The Tragedy of Broken Things

“The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that they are not mended again.” 

Thus begins this novel of powerful themes. The novel explores how one’s country creates pain and gives comfort at the same time.

Written by South African author Alan Paton in 1948, Cry, the Beloved Country is set in Ndotsheni, South Africa, a beautiful place tainted by the fear of a broken people. It is set during the difficult time of a racial segregation, where the rich and powerful white South African is frightened by the violence of the deprived black South African.  

In its core, the novel talks about the struggle of an old Negro priest, Kumalo, who learns that his only son has committed the most horrible crime of all: taking another man’s life. The young man who was killed was the son of the rich white South African, James Jarvis, who is a quiet and agreeable man in the village of Ixopo. His son was an active and a well-respected reformist in the city of Johannesburg and he was accidentally killed by Kumalo’s son, who along with two other young men, intended only to steal from the white man’s house.

Kumalo travels to the city of Johannesburg where his son is being kept. The old priest is frightened by the busy city, and is extremely distressed about his son; and although the novel is about the boy, the story is not his.

This is largely the story of the father who raised him, who had held his little hand in the darkness when he was afraid, who had looked at him and envisioned so many wonderful things for them both, who had prayed for him all the goodness of the world.

Now, sitting across his son in the jail house of Johannesburg, Kumalo asks the boy, “Why?”, but the boy could only hang his head and weep. He was going to be hanged for his crime. Kumalo wonders what breaks in a man, at the moment that he strikes another man, with the same hand that had groped for his father’s hand in the darkness, afraid, when he was a little boy. This breaks Kumalo’s heart, and he finds no solace, even, momentarily, in his faith.

He is only comforted by the memory of the beautiful land of Ndotsheni:

“Now God be thanked that the name of a hill is such music, that the name of a river can heal. Aye, even the name of a river that runs no more.”


Even the title of the novel is an address to the land, this unfortunate land, which embraces a people who are fearful and broken. It is a land where the young are made to think that progress is only achieved through violence in the city and where the old are left in the mountains to remember their children, because they do not go back. It is a land where the color of the skin dictates one’s fate. The title of the novel is an address to the land, telling it to cry for the unborn generation who will inherit the fear and the hopelessness.


The conclusion of this story is one of surrender, as Kumalo walks up the mountain on the eve of the hanging of his son. He had gone there before, in two occasions of crisis, when he needed to commune with God in solitude. On the way up, he meets Jarvis, and in words that are neither condemning nor kind, the two fathers both remember the son who died by the hands of the other son. Jarvis, “after such deep hurt, had shown such deep compassion” and Kumalo has seen it. The old priest is assured that there is hope—for him and for the land that he loves.


As the sun rose on the day of the hanging, the father rose too, with a panic in his heart that he quelled with a prayer. Somewhere else was a son who was looking straight at the same sun, with the rope around his neck, the same panic in his heart and perhaps, the same prayer; and up there on the mountain, the father saw his beloved country and wondered when the land, like him, would start to heal.

A Silence and A Half

To this day, four years after I read The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, I have been able to articulate only to two people my wonderment with how Rilke closed this opus.

I'd mention scenes from the book in class, or at the dinner table with friends. My students would always punctuate my narration with wondering silence, their eyes searching inwardly, as people do when a secret is revealed to them. A silence and a half later, almost always, one or two would start with  a wow, and after that, the class will erupt with thoughts.

They'd ask about Rilke calling Paris the city where one goes to die--'isn't Paris where people go to declare their love?' They'd  ask about other things, and they'd give examples for their own declarations.

But it's the silence before the Wow that I look forward to. It's those few seconds that comprise the pause that I tell the story for.

More often than not, it is in that silence that each of us becomes connected with each other. We become a singular energy. And while there are many many thoughts, we are united in thinking about one thing only.     

Within that silence, I can see in my class's minds the images that Rilke so masterfully paints: a man holding in his hands a worn-out face, thinning and torn in some parts, as he sits forlornly on the Parisian sidewalks, forgetting for two seconds that he is sitting there exposed, faceless. Without a face.

The first person narrator, Malte, sees this from across the street, and shaken to his core by the sudden jolt of the faceless man now realizing his carelessness, Malte walks away hurriedly, realizing, poor men shouldn't be disturbed when they are thinking.

Within a silence and a half, our minds build the physical form of fear--this abstract concept suddenly comprehensible in tangible terms, through Rilke's words. Our hearts drive us out of ourselves, Rilke says, our hearts pursue us, and we are almost outside of ourselves and we can't get back in. Like a beetle that someone has stepped on, he says, we gush out of ourselves. 

We gush out of ourselves, Rilke says. And like magic, it all makes sense.

Once, at a lunch with my mentor and her friend, we got around to talking about the laws of nature. A retired Physics professor, my mentor's friend brought home a point with an example: a heavily pregnant woman is often criticized as arrogant. Apparently, the arch of her back and the tilt of her head make her look like she is looking down on people. She explains, it's not arrogance but the woman's center of gravity that has shifted, requiring her to adopt what people perceive as a proud posture.

It was my turn to fall silent then. I remember the first few pages of Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge saying our deaths are born with us, and living is all just a prelude to a death that we should strive to be proud about. Regarding it this way, Rilke rearranges the hierarchy between life and death: it is death that matters more, and one's life becomes the condition with which one's death may be judged as good or bad.

The pregnant woman is proud, Rilke says, because she is carrying a life aside from her own, and with these, not one but two deaths.

But I did not say this out loud. I found myself keeping it for myself, like I keep from sharing the conclusion of Rilke's book. I can talk endlessly about this Rilke, but I have never once mentioned how it ends in class, or at the dinner table when I invite friends over. I fear that we reveal so much by how passionately we retell something we find beautiful. In this sense, it is us who decide whether we allow ourselves to be seen, and by whom.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge holds so much Seeing. Delicate sensibilities articulated in precise language. It talks about those who have taken to themselves the entire task of love; those whose strengths consist in being found.

It talks about beginnings. And it talks about endings--those conclusions one knows will eventually come. In Rilke's words, we are always painfully aware about 'partings one has long seen coming'. Cursed with this Seeing, we can only surrender, giving back to the universe what only the universe can endure.

Correct Isn't

I remember you on your birthday, Ma. And every day.

I still couldn’t tell stories about you. It is still difficult to have to remember how easily you laughed, and how beautifully you loved.

Loving, you expected nothing, accepted things even when they hurt you, stayed silent to keep the peace, and forgave even when you’re exhausted. Your love was perfect.

But I try not to love like you, Ma. I try to expect a little, to hardline against what hurts me, to speak up when it’s not my fault, to stop when I’m tired. I try.

I try to honor how you loved us, and how we had been suffered for, by loving ‘correctly’, but it is difficult to love less than the only way we know how, isn’t it? You knew that, too, Ma. Correct isn’t perfect.

There is a place in my mind I never go to. Everyday, I keep myself from thinking about how much you had to endure. How you had to learn to cut an onion with your one hand…and other things. 

What time did you have to start to make me the dinner you had ready that night, Ma? That night, when I arrived from work, and you called out from the kitchen that it was almost done. It was 8 PM. That night, eight days after we buried Papa, when after you placed my food on the table, you sat down, called me to you, and I came just in time to see all the light disappear from your eyes.

You left, too. With as little inconvenience for us as you could manage.

And all your love for me in my dinner plate.

April 22, 2018

Do Not Resuscitate

I ordered a Do Not Resuscitate for Mama.

I signed a DNR Form, authorizing her doctors to let her go when her heart stopped; no more drugs, no more CPR. It was me who ordered to withdraw life support.

Visitors are only allowed in the ICU at certain hours, so I camped outside her doctor's office at the first level of the hospital, near the lobby. I had told my brother and my sister to go home. There was nothing else that could be done.

I find it peculiar that I have no memory of how the DNR Form looked like. I think I might have signed it in the ICU; I couldn't remember that either. I had been made to understand that if Mama survived the night, she would be taken off her respirator, the machine that breathed for her.

Camped in the hospital lobby, I learned it was policy that a family member turns off the machine.

And because we just buried my dad ten days earlier, there was no one else who could do it. I was 28. I should have been planning family trips with my parents, buying them new furniture, trying out new restaurants with them.

Instead, I was signing DNR Forms, picking out coffins and buying memorial lots. Instead, I was haggling with hospital cashiers for the ICU cash deposit. "Sir, I'm a government employee. Sir, I work at IIT. Sir, you can have all my IDs. Sir, I swear to God I will pay the rest tomorrow."

He will not say yes.

I was a child; I did not even know how to plead properly. I did not even know how to insist to the night nurse that I be allowed to stay with my mom in the ICU in her last few hours.

When I talked to my mom for the last time, I whispered that it was okay for her to let go. I told her that she had been tired for too long, that it was time to rest. I promised her that my brother and my sister will both be fine.

I held her hand, just as she did during my grandmother's last moments. Her left hand was almost closed in a half-fist, the way it had always been after the stroke that left half her body paralyzed. For the twelve years following the stroke, she had been living with a disability that had caused her to do for three hours what she used to be able to do in ten minutes. Her other hand looked older than the paralyzed left hand. It had large, protruding veins, and longer nails; the years it spent compensating for the other lifeless one, were creased onto her fingers.

I held this hand, like she did with her own mother's right hand, and I told her what she told Lola. "Don't be afraid. I am here."

Today is my Mama's birthday.

It was also the 22nd when she passed away. She passed away before sunrise, before I had to be the one to unplug her, before I had to have one more memory I would need to forget.

They say our hearing is the last to go before we die. If that is true, then she would have known how I had been like her. She would have known that she did not have to be afraid.

She would have known that the love she loved us with, is the only kind of love we are capable of giving. Never less. Never, even when it meant letting her go.

Despite ourselves.

Written, April 22, 2017

Like This

When I was a little girl, I would fall asleep in the couch and my father would scoop me up, carry me to my room, put me in my bed. Most of the time, I would have woken up from being moved, but I would continue to close my eyes, pretending to still be asleep. I'm sure he knew I was pretending, but he would carry me nonetheless, and tuck me in. He would sweep my hair up from my nape, and I would feel cool against my pillow. He never rushed. And when he left, he would leave the light on, and the door open.

I have a memory of his shirt chafing my cheek, of the creak of my bedroom door, of the sudden warmth of the light in my room.

Years later, he would still carry me, every time our street got flooded and I would refuse to miss my 7:30 class. By this time, I was already a teacher, but in his eyes, I was still his little girl in need of being carried to a dry patch of street, seven houses away, so my schoolteacher's shoes wouldn't get soaked. He would wait for a dyip with me, and I would wave goodbye, both of us quietly laughing at the hilarity of it all.

I have a memory of the sloshing of the water, and of his back as he would slowly wade his way back home. I have a memory of the sound of his feet, and of the rhythm of his breathing.

On the day that he died, we had been laughing about a piece of pastry that had gone missing in the ref. Conveniently, of course, we had pinned the crime on the Chubby Brother, but my father's laughter was his admission of guilt. He was diabetic, and I remember the pastry conspiracy that sprung unspoken between us at that moment. It was my turn to carry him then, towards a reprieve from a hard and tedious life--towards his own dry patch of street seven houses away.

Some days, I look back and I see that we have never arrived on his dry patch. The floodwaters have caught up, and I had failed him.

But some days, I look back and I would know that this could not be true. He never allowed us to feel that we were causing him any trouble, much less allow us to think that we've failed him in any way. I could wash myself clean afterwards, he'd say every time. We'd get to a dry place in a jiffy, he'd say, assuring his girls that it was a small bother. The neighbors who saw us would fondly cheer him on, calling out to us, Palangga kaayo ni Papa o! 

Today, I brave the floodwaters on my own. But when the wading gets hard, it is still him who carries me towards a reprieve, towards my dry patch of street.

And these are what I keep, when I doubt what I deserve. When I forget that I, too, matter as much as the people I love. The memory of this service. 

"See, here," the memory says. "You had been loved like this."

Irrecoverable

January 17, 2015

Sometimes, when I put my hair up a certain way, and I catch a wayward reflection of myself on some shiny surface, I see my mother looking back. For a microsecond she is there.

But I have ceased taking a second look when this happens. She is forever lost to me. And irrecoverable, she stands on the other side of the shiny surface, perhaps looking back, perhaps not.

March 19, 2015

On his way back to the village, Jarvis meets Kumalo, the father of his son’s murderer. Despite himself, Jarvis asks the other father if he remembers his son, and Kumalo says, yes. Even if he doesn’t.

How does it happen that there are some things in this world we wish we did not understand?

Like this begging for a shared memory? Or the blinding clarity of how natural it is to need it so much. Or the embarrassment of having to stutter when you try to explain where you are going, because you  were going someplace where you could wait for the longing to abate. Or the immense gratitude for the kind of empathy that does not require a syllable of explaining.

This comprehension, this insight into what the human soul is capable of enduring—where does one give it back?

July 6, 2015

Always. I have to pause in the middle of a lecture, from my tasks, in my tracks. I stop because I have to acknowledge your non-presence. All of a sudden, This does not make sense. 

Towards what end do I slave away, or struggle, or endure? For what am I kind, or thoughtful or honest? Your death eats away at all my reasons.

And I want to stay there, in that pause, where you are.

We will forever be a heartbeat apart, forever a soul away--my breath is our distance; our memory, my curse.

Grays and Goldens

I now love the sea at dusk for a different reason.

I used to like it for the sunset, like everybody else, but one afternoon, lacking a reason to hurry home, I sat a little bit longer, and I discovered that the colors of the sea after sunset are more beautiful--when the sky is quieting down from its explosion of reds and yellows.

The sea gives up its blues and greens then, and becomes so many kinds of gray. Up in the sky, there are usually muted streaks of goldens—nothing extravagant. The grandeur of the sunset has subsided, and the sky and the sea give in to a denouement. This denouement is like a sigh, as if both the sea and sky are spent from all the work required in creating such a spectacle of colors that must accompany the setting of the sun.

From the left, what I come here to watch begins without haste. The goldens burn a little a duller, and the grays from the sea meet those from the sky, wiping away the horizon.

I come to the beach now to watch this disappearance.

Without the horizon, there is no longer a divide. It seems to me that the earth and the heavens continue into each other, as if we could reach the heavens if we walked far enough; as if all the people we have lost, who are there on the other side, could cross and come back to us.

Are they looking, too? Are they sitting down, perhaps, on their side of the shore, waiting out the horizon as well, so that they may also feel us near?

And always, as if my soul remembers an ancient instruction, I look up towards my left—towards the memory of a left hand that could not move, towards the memory of another left hand that endeavored to make up for what the other could not do. I have lost both of them now. I have lost, too, the memory of the last time I had stolen into either of those hands for their comfort.

When did I decide that the weight of my hand into theirs was a burden I could spare them? Why was it never revealed to me that by withholding my need for their hand, I was denying them a pleasure? 

Yes, the disappearing always starts in the left. And right up ahead always lies the last piece of horizon to disappear. Soon, the sky and the sea will be seamless. The new singular vastness will be two shades paler than night, and when the wind is right, it will be tranquil, save for the foam that would rise up and roll towards the shore.

The depth that this vastness would possess will be breathtaking. From where I sit on the shore, it will be as if I'd be looking right into infinity, and it will feel as if the reckoning of this unimaginable space/time could only be done right there and right then.

It is very, very far, where they are, isn’t it? And forever is a very, very long time.


Perhaps, sitting there on the shore at dusk, across the immense gray vastness, is the closest I will ever get to them.

This infinity separates us.

But then the horizon disappears, and for that little while, it is all the distance that I need.