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PARTISAN REVIEW
should at least go home in the persons of his sons if-which God
forbid! -it were his fortune to go home only as the dead bones and
ashes that they, his sons, would carry back with them, to be buried
in their own land, when it should at last be the free land for which,
when a young man, he had fought so long and so bitterly.
Seated on the foreign sands of a foreign shore, beside a young
wife,
his
two sons sprawled on their bellies at his feet, he had boomed,
placing a hand on the head of each boy:
"The house of our fathers is waiting for us to come home!"
And as, awed, they stared at him he had lifted his eyes from
their faces to the horizon and murmured:
«Si tui oblivero. Jerusalem .
..
J>
But, now, a war had come and destroyed the house. It was
waiting no longer. They might still go back, they could never go
home now, thought Pepe Monson, more vividly remembering that
house he had never seen (as he remarked to the woman standing
beside him at the window) than any of the houses he had actually
lived in.
"When my father was over there last year," he said, "he went
to see what was left of it. There wasn't much-a piece of wall,
;1
piece of the azotea-but the main stairway, which was all of stone,
was quite intact; had even kept most of its balustrade. My father
said it looked very sad: a stairway in a field of ruin, going up to
nowhere ..."
But she saw it going up to the chandeliers and the noise of
talk and fiddles.
"Whenever I see that broken stairway I feel your father waiting,"
she said, smiling, and saw
him
standing at the top of the stairs, a
fierce young man with whiskers, with a guitar strapped round a
shoulder, bowing over her mother's hand, whispering a word in her
father's ear, crouching down to greet her, a shy child in pigtails,
taking her hands in his and asking was she friend or foe. He had
led her to the dining room and had fed her grapes and ice cream
while they discussed the hardships of school life.
Before that year had ended he was in the field with Aguinaldo,
and the gay armies of the Republic were advancing in triumph
through the provinces. A few more years, and he and his general
were pale fugitives, fleeing up rivers, through jungles, over moun-
