Don Vicente

by F. Sionil Jose

  Father—he was young and handsome then—appreciated beauty and took it where he found it, and a year later the girl from Sipnget returned. The village was asleep. Only the insects in the grass and the owls in the buri palms were awake. She returned with her shame, which all the village came to know, and this shame became more than just the bones and the veins in me; in time it also became this passion that cannot be vented, these thoughts that cannot be spoken—all that I cannot be.

  Grandfather dreamed. Looking at the hollow creeks and the mouth drawn like a line, I knew that the maculate dream would endure, but it had to confront another dream—my father’s.

  They drove back to Rosales in great haste, and the road, white and shimmering in the afternoon heat, vanished behind them in billows of dust. The car rattled, but they did not slow down until they reached the main street and were past the open gate to the bodega of the rice mill behind the house where Santos, the perennial ledger under his arm and a pencil stuck behind his ear, was looking after the weighing of the sacks of palay before they were carted to the mill.

  Luis bolted out of the car. “Mang Santos!” he shouted.

  Santos laid his ledger on the small table beside the wooden platform of the weighing machine and met Don Vicente’s son. He avoided Luis’s angry eyes.

  “Why did you not tell me? Why didn’t you?”

  Santos turned furtively to the men heaving the jute sacks from the platform of the weighing machine into the queue of bull carts. They had paused and were watching with quiet interest.

  “Please, Luis,” Santos tried to quiet him, “let’s not talk here.”

  “Why did you not tell me?” Luis repeated.

  Santos did not answer. He placed a placating arm around Luis’s waist and led him to the room beside the garage. Santos offered him a chair, but Luis refused it.

  “You are all liars,” Luis said. “You came to me, all smiles, wishing me happiness and a long life on my wedding day, although you knew my mother was lost, my grandfather dead. Have you no heart at all?”

  The torrent subsided and Santos asked, “What good would it have done if I told you?” The caretaker’s hands were shaking. “I am no one here, Luis—just an ordinary servant, like the rest.”

  The caretaker’s face was frightened, and Luis pitied him. Like the others, he had grown old serving his father, and now another master was taking over. “You lied to me—with your silence. You did not say a thing, but you lied to me, just the same,” he said wearily.

  “Always remember this,” Santos said meekly. “You are your father’s son. What happened to Sipnget, to your mother and your grandfather—there was a time I knew them all—was an injustice that cries out to God for vengeance, but who am I to say this? Who can right the wrongs that people do in their anger or in their blindness?”

  After some silence, Luis said, “And Victor, do you know where he is? What has become of him? He wasn’t in Sipnget when it happened.”

  Santos rose and went to the grilled window. “We don’t know where he is, but the civilian guards and the constabulary think he is the new Commander Victor. They thought he was in the village when they attacked it.”

  So it was my brother who brought death and destruction to Sipnget, Luis thought grimly. My brother …

  “A happy day has come, Luis,” Santos was saying. “On your wedding day, how could we have told you? Besides, I should not be the one to tell you. Your father knows what happened. Our guards were involved, perhaps less than the constabulary, but they were involved, just the same.”

  He knows, the whole town knows—and how will I face him now who strapped these clothes on my back? Santos had more to say, but Luis wheeled around and rushed out.

  In the shiny, heat-laden hall the calla lilies that had been brought from Baguio for his wedding had wilted in their crystal vases. A garland of bridal bouquet that a thoughtful maid had strung on the statue of the farmer with a plow had dried, and its small petals had fallen, dotting the base of the statue with white. Trining was asleep in their room. He wriggled out of his sweat-soaked clothes and sat on the rattan sofa by the window. The fatigue had reached his limbs, and in a while he rose and bent over his wife, kissed her gently on the cheek, then went out and crossed the hall to his father’s room.

  Don Vicente was slouched on his bed. As usual, the blinds were down, but the depressing dimness of the room no longer dulled his vision. His father’s eyes were closed, mere slits below the black bushy patch of eyebrows. His arms were dumpy at his sides. On his head, as if it had been grafted to the round, fleshy lump, the ice bag was precariously propped, and running down the side of his mouth to his chin was a thin line of saliva. If he had as much as nodded, the ice bag would have fallen, but it did not fall even when he stirred. “Speak, son—what is it that you want?”

  Now the baggy eyes were half open and were glued on him.

  “I have just returned from Sipnget,” Luis said, sitting on the wrought-iron chair beside the bed, watching the rising and falling of his father’s broad chest. “I found out that my mother has disappeared and my grandfather is dead—killed by your guards.” He thought of sterner words to say, but now this was all he could utter, as if all fight had been drained from him and he had become puerile and timid.

  “I knew you would go there,” Don Vicente said softly. “I was waiting for you to come and see me, to tell me you finally did go. It is a very tragic thing, Luis—this I must tell you.”

  Luis bit his lower lip. “There were others killed.”

  “I know,” Don Vicente said, shaking his head. “Tragic thing.”

  “I have heard of things like this,” Luis said, “but in the city, where one is detached from the barrios, I always thought these were exaggerated.”

  Don Vicente propped himself higher on his bed. “Now perhaps you will tell me what wrongs are to be righted?” The father peered at his son, his thick, pallid lips drawn across the flat expanse of his corpulent face. “Luis—” The old man’s voice was almost pleading. He tried to smile, so that the corners of his mouth no longer drooped. “Luis, I have never told you about my past. I did not want to talk about it, but now, now I must. You are my son, you have a right to know it. You know that I am dying and perhaps I deserve to die unloved and—and hated, even by you. However, I was once young, too, and the young have their own weaknesses.”

  “I have never claimed that I have no weaknesses,” Luis said simply.

  The old man did not heed him. He went on, his face bathed with the luminosity of remembrance: “I was young when I traveled all over Europe, and I was curious and virile then—not like now. It has been two years since I have had a woman, because I am no longer capable. Oh, what I would give to have one erection! But this diabetes, this drug that works on my heart … Yes, it was different then, hijo. I traveled all over Europe and had a good share of prim English girls and healthy Nordics, but there’s nothing like a Filipina in the way she holds a man, loves him, satisfies him. I should know. God forbid that you become a homosexual—that’s becoming so fashionable nowadays—with all that literary life you are living. Oscar Wilde was a homosexual, wasn’t he? There must have been others.”

  “Must I prove my manhood all the time, Father?”

  Don Vicente shook his head. “No, hijo—I am explaining myself more than anything else. You see, Rosales was not big enough, nor was Pangasinan, perhaps not even Luzon. Your grandfather knew that. He knew I was bright. So off I went to Manila, to high school, like you did, and then I came back to this town and its stupid peasant ways and its ugly peasant women.”

  “Including my mother.”

  Don Vicente shook his head sadly. “You misunderstand, hijo. Please do not misjudge me. In her youth she was very pretty, and as you would say, I fell for her. It was not like those popular stories you like to repeat in your articles, about landlords having their choice of the prettiest of their tenants’ daughters. She was working in the house, and I loved her—you do not know how much. My father
knew, he heard about it—and that was why he sent me to Europe for college, and of course I could not but obey. It was difficult tearing myself away from her—you know, we couldn’t get married. There was not even a thought about it. For many months she was on my mind, always. You will understand the anguish. I did not write to her, nor did she write to me. I was in Europe. I was going around—”

  “And you forgot all about her—and her son.”

  His father shook his head sadly. “It was not like that, hijo.” His voice was soft, supplicating. “It was not like that at all. It was human frailty. I came back and wanted to see her, but I had gotten married in Spain, and I did not want to stay in Rosales. Would you want to live here after you have lived in Europe? How many times did I want to see her, to ask her about you, after I found out about you.”

  “And yet you did nothing to help her when I was a baby—yes, she did tell me this.”

  “I was away, Luis. I was away, and when I came back and her husband had died and I did see her again, she was no longer the pretty girl I remembered. Work and motherhood had destroyed her.”

  “And suffering, too,” Luis said. “I look at myself in the mirror, and I see you.”

  “And you do not like what you see,” Don Vicente said. “I do not blame you, Luis, but I want you, just the same.”

  “And that is why I am here—because this is what you want.”

  Don Vicente turned away, and sobs convulsed his body. “I am dying, and I don’t want you to hate me for what happened to Sipnget. I will do anything for you, because—because you are my son.”

  Luis steeled himself. “Thirteen years, Father,” he said clearly. “Thirteen long years—you never had need for us. No, you didn’t love her or me at all.”

  The old man turned to him, his baggy eyes red with tears. “What do you want me to do?”

  “There is nothing you can do now,” Luis said. “My grandfather is dead. My mother, she is crazy and no one knows how she is. And my brother—only God knows where he is.”

  “Your brother!” Don Vicente suddenly raised his voice. “He is my enemy. He is your enemy. All of them have become your enemy. Don’t you understand? She is a fine woman, but what could I do? I am no god, and I can’t dictate to the soldiers where they should go or to the civilian guards who are under their control—tactical, they call it—when they are in the field. They will not say it was a mistaken encounter, but that is what I suspect it was.”

  “But why did they burn the village? Why did you send your tractors there to erase it?”

  “Our tractors!”

  “Why?” Luis stood up and moved to the window. He raised the blinds a little, and fine powdery dust drifted from the blinds and dissolved as a little sun filtered in. The soldiers who made their camp in the schoolhouse across the plaza were cooking their supper in blackened cans and iron cauldrons.

  “The memory must be erased, that is why,” Don Vicente said. “Do you think I am not sorry that this happened? But if you must know the truth, blame it on frailty, everything that is natural with men. I don’t regret that you were born, that I cared for you and gave you things you needed. You will understand.”

  Across the plaza a soldier, naked from the waist up, his sweaty chest shiny in the late-afternoon sun, stirred one of the cauldrons with a big wooden ladle. A squad was preparing to leave at the camp gate.

  “I didn’t ask you to take me,” Luis said.

  “But am I taking back what I gave you—or boasting about it?” Don Vicente asked. “I couldn’t let you suffer, that was all. I was never happier than on the day Santos brought you here, and the other day, when you and Trining were married—what more can a father want than grandchildren?”

  “I should have stayed behind, in Sipnget.”

  “Do not be sentimental,” his father said. “What would have been your future there? The things that I give you, they are yours by right.”

  But these were mine by right, too: the days when we had nothing but salt and rice and camote tops, days when I walked in the sun, looking for crevices in the fields where the frogs hid, so that I could spear them and have something to eat. These were my birthright, too.

  The soldiers with their tin plates and spoons were filing out of the schoolhouse and finding themselves benches and writing desks scattered under the acacia trees.

  Don Vicente continued, “But I have no regrets except that your mother—”

  “Don’t talk anymore about her. You can’t give her sanity back,” Luis said, suddenly turning to his father. The old man was not looking at him. His eyes were raised to the ceiling. Luis strode to the door, but his father held him back. “Sit down,” he said sharply, his eyes now wide open. “I am not finished yet.”

  Luis returned to his seat and met his father’s steady gaze. This was the gesture of courage that he had long wanted to make. It is said, his grandfather had told him once, that the field rat that can look at the deadly rice snake in the eye before the snake strikes is saved. Am I saved now when I have become so pliable in his hands?

  “Do not be rash,” Don Vicente continued. “Truth—that which you seek, which I cannot give you—is how we look at things, what we believe. Do not talk about injustice or wrongs. There is always an element of injustice in this world, and many wrongs are committed in the jungle. We all live in a kind of bondage until we die. This, too, is truth, and it is ugly, so we do not call it that.”

  “How would you call it, Father?”

  Don Vicente twiddled his thumbs. “How can I call it anything else? All I know is that we are alive, that you haven’t grown up. How about motives, why don’t you go into them, too? What is the motive of Dantes, for instance, in building up his image as the champion of liberalism and all that crap? You know that he is not, that he is a vicious plutocrat, but you work for him just the same. You asked me why I had the village plowed. It was not hate—it was remorse. I wanted to start anew, to wipe out the traces of a past that will bother us.”

  “What about those who lived in the village?”

  “Their lives—what about mine and yours? Whose is more important? Your mother and your grandfather are no longer there. Don’t be sentimental. As for the tenants, they can be accommodated anywhere. The farms they tended—these will still be going to them.”

  “They are frightened, Father. They will not come back.”

  “And is that my fault?”

  Suddenly Luis felt very tired and his head ached. “We have to have a conscience, Father,” he said feebly. “That is what separates us from the animals. It is not the soul or belief in God that distinguishes us—”

  “Conscience is for the weak,” Don Vicente rasped contemptuously.

  So this is what we are up against, Luis cried inside him. The primeval law, the glacial age.

  “It is enough,” Don Vicente said, “that I didn’t approve of it, that I feel remorse about it. It is tragic that they were killed, but there was some firing from the village—don’t you understand? They fired back. And there is another thing you must realize—their minds were diseased and their death was inevitable. It’s they—or us.”

  How clear it had become. It was as if his father had been skinned and his insides turned out, so that Luis could look into each internal sore.

  “You must understand,” Don Vicente continued. “Perhaps I can put it better this way. Look at you, at your friends—the five-centavo guerrillas. Where are they now? Who are those who made money during the war, who survived? The collaborators, the buy-and-sell men who did business with the Japanese.” A long pause. “I am not saying that you should be an opportunist, but at the same time you cannot go against the wave. You must ride it and reach some place. To shout against injustice, to oppose it, is sometimes good for the spirit; but be sure it does not destroy you. Just remember this: the laws are made by the strong, not by the weak.”

  Luis nodded dumbly. There was nothing more that his father could say that he did not already know. He rose, and as he headed for the
door again Don Vicente called, “The blinds, Luis. Put them down.” But although he clearly heard his father’s command, he did not turn back.

  Trining had awakened when he got to her room. She was sitting by the azotea door, and in the soft light of the late afternoon she was reading Marquand’s Point of No Return, which he had brought with him from the city. She stood up and kissed him. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  When he did not reply she asked, “How are they? What did your mother say?”

  Luis probed into her anxious face, into the soft brown eyes that were always expressive and alert. She did not know what had happened to Sipnget, and somehow he was glad, for if she did and had not told him so, he would have hated her, too. He sat beside her and told her how the whole village had been burned, that there was nothing in the barrio now but ashes and plowed earth. When he had finished she embraced him, her heart thumping against his chest. “The soldiers and Father’s guards,” Luis said, “it was a mistake and that’s that.”

  “Did you fight with him?”

  “I was afraid once,” he said softly. “I stayed away from him, because I might say something I need not say. Now I am not afraid anymore. I can even damn him now without caring about what he will say.”

  Trining shook her head sadly. “You will end up hating everyone, even me.”

  “How else do you expect me to react?” he asked. He closed his eyes and held her close. Hate—but isn’t this the strongest force man has ever fashioned? The father rector argued forcefully once that love was far stronger, that it was the basis of Christian action and forgiveness its bedrock of virtue. Love, however, does not commit people. It does not draw them together in the same way that hate does. You cannot be Christian and forgive or love the tyrants around you, for in doing so, you will yourself institutionalize their brutality. There is nothing un-Christian about hating those who are unjust. I am a vengeful God—read the Bible again; I come bringing not peace but the sword. So let there be hate, so that we can exorcise the evils that plague us. Only with the cleansing catastrophe of fire can we renew ourselves.