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Pieces of String
Tita Lacambra- Ayala
Tita Lacambra-Ayala is an acclaimed writer, poet and painter. Born in Sarrat, Ilocos Norte,
Tita studied at the University of the Philippines, and after a fruitful stint as freelance writer forvarious major magazines and as press officer of the UP Los Baos College of Agriculture
Extension Office, she eventually settled in Mindanao with her husband painter Jose V. Ayala, Jr.
(deceased). She has published four books of poems: Sunflower Poems (Filipino Signatures,
Manila, 1960), Orginary Poems (Erehwon Publishing, Manila, 1969), Adventures of a
Professional Amateur (prose) (UP Press, 1999), and Friends and Camels in a Time of Olives (UP
Press, 1999.) She co-edited the visual and literary arts journal Davao Harvest with Alfredo
Salanga, Gimba Magazine, and Etno-Culture. She produced and edited the 30-year-old Road
Map Series, a folio of Mindanao artistic works and literary writings.
She won the Palanca in the English Short Story Category Everything (Third Prize,1967), and for Poetry in English A Filigree of Seasons (Second Prize). She also garnered the
following awards and citations: Gawad Balagtas Awardee for Poetry in English (1991), Manila
Critics Circle Special Citation for Road Map Series (1989), Philippine Free Press Awardee for
Short Story (1970, Third Prize), Focus Philippines Poetry Awardee, Gawad Pambansang Alagad
ni Balagtas UMPIL Achievement Award (1991), and National Fellow for Poetry, UP Creative
Writing Center (1994-95).
Lacambra-Ayala is a founding member of the Davao Writers Guild, and is the mother of famous
songwriter-musicians Joey Ayala and Cynthia Alexander and poet Fernando (Pido) Ayala.
GRANDMOTHER SITS on a stool beside my table. Her head is gray, seems grayer even in the
quieter hours of the night, domestic chores done, when she sits still except for fingers moving in
and out of stitches with a crochet needle. Every night it is like this. She crochets square upon
square of design which later she puts together into bedcovers. It is her pride when, on someones
birthday, she spreads one of her handiwork on my bed and listens to praises that go to her work.
How exquisite, how pretty, the visitors say.
And she hangs her head shyly like a girl and smiles out of the corner of her eyes, her
lower lip thrust out in a pout. Slowly this shyness goes away with the heaping of praise until
suddenly, her eyes glinting; she goes into intricate and sometimes trivial details of how thebedspread came into being.
Ten months, she would say, fondling a lacy corner of the spread not consciously but with
that passing motherly tenderness with which a mother pats the knee of a nursing child. Ten
months it took me to do this.
Do you devote your time to crocheting? They ask her.
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Oh no, she says, pouting again.In the morning I hardly ever have yje chance to do a row
of stitches. I work in the house, cook, go to the market. If I had the chance to crochet at any time
I pleased, I would finish the spread in less than half the time.
Is it difficult to make this design?
Well, no, this design is very simple. The beauty of the spread comes not so much in the
individual design of the pieces as in putting together of so many to form the whole.
Just as the visitors are about to go, either because they must or because they have had
enough on the making of bedspreads, my grandmother pulls a low wooden chest from under the
bed.
Stay, she says,I have more that you may like to see. They are all as exquisite.
Before they can protest, she has opened the chest and has hung one spread against her
body, her arms stretched out from each side. The guests desist from leaving, not merely forpoliteness, but because the spread is very exquisite, though oh very much unlike the one upon the
bed.
Does this not look old- fashioned, like Venetian lace? And look at the edges. So fine, so
evenly done.
You like it?She asks them. Then she would name a price.
They say,Naku! Or Susmariosep!
Theprice, she tells them, is nominal.I can charge more but you are friends of the family.If you compute how much I spent, and the work that I have put into it.
As she waits for my brothers to come in from their Saturday escapades or for my sister
who goes on hospital duty at three and comes home at eleven at night, she sits on her chair
beside my table and works. The white loops of string against the gleam of the steel hook
interpret, it seems, all she must feel, must think, must be made of.
Sometimes she nods into an unguarded moment of tiredness and her fingers are still, the
square of crochet is suspended and does not grow. A mosquito biting her arm, or the temptation
of slumber, wakes her and her fingers resume their movement, the square resumes its growth.
The lured visitor then makes a bargain. Cant she have it for forty?
Ill give it away for fifty, she tells the visitor.
How about forty- five?
No. Fifty.
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The visitor digs into her bag for the customary twenty pesos given down payment.
Grandmother looks at the handiwork still spread on her arms and drawn against her body, as if
counting the pieces, as if thinking whether or not to go on with the sale. In a while, she gathers it
in her arms, folds it and wraps it up in two or three rustling sheets of old newspaper.
She has been with us ever since I can remember. Very clearly in my childhood do I recallthat she had always been there to call me away from mudpies or pikoin the morning that I might
have my daily bath or that I might shooo the flies away from a tray of fish fillets drying in the
sun. And in the afternoon she would force me to gulp down a glass of milk after a ritualistic nap.
At night she slept with me on a mat spread on the floor of the sala. I was afraid of the
night silences too for they were too vacant, made me feel that in the whole dark world I was all
alone. When sounds or silence came into the nights of my childhood, I merely had to reach my
arms into the dark and her hands, warm and protecting, would pat my cheek, smooth the hair
away from my forehead, or pull my blanket up to my shoulders. I would not be afraid.
She had taken care of Benita before me. As the three younger boys grew up after us, they
in turn knew her as she and I did.
With the three boys she was fierce, for they were uncontrollable. She shouted at them to
come down from the trees when it was time to wash up. She pinched them on the buttocks for
the nails and razor blades that she found shredding the pockets of their pants. She refused to
serve meals until they stopped quarrelling at table. She tweaked their ears for refusing to change
into their pajamas, and then later for refusing to say their night prayers. The boys shouted at her,
cursed her, made play with her. But when they saw that she had grown silent, too tired to shout at
them, or to reprimand them, their faces grew still and penitent.
Francis, the oldest boy, was the closest to the three to Grandmother. He would, in his
quiet, almost mature way, steal to the kitchen when he was hungry in the afternoon, when she
was starting to be busy with supper. He would watch Grandmother with his dirty hands folded
behind him, follow her in her domestic trips to the sink, stove and table.
What is that? He would ask Grandmother.
Cauliflower, she would say, hiding a smile behind a wet hand.
It looks like a cloud, he would say.I like cauliflower.
It makes young people grow big and strong, she would say. Grandmother watched him
from the corner of her eyes. He would look furtively at her face, waiting for the right moment to
request a favor. He would make a move to go, half turning, but his young body would twist back
to Grandmother in appeal for the unsatisfied hunger.
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I will go out to play very soon, he said. I have no more marbles left. The older boys
always beat me.
Why do you allow them to beat you?
It is just bad luck, Francis said.
Are you going to play marbles again very soon?
In a little while, he said, affecting interest in a pot boiling over.
Grandmother would go to the cupboard, reach for a cookie jar, and place some cookies
on a saucer. Then, as if on sudden thought, she would put the saucer on the table in front of
Francis, saying something about the fish she had left on a tray to dry in the sun, or about having
to water bleaching clothes. She would leave the kitchen in a hurry, knowing that when she came
back, the saucer would be empty; there would be a few crumbs on the edge of the table, and a
used drinking glass on the sink.
In snatches of conversation between Ma, Pa, and relatives, we picked up a vague
knowledge about Uncle George. Uncle George was Grandmothers son. He was Mas cousin,
because Grandmother is the sister of Mas father.Uncle George was in a picture in the family
album. In it he wore white pants, a white coat and a striped bowtie. A stiff straw hat with a black
band was jaunty on his head. He was standing at attention beside a chair with a tall straight back.
His eyes and lips were composed in a gravity I usually see on Grandmothers face. But there was
a curve to his cheeks that showed that he was eighteen years young, very prone to laughter and to
song.
Uncle George is in the States. He had gone there to study when he was nineteen, one or
two years before I was born. In the States he studied during the daytime and worked during his
free hours, including sometimes at night. For many years after he left, he wrote to Grandmother
regularly and sent her money once in a while. Grandmother made fine things for him. Once she
sent him a pair of pillow cases with his initials embroidered in bold red satin stitches. At another
time she sent a set of hand- hemmed pocket handkerchiefs. Once a pair of striped cotton pajamas
with his initials cross- stitched on the pocket.
Grandmother was annoyed at the War when it came, first because the blackout practices
left her with no light by which to crochet or embroider. Later, there were no classes and children
messed around the house most of the time. But the real impact of the War came to Grandmother
not with the plans and bombs that pursued us from one evacuation to another but from the
realization that no mail from abroad could entry the country. This break of communication made
the world too utterly big, and Uncle George much too far, impossibly far away. Grandmother
took to prayer while we could only respond to fear cowering in dugouts, our heads against each
other.
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After months of losing weight and hope of safety, we received word that the capital city,
fourteen kilometers or so away, was American territory, was peace and plenty. We gathered light
packs on our heads and followed other families up the mountain trail leading to the city.
It was midmorning when we gained a mountain top from which we could overlook the
village of our birth, Antamok. The village was there unmistakably, with the river that haddivided it into two zones and into two social functions, those whose children took piano lessons
and those whose children did not. But as we could see, all distinctions were gone. The village
was black earth, black fallen tree trunks, black concrete posts. Ma and Pa must have thought of
the cottage with its green porch and hanging orchids; they did not say anything. My sister
gripped my shoulder; I remembered her garden and her well- loved begonians. The boys wanted
to know where the birds could have gone now that the trees were fallen, if their eggs had hatched
in the fire, or were cooked.
Grandmother, turning away from the scene, complained for the first time of pain on her
thigh and hip. She put down the load on her head (she had taken on the heaviest, including potsand pans) and said she would go no further.
I reckoned her losses to two large wooden chests full of embroidery and crochet work.
Most of them she had made to give to Uncle George when he would come home and get married.
It took sometime of rest and cajoling for Grandmothers pain to leave and enable her to lift her
load back upon her head.
In the city, we occupied the last vacant room on the second floor of a two- storey
bunkhouse that stood beside a black river. The room had no door to protect us from prying eyes
of neighbors in the other rooms, so Ma hung up an old blanket in the doorway. It was very hotinside this room during daytime. Water drenched us and our belongings when it rained.
All able members of the family, excepting Grandmother and the youngest boy, left the
house early in the morning to work for the Americans. We cleared the street of ruins, swept the
barracks, mopped floors, ate meals consisting mostly of strange- tasting soaked prunes and
apricots, too polished long- grain California rice, thick slices of Spam, omelets made with
dehydrated eggs doled to us in army trays by tall aproned winking American soldiers. We
worked till four in the afternoon when we would be brought home in large army trucks. And we
would get home to find Grandmother dividing her attention between the black river that was just
outside the window and the youngest boy who sat on the floor juggling empty cartridges andpieces of shrapnel.
Always now there was nothing, no flicker of expression on Grandmothers face outside
of ordinary interest in the cigarettes and bars of laundry soap that we brought home , to show
what she felt of the past or what she wanted of the future. She got up when the lone cock in the
neighborhood told her it was time to put on the coffee. She went to sleep on her part of the floor
just as soon as she had put away the lamp where the kerosene would not spill.
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One afternoon after about a month of sweeping barracks floors, I got home to find the
room looking smaller than usual. It was the presence of a khaki-clad man that made the roof
seem nearer to the floor, shrinking everything. He was sitting beside Grandmother on the bench,
an arm around her shoulder. Their similar eyes were smiling, bright with tears that must have
been shed over eighteen years of not seeing each other. His kiss on my cheek was as gentle as
Grandmothers hand.
How much schooling have you finished?
I was three months in grade six, I said with a GI accent
You speak good English, he said. What would you want to do when you finish school?
I wanna be a painter, I guess. I wanna paint pictures, you know.
Helaughed deeply, his very even teeth white against his swarthy face. He reached for his
open travel pack near his feet and took out an olive- colored knit sweater with sergeant stripes onit.
This will keep you warm, he said, tousling my bangs.
He came regularly every afternoon. We piled into his Willys, my sister beside him, the
three boys at the back. We rode through the city and saw different places over and over again in-
between bites of chocolate candy and canned cheese. We brought him home to supper to eat the
adobo, pinacbet, sinigang and other dishes that Grandmother cooked specially for him. He stayed
with us until it was eight, then he would go back to camp.
He left the city without telling us. We only knew he had gone when he did not come forthree days in a row and we received a letter to say that he was in Leyte where his unit was
stationed. He was sorry he could not tell us, army regulations, we must understand. After three
weeks he wrote again to say that he was back in San Francisco with his discharge papers. He was
due to return to Ohio, where his job in an engineering plant awaited him. We must not worry.
Grandmother lost patience with living among us. She slept late. She sat by the window
and looked into the black river. When it was time to eat, she did not call us. Hungry, I would go
to the kitchen and find her standing in front of the wood stove letting the cooling embers burn
just a moment longer in the steady gaze of her eyes.
Uncle George had been with us in summer. The rainy season set in after he left. The
landlord came to the bunkhouse with a couple of men and went up to the roof to cover the
wounds through which rain fell to the floor in dark pools. One morning after a heavy rain,
Grandmother picked up from the ground a piece of canvas that had fallen from the roof. She
brushed the canvas in the river and set it on a large flat stone to dry. She pulled the dried fabric
apart into lengths of string which she knotted together and wound into round balls.
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Digging into little bundles of cloth and paper which she kept in a woven bamboo basket
that was part of her growing old, she found a metal crochet hook. The rust on it she wiped away
with a piece of cloth dipped in the kerosene of the lamp. She wound a breadth of string around
her left forefinger and began to crochet.
She made pieces of triangles, squares, circles that she sewed up together like patchworkinto cushion covers and bedspreads. The things that she created filled up the room and
overflowed into the lives of others who came to see and to buy. They came into the room, the
women with knotted hair and red hands, examining finished and unfinished pieces, spreading
them over their palms, over their arms and in front of their eyes to better admire the lacework.
They brought in with their interest what gossip they could lay as tribute to the power that
Grandmother held captive in the slender movements of her gleaming crochet hook among the
knotted pieces of string.
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