EE22 Students Phil. Lit. College of Education

Instruction:

Part A (70 points)
1.Read this short story written by Dr. Anthony Tan
2.Using the formalistic approach in Literary criticism, make a Critical analysis on the Short Story by looking into the following aspects:

a.character
b.theme
c.plot / structure
exposition
conflict
rising action
climax
falling action
denouement
3. Encoded / computerized, short bond paper, 1 & 1/2 spacing, standard margin, arial, 12 f.s., minimum pages - 3-5 pages (or more)

4. Due date: February 5, 2009, to be collected during class exam schedule.
5. for further inquiries please visit my office on my consultation hour.


Part B - Online Project (30 points)

1. If you are going to make a new title of the story, what would it be and why?
2. answer briefly. Indicate your Title by placing it inside the quotation marks. Example Title: "Looking at a New Horizon" then add a 1 - 2 paragraph justification of your title as based from the story read.
3. Online Project due on February 8, 2009.
4. Entries beyond due date will not be honored.


The Cargo
ANTHONY L. TAN

A deep-blue stillness was upon the sea as if this were the earth’s last morning and the boat, with its cargo of dead bodies, were on a last voyage toward infinity.
He was in a daze, his mind unable to come to grips with bare facts. He was wrestling with the intrusions of fear and despair, alternating like the crest and trough of the waves on the boundless sea, bearing down on him, heavy as the sheer mass of the sea itself. He wanted to talk about these emotions, about anything at all, but there was no one alive in the world. If there had been seagulls, at least he could have shouted at them, or better still, cursed them. But no seagulls flew this far. If the earth had been flat, this part of the sea would have been its very edge before the boat would plunge into the abyss. Yet, he was aware, the sun was rising steadily, indifferently.

Asmawil stared again. On the bow, under a green tarpaulin, the huddled bodies were still warm. They were seated as though they were merely suffering from sickness. Their heads were bowed or turned. He did not know why he had them seated. He knew them all by name, by their first names. The one wearing a skullcap was his wife’s nephew, bodyguard to the ship’s owner. For no conscious reason, he had seated these two next to each other.

The motor launch had been drifting for three hours now. He had stopped the engine when he decided to drag the bodies to the bow. But even after he had put the tarpaulin over the bodies and securely tied its ends to the posts supporting the roof, he did not start the engine. He was in no hurry to reach Siasi, the port of departure, or any island for that matter. He was secure on his boat and, more than at any time in his life, he feared the living more than the dead. He knew what folks believed about a dead body on a boat—that it was accompanied by forty-four evil spirits, and that was why any boat carrying a dead body was a slow boat. But he feared neither the dead nor their spirits. For one thing, they did not ask any questions; or if they did, the questions were never on their lips, only in their eyes, in their faraway stare. They seemed to be looking for something farther than their eyes could see. They seemed to ask, but since their questions were never uttered, he did not have to answer them. Besides, he was certain there were no spirits.

He went to the kitchen at the stern and brewed himself some coffee. He had not realized, until now, how hungry he was. When he sat down to drink his second cup, with a cigarette between his fingers, he imagined what would happen when he got back to Siasi. The whole town would turn out and flock to the wharf to see his cargo. The people would be out on the streets as they would be on a morning when a hadji came home from a pilgrimage to Mecca. Except that there would be no school band, no streamers of welcome, no firecrackers, no rich and flowing robes, no turban, no tell-tale bruise on the forehead, which was the true mark of a pilgrim who had kissed the black stone at Kaaba. Because his was a different pilgrimage. Just a night at sea and a boat of ten men, nine of them now dead. As for the bruise, it was nowhere on the body.

And the people would ask all kinds of questions and interrupt themselves with accusations and curses. Did he kill them all? All of them? What a devil! Including his nephew? It’s only his wife’s nephew. The same. How can anyone do such a thing? He has a tail. Money, all that money. A hundred and fifty thousand, maybe more. More. Abdul was a rich man. No, it was not his; it was the middlemen’s. Robber, just the same. They will get his neck. Think of the relatives of the dead. Sure, the sons of Abdul. Why do you think he did it? He has a tail. No, greed. Insanity. They will kill even the cats in his house. Curse upon his children!

Upon my children? He shuddered to think of the curse upon his children. The curse upon his head he was ready to accept. He had seen enough of life and would willingly part with it. He could accept the end of his life the way he accepted that sharp, sudden pain at the back of his head each morning when he woke up. But not the curse of blood upon his children. Never his children. Never his wife. It was not right that they suffer for his sins, whatever those sins were. Besides, he did not do it. His children must not suffer. Neither must he.

For the first time since he was confronted with his cargo, his mind cleared up, and he recalled the incident only several hours before. It seemed ages ago, but when he looked again at the tarpaulin, he recalled that only yesterday afternoon he had seen the longshoremen roll two black, dented barrels of gasoline on a slender gangplank. He had feared the plank would break under the pressure. As a boat pilot for many years, he had seen enough of loading and unloading to know that the plank would only bend. He knew that as well as the longshoremen did. Yet he had some vague fear that the plank would break. Perhaps he had been wishing it would, so the trip would have to be delayed. If one of the barrels dropped into the sea, as he had wished, it would have given him a few more hours at home. He could have let the crew worry about it. He would have gone home to be with his wife.

When the last barrel had been rolled safely and staked in place on the side of the deck, one of the longshoremen, fiddling at his goose throat and showing his toothless gum, gave Asmawil a wide grin as if to mock him for his fear and selfish wish. Instead of being relieved, Asmawil was mildly angry and uncomfortable that his wish had not come true. Courteously, he smiled back at the longshoreman, who was still grinning and looking intently at him. Suddenly, something more than anger and frustration seized him. He went inside the poop to blow the horn. Two long, hoarse and impatient whistles startled the languid sundown, but the afterimage of that grinning face remained. A breath of vague sensation breezed through him.

The owner of the boat came out of the restaurant with his bodyguard and other members of the crew. A successful trader for some years, Abdul Tungki was a short, corpulent man whose waddling movements were made more pronounced by his bulging back pockets. Whether they were full of money or just business papers, nobody was certain. People who saw him waddle down the street on a busy day assumed that it must be money. As a trader, he made a fortune buying barter goods from Sandakan for the middlemen in Siasi. Even in the days before the national government sanitized the word “contraband” into “barter,” Abdul Tungki had always overstuffed his pockets the way most successful businessmen did. It was a status symbol, like carrying a chromium-plated .45, that the new rich should not be denied. They were to be envied, and only the poor bystanders of finer sensibilities were repulsed. On a trip like this, Abdul’s bodyguard, slinging an armalite, carried his black attaché case.
Asmawil had come out of the poop and lighted a cigarette. He inhaled the first smoke deeply and blew slowly out into the clear air. He was relieved to know that the weather was fine. It was not dark yet. High in the west the moon was an imperfect crescent. A feeble star hung above one of its horns. A week before, when he and his wife were relaxing on the porch of his house in South Laud, he had noticed that the star was directly above the valley of the crescent, and the moon looked like the crook of a mother’s arm cradling an infant. Looking at the moon and the star close together never failed to amuse him because of what folks believed, that the conjunction of these two heavenly bodies meant two young lovers were going to elope. Yet when he himself ran off with his wife, there was no such heavenly sign. He doubted the accuracy of the folk belief, but he was certain that, moon or no moon, young lovers ran off because it was the cheapest way to get married. Their hot blood did not wait for heaven’s sanction, nor for any distant signs, only for the encouraging glint in their lover’s eyes. The young had common sense. For them, the way through the knot of conventions was not to untie it but to cut it. Also, their acceptance of the risks when they ran off were somewhat romantic. And Asmawil knew those risks.

He tried to rouse himself from his reverie, but it gave him such immense comfort that he could not shake it from his mind. He lighted another stick of cigarette, and as the smoke made indefinite circles in the air, his mind sank back to that afternoon when Abdul Tungki entered the poop and told him to start going. In turn, Asmawil ordered the crew to release the cables from the bitts at the wharf and in a few minutes the boat, all agog with the raucity of the engine and the bell from the poop, set sail for Sandakan—one day and two nights away. The wooden hull of M/L Morning Glory was very light for its size, having been designed for fast sailing by the skilled boat makers of Sibutu Island. Fitted with two 90-horsepower Yanmar engines, it would use only one engine on a safe regular trip. The second was a standby engine in case the boat ran into naval boats patrolling the boundary between the Philippines and Borneo. Once in a while the second engine was used just to keep it in shape. In the days of smuggling blue-seal cigarettes, when naval patrols were more frequent, the slower boats always ran out of luck. They were caught and towed behind a naval boat to Bongao, the nearest port of call from the boundary, where the crew members were imprisoned and the boats impounded; or the merchandise and crew were lost to rapacious pirates, who made guns their primary capital in the lucrative business. The fastest boat was the luckiest, and Asmawil was proud that the Morning Glory—a name he had chosen himself because, invariably, it would have sight of its destination in a blaze of glorious sunrise—had never suffered humiliation or loss. Allah be praised for such a boat, he would pray in his unconventional way. He would never be a pilot of a slower boat. He would not take too many risks.

In the past he had known fear—the very shape of it, the way it struck him like cold air that, suddenly from nowhere, pierced his skin and stiffened his nipples and entered the hollow of his stomach—and he would experience the loosening of bowels. Often it came in the shape of a heaving sea. What lurked beneath the sudden swell, the mysterious and the unpredictable, what the eyes could not see and the mind could not anticipate, was what he feared more than the broadsides of the patrol boats or the firepower of the pirates. He knew one could always return the compliments with his own firepower although that was a last resort. The easiest way was to steer away from the course of enemies or outrun them on the high seas. But he could not forearm himself against that which he could not anticipate; responding to the unpredictable, when it happened, took a superior intelligence and vast composure. Yet fear of the unknown, rational as it was, was not to be revealed to another man, even to his co-pilot, who confidently steered the boat windward.

Last night he had no such fear. The weather was good. The cold wind was gentle and caressing. Within the range of his vision were the lights from the fishermen’s boats and crystals of foam on the otherwise still surface, and the only sounds were the engine throbbing, almost like the heartbeat of the night itself, and the gentle, incessant vibrations on the railing against which his body was pressed. Not fear, but awe—an awe so sacred that only an act of total surrender could capture its sanctity; to speak of it would only spoil its immediacy and ineffableness. Last night awe had filled his being as he wondered how in their silence the sea and the sky were one. No horizon separated them. Black merged into black. He had the uncanny feeling that if this boat were to sail on indefinitely, it would, on a night like this, be lifted one degree higher to touch the sky’s rim. So quiet were the empty spaces, he felt like a solitary earthling on an odyssey between the galaxies. The illusion of the nearness of the constellations to one another made him feel that no distance was far enough for his boat.

He looked toward the stern, and he saw the smokestack emit a steady stream of blackish smoke. There was something about machines, he thought, that made them a reassuring companion. They were so predictable, even the most sophisticated—until they conked out or were abused. Then they became dangerous, as if in their weakness or misuse they asserted their superiority and independence.

He was so absorbed in his thoughts that he did not notice the wind had changed course. He had been drifting for hours, but still no island fringed the horizon. By his reckoning it was nearly noon. The distant water had begun to shimmer in the heat, and under a light breath of wind the sea was like a million fish scales. He went to the kitchen and cooked something for lunch, then went down into the engine room. He noticed the bilge had risen to a dangerous level; it had, in fact, reached the wooden frame on which the engines were mounted. He started the motorized water pump. It began to make a sucking sound.

He went up and examined the bodies. The blood had dried and caked around the wounds and on the floor, and its bad smell assailed his nose. The heat, he thought. He went back into the engine room and, after hesitating a moment, carefully wound a light piece of rope around the ridge of the circular head of one engine. With one vigorous pull the engine thundered in his ears, and his whole body shook with the vibrations of the hull.

Taking the helm, he turned the bow 180 degrees and watched as the compass needle slowly moved east. He was moving opposite the sun’s path, against the wind, in the direction that would lead him back to Siasi. He knew that, and he knew that there was no other place for the dead but Siasi, where their families would bury them and avenge them; and he knew, too, on whose head their vengeance would fall. It should not be on his head, but it could well be because they would doubt his story, for vengeance would make them doubt the most naked truth. He was not turning back to Siasi for the sake of the truth. He knew its consequences not only for him, but also for his wife and children. Yet he was turning back to Siasi because it was the only place for the dead, and the dead needed burial. He was not concerned with decorous, purificatory rites: the bathing of the body, the shaving of the face, the white shroud, the mesmerizing prayers chanted through the night. The rites were for the living who needed distractions because they could not see death in its sheerest simplicity. As for the dead, even those who had made their living from the sea needed one thing only: a place in the bowels of the earth.

The tarpaulin was flapping incessantly on the bow, and the wind was blowing the smell into the poop. Leaving the helm, he went back into the engine room and started the other engine. He knew he had to get back to Siasi before evening, before the smell became unbearable. He thought again of the folks who believed that each dead person was accompanied by forty-four evil spirits. If so, he thought, there should be 396 of them on the boat, and they could gang up on him and hurl him against the engines or drown him in the bilge. It would have been better, he thought, if they did, and it would be the end, rather than this journey of infinite solitude. The thought of these spirits in the engine room made the hair on his nape stand on end. He reached back and slapped his neck three times. He climbed to the deck. He hurried to the poop. And then he realized that there was no one but him, the wind, the sound it made on the tarpaulin and the smell it carried, the engines with their vibrations, and the wavelets in the half-empty glass beside the binnacle.

He knew what he would do when he got back to Siasi. He would tell the story exactly as it happened, no more, no less, exactly as he remembered it. The bare facts would suffice, and they were easier to tell. In less than thirty minutes the authorities would know all they would want to know. But the truth was a different matter. It would not be necessary. It was powerless to bring back the dead, anyway.

He would not tell the authorities, unless they wanted some embellishments, how the sharp, metallic sound of the armalite had broken his sleep, how for a moment he had lain frozen, wondering if it was a nightmare, and then how it was followed by another burst of rapid sounds, like a hammer on a nail, and he had jumped out of his bunk and entered the poop and had seen a shadow dragging something, for it was dark. And all he had done was ask what it was, and the shadow answered, and he knew it was his nephew.

Plainly he would tell the authorities that it was his nephew who had killed the men. Why Tadji did it only Tadji knew, and he too was now dead. How could he, Asmawil, know what it would take to kill eight people? Only madness, and he called his nephew insane. Tadji said it was for a reason. Abdul had insulted him, called him lagak, glutton, and Asmawil said it must have been only a joke. Tadji insisted that Abdul had meant to insult him; otherwise, why did he do it in a restaurant, where there were many people? Where Sali, Akmad, Ummar, and the others were present, who also laughed when Abdul said Tadji was big because he ate too much and made a great deal of sound like a pig. But if Abdul got what he deserved, what about the others? Because they laughed, too, and they heard the insult; and if they lived, they would talk about his crime. That was how Tadji explained his madness, but it did not explain human madness at all—why there was such a thing in the world. The authorities may accept the explanation as plausible. So Asmawil thought he would simply repeat what Tadji had said. He would add only what he had seen at dawn, that Tadji was counting the money in the attaché case, and that it came close to 180,000 pesos. He would not tell the authorities, because it was beside the point, that he knew the wife of Tadji had an inordinate fondness for jewels and movies and clothes, and that Tadji was a devoted husband. He would not tell that Tadji, with a mysterious smile, had asked him if he wanted some of the money, and he said no, he did not want the money of other people, and the smile suddenly changed into a threatening glare. He would not quote Tadji, who said it was not the money of Abdul, but the money of the middlemen. He would not tell how he did not argue the point because it was dangerous to make a madman see that it was all the same, for it was not his money, and that in silence he called his nephew a pirate. He would ask the authorities to return the money to the middlemen whose names, and the barter merchandise they had ordered, Abdul had carefully written down in his notebook.
There was only one thing left for him to tell, and that needed an explanation. He would confess that he killed his nephew, his wife’s nephew. He hoped the authorities would be satisfied with an explanation of how he had done it, how he outwitted a big, young man with an armalite, and that they would not ask him, until later in court, to reenact the whole sequence of his crime because it was painful to go through the details once more. Later perhaps, he would be kinder to himself; he would absolve himself of any guilt because it was necessary to defend himself against a madman. Just for now, he hoped, he would only explain how he had done it, but even that was painful enough because it was shameful and sordid. It was not worthy of him to have done it, but it was necessary to kill a madman while he was off his guard, while he was squatting half-naked over the hole of the toilet, his back facing the door. Why Tadji trusted him after threatening to kill him, Asmawil thought, he could not explain. He had attributed it to the mysterious workings of fate because, quite simply, fate did not want him to die that day. It was Tadji’s life that had run its full course. But whether it was fate or chance was another matter. Tadji said he would kill him because he knew his uncle would talk, and he suspected that Asmawil wanted part of the money in spite of his denial. He was sparing his life for the time being because he needed his uncle to take him back to Siasi, that as soon as they were near the island his uncle would have to die, too. He told him that in Siasi he would tell the police that they had been robbed by pirates, and that his life was spared only because the pirates knew his wife.

Asmawil wanted to laugh at this ingenious lie, but it was a madman with an armalite who stood before him, and he was not tempted to wrestle with him for the gun. Tadji told him to keep his eye on the helm while he went to the kitchen to look for something to eat, and he warned Asmawil not to come near or he would shoot him. Asmawil heard no sound of utensils from the kitchen for a long while. He grew excited when the suspicion struck him that Tadji was in fact in the toilet. Knowing that Tadji had the armalite did not deter Asmawil from going to the kitchen for the knife. He had to take the chance to save himself. The long curve of the head of the knife must have caused Tadji enormous pain, he thought, for Tadji had swallowed the smoke of his cigarette and coughed when the knife struck the hollow around his collar bones, and a prolonged snore came from his mouth.

That was the story, not as he would like to tell it to the authorities, but as he remembered it. He would tell the other details, if they were necessary to convince them, but he would rather not. They would ask for the approximate time of the day when it happened, as if a man would slaughter another man at a specific time, like a goat or cow at the slaughterhouse. Goats and cows were killed more mercifully, he thought, with the sharpest blade, like a kris or a barung, with one’s own personal weapon, so that death was swift and there was less pain. On more than one occasion he had seen an imam, a religious man, slaughter a goat after a solemn prayer. Perhaps because its meat was to be eaten.

Would the authorities like to know about the weather, too? He would tell them of last night’s windless lull, of a world peacefully asleep. But even if the wind and the sea had raged, their fury would have been nothing compared to the madness of last night. Veteran sailors and competent weathermen could tell you when a storm would strike. They knew the places where the waves were always huge the whole year round, and they would tell you to avoid those places. Look for a harbor in the season of the habagat, the sailors would say. Sail in April and May when it is uttarah. The wind and the sea had their season of peace, as if they had a mind of their own and obeyed a meaningful pattern. No, he decided, the authorities would not ask him about the weather. It was not their duty to know about it. They were not sailors. It was also beside the point. The weather had nothing to do with the madness of man. And he knew the authorities were right.

The sun was down in the west when he got near Sirum, the island before Siganggang, which lay opposite Siasi. Two hours more, he said to himself, but, almost immediately, he remembered he was running on two engines. One hour, he corrected himself.

When he saw the mountain of Siasi rise slowly in the horizon, a sudden vision of his own death gripped him. Turn back, an inner voice told him, turn back. He felt powerless against the lure of the harbor. And he was tired, and the desire to lie down beside his wife in a comfortable bed overpowered his instinct to preserve his life. Besides, where would he go? Out there on the high seas, what would he have? He could not drift forever. Soon he would run out of oil, and he was sure the weather would change. He would have to find a harbor, a foothold on some land. If it meant facing the avengers of the murdered sailors, so be it. There was a slim chance that they would believe him. But even then, he would have to face the avengers of Tadji. He had not thought of Tadji’s brothers when he killed him in self-defense. He knew that self-defense did not exempt him from the stringent law of vengeance. Would it have been better if it were he, instead of Tadji, who was dead? For having outlived Tadji, for having bought a fraction of human time, he knew he had to pay with his own blood, and perhaps the blood of his own children, too. While his mind was debating whether he had acted wisely in bringing back the dead to Siasi, the boat had moved irrevocably within sight of the island.

In the twilight sky, the tallest landmarks of the island stood above the lights from the squat houses. From the distance, the telecommunications tower was a sharply tapering edifice, without lights since its antennas had been struck down by lightning many years before. The church belfry did not look so imposing now as when he was a boy. A very long time ago, he used to sit beneath a camachile tree at angelus, not to listen to the clang of the bell, which did not please him, but to watch the startled doves fly out of their niches when the bell rang and circle uncertainly for a moment about the belfry, like erratic silhouettes in the dusk. The needle-like minarets of the mosque did not seem to soar as high as they did at noon, when their chalky whiteness glinted in the sun. Darkness seemed to dwarf them. The faithful who built them had wanted them to soar beyond the highest pitch of the muezzin’s call to prayer, to soar to the bosom of heaven itself. The dome of the mosque was crowned, appropriately, by the ubiquitous symbol of Islam: a star above the crescent moon. Yet the sight of it did not summon religious fervor in his heart, nor images of the turbaned missionaries who had come to this shore centuries ago, nor the fiery swords of Bedouin sheiks crushing their icon-worshiping enemies. What images it summoned were supplied by the folk belief about fugitive lovers pursued by the armed relatives of the girls. He saw two runaway youths who would consummate their desire and repeat the eternal drama of love and birth. Further into his vision, images of the children of those lovers rose before him like the procession of the future itself, not ghostly faces, but clear, bright, and brown faces, like those of his own children, wearing in their smiles the innocence of those who would not inherit the blight of their human parents, as if they were to be the new creatures, running and playing on the primal shore, basking in the maternal warmth of the earth’s first morning.