Don Vicente

by F. Sionil Jose

  Everything is changed now; the mango tree has been cut. On the days that it was laden with fruit, Padre Andong used to count them like some miser and would rail at us when he saw us eating the sour green mangoes. “Why can you not wait till they ripen?” he lamented.

  “Some people cannot wait for heaven,” Cousin Marcelo would have retorted.

  Padre Andong came to the house one Sunday afternoon. He was a short, bulky man in his seventies. For the past three decades or so, he had been our parish priest. He used to be quite slim—that was what the old people say—but the town must have agreed with him, for he had put on weight. His bulk was covered by tight, ill-fitting soutanes, which were always frayed in the cuffs and collars and patched in the buttocks. He had a slight squint, which was not noticeable when he wore glasses. Somehow, that strong smell of tobacco and of public places never eluded him.

  He could not have chosen a more propitious time to visit Father, although the visit was not necessary, for even if Father no longer went to church, he sometimes went to the convent to play chess with the old priest or with Chan Hai, another chess player, waiting in the wings for his turn. But Padre Andong wanted to be correct; he had come to ask Father a favor.

  The harvest that year had been very good, and the wide yard was filled with bull carts laden with grain. Upon seeing the priest approach, Father gave the ledger to Tio Baldo and went to the gate to meet him.

  Up in the azotea where they had gone to sit in the shade, Sepa was preparing the merienda table. It was like this during harvest time, this ritual visit, and Father was in a boasting mood: “Is there any man in town, Padre,” he was saying, “who will give you thirty sacks of palay this year? Thirty fat sacks—you cannot eat that in a year!”

  “No, Espiridion,” Padre Andong was saying, “but there is a man who will give me forty sacks next year.”

  “I don’t believe it!” Father said.

  “You will,” Padre Andong said. “Because it is you who will do it. But I did not come here for the palay, Espiridion. I know that you will give it to me, even if I did not come. As you told me, it’s time that you send your boy over to be an acolyte.”

  His words jolted me; serving him was not easy, for he had flogged his erring sacristans and worked them hard and long. It did not seem to me an equable arrangement for Father, who did not go to church, to send me there, but it was his wish and I walked to the church that afternoon with Padre Andong, who was silent most of the way except for his quiet assurance that I would be a good acolyte. Old Tomas, the sacristan, immediately took me under his care, and we proceeded to the sacristy, where he showed me the vestments; he could have said mass himself, for he had served there so long, he knew the Latin liturgy backward.

  I served in the church for many months without pay, though money did come in, not just in the Sunday collection but from services: the baptisms, for which there were special rates, if celebrated at the main altar or in his residence; for burials, depending on how long the bells were tolled, on whether we met the funeral procession outside the church, halfway from the residence of the deceased, or when we went to the residence itself. The most expensive, of course, was if Padre Andong went with us to the house and accompanied the hearse to the cemetery. Even weddings had to be priced accordingly, and it was Old Tomas who recited the rates as well as the “specials” that went with them.

  The larder was never full; Padre Andong’s breakfast often consisted of just plain rice and dried fish, and as if to save on food, he often made the rounds of his parishioners, as we were having lunch or supper, which was good, for he became known to everyone and was involved not just as confessor but as counselor in many of the problems of small-town families.

  I was talking once to Sepa about there being no food in the convent, and she said, “That priest—he would boil a stone, add salt to it, and then call it excellent soup!”

  And it was not just with his food that he was niggardly; his clothes, as I have said, were a pauper’s. I had to consider, however, the fact that Sepa was not a Catholic and, therefore, had a biased view.

  About Padre Andong’s sternness—there was enough evidence of it to go around. I could start with Father, although I was not there when it happened. Father persistently kept away from the mass but not from the chess games that he, Chan Hai, and Padre Andong played in the convent patio. Father ceased attending church in the month of July, I think, when the rains were particularly strong and even the sturdy blooms of the rosal in the churchyard were frayed. That Sunday the rains had lifted briefly, and as usual, Father had gone to hear mass. Padre Andong was a disciplinarian when it came to how the faithful should act during the elevation of the Host. There were instances when he would interrupt this portion of the mass to shout at an erring parishioner and tell him to kneel.

  The old roof had long been leaking, and many portions of the church were wet. Father’s special pew near the altar was drenched, and even if Padre Andong knew it, I suppose he did not really feel it enough reason why now Father should stand up during the elevation.

  He spotted Father standing thus, and Padre Andong shouted, “Hoy, there, kneel down. Kneel down!”

  Father continued standing, straight as a spear, so the story went, and next Padre Andong shouted: “Espiridion, kneel down not for me but for God!” And Father, in his white alpaca suit, head drooping, crumpled to his knees in the puddle before him.

  Unlike God, said Cousin Marcelo, Father was not a vengeful man, and came harvest time, he sent the usual sacks of palay to Padre Andong. And Padre Andong came to the house on the occasions that warranted his being there—the thank-you call, Father’s birthday—as if nothing had transpired.

  He was more Ilokano than most of us, though he was Tagalog; when he first delivered his sermon in Ilokano, so the story goes, he had the whole congregation buckling in laughter, for some Ilokano words that he mispronounced easily became obscene. But what really labeled him as a native was his practicality around the church; he had planted fruit trees like the mango later, guava, pomelo, and avocado. He kept poultry, too, and even coaxed us to work with him several plots of pechay, eggplant, and tomatoes so that his larder was literally independent of the marketplace.

  But while his hens were always fenced in and properly kept away, the garden was not free from the chickens of the neighbors, which often flew over the fence and pecked on our plants. On one such occasion, Padre Andong was so incensed that he chased a white leghorn and felled it with a stick.

  He did not know where the chicken came from, and we certainly did not want to bring it home. The problem was solved by him, and that afternoon, in the convent, we sat down to a wonderful meal of arroz caldo con gallina. When given the opportunity, Padre Andong was also a good cook.

  Even in his seventies, Padre Andong saw to it that we were strong of build. He built a chinning bar behind the sacristy, which he often tried himself, and during the Eucharistic Congress in Manila he also bought for us a pair of boxing gloves.

  He was an indefatigable hiker, and when he was to say mass in the barrios, he was the first to wake up in the deep quiet of dawn. If it was my turn to go with him, he would rouse me in the convent where I slept for the night, and still drowsy, I would go down to the kitchen where Old Tomas would have a cup of chocolate and pan de sal ready; then we would be on our way, his soutane tucked in his waist, so that he would be able to walk faster, and I would keep pace with him with the small canvas bag that held the chalice, the candles, and the bottle of holy water.

  It happened on one such trip to the barrio of Calanutan. On the way back that afternoon, instead of taking a calesa, he decided that we would walk the shortcut, via the railroad tracks. We were halfway when we were caught by a pelting shower, and we got back to the convent drenched to the bone. The following morning Padre Andong was flushed with fever and had difficulty saying mass. The doctor came, and only then did we know that the old priest had never been too well—he had heart murmurs and as a matter of fact, we should never
have hiked to Calanutan at all.

  We cooked liver broth and gave it to him at lunchtime together with his medicine that the doctor had prescribed. He was grateful for the broth, but he did not take the medicine. In his rasping breath, he said, “Prayer is good medicine, particularly if you are as old as I am.”

  That evening I offered him a prayer.

  The fever left him, but he never regained his strength. He was pale and listless. One afternoon a nun came to the convent, and I learned afterward that she was Padre Andong’s youngest sister. They talked in Tagalog, some of which I understood. The nun was saying that it was time for him to go to the hospital, or to retire in the hospicio in Manila, where he would be taken care of in his old age. He could no longer say mass regularly, listen to confessions, or visit the villages where there were no churches; Rosales needed a younger priest. This was the way not only of the world but of the church itself.

  That afternoon, after Padre Andong had made his decision, he told me to go fetch Father.

  “He is leaving Rosales for good, Father,” I said, not quite sure that Father would come. “He is a sick man.”

  Father tousled my hair. “I am going to see him,” he assured me.

  The old priest’s room was airy and light, but it was bare except for his ancient rattan bed and his shabby clothes in the open aparador. He asked Old Tomas to draw from under the bed an old wooden trunk, to which he had a shiny iron key always in his pocket. Bending over, he opened it and removed from the top the same old black soutane that he wore frayed at the cuffs and the hem but pressed and clean.

  And beneath this was a heap of coins and paper bills—many of the coins already greenish with mold. I had never seen so much silver in my life, and I looked at it in sheer wonder. Then, Padre Andong’s cracked voice: “All of it I have saved these many years—the new church will not leak … you don’t have to kneel in a puddle anymore, Espiridion. And you will come back … The new church I will leave … and it is what the people shall have built.”

  So they came that week, the carpenters and the masons, and they dumped their lumber and their cement in the churchyard. They tore the façade off the old church first, then the tottering belfry, and through the hellish sound of building, Padre Andong seemed pleased with the world. He rose early, staggered to the churchyard, and looked at what was taking shape, and until the last day of his stay in Rosales, he seemed to want to linger a moment longer.

  The day Padre Andong finally took the train to Manila and his resting place, I asked Father during the evening meal, “What happens when old priests can no longer say mass? Who will take care of them, since they have no children?”

  Father was in a quiet mood. “Then it is time, I suppose,” he said with a wry smile, “that they sprout wings and go up there.”

  I am sure Padre Andong would have preferred it down here, in the new church, if he only could have stayed.

  CHAPTER

  10

  A week before Padre Andong left, the new priest arrived in Rosales. He was a young Pangasinense with short-cropped hair and a bounce in his walk. He had just graduated from the seminary near the provincial capital, and Rosales was his first assignment. During his first week in town, he was always up and about, visiting his wealthy parishioners and supervising the completion of the church.

  He came to the house, too, and after losing two successive games of chess with Father, he practically got Father to promise that henceforth he would hear mass again.

  He must have made some impression not only on Father but with the townspeople as well, for on his first Sunday mass, the church was filled to overflowing and the crowd spilled all over the sacristy and beyond the open doors onto the lawn.

  Shortly after his arrival, however, I stopped serving in the church. I no longer relished working for him; for one, he turned down Cousin Marcelo’s plan to paint murals. He wanted the wall plain. But what really angered me was his refusal to give Tio Baldo a Christian burial. I know that the laws of the church are steadfast, but still, I believe that Tio Baldo—because of his goodness—should have been given a church burial, and that he should not have been buried as if he were a swine.

  It is easy to forgive a person his faults when he is dead because in death he atones for his sins somewhat before the eyes of people who are still living and who have yet to add more on the parchment where their sins are listed. But even if Tio Baldo had lived to this day, I would not nurse within me the slightest displeasure toward him for his having taunted Father. I would, instead, honor him as I do honor him now, although in the end his courage seemed futile.

  It happened that year when the harvest was so good, Old David had to remove the sacks of rice bran from the bodega so that every available space there could be used for storing grain. I thought that Father’s tenants—and also those of Don Vicente—could buy new clothes at last, but they did not; all they saved they gave to Tio Baldo, who, I’m sure, spent it wisely and well.

  Tio Baldo was not really an uncle. In fact, he was no relation at all. He had lived in a battered nipa shack near our house with his mother, who had been, like him, in Father’s employ. She took in washing and did odd jobs for as far back as I could remember.

  Tio Baldo helped Father with the books. He had gone through grade school and high school with Father’s money and insistence, and when Father was in a gracious mood, he spoke of him in terms that always brought color to Tio Baldo’s dark, oily face.

  He would be a teacher someday if he continued enjoying Father’s beneficence. Indeed, Tio Baldo was made for teaching. He used to solve my arithmetic and my spelling problems in such a lucid manner that he never had to do the same trick twice. He also taught me how to fashion a well-balanced kite out of bamboo sticks, so that once it was airborne, it would not swoop down—too heavy in the nose. He taught me how to make the best guava handle for a slingshot, how to ride curves on a bicycle without holding the handlebar, and most important, how to swim.

  One hot, raw afternoon he came to the garden and saw Angel, one of the houseboys, squirting the garden hose at me. He asked if I wanted to go with him to the creek. No invitation would have been more welcome.

  We stripped at the riverbank. From a rise of ground on the bank, he stood straight and still, his muscles spare and relaxed, then he fell forward in a dive that hardly stirred the cool, green water as he slid into it.

  When he bobbed up for air, he looked up at me and shouted: “Come!”

  And seeing him there, so strong and ever ready to protect me, it did not matter that I did not know how to swim, that the water was deep. I jumped after him without a second thought.

  One June morning, Tio Baldo came to the house with his mother—an aging woman with a crumpled face, whose hair was knotted into a tight ball at her nape. They talked briefly with Father in the hall; then the old woman suddenly scooped up Father’s hand and, with tears in her eyes, covered it with kisses.

  The following day Old David hitched his calesa, and we picked up Tio Baldo at his house, loaded his bamboo valise, and took him to the railroad station. He was to stay in Tia Antonia’s house in the city, and while he served her family, he would go to college to be an agrimensor—a surveyor.

  For the next two years that he was in the city, Tio Baldo never took a vacation. He returned one April afternoon; he went straight to the house from the station, carrying a wooden trunk on his shoulders all the way. He had grown lighter in complexion. His clothes were old and shabby, but he wore them with a confidence that was not there before.

  Father stood up from his chocolate and galletas to meet him. Tio Baldo took Father’s hand, and though Father tried clumsily to shake off his hold, Tio Baldo brought the hand to his lips.

  The following day he resumed his old chores, but Father had other ideas. Father took the broom and ledger from him. “I did not send you to college so you can count sacks,” he said in mock anger. “Go train a surveying party. You’ve work to do.”

  Tio Baldo was delighted, particula
rly so when Father bought him a second-hand transit and a complete line of surveyor’s instruments. With these and some of the farm hands trained as linemen and transit men, he straightened out the boundaries of Father’s farms, apart from Don Vicente’s hacienda.

  For half a year he worked very hard; he would start for the fields early in the morning with his huge canvas umbrella, chain, and stakes, and he would return to Rosales late in the evening. He did not work for Father alone; he worked, too, for the tenants.

  Then, one evening, Father came home in an extremely bad humor. He struck my dog with his cane when it came yelping down the gravel path to meet him.

  “See if Baldo is in,” he told me at the top of the stairs in a manner that was enough to send me scampering down from the house to the nipa hut.

  Tio Baldo rushed to the house at once, to the dining room where Father had sat down to supper and was slurping a bowl of cold chicken soup. The moment he saw Tio Baldo, Father pushed the soup aside.

  “Sit down!” he shouted, pointing to the vacant chair at his side. “I want to talk to you, you ungrateful dog.”

  Tio Baldo, his face surprisingly unruffled, took the seat beside Father.

  Father did not waste words. “I’ve always considered a little knowledge dangerous. Baldo, the truth. Is it true you are starting trouble against Don Vicente?”

  I admired Tio Baldo’s courage. “Forgive me, Manong,” he said softly. “I am grieved, but I’ve already given them—the old people in Carmay—my word. I only want to get their lands back. Don Vicente can still live in luxury even without those lands, Manong. It’s common knowledge he grabbed these lands because the farmers didn’t know anything about cadastral surveys and Torrens titles. You said so yourself.”