by Nick Joaquin
Before those eyes, Monzon felt himself stripped, one by one, of all his defenses: maturity, social position, wealth, success. He was a little boy again and he bent down and lifted his father’s enormous, damp hand to his lips, and at the contact, a million pins seemed to prick his whole body.
But Chitong came forward and kissed the old man on the brow. The boy felt himself fascinated by those intensely hating eyes. He, too, was rather afraid of this old man; but with a difference. Even as a boy, he had felt the force of those eyes, lips, hands; but his grandfather had still been, then, in the plenitude of strength. But now, when he lay helpless, his legs paralyzed, the flesh gone loose about the bones, the face grown pale and shriveled, did he communicate all the more unbearably that pride, that exultation in simple brute power.
The boy felt himself becoming a single wave of obedience toward the old man. His lips lingered upon that moist brow as though they would drink in the old man’s very brains. The feel of the wet flesh was an almost sensual delight, something new and terrifying to him and, at the same time, painful; almost as if the kiss were also a kind of death. It was a multitudinous moment for the boy. When he straightened up, he found himself trembling. And at the same time, he wanted to run away—to some quiet corner, to pray.
“Well, father, why have you sent Paulo away?” Monzon asked, speaking very loudly. The old man continued to stare at them in silence. He seemed to be checking even his breath. His thick lips were pressed tightly shut. Only his eyes spoke. His eyes hated them. His eyes sprang at their throats and wrung lifeless their voices. His eyes challenged this unafraid-pretending solid man that was his son; at the challenge, Monzon stepped nearer and abruptly stripped the blankets from the old man. For a moment they stared at each other.
Monzon had collected himself. Of you, I am not going to be afraid, his eyes told the old man. Not anymore. Often had he said that in his mind; now, he wanted to say it aloud because, almost, he believed it to be true. But he spoke to Chitong instead: “Your Tia Nena may want you to help her. If the food for your grandfather is ready, bring it in here.”
When Chitong came back with the tray of food, he found that his father had taken off his coat and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He had propped the sick man up to a sitting position and had changed his clothes.
The sick man’s face had altered. He sat among the pillows, his face turned away, the eyes closed, the beautiful lips parted, as if in anguish. His hands lay clenched on his lap. He would not look at his son. He would not look at the food.
“You are going to eat, father,” Monzon told him. He had taken the tray from Chitong. He did not speak loudly now. He knew he had won. This old man of whom all his life he had been afraid: had he not just dressed him like any baby? And now, like a mere baby again, he would be fed. “You are going to eat, father,” he said again in his quiet voice.
The old man turned around and opened his eyes. They were fierce no longer. They were full of tiredness and the desire for death.
Chitong felt the old man’s agony as his own. He could not stand it. He had an impulse to approach his father and knock the tray from his hands. He could not trust himself to speak.
The elder Monzon must have sensed this fury, for suddenly he turned to his son. “Chitong, you must be hungry. Better go and find something to eat.”
Chitong swallowed the words in his mouth and turned away. At the door he paused and looked back. His father had laid a hand against the old man’s breast; with the other he tried to push a spoonful of food into the tightly closed mouth. The old man tried to evade it, but now he could not turn his face away; his son had him pinned against the bed. At last he gave up, opened his mouth, and received the food. His eyes closed and tears ran down his cheeks.
Chitong glanced at his father. The elder Monzon was smiling . . .
• • •
In the kitchen, he found his Tia Nena, sitting motionless in a corner. She looked as if she had been struck down. Her eyes were full of fear and suffering. Chitong realized that what he had felt for a moment when he kissed the old man’s brow, this woman had known all her life. That was why she could not leave the old man; why, of all his children, she had remained faithful. She was in his power; and like himself, Chitong thought bitterly, she was the kind for whom life is possible only in the immolation of self to something mightier outside it.
“Did he eat?” she asked and, when he nodded, began to cry. He stooped and took her in his arms and tried to still her sobbing, but he remembered how, this morning, he, himself, had cried in his mother’s arms and was not able to find, nor in her bosom, nor in her words, the answering strength he sought . . .
Monzon, when he came out, found them sharing a scanty supper. For once, he looked quite happy. He kept rubbing his hands and smiling absently. He shook his head at Nena’s offer of food.
“No, I am not hungry. And I have to go now.” He took out his watch. “Is there still a bus I can take, Nena? Chitong, you are to remain with the car. Tomorrow I will come back with the doctor.”
Chitong rose and accompanied his father to the door. The single lamp in the sala had gone out and they walked in darkness.
“Your grandfather is sleeping. If he wakes up, you can tell him I have gone.”
They had reached the stairs. The elder Monzon paused and laid a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Your mother has told you I am willing that you should follow your vocation, no?”
“Yes, father.” Chitong could feel how in the dark his father’s face had changed again. Even his voice had lost its momentary confidence.
“Yes. That is a good life,” Monzon went on, “and it is, perhaps, the best for you.”
He descended the stairs, opened the street-door below, and stepped out into the night. Chitong remained for some time at the head of the stairs, wondering just what those last words had meant.
In his grandfather’s room, he spread a mat on the floor, undressed, and lay down. He had placed the lamp on a chair beside him and, now, he took out his breviary and began to read. The words that opened out to him were like cool arms into which he surrendered his troubled body. That had been a strange day, full of unrest and uncertainties; but as he read, an earlier sureness and peace came back to him.
“. . . my soul had relied on His word. My soul had hoped in the Lord. From the morning watch even until night, let Israel hope in the Lord. For with the Lord, there is mercy and with Him plentiful redemption. And he shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities . . .”
In his bed, on the other side of the room, the old man was awake and restless. Chitong could hear him turning, now to one side, now to the other. His breath came in short gasps, as if in difficulty. He reached out with his hands. He clutched at the pillows. He tried to rise.
The boy rose from time to time to cover him up again or to pick up the pillows. The old man’s hands sought and clung to the boy’s arms but his eyes, Chitong saw, were closed.
Names poured from the old man’s lips. He called on every woman he had ever loved. He wanted his women. He became angry and shouted for them as in the days of his strength. He commanded them to come near. He cursed and shook his fists at them. No one came. He tried to rise and fell back, moaning and beating on the bed with his hands.
Afterward, he became quiet. He must have realized that he was powerful no longer. Then he began to call on his women again, but softly, tenderly. He wooed them as a shy boy might; his lips shaped broken and beautiful phrases of adoration. But still no one came.
He fell into despair. He became furious again. He raged in his bed. He howled with all his might. He tore at the pillows. He tried to get up. The bed shook with his anger.
Chitong, lying on the floor, tried to deafen his ears to the old man’s cries. He tried to read, but the words would not stand still. He closed the book and tried to sleep but, even in the intervals when the old man lay silent, he could feel him suffering, d
esiring, despairing, there in his bed in the darkness.
He got up and thought: I will pray for him. I will pray that he be delivered from temptation. I will pray that God quiet the fever of his flesh.
He approached and knelt beside the old man’s bed, but a glance at that tortured face shot hollow all the prayers in his mouth. He felt again, as at Santo Domingo that morning, empty and ridiculous.
The sick man stared at him, yet did not see him. Those eyes saw only women and the bodies of women. Pain and desire had made him blind to all else. He stretched out his shriveled hands for the women that were not there. He had exhausted his voice; now he could only moan. Chitong could bear it no longer.
He rose and left the room. He was thinking of that woman—no, only a girl really—whom his grandfather had kept before his legs collapsed. The elder Monzon had driven the girl away, but she might still be living somewhere in the town. His Tia Nena was still up, ironing clothes in the kitchen; he would ask her.
But she was frightened when she learned what he proposed to do. Yes, the girl was living in the town. “But your father will surely find out, Chitong, if she comes here. Oh, do not ask me how. He will. He knows everything.”
The words cut through the boy. “Then, let him!” he cried. “But I am going to bring the girl back. The old man needs her. Now, tell me where she lives.”
It took him almost an hour to find the house, but only a few words to make the girl come. Chitong had seen her many times before, but when she came running down the stairs and stood beside him in the moonlight, he knew that he was seeing her really for the first time.
She was not very pretty, and still very young; but her body, her eyes, the way she moved, hinted at that attractive maturity which only physical love develops. She had wrapped an old shawl around her head and shoulders, and as they hurried through the empty streets, Chitong could feel her thoughts running ahead toward the old man. But his mind, sensitive in such things, was not repelled.
There was in her, he knew, as in his grandfather, that simple unity which he, himself, had been denied. It was not strange that two such people should desire each other, or that so young a girl, when she might have more youthful lovers, should prefer the sexagenarian in whose arms she had become a woman. They had had to drive her away when he fell sick.
Chitong had been there when it happened and he recalled his father’s exquisite brutality and how this girl had seemed to him, at that time, incapable of either fear or shame. She had refused to leave the house; had stood before the elder Monzon, thrusting her defiant face into his; and Chitong remembered how his father’s hands had trembled, though not a nerve in his face had twitched.
Monzon had released his belt on the sly, pushed the girl away suddenly, and given her a full stroke across the shoulders with the belt. And with the belt, he had pursued her out of the room and down the stairs, slamming the door in her face. She had remained down there, screaming and kicking at the door till the police came and dragged her away.
But she was not thinking at all of those things, Chitong saw, as he hurried beside her, glancing into her passionate face. She was going to her first lover. He had called her. He needed her. Young men were only young men: they could offer nothing in love to make her wiser than she had been in such things from the very beginning. And her nervous fingers, clutching the shawl across her breasts, spoke almost aloud the violence of her need.
A few steps from the house, a woman abruptly emerged from shadow. Chitong recognized his Tia Nena. She had been running; she could hardly speak.
“Chitong,” she gasped, “your father has come back. He could not find a bus.” She turned to the girl: “You must not come. Go back at once!”
The girl stepped back, but Chitong grasped her hand. “Do not be afraid,” he said. “You are coming.”
His aunt stared at him. “Chitong, you know how it is when your father gets angry . . .”
“I am not afraid.”
“I think he suspects where you went . . .”
“So much the better then. Come on.”
It was the first time in his life he had made a decision. He felt released.
• • •
The elder Monzon was standing in the sala when they entered. He had lighted the lamp and now stood watching it thoughtfully, his hands locked behind him. He glanced up as they filed in. When he saw the girl, he flushed darkly and he felt again the multitude of pins pricking his flesh. He dropped his eyes at once, but the girl’s image persisted before him: the fierce eyes; the small, round mouth; the long, thin, girlish neck. She had drawn her shawl away and he had seen where her breasts began and how they rose and fell with her breath.
He had a sudden, delirious craving to unloose his belt and whip her again, to make her suffer, to tear her flesh into shreds, to mutilate that supple, defiant, sweet, animal body of hers. His hands shook and his desire became an anger toward his son who had brought this voluptuous being so near.
“Who told you to bring this woman here, Chitong?” He tried in vain to make his voice calm. He doubled his fists: the nails dug into his flesh.
Chitong stared, open-mouthed. He realized now that what he had done was an action for which his soul would later demand reasons. It was not his father before whom he stood. It was God.
The girl was standing beside him and he felt her moving away. He sprang to life. “No, no,” he cried. “You are not to go! He needs you! You must not go!” He held her back.
“A fine priest you will make!” snapped the elder Monzon.
Chitong came nearer. His eyes entreated the older man to understand. He stretched out a hand; with the other, he detained the girl. He had never found it so hard to make himself articulate.
“Father,” he said at last, “if it is a sin to allow him this woman, then I will take the sin on my shoulders. I will pray that it . . .”
“Release that woman!” cried the older man. “Let her go away!”
The boy’s face hardened. “No, father. She is not going.”
They were standing almost face to face. Suddenly, the father lifted his clenched fist and struck the boy in the face.
“Not in the face, father!” the boy cried out, lifting his hands too late to shield himself; the blow had already fallen.
Monzon, horrified, heard the boy’s cry through every inch of his body. He had never before laid hands on the boy. The impulse to strike had come so suddenly. He tortured his mind for an explanation. He had not wanted to hurt the boy, no. He had, the moment before, desired the girl evil, but it was not she, either, who had prompted his fist. Was it the old man, then? Was it his father he had struck?
No. No, it was himself: that self of his, inherited, long fought, which had, the moment before, looked on the girl with strange fury. It was that self of his, which perpetuated the old man, against whom he had lifted his fist, but it was his son who had received the blow—and the blow was a confession of his whole life.
Now he stood silent, watching the boy’s flesh darken where his fist had fallen, and the gradual blood defining the wound.
They stood staring at each other, as if petrified, and the girl, forgotten, slipped swiftly away from them and into the old man’s room, locking the door behind her.
A clock somewhere began striking ten. Nena sat in a corner, crying. A late cock could be heard crowing. And from the next room came the voices of the lovers: the old man’s voice, tired and broken; the girl’s, sharp and taut and passionate.
“No,” she was saying, “I shall never leave you again. I am not going away again. No one shall take me away from you again.”
THE LEGEND OF THE DYING WANTON
There lived in Manila in the year 1613 a certain Doña Ana de Vera, one of the principal ladies of the country at that time and a woman of great piety. This Doña Ana and her son, who was an official in the government, were from Madrid. At the Court and V
illa they had enjoyed the patronage of Don Juan de Silva, in whose retinue—on de Silva’s appointment as governor-general—they had come to the Philippines. Señor Vera had tried to dissuade his mother from coming along—she was over fifty and rather fragile of health but Doña Ana had mockingly feared he would degenerate into a savage in three days if she were not there to keep house for him. So, across two oceans and half the world she had come, one of the many spirited women who, hard on the heels of the conquistadores, sallied forth with kettle and skillet, with fan and mantilla, devoutly resolved that even in the heathen wilderness the rites for the altar and of the hearth should be performed with as much elegance as at the Court itself.
Now there was stationed in Manila at that time a wild young soldier named Currito Lopez, who was as evil as Doña Ana was good. This Currito was a lost soul, his every action being so public a scandal even decent people knew who he was and shunned him like a leper. Riding around the city in her carriage, Doña Ana often saw him in the streets: swaggering insolently if sober, reeling and howling if drunk—but his swart bearded face of a Lucifer never struck her with terror. Alone, perhaps, in all the city, she knew another side of this man’s character.
Being in charge of the wardrobe of the “Santo Rosario”—the fine Madonna whose shrine at the Dominicans the Dutch pirates were soon to make famous—she was often at that virgin’s chapel when it was deserted, and at such times she always found the notorious Currito there, kneeling in an obscure corner, his head bowed and a rosary dangling from his clasped hands. She never disturbed him; he never disturbed her. She was Spanish enough not to be shocked at this commingling in a single nature of vice and piety. He was Christian enough not to be shocked that she was not shocked. So, without a word or a look between them, the virtuous old woman and the wicked young man became each other’s friend. While she moved about her tasks at the altar, her face and hands gleaming like fine gold against the rich black of her skirts and mantilla, he knelt in his corner, red-shirted and black-bearded, praying and, sometimes, weeping quietly. From the blue dusk of her altar, the radiant Madonna smiled as lovingly on the wanton as on the saint.