Don Vicente

by F. Sionil Jose

  Luis had the Ermita house, therefore, all to himself shortly after he finished high school, except on those occasions when Don Vicente visited him, which was quite often at first but soon became infrequent. Don Vicente gambled still, but most of his old poker cronies had died, some of them at the hands of the Japanese, some in exile in America, and the old man did not seem to be at ease with the new occupants of Malacañang. Luis also knew that his father had some special women in Manila. He had never seen the Spanish woman his father married, for she was one of those mysterious creatures who lived in the shadows. The servants talked of her, however, of her madness, of her having been shut up in a hospital in Manila and then in the tower room of the big house, where she would be very quiet except for her whimpering, which sounded more animal than human. There was no medicine, no doctor, however, that could clear her mind, render it lucid again, for what had cracked was not because of some genetic discrepancy or some frustration that had finally surfaced but the heavy accretion of past profligacies, lies, indiscretions, and that hedonist view that regarded woman as a plaything as, indeed, Don Vicente considered his wife when she was younger. But she was a sensitive woman who was not just uprooted from hearth and home; she had also loved her husband deeply and had great hopes about the new land that she thought would be her country as well. When the poor woman finally died, her funeral was just as secret, for she was buried not in Rosales but in a cemetery in Manila. To the best of his knowledge, his father never visited her grave, and not once did he tell Luis of the life they had lived together, even in those moments when Don Vicente was reminiscing about Europe.

  The Ermita house was not particularly big by the standards of the district, which was Manila’s best housing area, but it was formidably built in Spanish style, with wrought-iron grills for windows and doorways. Red tiles were used unsparingly, and the walls were serrated, although this fact was no longer visible, for the walls had been covered with ivy, which Simeon trimmed. The grounds were wide, the grass was mowed regularly, and the pots of dahlias and ground orchids seemed perennially in bloom. Somehow the Ilokano nature of Luis’s housekeepers was evident in the grounds, for at the back, close to the garage where they lived, were plots of tomato, eggplant, and okra, and it was from this garden that Luis often got his fresh vegetables when he felt like having vegetable stew.

  The house had four bedrooms, and furnishing and decorating them when he was through with high school had given him some amusement. Together with Trining he had toured the furniture shops and the few drapery stalls in Divisoria. He had had air-conditioning installed in his bedroom and in the room that he had converted into a study/guest room. In the hall his father had placed a grand piano, which no one played except Trining when she dropped by with her college friends. He had a radio/phono, too, in the study, and extra speakers in the living room, and although he leaned toward the classics, Trining insisted on buying and stocking the record bar with her own Latin and boogie-woogie favorites. His library had been growing, but he often lent books to friends, and some of them took advantage of his good nature and forgetfulness.

  Marta was watering the gumamela hedges by the gate when the car drove in. She flung the gate open, then ran to open the door of the house.

  “I wasn’t expecting you so soon, señorito,” she said. She switched on all the lights as Simeon carried his suitcases to his room.

  He called Eddie at once, and as expected, although it was already almost seven, his associate was still in the office. Luis had left instructions on how the next two issues would be run, and he had hinted, too, that he might lengthen his vacation, so Eddie sounded surprised: “I thought I would be parking on your swivel chair for some time. What’s the matter—you broke a blood vessel?”

  Luis laughed. “That’s a bad guess. It is the place, Eddie.” He felt that he was being honest. “Any mail?”

  “Contributions,” Eddie said, “and some angry letters about the last article on labor you wrote. But they won’t sue because they are all crooks. I am glad you have returned, so you can be at the party tonight. You know, only editors were invited—from the entire outfit there are only eight of you going, and you know how the Old Man feels about invitations being rejected.”

  Luis knew. There was the famous story he had told earlier about how Dantes had eased out one of the executives in his shipping company after the man and his wife were invited to a sit-down dinner and only his wife came because her husband was down with a cold. In spite of such feudal attitudes, however, Dantes regarded his editorial people with more than employer interest. In the mornings when he was in his publishing office he often called his editors in to do nothing but play chess or comment on a new painting or sculpture that he had acquired. All the while the bar at the end of his office would be open and a waiter in white would hover around, jumping to their every whim, dumb-faced to their discussions of politics and culture. It was also at these informal sessions that Dantes gave instructions to his columnists and his editors—he would identify the targets of his derision and his ire, and it mattered not if the sessions lasted until lunchtime, for he would have lunch brought to the room. The editors always knew when the talk was over, for Dantes, almost as a ritual, would open his gold cigarette case and pass around—even to those who did not smoke—Sobranie Black Russians, and then he would light each stick individually with his gold lighter, and after a few puffs he would smile benignly and say, “Well, boys, that is how the cookie crumbles”—an old expression that he never quite forgot from his Harvard undergraduate days. Then the editors would file out, their heads up in the air, for the oracle had spoken and now they knew what to do.

  Luis had gone to see Dantes before he left, telegram in hand, saying that he would have to rush home to see his ailing father but that if everything was all right, he would be back. No, he must not miss Mr. Dantes’s silver wedding anniversary. The publisher had grudgingly consented to let him go home, “on humanitarian grounds,” but he had ended the interview saying, “Luis, you must know that this party is important to me.”

  There were other parties, and the whole week was to be devoted to them—one for each company, one for close relatives alone, then this major bash, for which the royalty of Europe had been flown in by chartered Stratocruzer and billeted in two whole floors of the Manila Hotel, together with an orchestra from the United States, a couple of opera singers, one from La Scala and the other from the Met, plus the five hundred most important Filipinos, headed by the president and his social-climbing wife.

  “Any message?” Luis asked.

  “Yes, Miss Vale asked if you had arrived. She seemed very anxious. It was Dantes’s daughter who asked for you. Say, you are moving up very fast.”

  He wondered if Ester had been instructed by her father to inquire or if she had done it on her own, but Miss Vale, Dantes’s old-maid secretary, never went into details. She gave out only the barest information, and it seemed that her head was full of secrets but that she stored them for no one but Dantes.

  Even when he was in college, Luis did not swallow everything said in the classroom. The family, the teacher, the church—everything was authoritarian, but there was a far more impressive schooling that he had gone through, where one learned freely: the years in Sipnget, which taught him how important relationships were, how people were what they were. It took only a few weeks in the Dantes offices, therefore, for him to know and to latch on to knowledge that was not dispensed in his sociology or political science classes, to amass the information that was never printed in the papers—not even in his own, noted though it was for its liberalism and steadfastness to truth as Dantes—not his staffers—saw it.

  As Don Vicente had said, Dantes was no patriot who would sacrifice for freedom and nation; he was a power merchant, selling dreams in his media complex and manipulating men with power at the same time. He could have had his main office in his shipping company and trading firm, which occupied one building in that new community called Pobres Park going up somewhere in
Makati, or in his electric and communications building—but no, he chose to have his main offices here in this newspaper building, for it was with his newspapers that he wielded the most influence.

  He was an astute politician, although he did not make speeches or run for any public office; in the highest echelons of both the Nacionalista and the Liberal parties, men vied for his favors and trembled at the slightest rumor of his displeasure. It was also believed that he was supporting the Huk movement and that his politics for the future was voiced by his leftist writers like Abelardo Cruz and Etang Papel, fire-breathing “liberals” who knew whichever way the wind blew.

  Luis had amazed both of these writers with his insights on rural life, the mute aspirations of those who work the land. Cruz and Papel were city-room revolutionaries who had romanticized their ignorance with facility, and in a sense Luis saw himself in them, for he, too, for all his protestations, was just as comfortable and incapable of sacrifice as they. But there was one major difference, which he prided himself on—he had lived on a farm, knew of the sun’s rage, the cold of the waterlogged paddies, and he had exposed Abelardo Cruz’s rural knowledge as a book-learned sham. “Do you know how to catch freshwater crabs in the fields?” he had asked the pugnacious editor one evening when they were having coffee after the paper had been put to bed. Cruz claimed he did and even went into the motions of how he did it as a boy, until Luis asked the most important, the most crucial question: “And what if there is no water in the hole?” It was one of the first things any boy in Sipnget learned, for it spelled the difference between life and death. And Luis explained it to them, these champions of agrarian change, these lovers of the poor: “When there is water in the hole, stick your hand in. The crab could be there. But in heaven’s name—don’t stick it in if there is no water. A snake may be there.”

  Etang Papel had insisted with her Manileña ignorance and colegiala impertinence that the lower classes were the makers of revolution; after all, she read and echoed the Manchester Guardian and those books that were difficult to come by but could easily be had if you had friends in New York or in London. But Luis knew that the indolence of the masses was real, that their volcanic angers were the accretion of repressed feelings, for he had seen dogged patience and docile servitude that had numbed their capacity for scrutiny. He had seen them troop to his father’s house to borrow money, to reaffirm their bondage—that they were secure in it, that his father could do no wrong. Where, then, was the massive force that could be harnessed? It certainly was not in this city room, it certainly was not in Sipnget; wherever it was, it had to be nurtured, lavished with care, so that it would sprout and grow. And only then …

  In many ways, he was very glad that he had Eddie to work with; he had met him at one of the college-editors conferences in his junior year. They had gone to the south and stayed for a week as guests of Dantes at one of the publisher’s island retreats off the city of Iloilo. And one night the two of them had wandered down the empty beach, and Eduardo Sison, the editor of a small college paper, had talked with him, questioned him, rather, about many of his assumptions, uncaring of the fact that he was a rich man’s son. Like Ester, he had asked Luis about his motivations, his insincerity. Eddie, after all, was a self-supporting student who clerked in a Chinese store in the daytime, then went to an accounting class in the evenings. He had a natural talent for writing, but he also had the peasant’s natural talent for survival, and because he was a farmer’s son, his instincts for what was right were also sharp. When this opening with the Dantes group came and Luis was asked to get a right-hand man, he did not hesitate in naming Eddie. The magazine was about three years old, and there was gossip that the former editor and his associate had been eased out for trying to set up a union. It was a weekly and their deadline was more flexible, but Thursdays were a travail, for the magazine came out on Friday, early enough, according to Dantes, to beat the Sunday magazines and yet interesting enough for the reader to go back to it for his weekend fare.

  It was patterned after the staid English weeklies—Dantes affected a liking for British papers—but its presentation was bright and breezy. The writing was in-depth without being ponderous, and the contributors, whose numbers Luis built up through personal meetings, covered a wide spectrum—conservatives and radicals, campus literati and aloof Ph.D.’s.

  He did not know it, but it was Ester who had brought his name to her father’s attention. She had heard of him often from Trining, had read his poetry, which Trining would bring surreptitiously to school, and the articles he had written in his college paper and in the other newspapers, for by the time he was in his senior year Luis had already caught the attention of the national-magazine editors for his forceful but elegant prose, and when he met them they were surprised that he was still in college.

  Dantes gave his two young editors a free hand, and he was not disappointed. Luis was a good team leader, although there was not much of a team to lead—just Eddie and one staff member, two proofreader/copyreaders, and a layout artist. Most of the articles were solicited, but in spite of a growing list of distinguished contributors the editors still had a lot of topical writing to do themselves—and fashioning those subheads and those pungent captions was always a dreary chore.

  Trining was right—the magazine was his life. Ester took him for a snob when they met for the first time, but he remembered her face, and it was not because she was Dantes’s daughter. There was a quality of frailty about her, of tragedy in her eyes. He remembered her, although she wore that anonymous brown, stiff-collared convent-school uniform. She had gone to her father’s office that morning and had interrupted a discussion on Hemingway’s latest fiction, The Old Man and the Sea.

  “My daughter,” Dantes had introduced her, and Luis had turned to her standing by the table, notebooks in her arm. He merely nodded—an almost mechanical reaction—then went on with the discussion, saying that Hemingway’s simplicity was terribly misleading, that this was no simple fisherman out for big game, that the work belonged to the same classic mold as Melville’s Moby Dick, that it was the story of man searching for meaning, and Ester stood there, listening until it was time for Dantes to hand out his black gold-tipped cigarettes to the two young men, who took them although they never really smoked. He did not speak to her, and he did not even bid her good-bye when he left the publisher’s office.

  At eight-thirty Luis was ready. He could not make up his mind as to whether or not he should wear a tuxedo. The invitation had left the choice open between black tie and national costume, but it was so warm that he compromised by putting on a barong tagalog, with the collar buttoned, over his tuxedo pants.

  The Dantes mansion—or compound—occupied a huge lot in San Juan, perhaps a full two hectares of choice land overlooking the city. It had been purchased by the Dantes clan before the war, when such mansions were comparatively cheap and there were still a few nipa houses in the area. The land was rocky, as were most of the environs of Manila, and people were not attracted to it, for nothing would grow on it except sturdy acacia and guava trees.

  Five blocks away from the Dantes house, Luis was struck by the immensity of the party. The whole distance was lined with fat, glossy Cadillacs, Jaguars, and Rolls-Royces. Ubiquitous motorcycle policemen from San Juan and Manila directed traffic. It was the party of the year, perhaps of the decade or even the century, but nothing was said about it in any of the papers that belonged to Dantes. It was in the other papers that the event made a splash, for the three big publishers, in spite of their stiff competition for advertising, had formed an informal club where their social doings and good deeds were publicized but not in their own papers—an expression of urbanity that was somehow shallow and hypocritical. It was in the other papers, too, that Luis had read about Sydney oysters and Australian lamb being flown to Manila for this party, along with champagne by the gallon, truffles from France, Roquefort and Stilton cheeses, and other gourmet foods, about how the tables were decorated with tulips from Holland, an
d then, of course, about the guests—bank presidents from Wall Street, a couple of princesses and some dukes, and a dozen titled personages from Europe.

  As he neared the Dantes mansion, a uniformed police colonel stopped his car at the gate and checked his invitation with the guest list, then a police captain gave his driver a card with a number and told him to park farther up the street. They drove into the compound, which smouldered with multicolored bulbs, and the door was opened by a doorman resplendent in the gala uniform of a police colonel. Like most of the big houses in the neighborhood, the Dantes residence was done in the ornate architecture of the twenties and thirties and surrounded by high adobe walls now covered with ivy. The acacia trees were strung with colored bulbs—green and blue and red—and in the carefully manicured gardens were huge candy-striped tents; in the tents were tables. There were four buffet tables at strategic places on the grounds, and beyond, on a stage before the tennis court that was not covered with Masonite, the American orchestra was playing “Autumn Leaves.” Luis listened briefly and concluded that the Bayside band was better.

  The guests spilled all over, on the terraces, under the high bushy pergolas, and across the grassy lawn. Waiters in white barong tagalog, black pants, and white gloves flitted about balancing trays and carrying drinks, and all around was the happy sound of people at play.

  The night was unusually cool, and the scent of sampaguitas hovered over everything. In the biggest tent, at the other end of the tennis court, Dantes was seated with his asthmatic wife, and beside them were the president and First Lady. Luis could see them clearly in spite of the distance.

  He walked toward the tent, and midway he caught Ester’s eyes. She rushed to him, and together they went to her father and mother.

  “Congratulations, sir, madame,” Luis said, shaking the couple’s hands, and Dantes, ever the impeccable host, asked, “I hope your father is well, Luis.”