Awaiting Trespass: (A Pasión)

Acclaim for Awaiting Trespass

"The complex drama of a gathered family shares equal time with the political and religious mood of the Philippines [under Marcos dictatorship] in 1981. Linda Ty-Casper pulls no punches in this unusual novel…yet she wears silk gloves. With jabs so deft they avoid the didactic but sting mightily, she indicts everything, from the values of the well-to-do to martial law to the Roman Catholic Church. It is not surprising that she felt Awaiting Trespass [her eighth published work] could not be published in the Philippines."         

The New York Times Book Review

Ty-Casper’s prose glitters.                       Publishers’ Weekly

"In some respects Awaiting Trespass reminds me of South American writing. It arises from a formerly Hispanic, deeply Catholic culture; it demonstrates what fertile soil for fiction political tyranny and the extended family can be; and it is preoccupied with death. The novel is about a wake, a three-day family mourning.

The coffin is sealed, where normally in this culture it would be open. Is this the wish of the dead man, Don Severino? Or is it for more sinister reasons…are there marks of torture on his body? [Thus]…the novel reaches out into a political arena that has underpinned the action all along.

In other ways the book is not at all South American…The work is much less frenetic, more introverted and graceful, and more involved with the protagonists. Each member of the extended family is beautifully caught, if only in a vivid sentence."         

South magazine

 The exact observation of character, the ability to make a plot that believably draws together a whole society in the grips of a terrible problem (in this case, the predations of a dictatorship), the ability to give reality to the thoughts of different characters so that they argue, not like a book, but like people who get angry, change their position, forgive one another, become frightened of having said too much -- those are among the author’s impressive gifts. Highly recommended for any fiction collection.                 

   ALA Booklist

This deeply moving book -- banned in the Philippines [on first publication by Readers International] -- is full of good people, good talk, and a wisdom regarding the inner life. Its Joycean expansion, from the funeral event to a portrait of a small, blighted country held hostage by other powers, reveals a fragile beauty that persists in this place and people.     

Kirkus Reviews

"While [the novel’s] form, a canticle of sorrows, draws the story of one death, one family together in a sober eulogy, Linda Ty-Casper’s style is most brilliantly satiric… Ty-Casper is not concerned with scandal-sheet items and Swiss bank accounts, but with the real and terrible despair of those who understand the sticky moral climate they live in… The dead man in the novel, Don Severino Gil, was rich, powerful, corrupt -- a caricature of the swaggering playboy… Big Daddy, yes, but Ty-Casper is not simplistic: [his son] the priest has doubts about his vocation; and Don Severino’s favourite niece is a sophisticated divorcée drawn to self-destruction, a poet who puts as little faith in her psychiatrist as she does in a fortune-teller… Manila is not Macondo: Awaiting Trespass resists nostalgia, and the novel’s lyric swirl is not a-historical; indeed, there is a clear investment here in the immediate risk of rebellion."

Yale Review

Through the eyes of Gil’s favourite niece, Telly, we see the family, especially the three elder sisters, struggle to maintain a façade of order and decorum amid the decay of martial law. This conflict is symbolized even more deeply in Telly’s own life: neurotic, suicidal, creative, affluent and alluring, at once vacuous and substantial, she has wasted her days and energy struggling against the constraints of upper-class expectations, a rebel without a cause…  A powerful and poetic description of Philippine life.  

Los Angeles Times

"The task of uncovering the truth about Don Severino’s death leads the three main characters into an act of defiance. Uncertain of the consequences, they await the ominous ‘trespass’ of the title. But there are two kinds of ‘waiting’ under the tyranny, after all: a self-imposed silence, or a courage that steadily pushes at the limits. Awaiting Trespass is a poignant study of life and endurance under dictatorship." 

San Francisco Chronicle

In the end, standing at the grave, Telly knows she will be able to write what is happening to them all. ‘If life is really a pilgrimage, its purpose cannot only be safety or comfort,’ she thinks. Leaving the cemetery she sees the priests in her family moving towards her in a prescient view of the revolution to come: ‘Their white cassocks sweep forward with the relentless force of driven rain.’                                           

The Women’s Review of Books

"Extremely well-written and interesting… Ty-Casper is an experienced writer, as the reader can see at once from the quality of her prose…[and she] writes from an insider’s knowledge of her society’s dominant class, the old, established families whose members may have varying relationships with the government…

In Telly, precisely because she fits in nowhere, Ty-Casper has devised a fine primary consciousness for Awaiting Trespass. Intelligent, observing, yet dreamily detached, Telly becomes a collecting point for information about the oppression, vulgarity, deracination and  corruption that have turned contemporary Filipino history into a pasión."

The Hudson Review

"A wake in Manila provides a situation for comedy, in which the dead man’s three sisters vie for the first position among mourners. This pasión chronicles the tribulations and agonies of a Filipino family, as well as those of the Philippines itself."                                                                                                       

Asia Week

Awaiting Trespass

(A Pasión)

Linda Ty-Casper

Readers International

Copyright ©Linda Ty-Casper 1985, 2020

All rights reserved in all languages

First published in 1987 by Readers International, Inc. and Readers International, London. Editorial inquiries to 8 Strathray Gardens, London NW3 4NY, England. US/Canadian inquiries to North American Book Service Dept, P.O. Box 909 Columbia, LA 71418-0909, USA.

The editors acknowledge with thanks the co-operation of the Google Book Project in the production of this digital edition.

Cover image: Deposition, the flag of the Philippines wrapping a body, etching by Filipino artist Benedicto Cabrera (BenCab).

Catalog records for this book are available from the Library of Congress and the British Library.

ISBN 9780930523121

EBOOK ISBN 9781887378284

For Kristina

Awaiting Trespass is a pasión -- traditionally a lengthy, chanted chronicle of agonies -- set in the Philippines, 1981. The agonies in the novel are those of a nation and of a family, the result of usurpations that have turned Filipinos into exiles in their own country.

Awaiting Trespass is a small book of hours about those waiting for their lives to begin again. It is a book of numbers about those who stand up to be counted by trying to be reasonable and noble during irrational and ignoble times; to be honest and compassionate when virtues only complicate sur­vival; to keep the faith when it is no longer clear to whom God is faithful.

It is a book of revelations about what tyranny forces people to become; and what, by resisting, they can insist on being.

L.T.-C.

Awaiting Trespass

Contents

Acclaim for Awaiting Trespass

Dedication

BOOK ONE: Tuesday

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

BOOK TWO: Wednesday

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

BOOK THREE: Thursday

1

About the Author

About Readers International

BOOK ONE: Tuesday

1

On Azcarraga, which is now Recto but was Iris at the turn of the century when the gray house was built, wreaths start arriving before the body of Don Severino Gil. They are lined up along the sidewalk on wooden stands, until those who sent them -- identified by bright ribbons across each offering -- come to pay their last respects. Their flowers are then carried up the dark wide stairs and placed before the temporary altar where the casket is to lie.

In order to accord the same courtesy to everyone, the wreaths are moved down the long hall after the visitors leave. On the stone porch, the azotea at the back -- from which the spires of San Sebastian can be seen through the shiny leaves of the caimito, the tree of Paradise -- stand the already dying wreaths of the very first to come.

The three surviving sisters of Don Severino arrive in time for a second breakfast. They learned of their brother’s death only late the night before, but already they are dressed in full mourning: the same black clothes that for years they have been wearing to wakes -- heavy sayas with large hidden pockets; baros as stiff as armor down the front; and over these, triangular panuelos held in place by jeweled pins. Appropriate to those born in the last century, the fashion is as rigid as the garments of saints inside old churches. The skirts are sad and heavy, but just right for January in Manila when the city is cool and mantons, for the elderly, are necessary.

The sisters greet, not each other, but the visitors who have lingered in the chance that their coming would not have to be repeated, or wasted on the servants of the house. After a round of kissing and rubbing of cheeks, in quick succession three orders are given to set the table in the long hall that divides the house like a highway.

Then, critically, the sisters and the visitors look at one another, trying to assess how the past is to be resumed for the duration of the wake. All of them appear to be the class of people who are safe from mourning.

With earrings as heavy as pendants pulling their ears, a strange impulse comes upon the sisters to sing. Their voices rise. But like a fixed solitude, a dark star, the death of their brother is remembered. Their hands reach for handkerchiefs deep in secret pockets. Their voices fall and they look properly bereaved again.

Perhaps he called to us. After some silence the oldest sister speaks, only loud enough to make others wonder what she could have heard. Maria Esperanza is certain it is her name. She and Severino had secrets together. It was even her best friend whom her brother finally married. And it was she more than the others who understood that infidelities become a man; she never chided Severino. Feeling young somehow, her thick hair barely streaked with white, fully stretched and exuding sweet odors to tempt the sun, Maria Esperanza lifts her neck clear of the panuelo into which is woven a design of dark lilies. Yet as soon as someone else speaks, she feels old again.

At eleven last night, I happened to look at the time. Perhaps that’s when he died. Maria Paz, second eldest, is impressed with this possibility. She starts to cry, then looks about for the clock that she hears ticking. All the others in that house have stopped telling time and are as useless as the chandelier wrapped in gauze, a nest of sorts above them. I don’t understand it. I never look at clocks. But last night, as if Severino himself made me look. Who else could it have been?

Assurance does not come from the others who want it for themselves, though they are not certain any more that such communications occur across the distance of time and other possible divides.

I look at the clock every time I pass one, Paz. At every one I pass, Maria Esperanza exaggerates. After the other two are silenced by this fact, she proceeds to elaborate upon the lie. The governor general, a tall man with whiskers like a cat, used to throw his hat at that clock the minute he cleared the last step.

She faces the one beside the stairs, a large standing clock inlaid with mother of pearl and various contrivances to indicate the phases of the moon and the tides. She is not certain it was the governor general; it only pleases her to identify him so. She would have just as easily said admiral, except that Montojo lost the battle of Manila Bay to Dewey in 1898. She does not recall the battle, of course. It was part only of the memory of her father who had stood on the seawall while the Americans and Spaniards exchanged shot and shell. So confident was he in his telling that sometimes people got the impression that it was Dewey who steamed out of the harbor that morning in May, scared and scarred by the cannons on the walls of Manila, by those at the arsenal in Cavite and, most grievously, by the long guns on the battleship Castilla, which stood on its concrete bottom in the Bay of Canacao.

Fact and memory have become one for Maria Esperanza, and wish as well, and dreams. I look at every clock I see; how can you say Severino called to you just because you happened to look at the time? Besides, we do not know when he died.

Or where he died, or why, Maria Caridad thinks, waiting for her two sisters to declare everything so it can be known, and thereafter fixed in the mind. Habits of deference have been born into her, are as old as her bones. Being the youngest, she is satisfied with what her sisters remember, what they know.

Maria Esperanza feels cross because Maria Paz is giving herself such importance, taking precedence for herself. She is, however, distracted from this transgression by the servants, who have set the table and are pulling out chairs for them. Obediently, she sits down, her dark clothes spilling about the chair. Her feet barely touch the floor. Under her heavy saya they are as soft and plump as her hands.

They begin looking about to see who is sitting next to whom. Across the table, their voices weave over cups of thick chocolate, which they stir with lightly held spoons, allowing the drink to cool a bit before tasting to see what spices have been churned into it. Memories come upon them in waves, join their thoughts so that they complete one another’s remarks and anticipate laughter soon enough to withhold it.

By the time the hard ball of Dutch cheese is sliced paper thin -- its odor promptly mixing with the scent of flowers and the smell of mothballs rising from their mourning clothes -- death is forgotten. Everyone begins to recall things about each other, instead of about Don Severino Gil.

Past occasions freshen sharply like a storm forming in the sea without warning: new slights answer old ones, a turning away when a reply is expected, the passing of dishes out of turn. With some relief the sisters watch their grandchildren feasting at their own table on small biscuits, shrimp chips, pastries and cola. The girls have tiny black ribbons pinned to their dresses. The boys have narrow black armbands at which they pull and twist.

Bring them over, Maria Esperanza orders, expecting her own grandchildren to be without comparison.

The children crowd the big table. There is much kissing and pinching of cheeks, as each child is presented and recognized. Their poses and light conceits remind the visitors of the parents. Faint resemblances spark excited comments. I can tell that is Paul’s daughter by the way she pouts, one of the visitors pulls a little girl to her; while another one declares, Virgilio used to hold his head just like this one; and that one has his father’s ears. You can’t mistake it.

Some of the children are great-grandchildren, removed by three generations from immediate concerns; and the sisters cannot always tell if the correct identifications are being made, so they smile and assume it is their own who are being most admired. Names have ceased to mean anything to them.

Finally the pleasure of recalling themselves in the children fades. Servants carry the young ones back to their table as if they were dolls unable to walk on their own legs.

Anxious to start dividing the responsibilities for the wake, the sisters hurry the visitors’ departure slyly by telling them, Come every day. The full nine days of prayers will be observed after the funeral. Bring everyone. Then, in the order of precedence they have followed all their lives, they accompany the visitors to the stairs.

I’ll take charge of feeding the guests, Maria Esperanza says before the visitors reach the lower door to the street. She intends to be overheard in her generosity. Large diamond solitaires bind her fingers as she stands imposed upon her sisters, as large as a major saint on a main altar.

We can alternate, Maria Caridad suggests sharing the burden. Her rings are sinámpalocs or rositas, small stones masquerading as a solitaire.

Nonsense! Maria Esperanza steadies herself on the banister. "It is I who have the cooks. I serve better pancit molo than they do in Iloilo. And my stuffed morcόn should be served to the Holy Father when he comes in February." She proceeds to describe the meals that come from the harvest of her farms with the pride of one who has been assigned to attend to the Pope and his entourage.

What can I do? Maria Caridad asks. In order not to be saddled beyond her means, she has always avoided taking the entire responsibility for anything.

In any family, there is someone close to poverty in the genteel sense. Widowed early, with no inclination to commerce, Maria Caridad has to be included in her sisters’ ventures in order to help augment the income from her short row of apartments. Over the years, however, she