Don Vicente

by F. Sionil Jose

  Angel was to serve us for ten years without pay. In the ledger in Father’s room, on the list of debtors, was the name of his father. As with all the other tenants, Angel’s father had often been in great need.

  “Why do you butcher your carabao and feed a throng because your son is getting a wife?” Father always blustered to them who came asking for loans. But always, in the end, the tenants got the money—what they needed for a “decent” funeral, a baptism, a wedding. And as their debts piled up, they promised, “Next harvest will be good …” Sometimes, when their forecast was right, they did pay, but during the planting season—in the lean days of June, July, and August—they would again be before Father with the same old plea.

  When Angel came to the house, his flesh was mottled with a skin disease caused by long hours of work in the waterlogged fields. Father bade him sleep in the bodega, by the wall near the west window. It was a shelf, actually, which was used to hold jars of fermenting sugarcane wine, and when the harvests came he was hemmed in by sacks, and there was only enough space for him to crawl onto his board and snuggle there. When the grain was sold and the storehouse was emptied, the cavern was all his again.

  In time the coarse board was polished by his back. The seasons changed, the balete tree lost its leaves, then sprouted them again. The fiesta filled the house with loquacious cousins from the city, and before long, Christmas. The boys and Old David received new clothes, they sang carols in the yard. New Year—the boys from across the street dueled Angel and me with bamboo cannons loaded with empty milk cans—and, finally, harvest time, and Chan Hai cluttered the yard again with his trucks.

  “This is a harsh year,” Angel said, when his parents came to stay in the bodega with him. May rain fell at its appointed time, and Old David hoped the harvest would really be good, for he had observed the sun sink blood-red behind the foothills and seen the full moon and its indigo halo. Weren’t those the signs that augured beneficence?

  But shortly after the seedlings sprouted from the beds, the worms crawled out and devoured them. What the worms spared was transplanted into the irrigated fields, but barely grown, the sprouts were parched by a long August drought. Only those near the waterways survived to be lashed later on by an October storm. For a week the winds whipped the crops and the farmers scurried in the fields. But no matter how fast they cut the ripened grain, they could not pick each seed from the mud where the wind had embedded it. Father’s share did not even reach up to Angel’s pallet, and Chan Hai made but a few trips to the bodega. By February all that was left were a few sacks of seed rice, over which Angel kept watch, because every day some hungry tenant came to town and peeped into the bodega before going up to Father to ask for a loan.

  Hunger precipitated despair. But more than despair was the nagging belief that the land they had patiently and lovingly groomed never really belonged to them but to Father or Don Vicente. This rankled in their hearts—Tio Baldo had long been dead, but they remembered. They knew that in the unrecorded past their forebears cleared the land but were cheated when influential men made the Torrens titles. This belief alone united them and gave them strength.

  One late February afternoon, Angel’s father rushed to the storeroom and told his son to leave immediately. Angel refused; instead, he convinced his father to go see Father, who was in the azotea, watching a ball game in the plaza.

  “They are coming tonight,” Angel’s father said. “They will force the storehouse open. The grain will be divided among them.”

  Father listened without stirring, and when Angel’s father was through, he walked briskly to his room. When Father came out, the new Garand that the soldiers had given him was slung on his arm.

  He looked at Angel’s father coldly. “By God, I’ll use this if I have to! I’ll call the constabulary. The bastards will not get a single grain.”

  They came at dusk, their bolos tied to their waists, their talk a drone of many bees that rose ominously to the house where, from the half-closed windows, the maids tried to make out their brothers and fathers. They spread out in the yard restlessly, then one of them strode to the door and rattled the iron latch and called, “Apo, we want to talk with you!”

  Father was waiting for them at the top of the stairs. He went down, brushing aside Old David, who tried to hold him back by saying, “Blood must not be spilled,” for Father was unarmed. I rushed down after him, walked among the strangers whose brown faces were indistinct in the shadows cast by the storm lamp Old David held high in front of Father.

  His tenants followed him like steel filings drawn by a magnet. Walking behind him, I expected anytime the shining arc of a bolo to descend on him. He walked on, silent and sure, and when he reached the bench under the balete tree, he mounted it. Old David hung the storm lamp on an overhanging branch, and in its yellow glow Father’s face was livid with rage. He looked at all of them gathered before him, the men whose first names he knew, and when he spoke, his voice trembled.

  “I knew you were coming,” Father said. “I know you want to tear down the gate of the storeroom, so you can get what is in there.”

  The men shuffled and murmured among themselves.

  “And I know, too,” Father went on, his voice now pitched and stern, “that you are saying, ‘Why must we pay a yearly rent when the land we farm is ours?’

  “I’ll tell you. I was not born a hundred years ago, but I know that when my father came down from the north, he cleared this land. I bought the rest. You know that. Maybe Don Vicente did steal from you, but not I! I can drive you from your farms, use machines. It is cheaper, easier, less trouble. Maybe I’ll even harvest more.”

  Father paused. His hands shook. “You came here to tear down doors. Well, go ahead. You’ll get a few sacks of grain. You’ll have full stomachs for a week. But after that, what? When the planting season comes, where will you get seed rice?”

  No answer. Then, slowly, some of them drifted away from where Father harangued at them and sat under the awning of the storeroom, mumbling a babble of solutions.

  “But can’t you give us something to eat, Apo?” someone finally asked.

  Father stepped down from the bench and went to the bodega. At the door Father called Angel. The massive doors swung open, and in the light of the storm lamp, which Old David raised, Angel stepped forward, the shotgun in his hands. The tenants glared at him, and from their curses I knew that they had disowned him.

  “I am not the government, nor is Don Vicente,” Father said. “If I give one, I must give all. Go home, all of you, or I’ll run you out of this yard!”

  “Hunger can’t wait, Apo,” one was brave enough to shout.

  “You’ll die of starvation tomorrow if you eat your seed rice!” Father shouted back. “Go home, all of you. I’m not the government—nor a philanthropist!”

  Then the dry season—the land beyond the fence browned. Heavy clouds formed overhead, but rain did not fall and light passed on to darkness. The boys gathered edible moss from the creeks, the women returned empty-handed from the withered vegetable patches, and the men scanned the blue, burning sky.

  Angel’s father, who came to the house every Sunday to give his share of firewood as did Ludovico’s father, stopped coming, and one April morning Angel and I rode a bull cart to Carmay to trim the madre de cacao and acacia trees that lined the barrio road.

  On our return, the cart loaded with green twigs, Angel said, “It is hardest this year.” Angel’s parents came with us with all their things, and upon reaching the house, they sought Father.

  He was smoking in the azotea.

  “We have nothing left to eat in Carmay, Apo,” Angel’s father said. “The sweet potato has been shorn of its green leaves.”

  Angel’s mother said, “We have tried everything. Even banana roots.”

  Father listened placidly, rocking his chair, his arms limp on his lap. The smoke from his pipe curled above his head. “I have many mouths to feed,” he said finally, “and your debts—you haven’t paid t
hem yet.”

  “We won’t stay here long, Apo,” Angel’s father pleaded. “Before the planting season comes we will leave Carmay.”

  “For where?” Father asked.

  “We are selling our house and our carabao, Apo, for our fare to Mindanao.”

  “Like the others, ha?”

  Angel’s father did not answer. There being no alternative for Father but to let them stay, they carried their things to the storehouse and swept away from a corner the cobwebs, bat droppings, and bran. They did not mean to be idle. Angel’s father fixed the fence, and his mother helped in the kitchen, until one May morning Father chanced upon her coughing hoarsely there. He told her never to work in the house again.

  Father did not send them away as the town sanitary inspector had recommended. It was June at last, and the first showers of the rainy season blanketed Rosales. All the things Angel’s parents owned were packed in two bundles, and Angel drove them in Father’s calesa to the train station. All through the narrow, shrub-lined dirt road, they did not speak. They loaded their bundles into a boxcar.

  As the train chugged to start, Angel reminded his father, “Don’t forget to write. Tell me what is happening. And someday”—he stared at his big toe digging into the sodden, coal-sprinkled bed of the ties—“I’ll come, too.”

  Angel’s father nudged his wife. “Hear that, woman? Don’t forget what your son said.”

  A slight drizzle started as they climbed into the boxcar, and Angel and I ran back to the rig. They lifted their hands in awkward farewell, but Angel did not look back. We drove back slowly, and he held the reins in check so that we reached home in a walk.

  A full month passed and the land finally stirred. The rains became fuller and stronger, and the fresh green of June darkened to a dirty hue. The banabas bloomed and amorseco weeds wove violet patterns around the mud holes that pocked the plaza. One afternoon, as was my daily chore, I returned from the post office with a bundle of letters. At the foot of the stairs, I called Angel, who was in the garden weeding the gladiolus bulbs, and threw him the bundle.

  “From Mindanao,” I said.

  In the storehouse that night, in the light of the storm lamp, I pored over the letters. They told of how his folks barely had enough seed rice to start the planting season in that distant land. They were isolated, and in the evening only the flickering of a faraway neighbor’s lamp in the trackless dark impinged upon them the consoling thought that they were not alone at the edge of the forest.

  The succeeding letters arrived regularly, and I answered some for Angel, who now mastered the alphabet but could not yet write legibly. The boys envied him for his parent’s luck. He told them of the wonderful Cotabato fields, how his father caught a wild pig under their house, how one evening his father killed a python in the chicken coop. As to what was in store for them, Angel had no foreboding. In another year Angel’s mother told of how they were plagued by moneylenders who wanted to get all they harvested for the little that they owed.

  “Tell me why it is like this,” Angel asked.

  I could not explain the tragedy that stalked his folks before the next harvest was in. When he received the fateful letter, he managed to have one of the boys read it. In the afternoon, when I came upon him filling the horse trough with water, his eyes were swollen from crying.

  “Father is dead,” he said simply.

  “Let me see the letter,” I said.

  He washed the bran and black molasses dripping off his hands and gave me a folded sheet from the ruled pad on which his mother always wrote. “Read it, please,” he said.

  I started cautiously, feeling out the words: “My dear son:” (The letters always started that way.) “This old and aching heart will overflow with joy if, when this letter reaches you, you are in the best of health.

  “There is not much for me to do now [there was an erasure that blotted out two lines] … now that your father is no more.

  “Sometimes I think we should have never come here, but in this land the rice grows tall. We thought we would never know hunger again, but hunger will always be with us. Your father could not even fight when they got him …”

  Somewhere in the stable, a neighing horse drowned out my words. Angel leaned on the wooden rail that separated the trough from the stall of Father’s castaño.

  “Why did they do it?” he asked.

  “We came here,” I went on with the letter, “because they said that for us who cannot wait for the three-month rice to bear grain, there is plenty here. The trees—they are in the forests. The cogon grass and bamboo, too. We can build strong houses here, but we shall always be cowering before the big men around us, doomed to die, paying …

  “We will always fall prey, chick to the hawk. They said this land is ours and we can own all we plant. But here there is hunger, too, as elsewhere in the world. We fear not only God’s wrath, but the field rats that devour our grain, the animals that trample our fields. We fear men because they have made the world too small for us. There is not enough of it for us to plant, we who have never known what lay beyond the waters we crossed or the high mountains that now surround us …”

  “What about Mother?” Angel bent forward, his eyes burning. “What does she say of herself?”

  I turned the letter over. “There is nothing more,” I said.

  In the days that followed, Angel would rush to meet me every time I appeared at the bend of the road with the mail from the municipal building. He would trail me up the stairs, and without bothering to look at him, I always shook my head. There were no more letters.

  I chanced upon him in the bodega one afternoon while hunting house lizards and mice. He was hidden by piles of firewood and corn, poking a rod into the piles to flush out the mice. He did not speak until I saw him. His eyes were hollow, his voice was heavy. “Mother is dead, too,” he finally said.

  “You are not sure,” I said, cocking my air rifle as a mouse raced across the eaves.

  “She is dead,” he said.

  I fired, and the lead pellet whammed into the tin roof with a sharp metallic twang. I lowered the air gun with a curse.

  “Two months,” Angel said, breathing hard, “and not a letter. Can’t you see? How was she buried, who dug the grave, was there a cross?”

  Silence.

  “And if someday I’ll go there, how will I look for them?”

  There was nothing I could say. I stood up and left him, his words ringing in my ears. The next day Father found him behind the bodega, seated in the wide drop of the driveway. He did not water the rose plots for a week, and in the heat, the young plants that Father loved were dead.

  Hard times, Angel said, for during the last harvest Father did not go to the fields anymore as was his wont. But for a company of soldiers who had their camp—an untidy blotch of olive-colored tents—in the town plaza, who drew their water from the artesian well behind the house, Father and I would have gone to the city to return to Rosales only when he could safely canter on his horse to his fields again.

  A few weeks back, the Huks swooped down on the next town and all through the long night the sad boding chatter of machine guns and the scream of speeding trucks on the provincial road kept us awake. Since then it was prohibited to walk in town at night without a light, and Father slept with his shotgun and his new revolver within easy reach.

  Shortly after the Angelus, Sepa came to the sala, where, beneath the new Coleman lamp, I was reading. “Angel has something for you,” the old woman said, and gestured that he was waiting for me in the bodega. I went down to the silent yard. Inside the big building I flashed a light on the broad wooden board where Angel sat leaning against the wall.

  “Do you want ointment for blisters?” I bantered, playing the light on his face.

  He did not answer. I turned the light off, and in the pale haze from the barred window above him, his gaunt, tired face became softer.

  He stretched his hand to me. “Here,” he said in a tone that was supplicating. I took from hi
m the battered cardboard box where he kept his mother’s letters. “Keep it for me.”

  I climbed to his side and sat on the pallet. I flashed a light on the stone floor, saw that his trunk fashioned out of packing boards was tied. He wore shoes, too, the worn-out pair Father thought he had thrown away.

  “Are you leaving because Father whipped you? Why, he whips everyone. Even me!”

  Angel shook his head.

  “Where are you going, then?” I asked, gripping the box.

  “Don’t tell Apo,” he said. “I am leaving tonight. With the soldiers.”

  “But where?”

  The alien sounds of evening filled the storehouse. In its blackness rats moved. Outside, in the balete tree, cicadas were alive.

  “I don’t know where they will send us,” Angel said carelessly. “I am not going to Mindanao, though. Maybe, someday, I’ll go to the United States, like your Tio Benito. But for the next few years …” He turned reflectively to the barred window and pointed to the starlit west where the mountains loomed. “We will go there. Fight there.”

  In my mind flashed the vivid sight of the uncovered bodies of soldiers brought to the town plaza after the all-night fighting in the nearby hills—the stiff, half-naked dead, some barefoot, all their faces anonymously stolid in death—dumped by the camp roadside to be identified.

  “You are stupid, just as Father said.”

  “I am eighteen,” he retorted.

  “You don’t know what is waiting there for you. You’ll die.”

  His rough hand slid into mine. “It doesn’t make a difference.” His voice quavered. “But what can I do? Will I stay here forever like David, tending the garden, feeding the horses? I would have joined the Huks if they came and asked me. I am sure that with them I’d be in a place other than here. Can’t you see? I have to go. Where I am going I’ll have my own life. The soldiers have that much to offer. And they are here.”

  “You are going to die.”

  He let go of my hand. In the dark, his teeth gleamed in a quick smile. “That should worry your father,” he said with a trace of sarcasm, “but don’t think I’m running away from my father’s debt. My salary, most of it, will go to Apo. Until we are free.”