The laughter of my father pdf12/30/2022 ![]() ![]() Then the children started to cough, one after the other. The rich man started to cough at night then he coughed day and night. Our faces were bright and rosy, but theirs were pale and sad. Other neighbours who passed by our house often stopped in our yard and joined us in laughter.Īs time went on, the rich man’s children became thin and anaemic, while we grew even more robust and full of life. We were always in the best of spirits and our laughter was contagious. Sometimes we wrestled with one another in the house before we went to play. We were all healthy because we went out in the sun and bathed in the cool water of the river that flowed from the mountains into the sea. He looked at us one by one, as though he were condemning us. Some days the rich man appeared at a window and glowered down at us. We watched the servants turn the beautiful birds and inhaled the heavenly spirit that drifted out to us. The chickens were young and tender and the fat that dripped into the burning coals gave off an enchanting odor. I can remember one afternoon when our neighbor’s servants roasted three chickens. Sometimes, in the morning, our whole family stood outside the windows of the rich man’s house and listened to the musical sizzling of thick strips of bacon or ham. We hung about and took all the wonderful smells of the food into our beings. Now, this rich man’s servants were always frying and cooking something good, and the aroma of the food was wafted down to us form the windows of the big house. His house was so tall that his children could look in the window of our house and watched us played, or slept, or ate, when there was any food in the house to eat. While we boys and girls played and sang in the sun, his children stayed inside and kept the windows closed. We had as a next door neighbor a very rich man, whose sons and daughters seldom came out of the house. ![]() Father’s farm had been destroyed in 1918 by one of our sudden Philippine floods, so several years afterwards we all lived in the town though he preferred living in the country. When I was four, I lived with my mother and brothers and sisters in a small town on the island of Luzon. ![]()
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