At a certain time of day, between the high heat of noon and the cool of afternoon, the streets of Casay have a strange quietness ­ as of a leaf arrested in its fall, or a vacuum from which air and life have suddenly been drained ­ a quietness which seems to bide its time. Very infrequently, a car, a truck, or a cart may disturb the stillness, raising brown dust in its trail and sowing screeching echoes into the silence. But a minute after, the dust settles, the noise fades away, and it is quiet again. Even when the wind blows and rustles leaves, sway branches, scatters blossoms, it is still quiet.

It stays so till the hour when the fading sun gives way to lengthening shadows and the church bells ring the hour of the Angelus, the coming of the day's second dawn. Then slowly, the streets come to life. Cockfighters gather at corners, stroking their roosters while wives and chickens cackle in coops and kitchens. An hour later, the silent street has vanished, the rustle of leaves drowned by the noise of people.

Of course, truly, the streets themselves have remained unchanged through the years. Sandy-gray, grass-grown on either side, and wide enough for two cars to pass at the same time, it is what have been borne on their uneven course that varied ­ senator's cars and carts of junkmen, carriages with beauties, armored trucks with guns, soldiers and rebels ­ and while the people themselves have changed, have grown older or wiser, more stupefied or more afraid, the streets have remained the same circling around the town, ending on rivers that edge a mountain, or ending near the foot of the mountain itself, their five-pace breadth narrowing to foot lanes that rise up to the hills, upwards to the imposing peaks of Anak-Dagat and Arawan.

Thus the town lies ­ the round bottom of a cup, from its rim, the clouds that wreath the mountain tops, like a beloved one, guarded on all sides by him who loves. Or like a prisoner, whose only bid to freedom is a winding, asphalt road that leads to the city, a road that must pass right under the green-purple peak of Arawan. Some, in their youth, reached this freedom, and now grown old in their swivel chairs or on their golf links, they call the city their home. But many others come back, a few because they must, others because they want to.

When I returned, not so long ago, I looked forward to the peace of Casay. I had been born there, spent many drowsy childhood summers in the town whose deepest impression on me, was the quiet noontime.

As I drove to the municipal hall I waited for the familiar breeze that blew at all hours, a soft wind that carried with it the tang of faraway sea and tender green leaves from cool groves, mingled with the scents of the flower gardens of Casay. But the air was arid, dusty.

It was only two o'clock. The village seemed asleep, but in the municipal hall, the hub of the town, there was a constant wake, a vigil of noise and activity fenced in from the rest of the community by barbed wire on three sides, the broken-down bamboo enclosure of the puericulture center's lot on the fourth.

Three old men with red lips and hardly any teeth sat on the porch steps chewing betel nut. Above them, on the railing, straddled two policemen, their guns hanging by their sides and a tommygun on the floor near them. They watched me walking under the shower of dried acacia leaves and feathery pink-tipped blooms that each slight gust of wind brought down. One old man, his mouth full, spat out red saliva. The rest stared, the old ones knowing they didn't know me, and the two policemen feeling that they should.

A tight little knot of women stood on one end stood on one end of the porch, young except for one or two of them, all noisy, dressed well, but shabbily shod. As I climbed up the steps one of the older women detached herself from the group, hesitated, then met me halfway on the porch, drawing tightly over her thin breast the edges of a messily-fringed shawl which she wore over a bottle-green dress. Her thick-soled Batangas slippers, topped with brown velvet, dragged on the floor, and before she spoke she glanced down at them, as if annoyed that they should intrude on the silence that settled on the hall as she approached me.

"Emma," she paused, half -questioning.

I smiled and nodded. She gasped. "You really are Emma! I could tell right away, even though you were young when you left. Do you know me?"

I pretended to, trying to remember. She interrupted. "Of course not," she said, "But my husband was your grandfather's clerk." She crossed herself quickly. "May they both rest in peace."

"Inggo? I remember him. You're Femia." Inggo was a dark, gentle man with prematurely white hair and very white teeth. "Dead?"

"Yes, last year."

"What of?"

A cloud shadowed her face. "He was shot. He'd gone to the barrio Lubak to get our pig. There was some shooting on the way, and he got caught in it."

"But why? Who did it? Did you find out?"

"There are many shootings these days," she said. "It was the will of God." She paused. I had nothing to say. "But we must not talk of those things," she smiled brightly. "Come, you meet your town mates."

I shook my head, saying I was in a hurry, that I had to get back to the city right away. But some other day, I promised vaguely. Now I had time only to get my birth certificate.

The Municipio's offices looked the same, mottoes on the walls ­ "Honesty is the best policy", "In God we trust", "Do unto others as you would they should do unto you" ­ busts on the shelves ­ Rizal, Mabini, Quezon ­ dust on everything, even on the splinters on the unvarnished walls.

All the male employees wore sports shirts hanging loosely on their bodies, and the women with the exception of Femia, pretty frocks. The young man who looked through the records for my birth certificate had a shirt more stylish than the others, a dark blue with yellow prints of pineapples entwined with red leis. When he came into his room he was sitting on a corner of his desk, one leg swinging freely and brushing now and again against the polka-dotted skirt of a young girl standing by the filing cabinet. She giggled as he stumbled against a chair in his rush to get up, and the threw her a furious glance.

I stood by a wire net window laced with cobwebs while Femia helped him in the search. "Emma needs it for her passport," she said. "It must be here."

Behind me I could hear the pages being rifled, files long unopened rustly giving way to their hunt. Their combined murmurs droned on, while outside a thick cloud covered the sun and a welcome shade cooled the heat of noon. Several policemen now paced the grounds, walking on the green grass and avoiding the potholed lanes. The girls had all gone to their desks, and next door the hinges of the puericulture center's gate creaked. A young nurse in starched white, black umbrella in one hand, a black bag in the other, pushed back the bolts and smiled across the broken fence at the postman leaving with his bag of mail.

This was Casay then, all of this. And the mossy ruins of a Spanish church across the street, the dazzling white of the concrete plaza to its right. Picture-book calachuchis shedding wax-like white blossoms on green velvet, a red-white-and-blue kite entangled in the branches of the enormous flame tree whose roots threatened to topple a streetlight. In the heat of the noon one heard the sound of the horse's neigh, the twitter of brown birds, the sound of a large truck driving away.

The voices behind me rose and fell. "It must be here." my companion insisted. "Why, I can tell you the very day she was born."

"I can't find it anywhere," he said.

"It was, let me see, it was May . . . the hermana mayor had just been to our house . . ."

"It is not here." There was finality in his tone.

"May . . .May . . ." From a distance the soft wail of a siren approached, sibilation pushing through the silent town. Like children playing a game of statues, everyone on the lawn paused, immobile in the fraction of a second.

It was reminiscent of the recent world war. The siren. The armored car. The machine gun. The three corpses.

"Outsiders," a man standing near on the porch said.

I shivered. As if sensing it, Femia turned and took may hand. "Child," she said, "Your hands are cold." I did not answer, letting my hand rest in hers." We are used to this," she said.

Two soldiers climbed up on the truck and lifted a body, swung it one, two, three, and let it fall on the ground. The two other corpses were thrown down the same way. Like practiced pitchers. the soldiers grinned triumphantly as they viewed their work, three dead bodies in a row.

Three corpses, eyes still open, arms flung outward like dolls thrown on the ground, blood spreading on clothes, on grass.

The first was an old man, naked to the waist, a trickle of blood running diagonally on his brown chest where old skin was drawn skimpily over aging bones. His faded denim shorts, torn and beltless, lay loosely on his caved-in belly.

The second one was emaciated, tall, but there was little left of him that one could look at. He had no face.

The last was just a boy in ragged T-shirt, short pants of some unnameable color. His hair was matted with blood. His left leg was missing, the stump coagulated with brown mud.

I felt dizzy, meaningless voices buzzing around me, like the hissing of flies feasting on rotting mangoes on a summer day. Men kept walking to and from the corpses.

"Sheets," I mumbled, but no one heard.

Through the closely packed crowd that had assembled, a dog edged its way into the clearing where the corpses lay. It sniffed at the ring of live humans, wagged its tail, then turning around, trotted to the dead.

It licked the boy's outstretched hand.

"Shoo," someone said. The animal moved on to the faceless corpse. Body arched as if ready to leap, it stood by the mass of serrated flesh and sticky strands of black hair. A lo growl came from the dog and retreating, it stumbled over the old man's body.

The dog's nostrils dilated as it sniffed the gray hair, the open mouth. Its pink tongue caressed the old man's bare chest, licked his armpits, his side.

The crowd watched the mayor, a young gangling man, nod his head approvingly at the soldiers, then turn to the woman who had just arrived. Pushing aside the people in her way she ran to the boy, and sobbing fell on his body.

The mayor cleared his throat. She did not look at him.

"A;e," he said. Her sobs continued. He shrugged his shoulders. "Her son should not have been where there are Huks," he said to the crowd. "He should have left the house when the Huks came." She shook her head without lifting her face, her sobs changing to low moans.

The dog, unmolested, tugged at the old man's shorts. A man snickered as the garment gave way. The animal barked softly at the naked thighs and old withered belly.

"I'm sorry," I said to Femia, shoving the tin wastebasket behind me. I had not been able to stop throwing up. "I'm sorry," I turned to the man in the Hawaiian sports shirt, "that I dirtied your wastebasket."

I was angry with him, sitting once more on the corner of his desk, ogling the girl in the polka-dotted skirt who was now chewing gum beside him.

"You're not used to it," he shrugged, looking at the girl, as if they shared a funny secret about me.

"No," I said. "No, I'm not."

"The blood makes you dizzy?" It was the first time the girl had spoken to me.

"Yes," I said, not looking at her. "And naked dead bodies . . ."

"You shouldn't have looked at them," Femia said. "We here, we are used to these things."

I didn't say anything. I turned to the young man. "My birth certificate?"

He shrugged again. "Not here."

"But I was born here," my voice rose. "I was registered."

"We looked for it. It's not here." He rose and sauntered to the window at the other end of the room.

"No birth certificate. No sheets for the dead," I shouted. "What do you have?"

He turned around. "Nothing. This is not the city. Go back and buy a birth certificate there. That's where you come from." His face was red as the leis on his shirt.

I left just as the afternoon bells began to peal. I could hear the footsteps of aging Femia hurrying after me, but I did not slow down.

The yard was still full of people standing by the dead. I walked on, but she caught up with me just outside the gate.

"Wait," she gasped, "wait. You must not be angry. He really is like that. He does not like city people."

"No," I said.

"But you shouldn't mind him."

"I do not, really," I tried to reassure her.

"You can get a signed document. You were really born here. I can sign it."

I nodded my thanks.

A group of children ran past us, babbling about corpses, their faces bright with expectancy. From somewhere a radio announced the afternoon Tagalog plays. The sun was a pale amber on the newly awakened town.

I paused in midstep and took her hand. "I'm sorry." I said goodbye and hurried away.