Dalipawen
In many villages and towns in the Philippines are trees—venerable and huge, which are regarded as the abode of spirits, the source of legend and romance.
In Rosales, Pangasinan, is a village called Carmay, it is on the way to Tayug and the other towns in the foothills of the Caraballo range. At the junction of the village road along the national highway stands an unusual tree. It is very tall, so straight like a spear, but without branches, except at the very top where there are a few short ones, no more than two meters long. The branches form a kind of crown to the magnificent tree. It is called dalipawen.
Long ago during the Spanish era when much of eastern Pangasinan was still forested, and the Spanish friars in the outpost towns freely associated with Indio women, there lived in the town of San Nicolas, at the foot of the Caraballo range, a pretty village damsel. She had gone to town, to the church rectory, to serve God and Fray Salvi, the Spanish friar. After six months, she returned to her village with evidence of such devoted service. Fortunately for her, a simple peasant took her as his wife and in three months, a handsome mestizo was born. He was baptized Fernando Santos. Because of his light skin, Fernando was called puraw, meaning white in Ilokano, and because he knew his skin was lighter than those of the dark-skinned Ilokano farmers, he expected a future that would not be confined to the hillside farms of San Nicolas.
He had served as an altar boy in church, and managed to get a little education, but having no money there was no place for him to go. Padre Salvi had returned to Spain but he had left a pair of shoes. “This,” the new priest said, “is yours, Fernando.” He always had his eyes on Manila and had hoped there might be some wealthy man who would take him there, but no such thing happened. He was 19 when he decided to take his fortune in his own hands, go to Manila by himself and claim whatever there was that the city had in store for him.
His mother and father understood the wanderlust in their only son, and so they let him go with the little money they had saved, plus some rice and dried meat. It would be a long walk, at least three weeks, but Fernando was prepared for it.
The roads, or trails rather, were bad. There was no transport except an occasional cart, or for the rich, a carriage drawn by one or two horses.
He started in the early dawn, the east still dark as his thoughts. He carried on his shoulder a woven rattan suitcase, tampipi, they called it. It contained his few good clothes, dried carabao meat, two gantas of rice and his most precious possession, the pair of used leather shoes.
It was his first time to get out of the foothills and when he reached the plain, farmers were out harvesting the grain in the narrow fields that they had snatched from the forest. By late afternoon, he came to the village of Carmay, in the town of Rosales. There was a fork in the village road, one leading to another town, the other going to Rosales and onward to Manila. He had lunch that day with the rice that his mother cooked, a cake of buri sap sugar, and a piece of dried beef. He saw the farmer’s hut close to the village and, perhaps, as was the custom, he could go there and roast the dried meat and eat his leftover rice.
An ordinary farmer’s hut — alone in this part of the village, the other houses clustered down the lane. It was walled with buri leaves and roofed with grass, its posts were wood as there was still plenty of timber from the nearby forest.
A girl of 15 or 16 appeared at the top of the ladder when he called. He was struck by the clearness of her brown skin, her dark eyes, and the long hair that dropped down her back, glossy in the afternoon light.
“Yes,” she told him shyly, “you are welcome to cook your food.”
He told her he was going to Manila to seek his fortune. Her eyes brightened — she had never been farther than the town, she did not know what lay beyond Rosales, and as a matter of fact, she had never been to Tayug or San Nicolas, although, at times, travelers from these places passed by.
He had expected members of her family to arrive anytime now from work in the fields, but when it was getting dark and no one had arrived, he asked where her brothers, sisters and parents were. She said she was alone, that her mother had gone across the river to help in the harvest and would be back in the morning.
“Dalin” — that was her name, short for Magdalena — “Are you not afraid?”
Dalin said she wasn’t; she had been left alone so many times even when she was much younger. Her father had died when she was ten years old, and it was her mother who supported her.
It was getting dark, and darker, too, had the sky become, for although the rainy season had passed and it was now harvest time, still there were sudden rains that quickly passed. Soon enough, a wind rattled the house and pelting rain drenched everything. Dalin closed the windows for the rain came in gusts.
The rain had not yet stopped when they had finished supper. “I am wondering where I can sleep tonight,” Fernando said, looking at the girl across the low eating table. “I will get wet walking in the rain, but then, that is my life. A traveler must expect anything.”
Dalin took pity on him. “You can sleep in the kitchen till the rain stops, till tomorrow if you wish,” she said. “I do not think my mother will mind.”
That was what he was waiting for and he proceeded to bring out what was in the small suitcase of woven rattan. He brought out a pair of shoes, the leather black and glistening in the light of the kerosene lamp. “This is my most precious possession,” he said. “I will wear it when I get to Manila. You see me barefoot now, but when I get to the city, I will dress up like any other cityman,” he said proudly. He handed the pair of shoes for the girl to hold and study.
It was quite heavy, the sole was leather and the shoestrings were untied. “Try it on,” Fernando coaxed her.
Dalin put them on slowly then stood up. The shoes were much too big for her; she had never worn shoes in all her life, just her mother’s cloth slippers when she went inside the church in town. She had always been barefoot like the other village girls, and did not even have wooden clogs.
She gave Fernando a mat but no pillow, then she went inside the house, in the little “sipi,” and put out the kerosene lamp. Outside, the rain fell in torrents as if there would be no stopping it. The road would be flooded now in parts. He couldn’t sleep — all through out after supper, he had looked at this girl, at the utter loveliness that suffused her.
She was so trusting, inviting a total stranger like him to sleep in her house. For a while, he could not bring himself to do what he wanted to do, but she had also looked at him, he suspected, with some kindled interest. He must find out how far he could go.
Rising, he went inside the sipi. Although it was dark he could see her on the bamboo floor. Immediately, he lay beside her. She woke up, realizing a man was there beside her, and fear strangling her voice, she said. “What are you doing here? Get away, get away!”
He clamped a hand on her mouth then and mounted her, her body between his legs so she couldn’t move. “Do not shout, Dalin,” he said quietly. “Besides, in this rain, nobody can hear you.”
She realized she couldn’t move, and when he removed his hand from her mouth, she stifled the effort to shout, knowing he was right, nobody would hear her in this storm.
“Do not hurt me, please,” she pleaded. “Do not hurt me.” Her voice trembled and soon, she was crying softly.
“I am not going to hurt you,” he assured her. “As a matter of fact, what I am going to do will please you,” and he pressed his mouth to hers. She squirmed, saying, “Please do not do it. Please.” But soon, her struggling and complaining ceased. She was completely still and when he kissed her again, this time she opened her mouth. She smelled of flowers and harvest and her tongue was salty.
Fernando promised Dalin eternal love, saying that in a year, he would come back for her, his fortune already made. “Wait by the roadside,” he said. “You will not miss me!” It
was all so believable and Dalin began to trust him. They hardly slept that night, not because of the storm, but because of the desires that had inflamed them. It was almost daybreak when they finally went to sleep and by then, the storm had also spent itself.
They did not wake up when Dalin’s mother arrived, not even when she let down her half sack of grain with a thud on the floor. When she couldn’t find her daughter in the house, she peeped into the sipi and saw her and her lover entwined in each other’s arms still asleep. She screamed at the sight, and grabbing a bolo from the kitchen, she went after the startled Fernando who rushed out, grabbed his suitcase and jumped out of the kitchen window. He did not have the time to take his precious shoes.
“Oh, my daughter, you are a whore!” the mother cried. But Dalin could not understand why her mother was so angry. “Now, no one will want to marry you.” the mother continued weeping. “Now, you are soiled rag. Do you hear? No man wants a soiled rag. No man!”
But Dalin did not care; she was absolutely certain that after a year Fernando would be back.
And so, the year passed quickly, and it was harvest time again, the fields were golden and the air smelled sweet with the scent of newly cut hay. Every day, she went out to the road, and stayed there at night as well, sometimes with a storm lamp. She always carried the pair of leather shoes, sometimes in a loop over her shoulder. Her mother was angry but there was nothing she could do. Why did her daughter fall in love with a worthless mestizo when there were so many peasant boys around?
And so it was, every day, she would be by the road, watching everyone coming from the direction of town, and Manila beyond it. People soon came to know about her waiting there, and when they passed, she seemed not to notice people passing, for her eyes were only for one person, for one man, for Fernando.
What had happened to him? He did reach Manila, of course, although it took him almost two months to get there, for along the way, he had often paused, particularly where there was a woman pretty enough and willing enough to waylay him.
Finally in Manila, with his good looks, he was able to get a job in a tobacco company. And because he was fair and mestizo, he was able to meet the pretty daughter of the owner
of the company. And because he also had a little education, he had a chance to further it, until he could also speak in Spanish and act like the aristocrat he had always wanted to be. In time he became rich, and because there were several women he had known on his climb to wealth and prestige, he forgot completely that evening in barrio Carmay and the girl Dalin whom he had defiled.
Dalin persisted. She grew old, sickly, hardly taking care of herself, depending on the kindness of the village people, for her mother had long passed away.
One day, she felt very, very sure that, at last, Fernando would come. And Fernando did pass; he was on a magnificent four-wheeled, maroon carriage, drawn by four handsome Abra ponies. A Spanish official was with him and the velvet window drapes were drawn because they did not want the curious Indios gawking at them; besides, what was there to see in this forsaken part of the country, but the endless clearings and the forest? They were going to his own native San Nicolas to see how a new tobacco plantation could be opened there. Inside the speeding carriage, he did not even remember how he had spent a night in this village, he did not even look at the bedraggled woman by the roadside, standing there forlorn in the noonday heat with a pair of carefully polished shoes in her hand.
The road to Rosales was slowly widened and filled with gravel and more traffic cluttered it, bullcarts carrying grain. Ilokano settlers to the Cagayan Valley. Always, there was this dust-covered woman standing near the junction.
Then Dalin was no longer at her usual station by the road. No one bothered to look, however, into the hut, until one day, passers-by noticed a terrible odor emanating from it.
A farmer peeped in. Dalin had died, her body had begun to decompose, and it was a brave man who could muster enough strength to go inside.
The villagers decided on the most decent solution; they gathered dried coconut leaves and placed the leaves inside the house, on the roof and around it. The house ignited quickly and burned brightly into the night, lighting up the whole of Carmay itself.
It was all ashes the following morning, with no trace of the body of Dalin, other than the mound of charcoal where her body was discovered. The rains fell soon after and where the hut stood, there sprouted a sapling. It grew so fast, the villagers were amazed. In a couple of years, it was as tall as a coconut tree. It had no branches, except at the top, where tiny branches sprouted. Its trunk grew thick so that it was soon as stout as the buri palm.
When the trunk was slashed, a white sap would flow out of it, the tears of Dalin, they said, mourning her lover. And at night, the top of the tree would be crowned with a thousand fireflies, Dalin with her lighted lamp, they said, so she could show her lover the way. Once a year, the tree bloomed, its flowers deeply scented, funereal, and this once a year happened during the harvest season. Dalin, they said, expressing her love. They called the tree, Dalipawen — for Dalin, he has left, he is gone.
They say that at times when the night is stormy, the tree seems to contribute to the whistling of the wind, and the sound is that of a woman insistently moaning.
As a boy, I have always regarded the tree with awe. The story was sad, haunting, and I should not have believed it, but my grandfather told me it was absolutely true. He swore by it, because it was the story told to him by his own grandfather, whose grandfather was no other than Dalin’s only son conceived from that evening of remembrance and undying love.
