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said.
    “All right,” the old man said weakly. “But grant me one last request, son. Don’t let them cut me up. Just promise me that.”
    “I’ll do all I can,” Tony said with feeling.
    “Take me back to Rosales when I die. Bury me beside your mother.”
    “I’ll do that, Father,” Tony said.
    “I’m not working in the fields anymore. They have transferred me to the offices and I clean desks and books. My legs and arms feel numb. Pain shoots up my spine. But now that I’ve told you what I want most, I’m glad. And when you get married, bring her to see me. And I hope I’ll see my grandchildren before I die.”
    “You will, Father.”
    The old man ran a nervous hand across his white hair. The bell above the iron door to the barracks rang. The visiting hour was over. Tony held the horned hand to his lips again. “I’ll come and see you again, Father,” he said as the old man turned away.
    On the way back to the city, it was the heat that made his homecoming absolute. The boat had left San Francisco in April and the air was fresh and sweet with spring. After that, Hawaii and balmy weather, the informality, the white beaches, the palm trees, and the people in shorts; then Japan and Fujiyama capped with snow, Hong Kong—Victoria Peak and its houses and many-storied buildingsgleaming in the sun. And finally, Manila, in early May simply unbearable. The heat claimed him back the moment they sailed into Philippine waters. The city hadn’t changed really, not its dusty streets, not its Antipolo. Its houses were still unpainted and falling apart, and the children who played in the dirt had the forsaken look he had always remembered. This was the dead end, the street where dreams vanished, and this fact was stamped on the faces of the people, the jeepney drivers, the anemic government clerks, the jobless, the petty racketeers, and the con men. This despondency was etched on the face of Antipolo, and there was no escaping it unless by some miracle one happened to have gone to college, gotten a fellowship, and set his course on distant sights.
    In May the body tires quickly, the brow is damp, and the mind is sluggish. The day commingles with the smell of sweat and the fumes of a thousand jeepneys; then dusk descends, and with the coolness that it brings, the fret and drudgery of the day is banished at last. The neon lights sparkle along Rizal Avenue, spewing greens, yellows, and reds at the darkening sky.
    Tony felt a kinship with twilight, for it brought him an inner peace no matter how brief, and a reminder, too, that day must end and that, extending this vision, there was a terminus to all the good things that were shaping before him.
    Tony got off the jeepney in Blumentritt. The sky was washed with indigo and with a lingering dye of red in the direction of Manila Bay. The walk home would be cool—a healthy excursion down a side street that was muddy during the rainy season but scraggly now with dying weeds.
    Home was his sister Betty’s
accesoria.
§ She taught grade school in Sampaloc and her husband clerked for a Chinese flour importer in Binondo. They had three boys who slept in the living room with the maid now that Tony was back and was occupying his old room. The house stood near a narrow dirt road that seemed to have been totally forgotten by the politicians because it was choked with garbage piles, and farther down the street it was pocked by those small sweet potato patches that squatters with untidy lean-tos tended. There were two ways by which one might reach the house:the railroad tracks or the narrow alley that curved from the road. The alley was seldom empty of children and housewives and drunks with heavy talk and desperate joys, their lives made more viable and secure by steady doses of devil gin that they bought from the store at the far end of the road.
    Tony followed the railroad tracks, stepping away from the little mounds of human waste that those in the vicinity had left, being too lazy to