ENRIQUEZ:Iguana/P1

1) Title – Iguana
2) Author – A. R. Enriquez
3) Author’s Bio –
A. (Antonio) R. (Reyes) Enriquez born and raised in Zamboanga City and educated at a local Jesuit school,
Ateneo de Zamboanga –an all-boys institution then –is the author of several books of short stories and
novels. He has been published in his homeland, the Philippines, and abroad. His short stories have been
included in anthologies and translated into Korean and German.
It was his fearful and unforgettable experience in Liguasan Marsh in Mindanao that likely started his
career as a novelist. Liguasan Marsh was the setting of his first novel, Surveyors of the Liguasan
Marsh, 1981. Other novels: The Living and the Dead, Giraffe Books, Philippines, 1994; Subanons, University of
the Philippines Press, Quezon City, 1999; most recent work: Samboangan: the Cult of War, (epic novel),
University of the Philippines Press, 2007.
However, his “happiest and memorable times” in his grandfather’s land in Labuan, 35 kms. northwest
of Zamboanga City, and the last coastal village reachable by land from there, which prodded him to write
about farmers, fishermen, and the rural folk. Labuan village is the setting of his stories in the collection,
Dance a White Horse to Sleep and Other Stories, 1977. The aforementioned novel and story collection were
published by UQP Press, Queensland, Australia. Other short story collections: Spots on Their Wings and
Other Stories, Silliman University, Philippines, 1972; The Night I Cry and Other Stories, New Day Publisher,
Philippines, 1989; The Unseen War and Other Tales from Mindanao, Giraffe Books, Manila, 1996; The Voice from
Sumisip & Four Short Stories, Giraffe Books, Manila, 2003.
He is a much awarded writer, among the notable awards: UMPHIL—Writers Union of the
Philippines—; University of the Philippines National Fellow for Literature lifetime award; S.E.A. Write
Award; Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers Fellowship; and Don Carlos Palanca Memorial
Award for the short story and its grand prize for the novel
He and his wife Joy, with their five grandchildren, now live in Cagayan de Oro City.
4) No. of pages - 13
5) No. of words – 6,829
6) Attachment:
 ENRIQUEZ:Iguana/P2

IGUANA
By A. R. Enriquez

WE HEARD the mother hen croak.

“Get up, Macario,” Ma said. “The mother hen…”
“What?” said Pa, awakening.
We heard the hen croak again and then, all of a sudden, become quiet…
“The mother hen,” Ma said. “Maybe the iguana has entered the chicken house.
Quick.”
“Léche!” Pa said.

I AM sitting on the top rung of the kitchen steps with a .22-caliber rifle in my hands. I sit
there waiting for the iguana to come out of the bamboo thickets across the river. It is
morning, soft and light.
Just then I hear mama call me from the flower garden. I lean the rifle against the
wall of the kitchen and go down the wooden steps. Then I go around the back of the
house and on to the footpath, worn smooth and scoured by countless interminable feet,
and then across before the now useless, broken-down chicken house. I go on. Suddenly
the path levels off as straight as a plumb-line toward the garden. I walk a small way on
the footpath before stopping in front of the garden.
Ma is squatting on the ground before her flower bed of daisies. Her hands are
busy turning the soft black loam over and patting it gently around the stems. “Where is
the water I asked you for?” she says without yet looking up at me. “Did I not tell you to
bring me some water?”
I have forgotten all about the water. “You did not tell me, Ma,” I say. She stands
up, her hands caked with black loam and hanging rigid at her sides. She turns toward me.
Her eyes become locked with mine, quiet and searching. But I still don’t move.
“You must help me in the garden, hijo–son,” she says. “For your father won’t lift
a finger to help me.” As I look back at her, I notice the reddish blotches on the balls of
her eyes and the swelling around them, and I think, She cried some more after Pa left.
She cried there in her room. Alone there in her room she cried as papa tramped angrily
out of the house.
Earlier Pa had shouted at her and was very red behind the ears with anger. I was
then under the house, the bamboo-split floor not three feet above my bare head, and I was
about to take the fodder to our pigs when I heard him, in the sala, say: “I’m not giving
 ENRIQUEZ:Iguana/P3

you even a centavo. Not one centavo, do you hear? Nothing for that foolishness of a
chicken house.”
“The iguana will kill all my chicks,” said Ma. I suddenly stood stock-still under
the house, not making any noise that would warn them. Then she said, “Last night I lost
my last chicken, the mother hen of those chicks. If you don’t give me money to repair the
coop, the iguana will eat all those chicks tonight. See if I am wrong.”
I could hear them talking loudly in the sala through the bamboo-split floor. I
heard Pa say, almost hissing with anger, “That wouldn’t have happened if you had
listened to me. But you would not listen. What you listen to are those foolish ideas which
go around in your head.”
“You do not care about the chicks,” I heard mama say. “You would rather see
them all eaten up by the iguana than give a centavo to repair the chicken house.”
Standing under the bamboo floor directly where they both stood or sat I heard papa’s
chair scrape as though he were about to rise, and then just as suddenly he changed his
mind and remained seated, still and immobile.
When papa spoke again, he was mincing his words carefully. “That is enough
talk. I’m telling you, you won’t get a centavo from me anymore for your foolishness.”
It was at this time I heard ma’s feet scrape on the floor and hiss up toward the
room. Yet I did not even move, still standing stock-still, not even to look up through the
splits of the bamboo floor, as she came into the room and stood by the window
overlooking her flower garden. Now I heard papa’s chair scraping roughly on the floor,
and then he stood up and walked out of the house, red behind the ears. I knew they were
red without seeing them, because his ears always turned red when he got angry. But that
was not what I was thinking then. I was not even thinking, but listening to ma as she cried
there by the window. Now she is through crying, I am thinking. But her eyes are red and
swollen and the crying is till there, only deeper now in her eyes.
Now I say, “I’ll get the water now, Ma.” Her eyes suddenly become blank,
turning inwardly into her sockets. She is no longer looking at me, her face bent down, but
staring at her brightly colored daisies. Her eyes seem to gape blankly. She turns to speak
to me, but already I am going down to get the water from the well below the chicken
house. After a while, I come back carrying a long bamboo tube over one shoulder.
“When are your city friends coming, Ma?” I ask, emptying the water from the
bamboo tube into a petrol can, which papa had emptied and scrubbed hard with soap and
ashes some time ago, and which we now used as a water container. Then I go to the
house and lean the bamboo container against the sawali–woven strips wall. Ma picks up a
dipper, its bottom perforated with nail-holes, and dips it into the water can, and, with the
dipper raised above them with one hand, she begins to walk up and down between the
beds of daisies.
“Maybe this coming Saturday,” she answers. She draws the dipper above the
flower beds as she moves up and down between them. With one hand cupped under its
bottom, she sprinkles the water on the flower beds.
“Are they really coming here, Ma?” I ask, thinking, But that was the other-other
Saturday yet. “Pa says they’re not coming to buy your flowers.”
I see her stop then. The hand, with the dipper, is half-raised in a silent dumb
gesture while the other is suspended midway between sprinkling the water and cupping
the bottom of the dipper. Suddenly a cloud passes her face. “Did your papa tell you that?”
 ENRIQUEZ:Iguana/P4

she asks me, still and rigid, with the now-empty dipper in her hand. “He must have made
fun of my garden, hijo.”
“He said that those city women were merely talking,” I say. “And you believed
them.” As you believed that building your chicken house beside the river was the best
place for the chickens. Then the flood came and drowned your chickens and washed
away the bamboo poles and left holes in it as wide as a man’s chest for the iguana to
come later and kill your chickens. I stop thinking now and say, “Pa said Mang Pedro
would grow hair on his pate if those city women would come back. “Why would they
come here,” I say, imitating papa, “some fifty kilometers from the city just to buy one
peso of flowers? Even at half the price in the city or even for nothing, they wouldn’t
waste time coming here.” I watch her hand that has begun to move above the flower beds,
with the perforated-bottom dipper raised above the daisies.
Mama moves up and down between the beds of her daisies. “They will come,”
she tells me. “They told me that if I sell them daisies a half the price, they would come
even from the city to buy them. So why should they not come?” Now she moves rapidly.
“I’m selling the flowers to them at half the price. No, not for nothing, as your papa said.”
She does not say anything for a moment. “Oh, your papa,” she says. “Sometimes I cannot
understand him. He never does anything that would bring us some extra money.”
“That was Saturday,” I tell her. “But the Saturday, Ma, of last three weeks, and
still the city women have not come.” I watch her moving rapidly back and forth among
the beds of her daisies, thinking, Even if they come this Saturday, the daisies would be
too old and wilted by then. Ma is watering the daisies to keep them fresh when all the
water in the world cannot do it.
She stops then. “Por favor,” she says, straightening up and arching her back
slowly, “would you bring the can of water closer?”
I walk over and stoop down to pick up the can of water. I take it closer to her.
Then I walk off down the feet-scoured path, not looking back at her, following the path
which goes straight as a plumb-line the same way I had come into ma’s flower garden.
I return to the kitchen and sit back on the top rung of the steps. I reach out a hand
and pick up the rifle leaning against the wall and lay it down across my lap. Across, the
river is beginning to glitter under the new sun. I think, Poor mama. O, poor mama, that
the river should swell just at the time that her mother hens were having their chicks. Pa
told her not to build her chicken house so near the river and she said to him, “They love
to be near the river and to scratch in the sand.”
“Oo,” said Pa. “And when the July flood comes, your chickens will be finished,
and even your chicken house will be washed away.” And that was exactly what
happened. The flood came last week and drowned all of mama’s 75 chickens except for a
rooster and a few hens and some six chicks. I think, Now she is watering her daisy flower
garden, which will never sell a single flower, and Pa would say what he had said to her
then: “How can you be so gaga, Isabel? Turning that vegetable garden into a daisy-
flower garden, the flowers no one would buy, which, in the first place, before it became a
flower garden had not produced a single vegetable. Because you were hard-headed and
insisted on sowing it with seeds you had bought from the city in small plastic packages.
The seeds would not grow here in our land for they were not sowed here, no coming from
here but from another country like American—yes, American seeds. Phhfft!”
 ENRIQUEZ:Iguana/P5

That is what Pa would say. Then Ma would say, “But the first lettuce crop was
big-big. You saw it yourself, Macario, and you even ate some yourself. Only the second
crop was small, and that was because you would not help me or Chu to carry the water up
here from the river.” And then Pa would look at her unbelievingly and say, “You mean
those two or three tiny stalks of lettuce? You don’t call that a crop, Isabel. Not when you
spent more than ten pesos on seeds, watered it day and night—the American seeds
needing more water, you said, than our own—and using our entire vegetable lot for it.”
He would be fuming and unbelieving, though he’d sometimes laugh inwardly at her. As
he had laughed that time they were talking about the chicken house; only he would be
laughing in that queer way. I think, O, pobrecita mama. Oo, muy pobrecita–poor woman
mama.
“You, Isabel,” my father said, “what crazy things get into your head. A whole
river for the chickens to drink and all its shore for them to scratch for pebbles and shells.”
He was getting bulbous and tomato-red around the face as he often got when he fumed or
laughed at Ma’s “crazy” ideas.
They were both standing on the vacant lot above the river bank. Here Ma wanted
her chicken house to be built, because “the shells along the bank,” she said, “will make
them hatch more eggs.” Ma gazed toward the river below the lot. Pa is hurting her, I was
thinking then. He is hurting her laughing at her there, and why doesn’t he stop that?
Instead Pa said, “You must have read that in a revista--magazine. What do you call it,
Farm Magazine? Perhaps it also tells you to build a chicken house beside a river.” Only
he was not serious, but getting more bulbous and tomato-red around the face. O,
pobrecita mama. To be laughed at, yet not rally laughing, laughing inwardly in the face,
and he tomato-red, ridiculing her as she stood in the vacant lot there.
“The water of the flood does not reach up to here,” she said. “It has never risen
higher than up to that rock there.” I can see her even now. She, standing above the bank,
pointing to the old rock, rigid and stiff beside papa. She seemed to break like the brittle,
dry bark of datiles trees which collapses at the mere weight of one’s foot.
Pa was quiet for a moment. “It rose once,” he said. “Some seven years ago. You
remember, Isabel, when it reached even up to the front stairs of our house. Wouldn’t it be
surprising if it does that again now just to spite you?” Only he was not serious, but even
mama could tell he was laughing inwardly behind his tomato-red face. And I think, Four
months later the river did swell and almost all her chickens were drowned.
Léche! Come on, iguana, I’m ready for you now. Léche, if I’m not ready for léche
y léche y léche!
I grasp the rifle lying across my lap. Shifting the weight o the right of my haunch,
I face toward the bamboo thickets which explode and crack like coconut shells as they
clash and bend against each other in the wind. In the meantime, the light has become
brighter and up along the river bank the dappled shadows are thin and green on the thick
mat of grass.
I remember what Pa had said: “O, hijo, this rifle is yours now. It had been your
papalolo’s—my papa—and he bequeathed it to me when I was just 14 years old. So, as
my papa before me had done, I now bequeath it also to you.” I was looking at some
pictures in the magazine in the sala–living room, which mama had given me, and he laid
the rifle down in front of me. He had to bend over as he set it down, carefully, for I was
sitting cross-legged on the floor, bent way over the pages of the magazine. “Take this
 ENRIQUEZ:Iguana/P6

rifle, hijo,” he repeated. “Go out and make use of it like a man. With this rifle, not with
comic books and magazines.” I said nothing. I had not killed anything then, much less
with a rifle, and now even with the rifle I still haven’t killed anything. Not even a tanśi
bird which is the smallest of God’s creatures, so tiny and very friendly that it is easy to
kill one. “You must have hate in you to do anything,” he had said to me once. “If you’ve
only all love you become a milksop, and the worst kind is one with all ideas in his head,
too. You see your mama. She has only ideas in her, and so she never gets anything done.
But hate propels you. It’s that which makes you do things; it makes you make what you
want of yourself.”
I remember that time he said he would grow rice on the slope of his kaingin. The
folks in the barrio laughed at him but while they laughed he ordered some upland rice
from a friend in Cotabato and then planted it beside the slope of his kaingin. And his
upland rice grew in his hatred for the ignorant barrio people, who were surprised that rice
could grow without water on the hillside. No one before that had thought that rice could
grow except in paddies in the lowland or in savannas. “It’s not enough to have ideas,’ he
told me after this. “But hate makes them practical; it makes them work.” I think, Still I’ve
not killed anything with this rifle. Not even a tanśi with this rifle that Pa has even killed a
wild boar with.
Now I listen to mama. But I do not hear her moving in the garden anymore. I
think, Maybe she’s at the back of the garden, and the water can is almost empty and her
city friends are not coming back to buy flowers. What’s the use of watering them? And
my legs are still twitchy with the climbing in getting water from the river. “Oye–Listen,
even nature has to assert herself,” said my papa. “Why do you think she swells and
overflows her banks, destroying your mother’s chicken house? Because there is hatred in
herself; without this hatred, without this flood, she ceases to be: to assert and to exist.”
The two of us were standing before the debris and flotsam of the chicken house.
We were not even looking at each other, standing there in the mire and slush that the
flooded river had dumped that night until early morning onto the bank. “O, yes,” he said,
“a river that has not swollen for almost seven years, but swelled just when your mama’s
hen had its very first brood. If this is not hatred, do not call me ‘Macario.’” He was
thinking as one thinking aloud to himself, and I listening to him as though listening to
myself; I who would also perhaps speak so to myself as my pa did then. I still did not say
anything to him, listening: “Your ma has much love, but look what happens to all her
ideas. It is true that she gets angry sometimes, just as the river swells in hatred to become
itself, for nature–if she only has love–would soon be ignored.” I was truly listening to
him, but I didn’t understand what he was saying then as I do not understand him even
now. Thinking then to myself, It’s three weeks now since, yet I have not killed anything
with this rifle. Not even a tanśi bird, the easiest thing to kill for it is the friendliest and it
is not wild….
“As I hated your papalolo,” he went on, more to himself than to anyone else. “My
own papa, who was like your ma, who was full of ideas from books and who would have
made all of us beggars. But I hated him enough to cheat him, to hide the copra money
from him before he had time to spend it all on any of his foolish ideas of planting tobacco
that would not grow near the sea, or put up, of all things, telephone lines in the barrio that
were broken down by falling coconut trees in the wind.” Still I listened to him, the two of
 ENRIQUEZ:Iguana/P7

us standing there in the mire and slush of the flooded river, and I did not understand him
then as I do not understand him now.
I looked at the three hens and several chicks and a rooster, the only rooster out of
ten that was still alive, all that was left of her 75 chickens, inside the chicken house–wet
and soaked at the same time with water and slush. A few days later there would be only
the mother hen and the six chicks. And then this morning even the mother hen was gone,
devoured by the iguana last night. And tomorrow the chicks too would be gone, to be
eaten alive and digested in the iguana’s stomach; for papa would not give mama a
centavo to fix and cover the holes in the chicken house made by the flood a weeks and a
half ago. Yet I was not thinking of this at that time nor of the fowls and the six chicks. I
was then wriggling my toes in the mud and slush, watching the alluvial sand as it oozed
between my toes. Then I heard his voice again, standing there with his flat feet in an old
pair of Marcelo rubber shoes, heavy and oozing with mud, which he had bought nearly
two years ago during the Fiesta del Pilar in the city, and they smelling now of athlete’s
foot; he never wore them, not even in the farm, except when he got his feet wet, saying,
“That was the ultimate. It was truly the last thing a man would do to impoverish his own
brood. Put up telephone lines through coconut land.” Still I was listening to him and not
understanding a word. “So I cheated him of his copra money, rather than see my own
younger brothers and sisters with nothing to eat later on.” He stopped then while I went
on listening, listening on to the silence, the hiatus after he had ceased talking. He went
on, "It was not easy to do this to the old man, my own father. But then there was enough
hatred for me to cheat him, of what is mine too–even to his death bed.” I had now ceased
listening to him, though his words somehow were droning in my head. I think now Not
even a tanśi. A rifle that has killed a wild boar already.
“Chu,” says Pa from the sala. He walks through the length of the sala and comes
into the kitchen. I turn around on the step. Pa lifts up the matambaka fish dangling from a
nawi string, swinging them up in one swift complete motion into a bateya–basin. I watch
his back and listen to the plop-sound that each of the matambaka fish makes as he slides
it from the nawi–rattan string into the basin. “The fish are already dead,” I think aloud.
“Yet they are now swimming around in the bateya, black and slimy.”
Pa says, “I don’t understand your mother. Gardening from the first light of day.”
He bends sideward and reaches down into the water jar for a tabo–dipper of water.
“Léche! She has not even done anything in the kitchen yet.”
“She went to see Piloy,” I tell him, not even thinking about it. I repeat, “Mama
went over to see Piloy after you’d gone this morning.”
He sets the dipper down beside the sink. “Piloy,” he says grimly, pulling out the
gills of the fish with his forefinger. “Oh, yes…Piloy.” Still he has his back toward me.
“Has the carpenter come yet?”
“No,” I answer, “not yet, Pa.” I think, Piloy has fixed the roof several times
already. Every time it stops raining, Ma calls Piloy to fix the leak in the roof.
“It is Ma’s fault that the roof leaks,” says Pa.
He said, that time when it rained for a week, “You, Ma. Look at the rain pouring
through our roof like it was a river.” He stood before the sala wall, looking up between
the joint where the roof edges against the wall. “Look at your work,” he said. “I told you,
you can not have that type of modern roof with nipa materials. But you’re so hard-
headed, so see what has happened.”
 ENRIQUEZ:Iguana/P8

What Pa meant was that you cannot build a roofless house with nipa and sawali.
Ma had seen the plan in a magazine and it was for a modern house, which from the
design showed the roof hidden from one’s sight, and she wanted our house to look
exactly like it. So when Pa built the new house, she also had her roof that is invisible
from the front.
“It only leaks when the rain is very strong,” said Ma. She was standing behind
him. The water came pouring down the sides of the sawali wall as though someone was
overturning buckets of water up on the roof.
Pa was standing before the wall. “I told you it wouldn’t work,” he said. “But you
wanted a roofless house. ‘It is the modern house,’ you said. Oh, yes, the plan which you
saw in a magazine, which hid the roof from your view if you were in front of the house.”
He turned around and faced her. He was not really angry yet. He would be very
angry later on that night. “It was all right,” he went on, “maybe if you built it in the city
with concrete walls and iron roofing. But, no, you must also have a house just like it, I
mean, the front with the invisible roof.” He stopped, and I was thinking then Pa is
breathing harder, as though he is trying to catch up with his words, the words that come
pouring, raining like torrents.
This time Ma spoke before he could catch his breath. “We will call the carpenter.
When the rain stops we’ll call Piloy to fix the roof——”
But he did not wait for her to finish. He said, “Only, the wall of your house is
sawali and your roof is made of nipa.” I think, And Pa got really very angry that night.
Even when he went to the kaingin the next morning, he was still very angry. “Milk of
your mother!” he said to her. Because it had rained all night that night and all the rain
collected in a sag in the roof, and in the middle of the night, while Papa was sound asleep
in his bed, the roof caved in and a ton of water came pouring down on him.
Pa sprang up from the bed and fell on his rump on the floor. “Coñodeputamadre–
Cunt of your mother!” he swore. “Now, just look at your work, Isabel. Do you see it
now?” as though Ma were also responsible for the rain. He was completely soaked with
the rain water. He looked even worse than the chickens would when the flood came later
and drenched all of Ma’s chickens. And that night, shivering with cold, and Mama sitting
silently on the edge of the drenched bed, Pa was very angry.
The carpenter is coming again to fix our roof.
He will go up the roof with buckets of water which he will pour on the roof to see
where it leaks leaks leaks….
“Look out you don’t fall,” said Ma.
“No,” he said. “No—ha ha ha—I won’t fall.”
Holding the fish in one hand, Pa slices each side on a block of wood and then
sprinkles salt in the wounds. He puts the fish into the basin and goes over to the stove.
“Go get some firewood, hijo,” he tells me, “because your mama is eating only flowers.”
The fish is bleeding now, I am thinking But they were already dead even before
they reached the fish vendors’ tables in the market. I lean the rifle against the wall,
thinking, Dead and bleeding and swimming no longer but floating in the water. I stand up
and go under the house only to find that the woodpile is used up. So I go to the small
forest beside the river and pick up some sticks and dry branches to carry back home in
my arms. As I turn around the bend and pass the chicken house, I look into the garden.
Mama is no longer there, though the empty water can stands between the flower beds
 ENRIQUEZ:Iguana/P9

with the dipper up-ended on its wooden handle. She must have gone back into the house.
I go on up the steps of the kitchen and roll the sticks of wood down from my arms under
the stove.
I hear Pa say in the sala, “A library. What would we do with a library, Señora
Concha?” I turn and look into the sala. The woman is sitting with her back to the
window, facing toward the kitchen. Her husband Señor Felipe Santos sits beside her, legs
crossed over, leaning stiffly against the back of his chair. Pa says, “We don’t need…a
waste of money.”
“Not really a library,” Señora Concha answers. “It will be just a small reading
center, where our boys can come and read.”
“It’s a great opportunity for our boys,” the man says. He sits upright on the chair,
his back pressed against the back of the chair like a hot iron. “We have so many
intelligent boys here, Macario. Their agrarian minds will be greatly enriched by this sort
of opportunity.”
Pa bristles like a hog at the long words, that tell nothing of the man himself but
only his university background. Maybe Pa is thinking, University people think they know
all the answers. They think they’re even smarter than God. “Reading books will only
make them lazy pícaros–rascals,” he says. “All they need to know is how to plow–and
that God has already taught them. It’s enough.”
“No,” says Señor Santos, “not in our modern world, Macario. The competition for
more learning and more knowledge is too great and demanding to be utterly ignored.”
“You talk with your feet above the ground. That’s why, I think, this library is a
crazy idea,” says Pa.
Ma says quickly. “My husband does not really mean that. He’s just against
anything new, that he has not seen put to practical use. You’d be very surprised how old-
fashioned he is.” I see her trying to smile at Señor Santos and at the other woman. “I
believe, Señora Concha, it will be nice to have our own reading center. Every barrio
should at least have a small one.”
“Your wife is right, Macario,” Señor Santos says.
“No, she is not…” says Pa. “And don’t tell me I am wrong. For I know my wife
better than you do—ay, even more so perhaps about her foolish dreams and her crazy
ideas.”
“Please, Macario,” Ma says. “Señor Santos and his wife are our visitors and you
must not talk that way. You’re only showing your lack of breeding.”
“Your visitors,” Pa tells her. “They’re not mine. I didn’t ask them to come to my
house and ask money from me for their crazy ideas.” And, fuming visibly, he turns away
from the woman who had said to him: “It was your wife’s idea…‘Ñor Macario—” and
then, turning to Ma with a sudden jerk of his head—“Your idea! Ah-ah-ah,” he says as
though he was about to cough the words out. “And how did she…to hide this idea behind
you…to make use of you”—still facing Ma, not even turning to the other woman. “So
that you’d come here and solicit the money, cheat me of money by hiding the fact that it
was my wife’s idea from the beginning!”
Señor Felipe Santos, who had been educated in the University, speaks with a
voice so soft even his wife can hardly hear him. “Señor Domingo, please keep calm.
Your wife means very well, and her plan to put up this library for the barrio is so
generous.”
 ENRIQUEZ:Iguana/P10

Pa jerks his head toward him. “Ah-ah-ah,” he says to Señor Santos, “she has used
you, too! What did she tell you? My wife, hah?” He stops, looking straight into the man’s
eyes. “Did she tell you of the library house she put up before—there, behind the crazy
flower garden?”
“Oh, you, Macario,” says Ma.
Still Pa looks into the man’s eyes. “Which she built some three years ago,” he
tells the man. “You were not here yet, Señor Santos. You were nothing to us then, you
and your city wife, not even a name yet—you who came only two years ago to inherit
your papa’s vast yet already barren farm. So you’d not know of our nice little library.”
“Stop it!” cries Ma.
Now he turns to her, slowly, not with the same quick-jerky motion of his head.
“Why not, Isabel?” he asks her. “They’ve the right to know. They are all the way in this
foolishness with you, too, aren’t they?” Pa now jerks his head back toward Señor Santos
and his woman, with that same quick savagery, gazing at them at one and the same time.
“I’ll tell you about my wife’s nice little library,” he begins, filling the baleful voice with
his slow, droning voice. “Well, three years ago my wife had this brilliant idea she has
now. So, three years ago, she built her little library, not with her own money, for her
father had left her nothing, but with money from my own pocket. She built it, just as
you’re planning now, for the barrio. And then she stocked it up with second-hand books
and old magazines that were given to her by her friends from the city, or she bought them
herself in second-hand stores.
“Which you saw on your way here,” Pa goes on. “You couldn’t have missed it.
That old fallen-down building you passed coming here. The same…that looks like a
church—once did anyway—behind her flower garden. Yes, that was her nice little
library.” The three are all quiet, listening to him who does not care whether they hate him
or not, who speaks on, knowing that once he begins, there will be no end to it, not even
when he knows that the library building he speaks of no longer has any resemblance to
either a library or to a church. He goes on, concluding now with the same slow, droning
voice: “But which is now used by pigs and goats to litter or to throw off their excrement.”
Pa stops and looks around him. “Yes, Señor Santos,” he says, “to litter and to
throw their excrement.” O pobrecita Mama, and that is not the end yet. “Oo, o, now filled
with excrement and stinking of pigs’ urine. And her daisy flower garden—that will soon
wilt and die before her city friends come to buy them, or her flooded chicken house—she
wouldn’t listen to me who knows about fowls more than she can ever learn in a hundred
years—which cost us 250 pesos, and for which she now asks more money from me to
repair as she would want me to give my money to your foolish library.” I listen on: “Even
our own house leaks every time it rains,” says Pa. “The house she wants with an invisible
roof, that she had seen in a magazine, and that now leaks and leaks and leaks.”
When Señor Santos and his wife leave by the front stairs, I sit back on the rung of
the steps and cradle the rifle in my lap. I gaze across the river to the bamboo thickets, and
I think: Come on out, iquana. You, lechery of your mother. Hen killer They are going
down the steps without making any noise. I listen but even the second wooden slab of the
last step does not squeak, which it usually does when anyone goes down the stairs and
steps on it. Ma says in the sala, “You’re a beast!”
 ENRIQUEZ:Iguana/P11

Pa, who has gone out to the porch, now comes back to the sala. He stops abruptly,
halting in front of her as though a horse had kicked him. Come, iguana. This time I’ll kill
you. Come now, hen killer He stands still, standing stock-still, and staring fixedly at Ma.
He says to her, “You baited them. Do you think because Señor Felipe Santos went
to the University, he would awe me with his presence? Insulted them and he sat there
cool as a cocoon. If the University makes you a coward, I would rather be un ignorante.”
All this time Ma has sat up right on her chair and now she slumps down on it.
“You didn’t have to tell them,” she says. “Oh, no, you didn’t need to, Macario, but you
were deliberately cruel, so you would embarrass me and keep your filthy money to
yourself!”
“But I thought you wanted them to know,” Pa answers mockingly. “Isn’t that
what you brought them here for? That they’d know about your nice little library and how
generous you’ve always been?” He starts to imitate Señor Santos: “‘Her plan for the
barrio to put up a library is so generous, Macario,’” and then he laughs, Ha ha ha ha.
“And when I insulted them he says cool as anything, ‘Señor Domingo, please calm
yourself…’ wasn’t that like a really educated university man, Isabel?”
“You told them,” she says. “You told them to shame me! You did not have to tell
them anything! Of the poultry, the garden, the leak in the roof…not anything!”
He begins to laugh again, in that same half-laughter. “Ha ha ha ha,” he says. “‘It
is not really a library,’ Señora Concha says to me. ‘Just a little reading center.’”
Pa walks out of the sala and through the dining room into the kitchen. He stops
before the kitchen door and peers over my shoulder. His eyes fly quickly across the river
to the bamboo thickets on the crest of the bank. After a while he speaks as though he is
speaking to himself: “Don’t you know that the price of copra, Isabel, has gone down to
only 23 pesos a sack? If it keeps on going down some more this week, I don’t know I can
pay even my own laborers. Ay, it has never been this low before. Yet we’ve to force the
Chinese merchants to buy our copra practically for nothing.”
He is quiet for a while. I feel him standing beside me, staring now over my
shoulder and across the river to the bamboo thickets on the other side of the bank.
“You’ll ruin us yet,” Pa says seriously. “If you don’t stop this foolishness, you will send
me to jail for debt.”
Ma answers him from the sala, “It is not that you’ll go to jail. You only wanted to
embarrass Señor Santos too just because he favored my putting up a library!”
“Léche!” says Pa in the kitchen. “You and Señor Santos are not getting a centavo
from me for your ‘crazy idea.’” I sit on the top rung of the steps, the rifle half-raised to
my chest in my hands. Pa walks over to the sink and peers into it. Suddenly, he swings up
his hand at the basin of fish, knocking it over on the sink with a sweeping blow of his flat
hand and spilling the matambaka fish all over the sink. Some of the fish plop down on the
floor, and the basin clutters emptily.
“Macario!” I hear Ma cry shrilly in the sala. Yet I continue sitting there without
moving. I am holding the rifle in my hand, thinking, Come out, iguana. Show your
natural ugly snout now, and I myself will erase it for you with this rifle. Ay, come out,
ugly-snouted one Pa turns and looks through the dining room door into the sala where
Ma sits alone. “Oo, Macario,” she cries, “what are you doing?”
He does not say anything. He walks back to the sala. Ma sits slumped on her
chair. He watches her for a minute without saying anything, perhaps thinking, “If I listen
 ENRIQUEZ:Iguana/P12

to her, there won’t be anything even for the boy. But as the boy in me hated the father, so
will there be enough hatred now in the man for the woman.” He halts before Ma and
looks oddly at her as though it were the first time he had seen her.
I look over my shoulder into the sala. I see Ma’s face begin to twitch like a
child’s. “You, Macario,” she says, “you don’t have to be so mean and cruel!”
“Lechery of your mother!” says Pa to her in the sala.
Her face twitches and contorts like a child’s. “I hate you,” she says. “Truly I hate
you, Macario!”
Ma puts her face in her hands and cries. Her shoulders shake with her crying, and
she tries to stop it by clapping both her hands over her mouth; but her crying oozes out
just the same through her fingers like vomit. Papa spins on his heels, and I look away and
then I hear the heavy squeak on the second rung as Papa tramps out of the house Come
out, iguana. Come, you hen killer. I raise the rifle against my shoulder, point it toward the
bamboo thickets across the river and squint one eye through the sight of the rifle. In the
meantime, Pa has crossed the river and is now climbing up the foot-worn path toward the
bamboo thickets, and as he turns round the incline, the bamboo thickets between him and
me, and is suspended briefly, as it were, in the sight of the rifle, I draw the cock back and
slowly pull the trigger. A quick report echoes across the river and, at that moment, Papa
falls down on the ground and then lies quietly among the bamboo thickets….

-End-