“Paradise on earth, achieved with human understanding. Not a single egg broken.” Vic coughed mirthlessly.
“Do not try to be smart or funny.” Luis spoke hotly. “I have been writing poetry, as you very well know—not very good, perhaps, but this is not important. What I am trying to say is that I have hope that there is still truth to be gleaned, even from the garbage dump, if we search hard enough.”
“And you think that I have no hope? We fought the Japanese with slingshots because we had hope. We now fight for the same reason. You forget the source of our real strength. It is not people like you, although you can be one of us. We are very rich in numbers. The poor are many—they are the majority. This is all that I understand. As for the good life or reason or the world of the spirit, you can afford to be poetic about it because you are here. You forget one thing: we are there!”
“Is that what they are teaching you in the Stalin universities? I have heard about them.”
Victor laughed loudly. “Listen,” he said after a while, “we have lots of books, and lecturers, some of whom are Ph.D.’s. Does this surprise you? And we do have schools but not the kind you think. Every day is school day for us. We deal with facts, not with books. We know who is exploited and who are exploiters. If there is a god at all, He is in us—He is not up there. Paradise can be here if we fight well. There is goodwill in men if they are of the same class.”
“You sound so familiar,” Luis said softly, thinking of his own college days and those sophomoric discussions under the acacia trees. “I am tired of dreams. Why can you not be practical and learn to live with facts, as you say you do? With education—and I am only too glad to help you—you can be more than what you are, whether you are a farmer or a clerk. There is a lot of room. There’s freedom, too. Why are you doing this? There must be a reason.”
Vic had not stirred from where he sat. “I cannot give an easy answer,” he said with great feeling. “I wish I could tell you that I will endure all privation because I love our country, but what is our country? It is a land exploited by its own leaders, where the citizens are slaves of their own elite.”
“Be honest,” Luis pressed. “Do you think you will be different if you achieve power?”
“I do not know,” Vic said humbly. “One cannot foresee the future. I would like to say that I will be Spartan and honest. I am no hero. I would like the good life if I can get it. I would like to have lechon every day, to travel and see the world. I would like to be comfortable and not have one worry. But none of these is possible. It is not even possible for me to go to school the usual way, to know myself better …”
Luis was silent.
“And you want to know why I am away from all the comforts that I could appreciate, just like other human beings? I will tell you why. I am tired, Manong—very tired. I am tired of everything. I hate the present and I long for the future. It is a future that I hope will at least provide enough food for all of us. I am tired of soft-boiled rice and camote tops and coconut meat and green papayas, such as we have in the mountains most of the time. Once, long ago, I thought that all that mattered was food. There was so little of it—you know what we had in Sipnget.”
“You shame me,” Luis said.
“But it is true. Remember how it was in the big house? How I used to go there to work and you did not because Mother didn’t want you to go to town? How I used to collect the peelings of apples that your father ate and bring them home for us to eat?”
Luis did not speak. He did not want to remember. “All right then,” he said after a while, “what do you want me to give you?”
“Give! Give!” Vic flung at him. “I shouldn’t be ungrateful, but you always give. People like me—we never get anything that is ours because we worked for it, because we deserve it.”
“You are my brother.”
“Half-brother.”
“We came from the same womb. It is all that matters. We are equals.”
“How I wish I could believe that,” Vic said, “but it is not so. If we cannot be equal, at least both of us are Filipinos, with the same opportunities. I did not make the laws, nor did I set up the system for mestizos and brown people like me. I would like to think that under the skin it’s the same red blood. But blood is cheap, and I will use it to water the land so that people like me will live.”
“I will be on the other side,” Luis said, “not because I want to be there but because that is where you have pushed me.”
“But that is where you are,” Vic said, “not because I want you there. You are there of your own free will. You will inherit great wealth. Would you give it up? Why should you?”
“We can share it,” Luis said.
“But how far will you go, my brother? If I asked you to get rid of everything and come with me, would you do it? You have much to lose—and if you stay, I will understand. I even understand why you are reluctant to come out in your magazine that you are for us. Yes, we read you every week, and although you seem to sympathize with us, you really are not for us. Could it be that you have forgotten those years in Sipnget?”
“I have not forgotten,” Luis said hotly. “I am not turning away from that. You do not know of my turmoil.”
“And you think I don’t have doubts and moments of anguish, too?” Vic asked. “It has been dirty, dirtier than the war we went through. I thought that after Liberation all the fighting would cease, but it has not been that way. It’s uglier now—and so sad—and yet, what must be done must be done.”
Vic stood up. He did not even look grown-up. His hands twitched at his sides as he walked to the door.
“You didn’t tell me what you came here for—or what I can do,” Luis said.
“Some other time, Manong,” he said. “It has been refreshing, talking with you.”
“One last question,” Luis said. “Did you send that message to my father?”
Vic smiled. “You see, my brother, I have not lost my aim.”
Luis saw him to the gate and on the way kept saying, “What can I do for you? There must be something …” Through it all Vic was smiling, and after he disappeared into the shadows it seemed that a primeval darkness, thicker than the night, dropped like a final curtain between them.
Dear Mother,
It is long past Christmas Eve, and I can think of no better time to write you this letter than now. As you perhaps have already surmised, I am not very religious. There was a time, however, when I was—and I remember how you took me to the church in town during the Holy Week and how piously I followed you as you fingered your rosary and made your Stations of the Cross, how your care-lined face was turned to the prostrate image of a dead Christ at the altar. I still recall that time when I was flushed with fever and Tio Joven applied all those leaves on my chest and rubbed his saliva all over my forehead and I still didn’t get well. It was then that you decided that there should be a novena in the house to appease God, whom you believed had been angered. That early evening, after the novena, Grandfather went to the backyard where the dalipawen tree stood, and there, making an offering of the rice cake that you made, the hard-boiled eggs, and the hand-rolled cigar, Grandfather beseeched the spirits: You who have brought fever to my grandson, here is a humble offering. Come now and partake of it, and hurt my grandson no more. That evening I felt the fever ebb, as if it were no more than simple fatigue, although for a week I couldn’t stand. I remember how that early morning I went to the tree and saw the cake and the hard-boiled eggs still there and how, because the spirits had not helped themselves to them, I feasted on the offering, against all customary warnings. All this comes to me as lucid as day. It was this that made me realize that food for the spirits could also be food for the stomach.
I am not being facetious. I had not meant to go off-tangent this way. I had meant to start this letter in all seriousness—like an editorial in my magazine, which will never be read by you and by Grandfather and by all the people in Sipnget, although Vic tells me that he reads the magazine
every week. I had meant to be poetic, for tonight the Son of Man was born to a mother who, like all mothers, should be revered because it was in her body that she suffered the beginning of life. The birth of Christ is to me the celebration of motherhood, for there are many among us today who would not be loved and who would not be cared for except by their mothers.
I write this letter because just a while ago Vic was here to see me. I asked him what he believed in, and he said he believed in you. I would like to say that I, too, believe in you, but do not think that I will be fair to you or to myself if I didn’t explain this belief that is more than belief. I think it is a kind of blindness—or faith.
There are times—and God knows there are many—when I wish I had not been born, but I must tell you that even this suffering that I bear is something that I must experience, both as a poet and as a human being who loves life. It will be difficult for you or for Vic to understand this suffering, for it is a form of ennui that is embedded in the mind, a pain without surcease, even after the wound has healed and the scab has lifted. In fact you will look in vain for scars. It is a malaise that money or circumstance cannot dispel. How utterly simple it would be if it were something a medical specialist could conquer with a new strain of antibiotic. Perhaps a vacation in San Francisco, a new Mercedes, or an eight-carat sparkler—each is a simple-enough solution, but not one of these will suffice.
I am speaking of my birth, dear Mother, my conception, my reason for being here, for being your son and my father’s son. It is not enough that I am here, living in comfort, while you are there, suffering. I would like to know how I came to be. I am curious to know if I was born out of love, if I deserve this life that has come to me as a gift from you, and if you regret that I ever came to be.
I will never know the answers, for these are questions I could not dare ask you or Father. At most I can only guess—and that is enough. Even if I do get the answers that I seek, I would still ask why I am here.
Vic knows his reason for being. He has found a cause to which he can give his life. As for me, I have not found out if this life is worth living. It was, I am certain, given to me in sufferance, and perhaps I am loved not because of myself but because of what I am supposed to be.
Dear Mother, in spite of all these doubts that rankle in my mind and poison my heart, there is one certitude for you: I love you, perhaps not in the way that you expect me to, sometimes not even the way I would like to, but I love you with a tenacity that I alone can feel. I love you because, as my brother has said, you are all I truly have.
Forgive me then, dear Mother.
CHAPTER
25
When Luis woke, the sun was already high. It flooded the room and danced in the cream curtains that stirred in the morning breeze. He could hear Marta puttering in the kitchen and Simeon sweeping the driveway. The first thing he thought of was Vic’s visit. He could vividly remember snatches of their long talk, and he had in fact started to think of better replies for the questions Vic had asked and was now better prepared to answer them if they ever came up again. He was now more curious than ever about the reason for the visit, for Vic’s having confronted him. He was sure that if he had not spoken so pointedly or tried to dampen his brother’s enthusiasm, Vic would have been more open and would have told him what he really wanted to say. It was all too late now; in all probability there would not be another such clash between them and, for all their closeness and for all that was dear and past, never again would Vic confide in him. Knowing this, he felt a great weight press upon him.
Ester called him up while he was having coffee, and her voice smoothed away the numbness of his spirit. “It’s nice to hear your voice,” he told her. “Would it be too much if you called me every morning to cheer me up?”
“The problem with you,” she said with a smile in her voice, “is that you are such a self-centered person, you think only of your convenience. Did it ever occur to you that sometimes it is I who may need the cheering up?”
“Well, sweetheart,” he said, “if we are to think of our mutual convenience, the best thing is for us to get married. We can get up together in the morning and cheer each other up.”
Ester kept up the banter. “Are you proposing?”
“After we go to church and I still feel the same way, I will.”
“Baclaran then,” she said. “It won’t be crowded today with all those favor seekers.”
“I am a favor seeker,” Luis said. He stood up, catching a draft of the sea breeze. “But I seek favor only from one virgin.”
A gale of laughter. “Suppose I told you I am no virgin?”
“I’m not old-fashioned,” he said.
“If you come with me after mass and have Christmas lunch with us, I will believe you.”
For a moment Luis wanted to accept the invitation, but he would feel awkward having lunch with the Danteses when he was not sure of how Ester would eventually regard him. “I have an idea,” he said brightly. “Let’s drive to the beach in Cavite and stay there the whole day. I’ll bring lunch.”
He could surmise by her silence that she was not so happy about what he had in mind. “You’re not going anywhere, are you?”
“No—no,” she said, undecided.
“All right, then, I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
“I’m already dressed,” she said with a laugh. “You get ready in half an hour, and I’ll be there.”
The sound of a kiss pleased him, and even after she had hung up he was still holding the phone against his ear.
Marta lingered while Luis was having his breakfast. Although she was past fifty like her husband, she had none of that middle-aged look that most women her age had—and the women of Rosales aged fast, oppressed as they were by the drudgery of the farm. Not that she herself was not burdened with work. She had always worked for the Asperri household. After the old house was burned down Don Vicente took her in to look after his orphaned niece in Ermita. Afterward he sent her and her husband to look after Luis.
“Why did you tell my brother to wait in the garage, Marta?” he asked. “You should have told him to go to my room and wait there or sleep until the party was over.”
“But Apo,” Marta explained, “I didn’t even know he had gone there. I thought you had already seen him, for right after he arrived we didn’t notice him anymore.”
Luis drank his coffee in silence.
“What is Victor doing now, Apo?” Marta could not resist asking. “We never got the chance to talk with him. He didn’t seem to want to talk. Why …” the woman hesitated, “why is he so secretive?”
Luis waved her away. “It’s his manner,” he said, “and you cannot change it.”
He was ready when Ester came. Simeon and Marta were not yet prepared to leave, so, just as he had promised, he gave them an envelope with money in it. After giving the couple last-minute instructions, he and Ester went down, carrying Marta’s lunch basket. Ester was radiant in a red-printed skirt and blue blouse. “I have heard so much about hangovers,” she teased him. “I wanted to see someone with one.”
He grinned amiably. “I am made of sterner stuff,” he said. “I am sorry to disappoint you.” In the car Ester told him that she had brought a bathing suit. Luis reminded Simeon to look after the house very well, then the car was on its way.
“I’m giving them a one-week vacation,” he explained to Ester. “I will be alone and liking it.”
“With no one looking after your chastity?”
“God is extra kind to bachelors.”
The sea breeze flowed into the car, and the fragrance of Ester’s nearness was intoxicating. The morning was brilliant, although ribbons of mist hung over the bay, over the hulls of half-sunken ships. “I was wondering,” she mused, her hand resting on his knee, “maybe I can come once in a while and clean your house—and cook, too, if you’d let me, just as Trining sometimes does. It shouldn’t matter that I’m handy only with a can opener.”
“I’m not finicky,�
� he said.
As Ester had expected, the Redemptorist Church in Baclaran was not crowded. Luis was even able to park on the mango-shaded grounds—an impossibility on Wednesdays, when the novena for the Mother of Perpetual Help clogged the church with devotees. The offertory had just started, and Luis was glad that he did not have to sit through the sermon. He had yet to listen to one that would impress him. The priests—Filipinos or foreign missionaries—always had nothing to say except the same clichés about salvation, and they always talked down to their parishioners and sounded as if they were the holiest and the purest of men when God knew that many of them kept mistresses or absconded with church funds. Luis and Ester walked out before the benediction.
The houses along the highway were all festive. Multicolored paper lanterns of various shapes—stars, fish, and octagons—were all over the place, their frills quivering in the December breeze. Roasted suckling pigs, impaled on bamboo poles, were being carried to some of the houses.
They reached the beach resort in about an hour. It was desolate, for people stayed at home on Christmas Day to receive members of the family or godchildren. Only a handful of bathers were swimming in the calm blue water or sunning themselves on the distant curve of sand. The wind was mild and the surf quiet. Luis parked under a clump of short, thorny aroma trees, which would give them shade when the sun got high.
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