Close by, the laughter of a girl reached them as a boy chased her to the water. They would have privacy in the world—under the trees, in the car—but this was not what he came for. “I am glad you came,” he said. She smiled at him. He moved to her and, tilting her face up, kissed her softly. When he drew away, she remained motionless. He opened the door. Simeon had been thoughtful enough to place in the rear of the car a wide piece of canvas, which Luis now spread in the shade.
Ester joined him. “We can sit here the whole day, doing nothing but talk,” she said. She removed her slip-ons and dug her toes into the cool, soft sand.
“We have to eat, too,” he said, “and other things, besides.”
“After lunch, we go home,” she said. “I must be home early. Papa does not even know I’m here.”
He took off his shoes, too, and stretched his legs. “Is your father afraid that something might happen to you if you are with me?” he asked pointedly.
“Luis,” she chided him, “he does not even know I’m with you—and on Christmas Day.”
He lay on his side. Beyond the slope of sand, the sea was clear and lustrous. Two boats, their sails tipping and bloated with wind, were riding in the far distance. Beyond them lay the small green hump of Corregidor, and still farther the soft blue line of Bataan and the aquamarine rise of Mount Mariveles.
“You can leave now if you want to. Breathe the word and I’ll take you home.”
She bent over him and cupped her hand over his mouth. “Don’t talk like that,” she said. She shook her head. “Please, why do you always want to fight with me? You are so belligerent, and you want me to be your enemy. All right, I’ll stay with you all day if that will make you happy.”
He sat upright, his manner grown mild, and pressed her hand. “Thank you,” he said contritely.
Ester did not mean to drop the subject. “Even to me you are bitter. Do you hate women, or mankind in general? I cannot believe it, but I wish you’d at least be honest with me. Tell me that you over-dramatize—like all poets perhaps—that you wouldn’t have been expelled from the university had you not fought over such a trifling matter.”
“Trifling!” he shouted at her, his humor vanished again. “It is a question of belief, and furthermore, I was not expelled. I quit!”
“Call it what you want,” she said coolly. “You would have graduated with honors and not have been a false martyr if you just saw it the other way. The priests are human, too. They had their reasons and they felt cheated. I hear that they considered you one of their best products.”
He closed his eyes and strangled the anger that was growing in him. False martyr, human beings—he clenched his fist and struck his palm viciously.
“That would have been me,” Ester said sadly.
He turned to her. She was gazing at him with the kind of look no man can fail to recognize, that countenance that can render granite into sand. What has come over me? What devil anger possesses me so that I lash out at everyone who comes close? I was unhappy because I did not know what to do. I hesitated and wondered. I was afraid that I was not right, that I would end up hurting people, then I looked around me and found that it was not I who was doing wrong to other people—it was they who had hurt and betrayed me, not so much because they had not accepted me but because they had in a sense rejected me. I cannot be close to anyone, not even to those who have reared me—and here is the girl who would give me herself and all the sacrifice this act implies.
He sat up, stroked her arm, and traced a blue vein with his finger. “I am not angry with you—you must know that. It is with myself that I am continually at war. Maybe that’s overdramatizing it again, but like you said, I am egotistical and self-centered.” He smiled. “You must forgive me. You are a wonderful creature.”
Her humor had returned. “Cut it out,” she said. “You know I am no ravishing beauty. It is the blind man who will appreciate me.”
“Because he will see something that others will not see—your soul, which is beautiful, too. Do you know what you really have?”
She shook her head. “Flattery will get you somewhere.”
He knew it then and he was sure of it. “You have a glowing personality. You are real,” he said, and holding her shoulders, he drew her to him and kissed her softly, ever so softly.
Afterward she left for the car to change, and when she came back and stood before him Luis realized what a really beautiful creature Ester was. The lavender swimsuit both revealed and concealed. He stared at her and marveled at the shapeliness of her figure, her thighs, the high, pointed mold of her breast, and how elegantly she walked.
“You are undressing me!” she said, blushing. “Come, let us swim.”
He did not go with her. “I’ll watch,” he said. She threw him a kiss and ran down the beach. He watched her swim out, her arms rising and dipping into the water with even grace. One time she dived so long that he thought something disastrous had befallen her, then she bobbed up, nearer the shore, laughing. “It’s not so cold,” she shouted. She didn’t stay in the water long. She was panting when she returned, shaking off her hair the droplets that had seeped into her bathing cap. After taking a shower in one of the bathhouses near the main rest house, she joined Luis and spread their lunch on the plastic sheet that had covered the basket.
Marta had prepared the food well—roast beef left over from the party, Coke, omelet, ox tongue, oranges, and raisin bread. They ate slowly, and when they were through, Ester wrapped the leftovers neatly and placed them back in the basket. She took some magazines from the car, and they leafed through them and argued a bit. It was then that the fatigue of the previous night caught up with him. “You wouldn’t mind if I dozed?” he asked. He lay down, and she took his head on her lap. Before he closed his eyes he had one glimpse of her lovely face looking down at him.
It was late afternoon when he woke up. The surf had become a thunderous crash. Ester was beside him. He sat up. The beach was empty, and the slope of sand where the breakers rolled in a while ago had become a chasm, and the waves, massive and white, were collapsing with a roar.
“That was some sleep,” Ester said. “I’m glad you are rested.”
“You should have wakened me.”
“But you needed sleep,” she said. “Besides, you were talking in your sleep and it was great fun listening.”
“What did I say?”
“Your life story,” she told him gaily.
He stood up and stretched his arms. “Thank you for keeping watch,” he said. She gathered the magazines, helped fold the canvas sheet, and followed him to the car.
All the way back he drove slowly, although the traffic was not heavy, since there were few commuters from Cavite during the holidays. Dusk had descended upon Manila when they crossed over from Baclaran to Dewey. The bay was shrouded with the purple hues of sunset.
“Do come and cook supper, like you told me,” he said. They were on the boulevard, and the façades of restaurants and nightclubs were already ablaze with neon.
“It—it is not proper, Luis,” she said tentatively. “Papa—”
He pressed her hand and assuaged her doubts. “I’ll take you home after supper. I will say we have been out, that’s all. He won’t get angry.”
“But I also said I don’t know how to cook. I am handy with a can opener only—”
He pressed her hand again. As he swung the car to the right, up the driveway, he said, “We will have the house all to ourselves.”
She looked at him covertly and asked, “How long will your servants be away?”
“They are certainly not coming back tonight—or tomorrow.”
Holding hands, they went up the short flight of stairs. This is what I want, Luis thought as blood raced to the roots of his hair. He opened the door and switched on the lights in the hall, Ester close behind him. She switched on the lamp by the piano and went to the kitchen with the lunch basket. Although this was only her third time in the house, she knew it well.
“We have time for that,” Luis called from the bedroom, where he was washing up. When he went to the kitchen Ester was still there, studying the refrigerator. He dragged her away despite her feeble protests. His arm deftly around her waist, they glided past the kitchen light, which he turned off, and into the hall. They sat down on the couch near the azotea door.
“You are sure Papa won’t be looking for me? I think I should call just to let him know.” But there was no urgency in her voice.
“He wouldn’t care,” Luis murmured. Ester lay on her back, her feet resting on the floor. Her eyes were closed, and a dreamy peace suffused her face. “I’m tired.” She sighed. “I can go to sleep now and not wake up until tomorrow.”
He did not speak. He knelt on the floor, bent over her and kissed her. He felt the warm parting of her lips and tasted the salty sweetness of her mouth. As he fondled the front of her dress she tried to push his hand away and he could feel a tremor course through her. “No,” she said with feeling, “I am not ready for it, Luis.”
But he did not heed her.
“Louie …” her complaint—it if was one—died on her lips.
Long afterward, when he drove Ester home, they were silent most of the way, and although he tried to make small talk, he just could not make himself regard the night as a time of conquest. Even in the depths of his passion, he had not really been unconscious of another reality. She had made the proper motions of pain, of distress, before the final surrender, but a man knows—he can feel this in his bones—and Ester was acting out something that she had already done, although not with him. A man knows, just as Luis knew it with Trining. It was not fair, of course, for him to ask. He had, after all, gotten what he wanted. But why did she have to lie? It would not have mattered much, but what was important was the honesty of the relationship.
Seeing him brooding, she squeezed his hand and asked, “Luis, aren’t you happy? Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“Yes,” he said without feeling. “I am the happiest man in the world.”
“I’m the happiest girl in the world,” she said, snuggling close.
CHAPTER
26
And so they piled high the hollow dreams and the senseless talk over many a ruffled moment. The relationship was intense. Although she was barely past twenty, Ester had refined sensibilities and an intelligence that sometimes surprised Luis with its depth and lucidity. She asked him questions that he was afraid to ask himself, needling questions that had to be answered honestly, for they were matters of conscience, and even if his answers often did not reveal his thoughts, to himself at least he was honest. Why did he write poetry—was it out of some deeply felt need to express what he could not express in prose, or was poetry a search for that basic truth without which men could not live with themselves? Why did he sound so private in some of his lines—speaking only to himself? Was his involvement with social justice based on what he perceived to be unjust, or was he obsessed with it because he himself had committed an injustice and was, in a sense, flagellating himself for his final atonement? At times, when he was pushed to a corner, squirming and shorn of defenses as his innermost privacy was gouged, he would be angry at her with a cold and persistent wrath and he would ask her the same question but rephrased—or buttressed, rather—with the sharpness of torture. Why did you surrender yourself to me? Is it because you think I would be some cheap and easy conquest? When we make love, is your orgasm real or make-believe? Suppose I tell you that I am your lover only because I’m interested in inheriting the Dantes publishing empire someday? Remembering all these sometimes filled him with remorse, and he would wonder how deeply he had hurt her, but then she always went back to him, like some masochist, and their quarrels, although pitched and bitter, always ended in a passionate reunion, which both of them hoped would not be marred anymore by the kind of disagreements that exposed their nerves raw to the wind. He failed to understand that in many ways Ester, too, was unsure of herself, that she was groping for something to hold on to, apart from the ready pattern that school, social position, and her father’s wealth had made for her. If she could not express this in poetry, the way Luis did, she could at least express it in her relationships—and the deepest, the most human, and the most touching of all was her commitment to him.
They were bound to drift apart, however—irrevocably, inexorably. There came a time when to make up was such an effort it drained them of feeling, of expectation. After they had disagreed on his leaving school, on ideas about art and the future of the Huk rebellion (Ester felt that it was justified, but Luis felt that there were other equally effective methods that could be explored and experimented with), the arguments deteriorated and turned to trifles—movies that they saw and novels that they read—and by the time some rash words were exchanged they would be like two beasts, fangs and claws ready to strike.
Their last quarrel concerned the tritest of things—his latest poem, “The Changeless Land.” She had read “The Waste Land,” and she felt that the similarity was so obvious—but Luis was no Eliot fan and had not even read Eliot’s poem. She said that it was unthinkable that someone writing in English in the twentieth century, involved with social change and manners, could avoid Eliot. They were on the azotea, and it was past sunset; before them the lights of ships blinked in the wide, blackening bay. Before finally going up they had strolled down the grassy shoulder on the boulevard, following the sweep of the seawall, then when sunset came they danced between sips of Coke and sandwiches Marta had prepared. Now they were estranged again. It was their last quarrel, and Ester declared without rancor, “All is finished—I suppose it is best this way. I am tired of it all, always having to eat humble pie.”
“And what about me? Do you think I have no self-respect at all?”
The year had ended—the December picnic, the clinging smell of the sea. “I have tried my best at least to see that we are headed for somewhere, but I will never know. The way we are quarreling over trifles—there’s no future for us, Luis, and the best we can do is call it quits while our personalities are intact.” She sounded so cool, so detached, and this infuriated him, for he could not feel the same way. It was as if she had robbed him of his manhood and that he had let her do it at will. He watched her every move, her gestures as she sat on the azotea ledge and spoke, and he did not know whether he would walk to her and push her, or take her in his arms and end the silly argument with a kiss, or stomp away in superior rage and let her go home alone.
“If I keep up with you, what is going to happen? You will probably drive me to suicide. You are, as I have said before, simply, hopelessly self-centered,” she said, trying bravely to still the quaver in her voice.
It was then that he laughed. “You committing suicide? Ester, you have no sense of honor as the Japanese have. It’s not in your upbringing. You know very well where you will end, you and your Catholic clichés. You will roast in hell—that is what you believe—if you try as much as pull one pubic hair!”
She was fairly shouting back, taunting him: “You will probably gloat over your victory, for you will then think that I have given my soul and my body away to you.”
It was she who stomped out of the house, not even bothering to close the door after her. He heard her car crunch out of the driveway. For a while he was really vexed; he loathed the way she had treated him, but his anger slowly turned to regret that he was not really able to answer her. Finally he came to realize that he had a part in fueling the quarrel and that the decent thing for him to do was to call her up and repeat the same pat apology. If they could never be together again, at least they could part on a note of civility, if not affection. He decided to wait until morning, but when morning came he found no chance to make amends, for as he prepared to go to the office the telephone rang and the message was to alter his plans.
It was a long-distance call from Trining, and her voice was urgent: “Luis, what will I
do? You must help me. I don’t know what to do.”
“Take hold of yourself, and slowly, slowly tell me what the matter is.”
“Hurry home, I mean to Rosales—now, as fast as you can.”
“Is that all?”
“I don’t know, but I think it’s serious—and besides, Luis, I want to see you, too. It’s been so long now that you have not been here. You can come, can’t you? Tio says today—and you need not stay for more than two days.”
“What does he want to see me about?”
“He won’t say—but if you want a hint, a heart specialist from Manila is staying in the house. He’s been here for a week now.”
“He isn’t dying, is he?”
“I don’t know, but a heart attack is often sudden, isn’t it?” She sounded frightened. “And suppose he dies, what will I do, Luis?”
“Father is like a bull. He will live to be a hundred.”
“It is serious, Luis. Please believe me.”
“I’ll try my very best to be there this afternoon, then. I have to rush to the office first and fix things up. Tell him that.”
It was early afternoon when Luis reached Rosales. The sun was warm, and in its white glaze the town dozed. No change was apparent in the town except for the presence of Army trucks in the plaza. Soldiers in olive uniforms loafed in the shops, on street corners, and in the barong-barong refreshment parlors.
Two civilian guards were posted at the gate to the house. They had strung across the gate a barricade of barbed wire, which they swung aside when he arrived. It annoyed him immensely to think that he must live in a fort, but it was, perhaps, for the best. Trining ran down the marble stairs to greet him. She was pale, and because she wore no lipstick, she looked as if she were convalescing from an illness.
“Luis,” she said, holding his hand tightly, “I have something important to tell you.”
He pinched her chin. “You’d better tell me something really important. It was no pleasure getting here—all those damned checkpoints.”
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