The sun that is kind now ripens no grain
And rain that falls, falls on barren clay.
My Brother, I am alone.
CHAPTER
18
Luis Asperri could have gone home to Rosales every weekend if he had wanted to. There was a host of legitimate reasons for going home: his father’s birthday, the town fiesta in June, Christmas, the Holy Week. After all, Rosales was a mere two hundred kilometers away from Manila. But after he had left the town and gone through college, he had always found it inconvenient to go home, and though he knew the real reason for staying away, there were always excuses that were credible, so that in time he came to believe them. Seeming to understand, his father did not press him all through the four years. After all, it was easy for the old man to go to Manila, at least five times a year, to visit his favorite gambling den in San Juan, have a lengua dinner in the casino, of which he was one of the oldest members, and after that, polish off the evening with a visit to his whorehouse in Pasay.
The old man, however, had not come to Manila for the last six months. As Trining had said, Don Vicente was ill. He had always been robust and even obese, so it must have been the Carlos Primero, the pork asado, and the sin vergüenzas that had finally taken their toll. The thought that his father might finally die lingered in Luis’s mind with a touch of melancholy, although it did not strike him with apprehension. It was, after all, something that would happen someday to his father as well as to everybody else. Besides, the old man had gotten what he had wished for: a son who bore his name, though his complexion was not as fair nor his nose as aquiline.
Luis had picked up his cousin Trining from her convent school the previous evening to sleep in his house so that they could start early. Indeed, they had had a six o’clock breakfast, but the traffic in Balintawak, at the northern exit from the city, was overwhelming, and when they finally managed to reach the open highway the sun was already blazing down, its rage over the land white and consuming. It was March, and the fields were chico brown. The emerald green that burnished everything during the rainy season had long become faded except in patches of irrigated plots where grew watermelons and mongo.
He seldom went outside the city. There had been excursions to the south, to Negros, where some of his sugar-planter friends often asked him to spend the weekend, and a couple of shopping trips to Hong Kong, but no lengthy car rides like this one. Looking fretfully at the land around him, he realized that in all the years he had been in Manila nothing in the countryside had changed, not the thatched houses, not the ragged vegetation, not the stolid people.
Changeless land, burning sun—the words turned in his mind and he decided that they would someday make the opening line for a poem.
Changeless land?
He could see the blight sweeping over this land like a thunderstorm creeping over the near horizon. Quickly the sky above the line of trees darkens and the clouds start to boil. The muggy heat disappears, and the air is quiet and still. Then the wind stirs and the dust in the street rises in billows, as if some giant fan has been turned on. A blackness starts to descend and cover everything, the browned fields of May, the old cracked earth. A flash ignites the sky, and the crack of lightning hurtles across, reverberating into a long, roiling boom—and then silence, coolness, and blackness again. Now a rattle from the distance, like a thousand pebbles cast on tin roofs, on the steaming asphalt, on everything that has waited and waited. The rain has come, the season for green things.
It was not rain that was coming; it was another season, and he could see it as darkness, could feel its electric tension as he had felt the touch of life itself. But this was not life, not even the promise of it, and the fact that he was no longer part of this land, this changeless miasma from which he sprang, filled him with sadness and guilt.
His kind of life was not what he had sought; it had been thrust upon him. His consciousness hounded him, and it made all the difference, the nagging qualm, for though he had fled Rosales, there was no escaping this blight, and he saw it clearly as the Chrysler sped through the monotonous drabness of the plain.
This is the changeless land, scorched by sun and lashed by typhoon, and on it the peasant—as much a part of the land as the barren trees and the meager grain that grow on it—is changeless, too. Barefoot, ill-clothed, a fighting cock under his arm, here is the peasant, working with scythe and plow, plodding along, as slow and as patient as his water buffalo.
How to be completely free from this land—this was what he had sought, and yet he was going back now, not just to Rosales but to the beginning.
His cousin who was beside him would never understand what it was that cankered him. She had not bothered to understand; she welcomed his company—that seemed enough. She was eighteen, and the life in Manila was waiting to be lived. To her, going to Rosales was but the savoring of another life—and perhaps she could make the experience more sweet than it promised to be.
The two other men in the car, the driver and the encargado, were incidental, servants to be ordered around, to warrant a safe, comfortable passage, and they did their best, making small noises, running to the restaurant in Angeles to get cold drinks for them. Both these men, however, could have been his relatives, for they came from the village where he was born.
Santos, the caretaker, could have been an uncle. In his own self-deprecating way he hid a sharp mind and a capacity for observation that was both peasant and sophisticated. He had been his father’s caretaker for years and had maintained the position by sheer talent. Simeon, who was Santos’s cousin, was stolid like a buffalo but not dim-witted. He lived with his childless wife, Marta, in the garage behind Luis’s house on the boulevard. He was also part-time gardener, handyman, bodyguard, and messenger for the young mestizo. The two could be mistaken for brothers because they were both short and dark and their Ilokano faces were broad and solemn, as if they had never learned to laugh.
The big black car slowed to a stop, and the warm, gummy spell of the dry season rushed in. Luis stopped reading the manuscript and put it back into the brown pigskin portfolio beside him. Five soldiers in battle green were seated on a wooden bench in the thatched shed by the road. A tall, lean one with a steel helmet, his carbine dipping from the crook of his arm, approached the car.
“It will be night when we reach home,” Trining said edgily. “It’s more than two hours lost, these stupid checkpoints.”
Luis pressed her hand, then turned to the window. The soldier peered briefly into the car. He doesn’t even look eighteen, Luis thought as their eyes met.
The soldier moved toward the front and asked Simeon where they were going. Santos, the caretaker, answered, “To Rosales,” and turning to Luis and Trining, “we are taking our master’s children home for a vacation.”
“I didn’t ask you,” the soldier said gruffly. “You,” he said, thrusting a chin at Simeon.
“We are going to Rosales,” Simeon said.
The soldier looked at Luis again and then at Trining; on her, his eyes lingered. He waved his hand: “Roll!” The gears clashed and the car surged forward.
“Son of a whore,” Luis said softly under his breath.
“Don’t curse,” Trining admonished him. She was a sophomore in an exclusive girls’ college run by German nuns, and her obsession with clean speech bothered him.
“Whore,” he repeated. “That’s the truth, isn’t it?”
“You have been in the city too long,” Santos said. “There are many things in the province that have changed, Luis.”
The car picked up speed, and it was cool again. Luis returned to the manuscript he was reading.
“Do you really have to work?” Trining asked. “We are almost there.” Turning to her, Luis saw her pout; he had not been too attentive to her, so he placed the manuscript back and zippered the portfolio. She smiled and pressed his hand.
They were nearing Rosales—one more village and they would be there. To his right, beyond the clumps of bamboo on the
horizon, the thin finger of the town’s yellow water tank towered above the trees, the coconut groves and the buri palms. The car slowed down as Simeon let a herd of carabaos cross. Then the car turned right to a dirt road, leaving the main cement highway.
Santos turned to Luis. “I might just as well tell you,” he said evenly. “Do not be alarmed when you see him and find him changed. We all grow old …”
Luis nodded.
“But in his case,” Santos continued, “he seems to have grown old suddenly—and tired. I am not saying he is different from what he has been in the last few months. But all day now he does nothing but stay in the house. He doesn’t go out anymore. Does not even read like he used to. He is just there, propped up on his bed with an ice bag on his head. The doctors say his heart is not getting any better, but he doesn’t believe them. He says it is the times, the mood. And at his age there is everything to make his heart worse. The troubles we are having in Lagasit, for instance. That’s why we now have civilian guards—twenty of them. You can never tell how useful they will be—in the north, particularly in Sipnget.”
“Sipnget? What is there?” Luis bent forward, anxious to know more.
Santos turned to him again, an assuring grin on his face. He seemed to know just what made Luis apprehensive. “Do not worry,” he said lightly. “Your grandfather and your mother, they are well. And your brother, Victor—I think he has found work.”
Luis leaned back, relieved.
“It’s another kind of trouble,” Santos elaborated. “You know about it, I am sure. You are working for a newspaper, and this is no secret anymore.”
“What is no secret?”
“Times are changing, Luis. People, too. The tenants are getting organized, and they cannot be frightened anymore—nor impressed by what is being done for them. The last time I was in Sipnget to supervise the division of the mongo harvest they were dissatisfied. All of them. One even said, ‘Well, the law says you only get a third of the harvest and we keep the rest. But you still get half. Remember, it isn’t far off when you won’t be able to get anything. In fact, it is you who will have to pay.’ ”
“You told Father this?”
“No, but I think he knows. And now, with all this bothering him, he is touchier every day.”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” Trining said, turning balefully to Luis. “Twice a month I go home. But you!”
“Please, it’s different with you,” Luis said.
“He reads your letters,” Simeon interrupted their private war, “and he gets your magazine and reads what you write. Sometimes he asks me to read for him. His eyes were never strong, and they are weaker now. But my knowledge of English is poor, and his eyeglasses—he breaks one almost every month.” Santos laughed nervously. “They are handy to throw when you are angry, you know.”
The ride was no longer comfortable, for the roadbed of pebble and stone, unleveled throughout the wet season, was laced with ridges, and where the pebbles had been scattered, the ruts were deep and the bigger boulders that were road foundations thrust up like mounds. The land had not changed—this vast brown land his father’s great-grandfather from that small pine-clad town in the Basque had claimed long ago in the name of the Spanish sovereign and the Asperris yet to come. On both sides of the road the fields, long shorn of their harvest, had become scraggly with growths of grass. Everything was tinted with brown and the dazzling sunlight, but beyond the fields, the foothills of Balungao, where his great-grandfather had once stood to gaze upon this plain—as his father never tired of retelling—were purplish and scabbed with black where the cogon grass had been burned. It was there that his father had gone in the past to hunt. It was to these foothills, gold-streaked and blue and bathed with translucent haze, that the farmers who could no longer farm in the plain eventually went to eke out a living from rock and thin soil.
The forest had long been shaved off, and where the deer and the wild boar used to roam, there remained only cogon wastes splintered into tenant farms for the hundreds of patient and land-hungry Ilokanos who had come down from their narrow and inhospitable homeland in the north. After three generations the footpaths had become roads leading to Acop, to Carmay, to Cabugawan, and to Sipnget and the small village called Rosales had become the center of the rice trade from the Cagayan Valley and had grown, as had the fortunes of the Asperris. They built bodegas, which they rented out to Chinese rice merchants and moneylenders. They also built a rice mill for the cheap grain their tenants produced and what they cornered in the harvest months, when the price of grain was very low. But difficult times soon came to the eastern portion of the province and to Rosales: a railroad to San Jose farther north cut down the importance of the town as a trading center. Left on its own, Rosales did not progress or produce more; there was no effort to build a dam across the two rain-fed creeks that hemmed the town and converged to drain the precious water into the Agno River. The Asperri clan did not manage the land well, and there finally came a time when only two were left—Don Vicente, who preferred the sybaritic pleasures of Manila and Europe, and Don Alfredo, his brother, who lived in the old brick house their grandfather had built. It was spared by revolutionary ire in 1898, but not by the colorums in the thirties.
Because Rosales is not astride the main Luzon highway, it is, like all small towns, condemned to anonymity and to that disquietude that has pervaded the rural areas for decades. The Ilokanos who inhabit it are hardy and given to carabao-like drudgery, but they are also in constant debt, not only to the Asperris but to the leaseholders, the encargados, and the Chinese shopkeepers or the lesser landlords, men like Santos who are Ilokanos, too.
Luis had not missed all this. The comforts of his Manila home had bothered him. It was in this Ermita house where his father had lived as an absentee landlord. It was here, too, where Luis had grown to manhood, away from the cares of Rosales and of Sipnget, away from his grandfather and his brother and his mother. Thinking of Sipnget now, Luis felt a dull ache pass through him, but it was nothing, nothing but a wisp in the wind; he was here in this place called Rosales—and how small, how nondescript and immemorial the town appeared.
It seemed as if in Rosales nothing had stirred from its ancient lethargy, as if no breath of life had blown through. Even the people in the streets, in front of nondescript stores, seemed to move about with the imprint of lassitude and surrender on their tired brown faces. Here was the herd, inured to everything; here was stone-hard patience not as virtue but as deadly vice—not only in the faces of people but in the physiognomy of the town itself, in the pathetic row of low, squat buildings with horrid soft-drink signs. The dirt road now had been asphalted as the center of the town has drawn near, with its main street and the town plaza—an expanse of withered grass, a cement basketball court with its cracked floor, and at one edge of the plaza this giant, gnarled balete tree, which, as small-town legends go, was supposed to be the home of spirits and all those anonymous wraiths that bode evil if they are not flattered with offerings. At the other end of the plaza was the municipio. It stood on the same spot where several years back, before the war, it was burned down. Fronting the municipio was the white monument of Rizal, stolid in the brilliant sunshine, and to its left was the Catholic church. The houses thinned out, and beyond was a line of small cogon-roofed houses on bamboo stilts and a few big houses of the merchants and lesser landlords.
A shallow curve, then the Asperri house comes into view, fortresslike, surrounded by a brick wall covered with dying strands of cadena de amor, which would turn lush and green with the first rains of May. As a little boy, he had seen another house, of brick, paned with colored glass as this house was now paned, overlooking the whole town, higher than the church steeple, taller than the coconut palm but not as high as the balete tree. Before the war, as with the municipio, this house was burned by a small band of men—fanatics who professed an implacable hatred for the Asperris, members of some native religion that enshrined Bonifacio and Rizal and the whole phalanx o
f heroes who had fought the Spaniards. He had read about them, heard about them from his grandfather and his mother, and secretly he had shared the sentiments that had propelled them to violence. There were even times when Luis had mused how it would have turned out if they had chanced upon his father in the old house and killed him, too, as they had killed his uncle and his aunt. Then he would not have been born—a wish that came to him in those moments of anguished self-doubt that were far more frequent now that he was secure and never in want than in the days when he was sunburned, barefoot, and perpetually hungry in that godforsaken corner called Sipnget.
A new house had been built—a replica of what had been destroyed in one night of fury, but sturdier of foundation and with the latest accoutrements, for his father loved comfort, ease, and of course, the power that his lands and other forms of wealth had brought him. He had lived in Europe and in Manila indulging in his pleasures; he had not intended to go back to Rosales to manage a hacienda and those simple Ilokanos and live like a hermit as his brother had done; he had gone through that experience already, had loathed Rosales and would have found the small town unlivable—but there was duty, not just to what his forebears had carved, but to his young niece, who had survived that indescribable night.
This was home, this was the repository of the past, and every boy in town regarded it with awe. It was as secret as the sacristy, for very few had been inside it and hardly anybody knew what moved within its caverns.
In its yard were the ancient trees that had been spared by the fire. From a distance they looked like green mounds from which the battlements rose, dull red and white, their glass windows reflecting bits of sun. Wooden caryatids of buxom women naked from the waist up adorned the corners that faced the street. Although the house was not old, the original red paint had not been renewed and the cracked red walls gave the house an ancient, medieval look.
It was just as well, for Luis had once likened the house to a storybook castle, sinister with dungeons—but dungeons in which the prisoners had a beautiful time, served as they were with bread and water. In Sipnget, where Luis had grown up, he had tasted bread only on Sundays, when his mother went to town to sell a few greens and came back with her rattan basket half-filled with soap, matches, salt, sugar, and a couple of pan de sal for her two boys.
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