“Ah Love! could you and I with him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire
Would we not shatter it to bits--and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire?” Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
His father was the driver of Governor Isabelo Indice, the father of Gloria, the girl to whom he was hopelessly smitten. It was his resolve to cut cleanly from this forbidden yearning.
He could not ignore the weight of the biases and prejudices of centuries of serfdom and servility that was his family legacy. His father was a farmer who went to the city to become a family driver and his father before him tilled the soil of the cane fields of Iloilo and so with his great grandfather…sacadas all.
For the depth that he had dug into his ancestry there was not even a single vestige of highness in any of the generations. His family was of the soil…an indelible distinction as hard to deny as his flat-footedness which is said to be the stigma of a peasant ancestry.
So unfair…he felt that this was so unfair that he was destined for this earthly role that he could not extricate himself from. He raged and ranted for the sordidness of it all but he knew that his protestations were just echoes of familiar plaints of a million voices in the night.
(an adaptation from "Lonelines of a...")
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