Don Vicente

by F. Sionil Jose

  “… This is a great place to live in, Luis, but one must be strong to live here—and practical; one must know how to deal with the weakness in oneself as with those in others.”

  Luis bowed, as if in thought, and his gaze wandered to the fine polished planks of narra that made up the floor—long, wide, and shiny, the grain pulsing through. It was almost impossible to get this kind of wood now, for the big trees that once stood in this part of the country had been cut down. Indeed, this house, though a replica of what was burned, was the handiwork of his forebears, the Asperris. It could well be the vaulting monument of their perseverance and their cunning. He knew the story by rote, as his own people in Sipnget had told him—how the Americans came with their transits and their measuring rods, how the Spaniards worked with the Americans, and how with no more than scraps of paper they made binding and permanent the bondage of those who had from the beginning felled the trees, cut the grass, killed the snakes, and dammed the creeks, so that this inhospitable land could be made gracious and fecund.

  History is written by the strong? Where had he read that before? Was it Vic, his half-brother, who had quoted it to him, or one of his radical friends in the university? Again the old anger was brought to life and with it the sense of futility that he could do nothing, nothing, for it was not in him to do battle with the wind, not with his puny body, not with his shallow intellect, least of all with his poetry. He cringed again at having to listen to his father’s fears, his expectations, and he listened to the old man as one would hearken to a knell.

  “I will go as most men must go, but I want honesty between us. You are my son, my blood is in your veins, my sinews …”

  I am your son but also my mother’s. Luis turned over the silent reply; the land that you ravaged has claim on me, too, and not just your ancestors from a distant and rocky peninsula.

  “And I want my blood and my life to go on when this mortal frame is no more. I want you, Luis, to marry and have an heir before I go. I want you to look again at your cousin. It is important that this land, this wealth, should not leave the Asperris. It should not go to these tenants who do not understand what it is to carve something out of nothing, who have no pride in their families, in their race. They are treacherous, they are ingrates—they killed my brother, don’t ever forget that.”

  The old man was angry; he was also afraid. Luis could understand it better now—the civilian guards, the patrols, and checkpoints. The Army was never there to protect the poor—it had always been an institution for the preservation of privilege.

  “I know, Father,” he said, “but if they do want to kill you or me, do you think your civilian guards—”

  “Our civilian guards, Luis. Our civilian guards.”

  “Would the Army be able to defend you? This is not the best defense, Father; it has never been—”

  “You have the traditional loathing and distrust of the intellectual for anyone who carries a sword. You have been mesmerized by that old saying, the pen is mightier than the sword. Did it ever occur to you that it was, perhaps, a poet who coined it? People believe it but it is nonsense. The man with the gun is the state, and the state is everything. Can there be progress without order? Without the state and its stability, you have to go back to the jungle …”

  “This is the jungle, Father,” Luis said, surprised that he could now openly contradict his father. “It has always been thus.”

  “And the predators are people like me?” Don Vicente shook his head ruefully. “And what are you?” he asked. “Will you be the savior of the oppressed and the weak? My son, there are no oppressors, there are no oppressed. There are only people who seize opportunities to make their lives better. The poor are virtuous? The worst enemies of the poor are their own kind—because they are lazy, because they refuse to change.”

  “It is we who refuse to change, Father,” Luis said. “We have grown used to our comforts, to habits of the past.”

  Don Vicente’s voice lifted. “But I have changed, Luis, not just in the flesh. I am no longer the youth who loitered in Europe, who lived lavishly in Manila and loathed every moment I spent in this town. My views—they have changed as well. You don’t have to tell me that everything springs from the land and what we have gotten from it must be returned.”

  Did his father finally believe in justice, then? Or was he again indulging in rhetoric?

  Another uneasy silence, then Don Vicente thrust his chin to the door. The interview had come to an end.

  The sun-flooded hall was blinding after his stay in the old man’s darkened room. In his own room, near the end of the hall, the floor appeared newly waxed and the bed smelled clean, the sheets freshly starched. Beside his bed his suitcases were lined up, and he unpacked them, arranged his clothes in the tall aparador in the corner. He walked to the azotea and sat on the stone ledge. The faint rustling in the eaves and the sonorous chug-chug of the rice mill behind the house came to him. The brown fields lay beyond the walls of timeless adobe; so, too, did the river dike and the brown dots of buri palms far away.

  Trining came out of her room and joined him. He did not notice her until she sat by his side, their arms touching. He turned to her and saw that she had changed from the brown starched uniform she had worn on the trip. It was sloppy and had given her no identity. Now she wore a yellow silk dress that accentuated the soft lines of her young body blossoming into womanhood.

  “You seem to know everything—just about all the wrong things to tell him,” Luis said petulantly.

  Trining looked at him incredulously. “But he knows, Luis—everything—even without my telling him. Do you think Tio is a fool even if he sits in that room all day? He wrote to me about your quitting school. He knows you quarreled with your father rector. Prerogatives—was that what you called it?”

  Luis did not answer.

  “Besides, it is true. You didn’t visit me often enough. I would have seen more of you if only you tried. I am really proud of you, Luis. Just ask my classmates what I always tell them. Why, they say”—she paused and blushed—“I am in love with you. It was very embarrassing for me to appear to like you so much, and you never came as often as I wanted you to—and when you did, you didn’t want to take me out.”

  “You talk too much,” he said, dismissing her prattle, walking away from her. He went to the bedroom and flung himself on his bed. The sheets were fresh and cool. Above, from the ceiling, as in all other rooms of the house, dangled a small pink chandelier, and it tinkled as a slight breeze from the open azotea door flowed in.

  Trining followed him and sat on the edge of his bed. “Well, if you don’t like me, at least you could have been sociable with my friends. Ester, for instance—she is your publisher’s daughter, and when we came to your office you didn’t even notice her. Then at that party at the Cielito Lindo—I had begged you to take me there. Who will take me, Luis? My friends think you are a snob. I had to explain that you are not.”

  “I am sorry,” he said, pressing her hand.

  Trining stood up and walked to the door. “Do you want to walk with me around the town?”

  “What is there to see?”

  “They will see us,” she said, smiling. “Four years you’ve been away. The people would like to see the difference—”

  “No,” he said brusquely.

  “I’ll call when supper is ready,” she said. The door closed, and he heard her soft humming as she padded down the hall.

  So this was home, this mass of unfeeling masonry, this alien room. But the people that he loved were not here. They were in another time and place, and the fact that he had not written to them for a long time or given them more than the few tidbits that he had thrown their way filled him with remorse. Maybe at this hour his mother would already be cooking supper and his grandfather, as usual, would be by the window that opened to the west, trying to make use of the last faltering light of day, knitting fishnets. Vic would be herding the work animals to the corral if he was with them, if he had not l
eft Sipnget so that he could get some education and improve himself as he had vowed he would. Luis had not written to them for months, and he was sure they did not even know he was home. On his last visit to Sipnget four years ago his mother had cried, saying how tall he had grown. “Jump up you did, like a bamboo shoot!” she said, her eyes laughing and yet filmy with tears. They had tried to make him comfortable as best as they could. His grandfather even vacated his chair by the window and offered it to him.

  Trining slipped back into the room quietly. He had closed his eyes but had not really fallen asleep, just drifted into that dulled consciousness between waking and sleep. She was bending over him and shaking his arm. “Supper is ready. Wake up, lazy one,” her voice droned pleasantly.

  His displeasure with her recent conduct was gone, and looking at her in the gathering darkness, so near and smiling, he raised his hand and caressed her face. She held his hand and brushed his open palm against her lips, her cheek. He rose and pulled her to him, felt the trembling of her lips, tasted their sweet honey-salt, felt her breath warm and soft on his face, smelled the scent of her hair. She did not object. Instead, her arms encircled him slowly, tentatively, almost shyly. Then, with a swiftness that surprised him, she pushed him away and stood up. Her eyes were serious, but they were not angry. “Tio,” she whispered. “He is waiting for us.”

  He stood up reluctantly and changed his shirt while she, too, brushed her dress, although it was not crumpled. That was a beginning, he thought, and before he opened the door Trining tiptoed up to him and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “I think I have been forgiven,” she said with a smile.

  The dining room that adjoined the hall was lined with glass cabinets varnished rich brown and filled with silver and antique china that his father had brought from Italy and England. On the severe mahogany walls were still-life paintings of ripe guavas, mangoes, and chicos in gilt frames. At one end of the glass-topped table in the center of the room Don Vicente sat, and behind him on the wall hung a large silver-framed painting of the Last Supper. A maid stood by with a cut-paper wand, which she occasionally shook over the table.

  Don Vicente stopped slurping his soup and bade them sit. Trining paused before her place at Don Vicente’s left and with head bowed said grace. Don Vicente looked at his niece, then turned to Luis, who had not observed the ritual but instead had sat down immediately.

  “Ah,” Don Vicente murmured, “it’s wonderful to have someone in the family who will save us heathens.”

  The girl made the sign of the cross. “I can’t eat without praying,” she said, sitting down. “It’s a habit, more than anything.”

  “You will go straight to heaven,” Luis said. Trining glared at him.

  “I do my only son honor,” Don Vicente said. “This is the first time I have come out to eat in weeks.”

  “Thank you, Father,” Luis said. My son, my only son—the words roiled in his ears. Father, what is the love you know—you who sent Mother away and took me here? I can go on living, accepting your presents, your protestations of affection—but is this love?

  A beneficent dinner—stuffed chicken, fruit salad, mushroom soup, spaghetti, and roasted eggplants in tomato-and-salted-fish sauce—but Luis had no appetite. Maybe, he thought, picking at his food, at this time Mother, Grandfather, and Victor would be through with supper—perhaps just boiled camote tops and rice—and now Mother would again be before the sewing machine, stitching in the poor light of the kerosene lamp. He turned to the table laden with food, to the servant waving the cut-paper wand to keep the flies away, the cook glancing in through the screened kitchen door, waiting for the signal that meant his masters wanted more. I see a sullenness in their faces as they serve me. Even in my cousin’s eyes and in the face of this man they call my father, I see ridicule and contempt.

  “Anything the matter, Luis?” Don Vicente’s voice jarred.

  “The trip, Father.” Luis had a ready alibi. “All those checkpoints, the delay … I’ve lost all appetite …”

  His father sighed. “I know, I know, but what can we do? Now, that chicken.” Don Vicente pushed toward him the serving tray filled with brown chunks of chicken in gravy. “Try it, just the same.”

  Luis placed a drumstick on his plate. It was strange how his mother used to do the same, push her plate to him, saying, Here, son, I’m not hungry. His grandfather, too, saying after her in a crude attempt at levity: I am full. Finish this catfish or the house lizards will beat you to it.

  Supper was extremely long. After the macapuno ice cream and a few more explanations about his work (a good magazine, one that seeks the truth and, having found it, isn’t afraid to print it) he asked his father if he could leave for a walk.

  “Where to?” Don Vicente asked, putting his dessert spoon down.

  “I was wondering how things in Sipnget are,” he said simply.

  Don Vicente’s face became thoughtful, and his red, baggy eyes narrowed. He shook his head. “I don’t want you walking alone—not these days. I’ll have Simeon go with you.”

  “Can I come along?” Trining asked.

  “You stay here,” Don Vicente told her.

  Luis was embarrassed telling his father where he wanted to go. He stood up, avoiding his father’s eyes, which he felt clung to him even as he walked out of the dining room. He paused in the foyer. The night was calm, and beyond the long tiled sweep of the porte cochere, the stars were luminous. He went down the stairs, the marble banister cold and smooth in his hand. In the garden the crickets were alive and the scent of azucenas and roses met him like a welcoming wave. Deep inside him he cried: If I can go to Sipnget and climb another stair, would I belong there, I who have long disowned them? He remembered with a twinge of regret, of sadness, how he had told all his city friends that his mother had long been dead—she was not, she had done him no wrong except to carry him in her womb when he did not want to be born.

  “Luis,” Trining said softly.

  He turned around. Trining hurried down the landing after him. “Must you really go? Please bring me with you! I would like to meet them.”

  He shook his head. “Yes, I want to go. That’s my family there, can’t you see? And you need not meet them. They do not matter to you.”

  “Oh, Luis,” she said, holding his hand.

  Does she know, does everyone know the sore that festers in me? “They matter only to me, and you don’t know how much I really miss the place,” he lied. He would have added: That was where I was born, and all that I remember or need to remember is there—but the words just did not take form, for there was this rock in his throat choking him and all he could say hoarsely as they were parting was, “That is where I belong!”

  CHAPTER

  19

  Simeon had an almost paternal feeling for the big car, and in the mornings and late afternoons, when there was no more driving to be done, he would clean and polish it till the black paint was glossy. He would lift the hood and wipe clean the carburetor, the wirings, the steel hump of the engine, and even the backside of the hood. He and his wife—the chubby, cigar-smoking barrio matron who looked after the house in Manila—were childless, and they had transferred their affection to other things, even to Luis, whom they looked after with devotion. It was Marta, too—then a maid in the old Asperri house—who had clasped the frightened Trining, four years old, to her breast, telling the madmen who had already killed the girl’s father and mother and were now setting the house on fire that they should spare her who was without sin.

  Luis sometimes tried to fathom what went on in his driver’s mind, but Simeon was quiet most of the time and there was this meaningless smile plastered on his face when Luis called him down for some small misdemeanor. Luis was almost sorry; the car had already been thoroughly cleaned, and a thick powdery coat would cover it again by the time they returned.

  Simeon drove slowly, his headlights picking out the stray pigs along the main street, then they turned right to the narrow camino provincial. It had not been
maintained; the sides were covered with weeds, and the gravel undulated in piles where it was not swept back by the camineros to the center of the road. The night was calm, that vaporous kind, which transfixes the land during the dry season. The dark was pervasive but for a few flickering orange lamps that marked the houses. In the backseat Luis tried to catch a firefly that had been blown in, its pale luminosity popping up and down—but the firefly was soon sucked away and once more Luis was immersed in expectation and apprehension.

  “I should be cooling off in a brook now,” Simeon said without turning to Luis as the car crawled on.

  Luis peered at the left side of the road shrouded with night. They had passed the last kerosene-lamp-lit house, and the road sloped down into the farmlands, anonymous and black around them. All this distance, this vastness, belonged to his father.

  “Drive a little bit faster,” he said. The car crunched forward. The camachile trees that flanked the road hurtled by. A gray unending stream of night insects caught in the white glare of the headlights pelted the windshield. As the pebbly road rushed toward them Luis searched for the old landmarks, and in a while he recognized the broad end of the bull-cart path from Sipnget that joined the camino. Simeon slowed to a stop and Luis got out. A bridge made of coconut trunks laid side by side and covered with matted bamboo spanned the irrigation ditch alongside the road. The land waiting for the plow smelled burnt.

  “Wait here,” he told the driver. “I’ll walk.”

  Simeon stepped out of the car. “Your father, Apo—he told me not to leave you.”

  “Simeon,” he said firmly, “I am seeing my own village and my family.”

  A thick layer of dust covered the path and fluffed up at each step, and he often stumbled as he stepped on depressions formed by the steady groove of carabao hooves. Tobacco patches on both sides of the path clogged the night with a thick, pungent odor. Insects whirred in the grass that covered the dikes.