Don Vicente

by F. Sionil Jose

  “I will write to you,” he promised. He took her hand and guided her back to the room. “I will try to write to you every day …” But he doubted if she heard his last words, for she had wrenched away and ran, her slippers thumping across the silent hall.

  CHAPTER

  20

  Don Vicente did not join them for breakfast. Trining and Luis had the long table to themselves. The chocolate was very hot, and the pan de sal, since it was baked at home, was much bigger than they got in Manila. Mangoes were in season, and the silver tray was full. How was it in Sipnget then? One fruit had to be divided among the four of them, and the seed was always for him. He would savor it by sucking and licking it till it was dry, then he would slip the seed into the eaves of the kitchen roof and it would stay there, dried and waiting. He never got to planting them.

  He had expected Trining to be sullen, but the brief encounter last night seemed to have been forgotten, for her face was aglow. He had known her when she was a gangling girl of eight, and he had seen her in all forms of dress and undress. In the warm morning light she was indeed a woman now, clear-skinned and beautiful.

  They were finishing their chocolate when across the hall there reverberated a crash, then his father’s startled cry. They rushed to the room. By the time they got there Don Vicente had already risen and was at the door, bellowing to the servants to call the captain of his civilian guards.

  “What is it, Papa?” Luis asked, but the old man, blocking the door, merely shook his head. “Nothing, nothing, take your cousin away from here …” Through the half-open door Luis could see that the window was broken and shards littered the floor.

  Shortly before lunch, after he had apparently thought it all out, Don Vicente asked for Luis to come to his room. By then what had happened was the talk among the servants and the civilian guards on the grounds. Luis wanted to question the commander, but his pride held him back. Why did his father not confide in him? That he did not rankled in him as he proceeded to the old man’s room.

  Luis found his father immensely composed. He was before the window, gazing pensively outside. He even smiled as he turned. Although the old man had a passion for order and cleanliness, he had obviously left everything as it was for Luis to see. “It was intended that I not be hurt,” the old man said without emotion. He eased his corpulent frame into his rattan lounging chair, and with his double chin quivering as he shook his head, he continued: “No, they merely wanted me to get this message.”

  From the marble-topped side table he reached over and picked up a stone as large as a duck’s egg and beside it a crumpled piece of paper—the kind that children use in grade school. He handed the paper to his son. The penmanship was masculine and at the same time very fine. Indeed it seemed familiar, although it was in Ilokano: “The land belongs to the people and the people will get what is rightfully theirs. The next message will be delivered with a bullet. Commander Victor.”

  Luis turned the paper over to see if there was anything on the other side. His father spoke again: “But I do not see how anyone can throw it clear to the window of my room in the daytime. If he was in the street, he would have been seen. In the neighborhood he could not go anyplace. The guards have checked everything.”

  Victor—Luis mulled over the name, not only because it was his brother’s but because once upon a time, during the war, Vic and he did know a Commander Victor. He, too, came from Sipnget, but unlike most of the young men in the village, he had been able to finish high school. He had ambushed the Japanese almost at will and had distributed food, not only in his village but also to others in need.

  Commander Victor was dead. But was he really? There was a new Commander Victor whom he had yet to meet.

  Luis walked to the window, which opened to the street and to the town plaza and beyond, to the huddled houses of cogon and bamboo, homes of inconsequential people—clerks, shopkeepers. His father was right—it would require great strength to hit his father’s bedroom window. Then quickly it came to him that it could be done with a sling—from across the plaza, beyond the houses, from the line of bamboo at the end of the town, and he remembered how he and his brother used to fling stones, making two or three circular swings with their slings before letting go. How well Victor did it then. While his stone often splashed on the opposite rim of the river, Vic’s always went beyond, to wherever he aimed.

  “Why do they hate me?” his father’s voice prodded him. “I have tried my best to do what I can for them. After all, this land, which my great-grandfather cleared—all of it—bears more than just his pride and our name, and we are duty-bound to preserve it and help those who help us preserve it. Haven’t we lived with honor, giving them what is their due, helping them with their problems, no matter how personal? When they are born, when they get married, when they get sick, and when they die—to whom do they come for help? It’s I and no one else; I look after them, more than like a father. Can they not see what this means? My brother was the same—he helped them and they killed him and his poor helpless wife, his son. What kind of people are these? Can they not see that we are honorable?”

  Luis knew all the words—the rights of the nobility, the responsibilities of serfs—but now they did not evoke anger from him, just indifference, and if he could, he would banish them from his own vocabulary, just as he would relegate all of Rosales to limbo.

  “Why do they hate me?” the old man repeated sadly. “Soon it will be a grenade in the yard—or poison in our food. Yet I care for them, more than they will ever know. I have built irrigation ditches for them, sent them to the puericulture center, given rice and money to the priest so that he can go to their villages and minister to their needs. I contribute to their fiesta generously. I have stood as godfather to their children—they are all my children—and they hate me. I can see it in their faces when they come here, whining and begging for help. They cheat me of the harvest, but I continue to keep them because I love them, because they are part of the land, which is part of me. What do they want that I cannot give? They have food, security, and peace. They are happiest as they are, and they do not have a single worry—not a bit of what I have to endure—and only because they are under my wing. They repay me with this—this,” he said, pointing to the piece of paper on the table. “Luis, can you explain this to me?”

  It would have been the simplest thing to do, to declare that Rosales was no longer the paradise his father had proclaimed, that paternalism was done for, that charity is its own stigma and that the best of intentions are often brutalized and demeaned, but he chose to speak as only a son would: “You must be patient, Father. We are living in difficult times, and this is not your creation. It was created by the war, by expectations that could not be fulfilled. They will learn in time what their place really is, but”—and now he weighed his words carefully, hoping not to displease his father—“we must also understand that if we are to stay here, to be on top as we have always been”—he checked himself and was surprised that he was verbally and emotionally taking his father’s side—“then we must also change and learn to understand what is happening below us.”

  “Just what do you mean?”

  “Change, Father, is sometimes imperceptible, because it is slow. You have changed, too, perhaps without knowing it.”

  Don Vicente smiled. “Yes, yes,” he mumbled under his breath. Then, “When you were there last night, how was it?”

  “Everything was fine, Father,” he said. Don Vicente turned away, waving his son off. “Everything was fine, Father,” he repeated as he went out of the room. He was again the boy who played on the banks of the Agno, who shared a roof in Sipnget with another boy and with this boy ate the same soft-boiled rice in the lean months of the planting season. Vic was with him again—the stone, the sling—and he would always be near. If he was darkness, Vic was light, was free, while Luis was encumbered with a past, the remembered experience that brought no certainty, although it was as real as flesh and as haughty as day.

 
Time that I have lived! It is all here now, compressed in this house, encompassed by this little town. Time that I have lived—there is a creek that passes the village, a creek spanned by an old wooden bridge that was often washed away by monsoon floods. When the rain comes in June the creek slowly fills, then overflows, and the waters could come right to our backyard and we would go to the bridge with long poles and ensnare the pieces of driftwood that have been carried away by the current and we would keep these for firewood. When the rains subside the creek dries up until there are just pools, moss-green and muddy, but we would still bathe in it, for the creek is closest to us and it was here where Vic first told me: Manong, you are white and I am brown. We are brothers, but how can that be? The creek brought us face-to-face. Again, one day, he said: I have been told that you should leave and that if you left, you would not return. I will leave, too, as all of us do leave the place where we were born—but I am sure we will come back.

  Vic had returned. That could have been his message that Luis had seen, that could have been his sling. Then it occurred to him that he was ignorant of his brother’s movements. If Vic had changed somehow, Luis had helped in the transformation, for it was he, after all, who had sent Vic the books to read and had helped him find the answers. Vic did not have to search far if he had desired to find answers himself, for they were all here in Rosales amidst the implacable poverty and the dullness of the herd.

  Luis was free at last from all these, thanks to his benevolent father. He could roam and reap the harvest—but not Vic, although at least Vic now had the freedom to create, to travel an expanse unlimited by geography or vision. Luis prayed to God that in spite of everything Vic would retain this thought at least: that they were brothers and that Luis had not forgotten the jungle’s torment. Vic was courage, and what did Luis have to show to redeem his manhood, to attest to his creativity? A few poems? He had the beneficence of a name he was born to bear. If he could only turn back, he could now be by Victor’s side as he should be, for his brother was also his fate.

  CHAPTER

  21

  Luis changed his mind about not saying good-bye. He had expected his father to hold him back, but Don Vicente was more than understanding. He even tried to be blithe about it.

  “I see, I see,” he said, nodding and grinning, so that the double chin quivered and the bags under his eyes broadened. “Rosales is very dull except for what happened this morning. What is more, you cannot miss the party of the year—yes, I have read about all those European dukes coming. In any case I have already told you what needs to be said. Do not forget—”

  “I won’t,” Luis said, holding the pudgy hand to his brow. His suitcases were packed, Simeon was waiting downstairs, and outside his father’s room Trining was pacing the hall, waiting for him. “I won’t,” he repeated, then he wheeled out.

  But what was there to remember? It was a story he had heard so many times, the call to duty and the land, that his future was in politics. It was of course difficult to understand his father’s attachment to the land. As a young man, Don Vicente had lived in Spain, visited the old village near Bilbao where his great-grandfather had come from. There was not much now in the Asperri lineage to suggest that it was Basque, nothing but the name, the fair skin, and the demeanor, and those did not matter. His exhortations were sown on barren soil, on the arid reality of Rosales itself. The life of the mind, which beckoned to Luis, was in Manila. It was better to revel in it, to seek the kindred vitality of the young who revolved around the editorial offices, and the nearness of Trining, Ester, and her friends. Although he did not want to indulge in it, he basked in their flattering attention—a result of not only his looks but also because as a poet he exuded some kind of exotic magnetism.

  He wanted to spend some time with Trining, but she had waited in the hall only to find out if he would be permitted to leave, and when she found out, she had rushed to her room. He knocked at the door, pleading, but she would not open it. From within came a mumbling sound that could have been her weeping.

  He reached the city at dusk. Depressed, he had dozed through most of the checkpoints, and Simeon, still displeased that Luis had cut his vacation short, had been sullenly quiet. The depression lasted for some time, and it was not banished even after Luis had finished the homework he had brought with him.

  He developed in his mind a master dummy of the next issue of Our Time. There would be a couple of articles on the Bell Act, an exposition on the cultural resurgence in Southeast Asia, a couple of stories, and an essay on the crisis of the Filipino identity. The scenery no longer interested him as it did the previous day. The country was drab, dead brown. The dirty towns through which they passed were all the same, their asphalted main streets lined with wooden shops boarded with impieties of soft-drink signs.

  “Do you want to pass by the office, señorito?” Simeon’s voice startled him. They were now entering the city, and the traffic in Balintawak was tangled again—jeepneys and buses filled with office workers hurrying home. Toward the west the sky was a riot of indigo. Dusk finally brought a sense of peace.

  “Home,” Luis said. He needed a shower more than anything, to wash away the fatigue. The car could not avoid Rizal Avenue and the snarl of traffic in Plaza Goiti, but in a while they were on the boulevard and Luis felt at home once more in the wide Luneta, now covered with dying grass, and to the right the sea, the stubby trees, all covered with the deep and onrushing dark.

  The house was one of those prewar structures spared by the holocaust of Liberation that leveled much of the Ermita and Malate districts, south of the river. It was built by his grandfather in the twenties for Vicente and his Spanish bride.

  Sometimes his grandfather drifted into his thoughts, particularly when Luis and his writer friends talked about the revolution of 1896 and how in the end it was usurped by the ilustrados. His grandfather was one of them; though he had always considered himself—according to Don Vicente—a Filipino, Luis knew that his loyalties were with that far-off peninsula from which his forebears had come. The old man had been an astute politician, although he did not run for any public office; he knew where the centers of powers were, and when he saw, for instance, the inevitability of revolution, he made the proper noises, which seemed to indicate that he, at least, sympathized with the ill-disciplined, ill-equipped Army. As a Basque, he had always regarded the Spaniard as inferior in the first place. But to avoid total involvement, he had feigned illnesses and was conveniently sick in Manila. The coming of the Americans ended the masquerade for the wily old Vascongado. He saw the inevitability of American suzerainty, and one of the first things he did was join the Federalista party. He would have gotten a very high position in the new government—friendly as he was with those in Manila—but he had decided, like all good Basques, that the future lay in the land, which had, after all, supported him in splendor all through the years.

  He was not wrong; it was a time when the haciendas were being forged and sugar plantations in the south were being set up with American and other foreign money. He went back to Pangasinan and the vast lands he had laid claim to and built that region’s biggest house, which became a rest stop for any tired and visiting Americano. In the process, through the American cadastral surveys that were being made all over the country, he brought out his old Spanish titles, and with Spanish sherry and other forms of concession, he included into the Hacienda Asperri hundreds of small clearings that the Ilokano settlers had made.

  The old man liked to consider himself a diviner, a plutocrat ahead of his time. He saw, for instance, the movement of Manila out of the strictures of Intramuros, and he bought lots in Santa Mesa and of course in Ermita, on the boulevard close to the sea. It was in the Ermita house he built where his son Vicente lived, his daughters having married Americans and Spaniards and left for wherever their husbands willed.

  The hacienda in Pangasinan prospered, and he died a very happy man knowing that his other son was prepared to take over while Vicente hobnobbed with t
he rich and the powerful in Manila. He did not know of the ill will that exploitation had spawned, how the house would be burned by the same peasants who he thought were loyal to him. Don Vicente continued living in Manila, depending on the overseers who worked for him, knowing that though he was in the city, he wielded great power. He played poker regularly with Quezon and was on the best of terms with the mestizos who revolved around Malacañang.

  Having finished law and studied history as well, he had learned what his father had taught him, and to this wisdom he added his own instincts. He had information on what stocks to buy, where new roads were to be built, and when export crops were to be developed, and his intentional losses at the poker table, which were substantial, were easily recouped.

  He contributed, too, to the campaign funds of senators and, of course, to the Independence mission, while in Pangasinan his tenants toiled and filled his bodegas with grain. Even when his brother was killed and he had taken his niece under his wing, he did not see the need for returning to Pangasinan; the order of things was secure, the constabulary would see to it that a similar uprising would never happen again.

  After the war, his instincts served him once more; he could see the changes coming, and one of the first things he did was rebuild the old house that had been burned, bringing to it many of the artifacts in Manila that were not destroyed; his son was growing, he could leave Manila and go back to the land where he now should be.