Don Vicente

by F. Sionil Jose

  Father grumbled. “Don’t worry about dying, David. You’ll live to be a hundred. You’ll still be around long after we are turned to dust.” Father turned to his sister: “I have no objection.” Then to the old man, “You’ll go, David. Maybe just for half a year—”

  “My days are numbered, Apo. I feel it in my bones, in the lungs that are dried in my chest,” Old David said.

  “Who wants to live forever?” Cousin Andring asked. “Drink, David.” He extended another glass of Scotch. “There’s more of this where you are going. None of the cheap nipa wine and gin you have here.”

  But the old man did not even look at my cousin; he turned and shuffled out of the hall.

  The next morning the house was quiet again. Several women from Carmay stayed behind, and, after the guests had gone, they swept the yard, then scrubbed the narra floors. The stable was being torn down by the boys. Earlier, the horse had been dragged to the nearby field and buried there.

  I lingered in the stable, waiting for Old David to go. He was dressed in his best denim—a little faded on the knees and on the buttocks but still quite new because, unlike his other pair of pants, it was not patched. He watched the planks being torn down. The dirty harnesses cluttered up a corner together with those that he had cleaned, their bronze plates polished to a sheen. His battered bamboo suitcase, lashed tight with abaca twine, was beside him.

  “When will you return?” I asked.

  His eyes were smoky red as they always were. He gazed at the ground, at the black streaks of molasses, which the boys had carelessly spilled in their hurry to dismantle the stable. Upstairs in the house, Cousin Andring traded parting pleasantries with Father. Then they came noisily down the stairs.

  “Must you really go?” I asked the old man again.

  Old David’s voice was hollow and distant. “So it must be. This is the time for leaving. Just as there was a time for beginning, planting, growing. I watched them all grow—your uncles, your father—all of them. Your grandfather—he was a spirited young man. I remember how he dared his father’s wrath, how he would flee to the forest with me in search of game. We swam the swollen creek together, even when logs hurtled down with the current. Ay, he was not born to the wilderness, but he defeated me in almost every contest except running. We would race to the edge of the river, but my legs—they were young and agile then, and they always carried me there first. He could shoot straight with the bow or with a gun. But he died, too.” A long pause. “Then your father—I would carry him perched on my shoulders, just like you. I used to drive him around, just the two of us, in the calesa to Calanutan and Carmay. I remember we spilled out once when the wheel fell into a deep rut and broke. I carried him to town on my shoulders, and never once did I put him down. Balungao it was, and that’s five kilometers away.”

  “You are drunk again,” I said.

  He dug his big toe into the sawdust and shook his head. “Ay—I knew them all. I watched them grow into big men, learned men. But no one lives forever—that’s what your cousin said. I can die here, where I saw them all grow. There is nothing like the land you belong to claiming you back. But everywhere the earth is the same.”

  Father, his hands on the shoulders of Tia Antonia and Cousin Andring, walked idly to the gate where the jeep was parked. The servants were loading it with vegetables, two sacks of rice, chicken, and bunches of green bananas.

  Cousin Andring turned to us. “And why isn’t David moving yet?” he shouted. “Is he drunk again?”

  The old man stood up and tried lifting his valise, but it was cumbersome. I grasped its lashing at one end, and we carried it to the jeep.

  “Does he have to bring all that junk to the city?” Cousin Andring asked, looking apprehensively at the jeep that was now overloaded. “I’ll bet anything it’s all bottles of nipa wine. A year’s ration, that’s what.”

  Father smiled. “Let him,” he said.

  “Hurry, David,” Cousin Andring urged the old man, “we’ll miss the train.”

  We raised the suitcase, but the old man’s hold was not firm enough and the trunk fell. I stepped aside lithely just in time to avoid being hit by it. Its lashing broke, and out spilled his things—an old prayer book, his clothes, a leather case in which he kept his betel nuts, and a bottle of nipa wine. The bottle broke when it hit the ground, and its contents were spilled.

  Tia Antonia buckled over laughing, but Cousin Andring was angry. “God,” he cursed, “can’t you be more careful, David?”

  Pushing the old man aside, he picked up his things and dumped them into the open suitcase, then heaved everything into the jeep.

  Old David’s face was pale and expressionless. He was the last to board the vehicle, and as it started, he turned briefly to me. I could not tell whether what glistened on his cheeks was beads of sweat or tears.

  CHAPTER

  16

  Shortly after Old David left to serve in Tia Antonia’s house in the city, I, too, had to pack my bags. I always knew that someday, after I finished high school, I would proceed to Manila and to college. In my younger days I had looked ahead to the event, but when the moment finally came, leaving Rosales filled me with a nameless dread and a great, numbing unhappiness. Maybe it was friendship—huge and granitelike—or just plain sympathy. I could not be too sure anymore. Maybe I fell in love for the first time when I was fifteen.

  Her name was Teresita. She was a stubborn girl with many fixed ideas, and she admonished me once: “Just because you have so much to give does not mean it will all be accepted. Just like that. There’s more to giving than just giving.”

  She was sixteen then, and looking at her made me think of moments bright and beautiful, of the banaba in bloom.

  I did not expect her to be vexed when I brought her a dress, for it was not really expensive. Besides, as the daughter of one of Father’s tenants, she knew me well enough, better perhaps than any of the people who lived in Carmay, the young folks who always greeted me politely, doffed their straw hats, then closed-mouthed went their way.

  I always had coins in my pockets, but that March afternoon, after counting all of them and the stray pieces that I had tucked away in my dresser, I knew I needed more.

  I approached Father. He was at his working table, writing on a ledger, while behind him one of the new servants stood erect swinging a palm-leaf fan over his head. I stood beside him, watching him scrawl the figures on the ledger, his wide brow and his shirt damp with sweat. When he finally noticed me, I could not tell him what I wanted. He unbuttoned his shirt down to his paunch. “Well, what is it?”

  “I’m going to take my classmates this afternoon to the restaurant, Father,” I said.

  He turned to the sheaf of papers before him. “Yes,” he said. “You can tell Chan Hai to take off from his rent this month what you and your friends can eat.”

  I lingered uneasily, avoiding the servant’s eyes.

  “Well, won’t that do?” Father asked.

  It was March, and the high school graduation was but a matter of days away. “I also need some money, Father,” I said. “I have to buy something.”

  Father nodded. He groped for his keys in his drawer, then he opened the iron money box beside him, drew out a ten-peso bill, and laid it on the table.

  “I’m going to buy—” I tried to explain, but with a wave of his hand he dismissed me and went back to his figures.

  It was getting late. After feeding the hogs, Sepa was getting the chickens to the coops. I hurried down the stairs to the main road, which was quiet and deserted now except in the vicinity of the round cement embankment in front of the municipio, where the town loafers were taking in the stale afternoon sun.

  The Chinese storekeepers who occupied Father’s building had lighted their lamps. From the ancient artesian well at the rim of the town plaza, the water carriers and servant girls babbled while they waited for their turn at the pump. Nearby, traveling merchants had unhitched their bull carts after a whole day of slow travel from town to
town and were cooking their supper on broad blackened stones that littered the place. At Chan Hai’s store there was a boy with a stick of candy in his mouth, a couple of men drinking beer and smacking their lips portentously, and a woman haggling over a can of sardines.

  I went to the huge bales of cloth that slumped in one corner and picked out the white silk cloth with glossy printed flowers. I asked Chan Hai, who was perched on a stool smoking his long pipe, how much he would ask for the material I had picked for a gown.

  Chan Hai peered at me in surprise. “Ten pesos,” he said.

  With the package, I hurried to Carmay. Dusk was falling very fast, the leaves of the acacias had folded, and the solemn, mellow chime of the Angelus echoed to the flat stretches of the town. The women who had been sweeping their yards paused. Children reluctantly hurried to their homes, for now the town was draped with a dreamy stillness.

  Teresita and her father lived by the creek in Carmay. Their house sat on a sandy lot that belonged to Father, set apart from the cluster of huts of the village. Its roof, as it was with the other farmhouses, was thatched and disheveled, its walls were battered buri leaves. It stood alone near the gully that had been widened to let the bull carts and calesas through when the bridge was washed away. Madre de cacao trees abounded in the vicinity but offered scanty shade. Piles of burnt rubbish rose in little mounds in the yard, and a disrupted line of ornamental San Francisco ringed the house.

  Teresita was in the kitchen, sampling the broth of what she was cooking. There was a dampness on her brow and a redness in her eyes.

  “What are you doing here at this hour?” she confronted me. In the glow of the crackling stove fire, she looked genuinely surprised.

  I could not tell her at once or show her what I brought.

  “I wanted to see you,” I said, which was true.

  “But it’s already late, and you have to walk quite a long way back.” She laid down the ladle on the table and looked puzzled. She must have noticed then that I was hiding something behind me.

  “What do you have there?” she asked, moving toward me.

  I laid my package on the wooden table cluttered with battered tin plates and vegetables.

  “It’s for you,” I said. My face burned like kindling wood. “I hope you’ll like it.”

  Her eyes still on me, she opened the package. When she saw what it was, she gave a tiny, muffled cry. She shook her head, wrapped the package again, then gave it to me. “I can’t,” she said softly. “It does not seem right at all.”

  “But you need it, and I’m giving it to you,” I said firmly. The burning in my face had subsided. “Is there anything wrong with giving one a gift?”

  And that was when she said, “There are things you just can’t give like what you are doing now …”

  I think it all started that evening when we were in the third year and Teresita recited a poem. It was during the graduation exercises, and she was the only junior in the program. I cannot remember distinctly what the piece was about, except that she spoke of faith and love, and how suffering and loss could be borne with fortitude, and as she did, a clamminess gripped me, smothered me with a feeling I’d never felt before. I recall her resonant voice cleaving the hushed evening, and I was silently one with her.

  I did not go home immediately after the program, for a dance in honor of the graduates followed. Miss Santillan, who was in charge of the refreshments, had asked me to help Teresita in serving them. I sat on one of the school benches after I got tired, watching the dancers file in and out, giggling. When most of them had eaten, Teresita asked Miss Santillan for permission to leave.

  “My father, ma’am,” she said. “He doesn’t want me to stay out very late, because of my cough. Besides, I have work to do early tomorrow.”

  “Going home alone?” Miss Santillan asked.

  “I’m not afraid,” she said resolutely.

  I stood up, strode past the table laden with an assortment of trays and glasses. Beyond the window, a moon dangled over the sprawling school buildings like a huge sieve, and the world was pulsating and young.

  “I’ll walk with you,” I said.

  She protested at first, but Miss Santillan said it would be best if I went along. After Miss Santillan had wrapped up some cakes for her, we went down the stone steps. The evening was clean and cool like a newly washed sheet, and it engulfed us with an intimacy that seemed unreal and elusive. We did not speak for some time.

  “I live very far,” she reminded me, drawing a shabby shawl over her thin shoulders.

  “I know,” I told her. “I’ve been there.”

  “You’ll be very tired.”

  “I’ve walked longer distances. I can take Carmay in a run,” I said, trying to impress her.

  “I’m sure of that,” she said. “You are strong. Once I was washing in the river, and you were swimming with Angel, and you outraced him.”

  “I did not see you,” I said.

  “Of course,” she said, “you never notice the children of your tenants, except those who serve in your house.”

  I was so upset that I could not speak at once. “That is not true,” I objected. “I go to Carmay often.”

  She must have realized that she had hurt me, for when she spoke again she sounded genuinely sorry. “That was not what I meant, and I didn’t say that to spite you.”

  Again, silence.

  The moon drifted out of the clouds in a sudden smudge of silver, lighting up the dusty road. It glimmered on the parched fields and on the giant buri palms that stood like hooded sentinels. Most of the houses we passed had long extinguished their kerosene lamps. Once in a while a dog stirred in its bed of dust and growled at us.

  “You won’t be afraid going home alone?” she asked after a while.

  “There is a giant capre in the balete tree that comes out when the moon is full,” I said. “I’d like to see it. I’ve never seen a ghost.”

  “When I die,” she laughed, “I’ll appear before you.”

  “You’ll be a good ghost, and I won’t be afraid,” I said.

  We walked on. We talked about ourselves, the friends that we ought to have had but did not. We reached the edge of the village where the row of homes receded and finally her house, near the river that murmured as it cut a course through reeds and shallows.

  When we went up to the house, her father was already asleep. In fact he was snoring heavily. At the door she bade me good night and thanked me. Then, slowly, she closed the door behind her.

  So the eventful year passed, and the rains came on time. The fields became green, and the banabas in the streets blossomed. The land became soggy, and the winds lashed at Rosales severely, bowling over a score of flimsy huts that stood on bamboo stilts. Our house did not tremble in the mightiest typhoon. With us, nothing changed. The harvest with its usual bustle passed, the tenants—among them Teresita’s father—filled our spacious bodega with their crops. The drab, dry season with its choking dust settled oppressively, and then it was March—time for Teresita and me to graduate.

  Throughout the hot afternoon, we rehearsed our parts for the graduation program. We would march to the platform to receive our high school diplomas, then return solemnly to our seats. When the sham was over, Teresita and I rested on the crude benches lined before the stage.

  She said softly, “I will not attend the graduation exercises. I can feign illness. I can say I had a fever or my cough got worse, which is the truth, anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “No one would miss me in the march if I don’t come.”

  “You are foolish,” I said.

  “I can’t have my picture, too, I’m sure.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I can’t come. I just can’t,” she repeated with finality.

  She did not have to say anything more. I understood, and that afternoon I asked for money from Father to buy a graduation dress for Teresita.

  And that same week Father ordered Teresita’s father, who
farmed a lot in the delta in Carmay, to vacate the place, as Father had sold it. Teresita’s father had to settle in the hills of Balungao, where there were small vacant parcels, arable patches on the otherwise rocky mountainside. There he might literally scratch the earth to eke out a living.

  April, and a hot glaring sun filtered through the dusty glass shutters and formed dazzling puddles on the floor. The dogs that lolled in the shade of the balete tree stuck out their tongues and panted. The smudges of grass in the plaza were a stubbly brown. The sky was cloudless and azure. Sepa told me to see Father, who had something important to tell me.

  He was in the azotea reading the papers and fanning himself vigorously. The question he asked stunned me. “When do you want to leave for the city?”

  For some time I could not say a word. The school vacation had just started, and the school opening was still two months away. “It’s only April, Father,” I finally said.

  “I know,” he said. “But I want you to get well acquainted with your cousins there.”

  Heat waves rose, shimmering in the street, swallowed up by the dust that fluffed high when a jeepney passed. Father’s voice: “You will grow older.” He hammered this notion into me. “You will grow older and realize how important—this thing that I’m doing. You will leave many faces here. You will outgrow boyish whims. In the city you’ll meet new friends.”

  I did not speak.

  “The time will come when you will return to me—a man.”

  “Yes, Father,” I said as he, having spoken, went on with his reading.

  The dark came quickly. The sun sank behind the coconut groves of Tomana and disappeared below the jagged horizon. Before darkness fell, I left the house and journeyed to where the houses were decrepit, where children were clad most of the time in unkempt rags and, when a stranger would stumble into their midst, they would gape at him with awe. Beyond the cluster of homes came the barking of dogs stirring in the dust.

  I went up the ladder that squeaked, and when Teresita’s father recognized me in the light of the flickering kerosene lamp hanging from a rafter, a shadow of a scowl crept into his leathery face. Even when I said, “Good evening,” his sullen countenance remained. He returned my greeting coldly, then went down and left us alone.