, as it also is in such works as Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown.” (1846).
"The Losses of Sunday"29 is one of the odd ducks afloat on the Ty-Casper literary pond. Its first-person narration from an enlisted U.S. soldier who is primarily interested in seeing some combat and doing some souvenir hunting, with side commentaries about the amenities officers receive and the prevalence of disease and other repellent conditions in battle-torn areas, occasionally turns to the questions Ty-Casper's commitment to advocacy30 raises. E.g., “I had not enlisted to fight them [Filipinos] but the Spaniards who were taking their country from them; and now we were sending the dons [Spaniards] back to Europe at our expense and shooting to kingdom come the Filipinos whom we had come to liberate." (113) This, of course, is a surprisingly enlightened view to attribute to a common soldier in February, 1899, at the confluence of the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War, and even more so is the pronouncement on the next page, about persuading the U.S. Senate to "vote on the treaty buying the Philippines for the princely sum of twenty million dollars. This, everyone in Manila knew, was not to enrich the dons but to enable them to pay the war debts of the same amount to an English firm that was also financing the Boer War."31 (114) the notion that an enlisted soldier (who may or may not have even graduated from high school) would know this, much less that "everyone in Manila knew" stretches credibility, but it does add ballast to the conclusion that the U.S. military takeover of the Philippines was illegitimate.
"One-Man Deep,"32 like "The Losses of Sunday, " is set in 1899 and centers around the Philippine-American War. As such, it too is a companion piece to Ty-Casper's historical novels with 18th or 19th century settings: The Peninsulars (Manila: Bookmark, 1964); The Three-Cornered Sun (Quezon City: New Day, 1979); Ten Thousand Seeds (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1987); and The Stranded Whale (Quezon City: Giraffe Books, 2002). "One Man Deep" is more substantive and somber than "The Losses of Sunday," detailing as it does the horrors inherent in a war. Its first-person narration is from Bierly, a U.S. soldier who, along with compatriots Hatsell and Stringer, are the only characters whose words we hear. The salient character, however, is an old Filipino man who never utters a word. He returns, day after day, to the U.S. encampment to seek justice for his son, whom a U.S. soldier has watercured to death. As flesh and blood he is enigmatic, always at a distance, but he is the physical manifestation of guilty conscience not only for his son's death but for the other atrocities committed by the personnel of the army as well. Hatsell, who has participated in the watercure murder of a priest in San Mateo, tries to rationalize that "watercure isn't fatal...people don't die of it.... He died of heart failure, not of watercure. Doctor said so." The doctor, of course, is a U.S. army officer, so to cover up the crime, he falsifies the cause of death. The priest had been "strapped with hard vines to a ladder of bamboo. As more water was poured into him, he was spun about clockwise. He tried to keep his lips together but there were ways of opening a man's mouth." (121)
Stringer tries to palliate this demonic act by pointing out that "'Company B used.... Horse urine mixed with blood." (123) Bierly notes that "some towns, whole towns, were looted then set to fire" (122) and that "we came upon horses... and on orders, cut them loose to run them into the river where we shot them until they fell over and drowned. We shot cattle, too, wherever we found them, feeling more sorry for them than for the people who owned them, whom we had shot earlier." (124) "Once we came across an infant lying across its dead mother. Apparently, she had run into a crossfire. The lieutenant had Hatsell take the baby and shoot it. A blooming rose sank quietly in the middle of its forehead. It never even struggled." (125)
To be fair, some soldiers acted on humane impulses when they could. For instance, even "Stringer could not shoot anyone in the back. When we chased the enemy in retreat, he'd be firing high or not at all. His rifle often jammed." (120) And "General Lawton ordered the rice distributed to the people instead of being fed to the bonfire." (128) Still, the unnamed old man who each day comes to the army camp for justice is the moral measuring rod here. At story's end, it is "as if he were treading a river no deeper than himself.” (130) It is "the river to our right, [leading to righteousness as well as the opposite of left] which flowed slowly, one-man deep." (120) How deep is this? "Water covered the holes our shells had burst into the fields; holes deep enough for the sun to wallow in, for the earth to drown." (127) The old man's presence may not have seemed efficacious, but its reverberations are cosmic. “I felt hot, burned as if a shell had burst in my flesh. A trembling, not inside me, but around me was shaking the leaves of trees. I could feel the earth's slow turning, its silence beating while I tried to see what could not be seen by the eye, while the old man continued to walk away...fastening himself to the sky, a separate and resisting hill." (130)
"A Swarm of Sun"33 is the last of The Common Continent group of stories about the Philippine-American War, even though it is set in Aloran34 in 1903, not long after Aguinaldo's surrender. As such, it is an appropriately placed piece in the Philippine-American War tetralogy. The story's tone is not quite relaxed, but it is calm, unstressed because the plot is emblematic of coming to terms with "The Losses of Sunday." An American boat arrives to retrieve the bodies of six soldiers35 now buried in the Aloran convent garden. At first it seems likely that this visit may be unwelcome to the townspeople. Above the oncoming craft "the sunlight hangs suspended like a swarm of bees nesting," in keeping with the story's title, and "the metal church spire is visible, distorted by the sunlight so that it appears like a trunk split by lightning." (132) But the visit is not unwelcome." For the past three Todos Los Santos36 the townspeople have carefully pulled the grass off the American graves and placed candles on the crosses, recalling each one with affection, for somehow the only ones killed in that single encounter were those who had made some effort to know them." One of the dead soldiers, in particular, "taught the children baseball" and accompanied Padre Cipriano "on his walks along the shore to wash his dogs," so the friar arranges for him to stay in the graveyard. His place in the sixth coffin to be picked up by the boat's crewmen will be taken by an exploitative, parasitic civilian American weasel "who came to open a saloon, buy a plantation or dig gold, anything to get rich with all at once; who sold them talcum powder at quinine rates and informed on the American teacher; finally, who told the captain commanding the detachment at Aloran that the music being played in the church was Aguinaldo's march.” (137) He is the local, much worse version of Taft, who as commissioner "did not even stop in Aloran to see what kind of government the people there desired." (135) These two Americans, one despicable and the other supercilious, provide the balance of good (the caring soldiers) and evil which is such a staple of Ty-Casper's work.
For the crewmen of the boat who have come to claim the fallen American soldiers' bodies, however, the townspeople bring out their best food and drink, of which they have none too much for themselves and their own special occasions. "Padre Cipriano's provisions are soon exhausted, so the presidente has to send to his house for the leg of ham he has been saving for the fiesta. The justice calls for the blue crabs set aside for his supper. The others send for whatever happens to be in their larder." All that Padre Cipriano can provide now that his provisions are depleted "is the liquor estomacal [a digestif] which he serves anyway..." The atmosphere is jovial: "The burial detail has become so friendly that they laugh when anyone says anything at all. And the town officials are all talking at the same time." (141) The conviviality and hospitality here, between people of different nationalities and races, inevitably raises the question of why people are ever at war with each other. "A Swarm of Sun," then, takes an anti-war posture,37 consonant with a long tradition in music and visual art (e.g., Picasso's 1937 Guernica) though unique in the Ty-Casper corpus. The story's stance is in keeping with its tone: subdued rather than strident but not less firm because it is not exclamatory.
“Triptych for a Ruined Altar”38 is, along with stories like “Unleavened Flesh,” “A Wine of Beeswings,” “A Wake for Childbearers,” and “A Swarm of Sun,” A Ty-Casper Common Continent story with a title so gripping and uniquely innovative that the reader may well associate it more with a poem on the order of Jose Garcia Villa's “A radio made of seawater” or “I think, yes a leopard in Dufy blue would”39 than with a piece of short fiction. In this story we get a passage of lyricism unparalleled elsewhere in Ty-Casper's fictive cosmos:
The rain fell upon us. It sprinkled her hair and webbed it, ran down her face, into the white gown softer than her skin. ...She only tipped her head back, her eyes wrinkling, almost happy...at the tight ball that hung in the sky above the rain, and slowly, shaking, her tongue came out and stretched to catch its fall.
I held her there while the rain, strengthening, began to push itself into the ground, until the warm smell of earth, flower-like, rose steadily into that brightly streaked hole in the sky. (146)
But this joyous, uplifting scene only exacerbates the pathos of the woman, "someone who had already slipped past herself and was just like the glow left behind by burst stars." (143) She has an unidentified terminal ailment; though she had resolved to be "the one to prove the doctors wrong," (147) she is now immobile, "arms tight about herself, body clenched like a fist exactly," (149) and she is conscious of "the fact that she would die." (149)
Another surprising element in the story is the predominant motif: carpe diem, in contrast with the almost fatalistic plot developments of other Ty-Casper stories. The dying wife sees "that it was unwise to save the best things for later. Now was when one lived, here.... Something special must be made of each day now, she thought: flowers massed on the tables instead of allowing them to seed in the garden for the following year, the good silver, the special dishes, time to listen, to hold, to fix the children's memories in this house, in her time.” (148) The husband "recalled that she had always wanted a porch in back, in which to sit after supper and watch the birds pierce the apple tree; a new rug, a sideboard antique. It could have been arranged, these simple wants, if he had known this was coming." (151) The wife fantasizes that "All morning she had to make herself sit because she felt like pulling weeds, or potting plants to bring inside, or just folding the washed clothes piled high on the kitchen table.... She would get up and make pinwheel cookies, three colors instead of two, mint and butter and chocolate just like the holidays when the windows steamed with the heat from the oven. Or perhaps, gingerbread cookies with raisins for eyes." (147) She is "thinking ahead to the times that would never come, in order to bear the ones that had started." (149)40
The story's structure is designated by its title. Its three sections—"Falling Up," "Wake /Not from Sleep," and "Deliver Into" correspond to the three panels of the triptych, which, beginning in the Middle Ages, was often the focal point of an altarpiece, representing the Holy Trinity of Christianity.41 However, the next element of the title is not so clearly demarcated: “for a "Ruined Altar," not "of [my emphasis] a Ruined Altar." The story mentions no altar, ruined or intact, and clearly the dying wife is not—thankfully—equated with the altar, nor can she be represented in the Christian Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And the triptych is for a ruined altar, not the ruined altar; apparently any ruined altar will do as well as any other. But why a ruined altar, which symbolizes loss of faith or hope? One might think that, because the triptych is intact—only the altar is ruined—the triptych symbolizes the reinstatement of faith, hope, or both, which the husband urgently needs: "Marks of crying distorted his face although it was not for her, but for himself; that he should be trapped in this situation, that this could happen to his wife, to his children in his house."42 (150) However, the story's last sentence is no reassurance that he receives an infusion of either faith or hope; it only conveys his affirmation of togetherness: "he took off his clothes to lie down on the floor below her, to begin to dream of what they were, the two of them, before they became each other." (152) If anything, this ending has an overlay of resignation, capitulation to painful dying as the inevitable termination of all that is good and wholesome about life: four children happily at play, the beauty of blooming flowers, and the delectation of delicious cookies. We can only hope that the husband has not lain down to become one with his wife in death.
“Small Lives”43 is a first-person narration of inconsequentiality featuring only three characters: an unnamed narrator, a landlady (Mrs. Johnson), and Mrs. Johnson's sister Lotte. The latter two women are borderline dotty. The narrator seems to have at least partially withdrawn into a shell because of her parents' deaths. Mrs. Johnson, to her credit, senses this and tries to counter it with welcoming hospitality.44
Aside from ruminations about matters like acquiring drapes, the plot is static; virtually nothing happens. Ty-Casper's usual intensity is replaced by tonal lassitude that is nearly somnolent. The story has only slightly less overt purpose than Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1952) does. Yet the ending is a sudden awakening from hibernation. Lotte is being sent by Mrs. Johnson to a nursing home. Perhaps partially because until six months before she had been a nurse herself, Lotte is "standing like a gnarled tree, an empty willow through which rain was falling...I noticed how colorless her eyes were. ...She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. Struggling, she hung at the threshold, her heart taken out of her." The narrator "felt her trembling in my body.... Filled with terror I could not place, I felt, somehow felt, as if it was I who was sending Lotte out of her life, forever." (165) The narrator has no doubt recalled that her own mother's death was the result of a car accident on the way to replace burned buns for the homecoming feast she was preparing for the narrator. Together, these incidents have brought home to her that there are no "small lives." Every life matters, and even such mundane activities as driving to the store for biscuits or being dispatched by a loved one to a nursing home can have cataclysmic consequences.
"Mulch"45 is another story with a terse, unprepossessing title, quite the reverse of the innovative, poetic titles of a number of her stories in this collection. "Mulch" may well carry the intensity of "A Wake for Childbearers" one step further, into the psychologically aberrant world of Dissociative Identity Disorder (once called "Multiple Personality Disorder"). The "neighbor" of the story's first person narrative may be an alter ego. The narrator regards herself as scrupulously truthful; the neighbor's" truth" shifts from one recounting to the next. This alone takes us past the baby logic puzzle of knight and knave (the alternate expression is the Two Guards Puzzle).46 In "Mulch” we don't know that there is a truth-teller; all details," interior" or "exterior," may be interior and, if so, have no necessary grounding in actuality. This degree of interiority is also the obverse side of the empirical Ty-Casper coin. Perhaps we will not be led astray by the narrator's opening scene-setting description: "A brake of scrub oaks divides our [my emphasis] street from the main road.... The branches are as thick as roots …. Behind us [my emphasis] there is the river, turning upon itself so that it is almost as wide as a pond. "With a stand of alders on both banks, it separates us [my emphasis] from the new houses with fresh lawns." (166) But are even the seemingly factual statements entirely credible? The narrator supposedly has lived alone for ten years; why "you" an "our" instead of "my" and "me"? She must be including her neighbor in these references, yet the narrator claims that "I dread her coming." (167) The narrator patiently listens to her neighbor, who telephones every day. The narrator opens her door every time the neighbor knocks, and the narrator gives the neighbor coffee. The neighbor "has spoken ill of everyone in our street" (168) and is constantly complaining about something, ranging from Public Works not putting sand on the street ice to the welfare recipients at the grocery store with "two carts loaded with junk food" at the express (8 items or fewer) checkout lane.
Toward story's end, though, we get indications that the narrator's stance of forbearing listener is not all that it seems to be. She acknowledges "the bad ones [headaches] I used to have when any sound, any light is unbearable." These headaches are obviously migraines, but the neighbor questions whether that's all they are: "Are you sure it's just a headache?" The narrator concedes, but only to herself, that "suddenly I felt a silence, a stillness shaking me inside." (171) And the concluding note of the story is "the road was empty, shaking with the absence of something I cannot place; as if I had just heard her say, not to me but to someone else in my presence: a year from today, she died." (172) Since the wording is not "a year ago," at face value this means that the neighbor is a babaylan (since "died" rather than "will die" is a foretelling, not a prediction), or that, if the narrator and the neighbor are bifurcates, "Mulch" is a ghost story. In any case, it is an impressive enlargement of the Ty-Casper corpus.
"Fellow Passengers"47 comes as another enlargement of the usual controlled scope of the Ty-Casper short story, though in overall design it is reminiscent of "A Wine for Beeswings." Fellow Passengers" houses literary, philosophical, and historical allusions, beginning with the title: "In Dickens' own words-fellow passengers to the grave."48 (182) In the last three pages of "Fellow Passengers," a cluster of erudite allusions resides, beginning with the new priest of the rectory, Father Paul.49 Father Paul's ruminations result in his "betraying pre-Copernican notions of earth and heaven." (182) Overtly, this seems to self-indict Father Paul because he is thinking in terms of the geocentric model of the solar system that was official in Catholicism prior to the 1543 publication of Polish astronomer and mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus' heliocentric model. But "betraying pre-Copernican notions” is ambiguous. It could mean that Father Paul self-indicts because he is thinking of the Copernican model instead of the pre-Copernican one. In either case, he is feeling somewhat unsettled. On a personal level, he acknowledges to himself that "he had not been good to the old one." (182) But because he becomes aware, on a quasi-theological plane, that "It was in humility and inarticulate grace that souls spoke to one another," (183) Father Paul's conscientiousness has expanded enough to reach the threshold of what is called the still point, which is an interior refuge from the tumult and disorder of what is deemed "the turning world." It is both a philosophical and theosophical recognition that, amidst the flux of life, at the still point, past and future are gathered in the center of existence, which is dynamic yet unmoving, often associated with Divinity. Achievement of participatory access to the still point, however, is not exculpation from human shortcomings. It does not bestow Grace or substitute for the performance of good works. The housekeeper of the rectory, Elizabeth, also experiences this apex phenomenon; the story's ending is "She felt the awesome feeling that endless time had begun then. There."50 (183)
Elizabeth is the paradigm of good works; if salvation is attainable by them alone, she will be welcomed into Dante's Paradiso. Early in the story, the omniscient narrator tells us that she, now a widow, “had buried all but three” (174) of her eight children, was old enough to be the grandmother of the curates of her parish, yet “worked harder than any of them, going down to her room in the basement only after everyone had come in for the night and the doors were good and locked, and rising up to make coffee for whoever had drawn the 5:30 Mass in the morning.” (175) When the old priest is on the porch for lunch, “she brought his tray” and “unfolded one of the extra-large napkins she had sewn by hand for him, tucked one corner under his chin, another under the tray.” (176) The old priest is debilitated because he has suffered three strokes and can no longer speak or sing. He can no longer move one arm, and his sight and hearing are gone.
The old priest is therefore locked within the confines of himself, mirroring the largely interior setting of the story in St. Jerome's rectory and, like the motif of elderliness, a common element in a piece of Ty-Casper short fiction. A new twist, however, is introduced by the new priest's confident assertions about what constitutes interiority and exteriority: "Thoughts are not meant to be useful.... Yet they, in the words of a famous man, surpass all the activities of the human life51 .... Thinking yields nothing...but man is never less alone than when he is by himself, nor more active when he is doing nothing but thinking." (174)
This stance is a retreat into solipsism, Hamlet-like, to be “sicklied o'er by the pale cast of thought,”52 a rationalization confuted by the old priest himself, who, sadly can do little else but think. The old priest wonders, “What good is a thought that remains unsaid and what is the measure of life besides usefulness?.... Speaking, he needed, to hear himself singing. He liked to sing....Without speech, the world disappeared." (175) He longs for exteriority, even if it must now take the form of a Proustian Recherche du Temps Perdu. He reminisces that "the shape of the tree that stood between the rectory and the church began to grow colors in his mind. He recalled birds covering its branches, calling out their songs; and in the summer, fire-flies blazing below on the grass. Some of the wonder and awe he had ever felt returned. If he could only speak, even if just one word to break the endless silence." (176) The new priest's intellectual allegiance to existence as passive contemplation is, at heart, rooted in escapism. He wants to tune out Elizabeth because she "throws back at me the small details I have discarded to unclutter facts." (181) The "small details” are matters like the sisters' request for a salary increase to equal the compensation that lay teachers receive. The sisters want their own credit cards for gasoline. The sister principal even lobbies for his support for their request to become priests. This last issue is especially thorny for the new priest because he can find no Scriptural injunction against it, even though the Pope stands in opposition to the idea.
"Tides and Near Occasions of Love"53 is very brief, centered around one strand of plot: a father's inevitable, impending death in the hospital in spite of numerous ongoing intravenous procedures to prolong his life. The story's placement as the termination of Common Continent therefore seems very appropriate. The third-person omniscient narrative stance does not detract from the anguish the protagonist feels nor the plangency of the reader's experience. Even though the story has a fairy tale-like beginning ("a long time ago when she was young"), its immediacy is not compromised. It opens with an idyllic scene recalled from childhood: "she would look out to the sea through the trees and think that someone was coming up the walk of white crushed coral; coming directly from the sea and going up the front steps to ask for her. Sometimes, quietly, she would come out onto the porch to wait, stepping up to where she could see pink flowers clustered on the branches of the kamachile tree over the gate; wild urgencies caught in the sun floating on the waves, taking all day to fall about her." (198)
The peaceful quiescence imparted by this description exacerbates the depiction of the father's rage toward and resistance against the tubes, needles, and catheter placed on and in him. He feels "abused" with care he does not want." (199) His reaction is not directed at death itself; it is directed at the manner of death: painful, humiliating. and demeaning. Yes, as Dylan Thomas put it in "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (1952),"Old age should burn and rave at close of day;/ rage, rage against the dying of the light./ Though wise men at their end know dark is right,/ Because their words had forked no lightning they/ Do not go gentle into that good night." (lines 1-6)
Common Continent is the home of more short stories than any of the other three collections has, but quantity has not meant loss of quality. In fact, none of her four volumes contains a story of inferior merit, a remarkable achievement of sustained excellence over nearly sixty years. Her short fiction has deepened and broadened Philippine literature.
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Notes
1 Manila: Alberto S. Florentino, 1963.
2 [Manila]: Alberto S. Florentino, 1974.
3 Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1991.
4 Santa Monica, California: PALH, 2017.
5 Orig. pub. Antioch Review (Summer, 1958).
In The Transparent Sun 56-64 and reprinted in Common Continent 13-20 with only two revisions, neither consequential. I have excluded periodical publication versions of stories in my textual analysis because authors typically are not able to read proofs of their contributions.
6 Orig. pub. Southwest Review (Summer, 1961); in The Transparent Sun 48-55 and in Common Continent 21-27. “Unleavened” is a cultural feature of bread (e.g., roti in India) and in some contexts, like Passover in Judaism, is part of religious rituals. The story of the unleavened bread is in the King James Version of the Christian Bible, Exodus 12:15-20, 33-39. In “Unleavened Flesh,” however, no cultural and/or religious significance is invoked. “Unleavened” applies to the sunken flesh of the protagonist, Don Alfonso Sangriel, in turn a reflection of not only his age but also his circumstances.
7 A calesa is a small, two-wheeled, horse-drawn carriage.
8 Un rincon para morir is a corner (i.e., a secluded place) to die. The phrase evokes a sense of isolation, despair, a desire to escape and end one's life. Shortly thereafter is either an ex-cathedra Ty-Casper inquiry—though such an intrusion into the text is anomalous in her work—or Don Alfonso's unspoken question to himself: “Espaňa mama, Espaňa mama, nagasawa na kayo sa buhay? (“Mother Spain, Mother Spain, are you tired of life?” —23)
9 An estuary, but in populated districts a tidal channel used as a drainage canal for garbage and sewage.
10 A flat roof or terrace roof.
11 Characterized on p. 22 as “an open sewer these days!”
12 A Spanish colloquial derogatory term meaning “rascal” or “riff-raff.”
13 In Spanish, the denotation of “indio” is “Indian,” but, when applied to the indigenous people of the Americas and the Philippines, the word carries a derogatory connotation of inferiority. The use of terms like “canalla” and “indio” by Don Alfonso make this story the counterweight to “The Transparent Sun,” the opening as well as title story of The Transparent Sun collection. Don Julio of “The Transparent Sun,” like Don Alfonso,is an old man in a story depicting the Spanish presence in the Philippines, but a sympathetic character because he is empathetic, victimized by his young but selfish wife. Both stories center around grandeur in decline, but “The Transparent Sun” elicits sympathy, whereas “Unleavened Flesh” elicits disgust. The presence of both in one volume creates a balance between good and evil, worthy and unworthy, that Ty-Casper maintains throughout her oeuvre.
14 A Filipino bread that is soft, airy, and slightly sweet.
15 Ball cheese, much like Dutch Elam.
16 The location of the Black Nazarene, a carved wooden statue of Jesus carrying the cross to the crucifixion. It is enshrined in the Minor Basilica and National Shrine of the Black Nazarene in Quiapo, Manila. Many impoverished followers relate their daily struggles to the passion of Christ. Although over the years opinion has been divided about whether veneration of the figure constitutes idolatry, the Black Nazarene is accepted and has been approved by three popes, including John Paul II.
17 Orig. pub. The Asia Magazine 3 November 1968. It is the leadoff story in The Secret Runner (pp. 9-23). The Common Continent version is on pp. 79-90. The real-life basis for this story is recounted in Linda Ty-Casper, Lives Remembered: A Memoir. Santa Monica, California: PALH, 2025: 170: “From time to time, I remember the man who stood outside the door in Camarines, trembling, unable to speak or knock; my aunts afraid to let him in. He is in 'The Outside Heart' where a little girl gives a mute beggar her earring.”
18 This closing sentence may well evoke Carlos Bulosan's 1946 quasi-autobiographical America Is in the Heart: A Personal History (New York: Harcourt Brace). In Bulosan's case, the question is where America is; in the present case, the question is where the heart is, so the polarities are reversed, but the evocative power of each is strong.
19 Org. pub. The Weekly Nation 23 December 1968. Rptd. In The Secret Runner pp. 120-135 as “A Wine for Beeswings” and Common Continent pp.28-40 under the tittle “A Wine of Beeswings” and with other minor but not inconsequential revisions.
20 The name means “a friendly and loving person.” Spelled “Philemon” it derives from Greek mythology and acquires the additional sense of one who extends hospitality to others. Cf, the book of Philemon in the New Testament of the Christian Bible, in which friendliness. affection, and hospitable nature are Christian virtues.
21 Philippians 4:7 in the King James Version of the Christian Bible.
22 In The Secret Runner pp. 49-61. Common Continent attributes the original publication of the story to the Fall, 1980 number of the Hawaii Review, but this cannot be because The Secret Runner was published in 1974. I asked Ty-Casper about it, and in an e-mail to me of May 2. 2025 she replied that the first publication of the story was in The Secret Runner and that she doesn’t recall revising the story for the Hawaii Review. She did, however, extensively revise The Secret Runner version for inclusion in Common Continent. Many of the revisions tighten the syntax, enhancing the flow of the narrative and sharpening the focus of a detail. E.g., “letting these land[s] out” in The Secret Runner (134) becomes “to rent parcels of land” in Common Continent. (52)
However, some of the revisions add or subtract information, and other revisions substitute English words for Tagalog words; occasionally, a revision will do both types of changes at the same time. An example of added information is The Secret Runner sentence, “Except for Sisa, the children would allow the house to sink to the ground.” (140) The Common Continent version of the sentence has “...to sink into the ground, to return to nothing.” (53) A case of subtracted information appears in the Common Continent phrase “even in the dark” (54) a change from the more precise “though it was completely dark” in The Secret Runner.(143) An expression that both adds and deletes information at the same time is “... the town of San Miguel... was thirty minutes away across the rice fields.” (50) In The Secret Runner we get “the town of San Miguel …was thirty minutes away by carretela.” (137) In the former version of the story the landscape is specified (“the rice fields”) but the means of transportation isn't. In the latter version we aren't told about the terrain, but we do know why the town is half an hour away. That is the time it takes for a one-horse, two-passenger carriage used as public transportation as well as being privately owned in the Philippines at the time setting of the story to cover the distance.
The occasional changes from Tagalog or Spanish in The Secret Runner to English in Common Continent do very slightly reduce the Philippine ambiance of the story's texture, but the resulting gains in meaning clarity more than compensate for the small loss; for instance, replacing the Spanish “caminero” of The Secret Runner (143) with the “roadkeeper” of Common Continent. (55) Even more conspicuously, using “midwife” throughout, as the Common Continent version does, clears away the ambiguity of The Secret Runner introduction of the Tagalog “hilot” (142) and then, one word later, the English word “midwife.” (143) “Hilot”identifies a traditional healer who uses rubbing and sometimes herbs to relieve aches and pains. For childbirth, the hilot uses message-like touch to try to adjust the position of the uterus. However, a “hiliot” may also be a trained health care professional who assists during pregnancy, labor, and postpartum, often in a hospital or a clinic. The presence of both, especially so close together, may make us wonder whether one person is intended or whether two different people are meant. Since “A Wake for Childbearers” is set in the rural countryside and the story dates from more than half a century ago, it is highly probable but not certain that the traditional practitioner is the intended referent.
23 On pages 41-48. Orig. pub. The Other Side March 1988. This ecumenical Christian magazine was dedicated to social justice issues until it ceased publication in 2004.
25 Ironically, the only shade from 'the sun that beats down upon the house” (41) is a zapote, which evidently lies outside the fence. The zapote tree bears soft, edible fruit that the protagonist, nearly out of food, urgently needs.
26 Short for Hukbalahap, a peasant-based resistance movement originally formed to fight against the Japanese during the Occupation. Later, the movement, Communist-led, turned against the government and large landowners in the rice growing Central Plains of Luzon. Though the movement officially ended with the 1954 surrender of its leader, Luis Taruc, it joined other insurgent groups and continued into the 1970's.
27 On pages 62-78 in Common Continent. Orig. pub. The Manila Review January 1975. (
28 New York: Random House, 1983.
29 On pages 105-118 in Common Continent. Orig. pub. Solidarity Third Quarter 1983.
30 Detailed in Linda Ty-Casper, Lives Remembered [:] A Memoir. (Santa Monica, California: PALH, 2025): 54-55, 57, 71-72, and 104, and in her contribution to How I Became a Writer: Essays by Filipino and Filipino American Writers, ed. Cecilia Manguerra Brainard. (Quezon City: Vibal, 2025): 31, 33-35.
31 The Boer War was fought in South Africa in 1899 to 1902, simultaneously with the Philippine-American war. The British Empire battled two Boer Republics, the South African Republic (Transvaal) and The Orange Free State. The Boers were descendants of Dutch settlers.
32 On pages 119 -130 in Common Continent.
33 On pages 131-142 in Common Continent.
34 A coastal municipality in Misamis Occidental Province in Northern Mindanao. Its isolation just after the turn of the 20th century can be gauged by the fact that, in the 2020 census, its population was under 28,000, representing only some 4.5 % of the population of the province and about 0.5% of the population of the island.
35 The six correspond to the standard number of pallbearers at a U.S, funeral, certainly not a coincidental detail here.
36 In full, Dia de Todos Los Santos, the religious observance of November 1st each year. As the name suggests, it commemorates all saints, but it is also a day when families bring fresh flowers to the graves of their loved ones.
37 Cf., popular folk artistry in the mold of the song "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" The 1960 version done by Joan Baez fits most seamlessly here. Her incomparably expressive vocal modulation of pitch, volume, tempo, inflection, and syllable elongation sets it apart even from such well-received renditions as that of Peter, Paul, and Mary. The lyrics unfold the processes of nature, and the recurrent interjection is interrogatory: "When will they ever learn?" Still, the implied amalgamation of reprimand and declamation inheres in the same question so gracefully raised silently in "A Swarm of Sun."
38 On pages 143-152 in Common Continent. Orig. pub. Windsor Review Winter 1976 and recognized in the Roll of Honor in The Best American Short Stories of 1976, ed. Martha S. Foley. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt, 1977.
39 Both poems are from Jose Garcia Villa's collection Have Come, Am Here (New York: Viking, 1942), pages 28 and 31 respectively. The Ty-Casper story titles are indicative of an impressive lyric gift that rarely comes to the forefront. Lives Remembered contains the most extensive examples, unfolding in the local color of “Early Memories” (1-4), a verbal tapestry that Amorsolo would applaud and, in just two paragraphs in "Djerrasi" (87-88), not only allude in each to Villa's poem "Girl Singing. Day" (page 15 in Have Come, Am Here) but also evoke memories of Villa's incomparably mesmerizing lyricism.
40 Though very different circumstances are involved—quiet, humble, sensuous domestic pleasure as opposed to maximized sensual indulgence—this paean to joie de vivre is as evocative as the flamboyant account of the dying Currito's is in Nick Joaquin's “The Legend of the Dying Wanton.” The story is on pages 84-97 in Joaquin's Tropical Gothic (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1972); the paean is on pages 86-88.
41 In an e-mail to me of June 9, 2025, Ty-Casper wrote that “Triptych was actually three stories that worked together,” and the coherence of the story confirms that assessment.
42 Here there is an echo of the closing couplet of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "Spring and Fall: To a young child" (1880): " it is the blight man was born for, it is Margaret you mourn for.”
43 Pages 153-165 in Common Continent. Orig. pub. Cuyahoga Review Fall 1985/ Winter 1986. The story is set in Massachusetts.
44 The hospitable warmth of a homecoming for the narrator is, not coincidentally, closely parallel to the real-life reception Ty-Casper and her husband received from their landlady, Lottie Johnson, in Watertown, Massachusetts. In the story the landlady is "Mrs. Johnson," and her sister's name is "Lotte." In the story we are told that "Once she knocked at my door at 5:30...with a fresh batch of doughnuts she had stayed up all night to make." (160) She also invites the narrator for a supper of salmon and peas." (162) Both hospitable acts are taken from Ty-Casper's own experience, recounted in Lives Remembered. (49)
45 On pages 166 -172 in Common Continent. Orig. pub. Prairie Schooner Fall 1977.
46 In the Two Guards version, the solution is to ask the same question of each guard, one of whom always lies, and the other, who always tells the truth: " Which door leads to freedom rather than death?" Since both will give you the same answer, do what they tell you to do.
47 On pages 173-183 in Common Continent. Orig. pub. Greensboro Review No.36, 1984.
48 From Charles Dickens' novel A Christmas Carol (1843), used to specify how affluent people should view the poor: not as a separate class, but as fellow travelers in life.
49 As the story proceeds, it becomes increasingly plausible to see him as emblematic of the Apostle Paul, a convert to Christianity, as were two other historical figures alluded to in the paragraph following the first mention of the new priest's name: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Jacques Maritain . All three—St. Paul, Hopkins and Maritain—maintained that salvation could only be attained by justification on the basis of faith; Grace cannot be earned by good works (rectitude) alone. Rather, justification is a gift bestowed by God. A true believer is the recipient of Christ's righteousness, which is total and unflawed. Human sins and shortcomings are redeemed without limit by Christ's perfection. The omniscient narrator surmises that it must be a reading of Hopkins that had remained encoded in his [Father Paul's] brain." (181) The English poet Hopkins became a Jesuit priest but was reassigned from parish duties because of his odd sermons (e. g., one in which he compared the church to a cow whose moo parishioners followed). But his poetry glorifies the sensuous beauty of the creation (cf.,"The Windhover"), though the Hopkins poem that best fits thematically with this story is "Spring and Fall: To a young child."
Jacques Maritain was a French philosopher cut from much the same cloth that his countryman Henri Bergson was. Maritain's philosophy of salvation is consonant with St. Paul's and Hopkins', though he thought that justification emanated from a combination of belief and Divine Grace, which led naturally to good works. The subsequent "Fellow Passengers" paragraph delivers more a mandate than a suggestion about the theological progenitor of these philosophers: "Check Martin Luther and the Reformation for the matter of grace and justification." (182) Luther is often remembered more for the 95 theses he purportedly nailed to the door of the churchyard castle in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517 and for his adamant opposition to the sale of indulgences, but the significance of his intellectual stance on the matter of faith and justification should always rank as his principal contribution to the history of theology.
50 The resemblance of this wording to the title of Nadine Lynn F. Rodriguez' slim volume of poetry Start of Infinity (Manila: Regal, 1974) is purely coincidental.
51 This wording is elusive. No famous philosopher has made precisely this claim. The old priest may mean something like "the unexamined life is not worth living,” but this statement is attributed to Socrates by Plato in The Apology, not written anywhere by Socrates himself. Even in more modern times, a quotation widely accepted as from the horse's mouth of a renowned thinker may actually be a derivation. E.g., "A thought that does not result in action is nothing much," supposedly stated by 20th century French philosopher Georges Bernanos. That specific wording appears nowhere in his writings.
52 Act III, Scene 1 in the "To be or not to be" soliloquy of Shakespeare's play.
53 On pages 198-202 in Common Continent. Orig. pub. Philippine Graphic August 27, 1990. The story germinated 40 days after her father's death on March 7, 1990, as Ty-Casper notes in Lives Remembered. (94)
Lynn M. Grow is Emeritus Senior Professor of English, Broward College, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. He received all his degrees from The University of Southern California: B.A., English and Philosophy, 1967; M.A., English, 1968; Ph.D., English, 1971; M.A. Philosophy, 1972.
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