A hand rested on his shoulder, and he turned to his wife, her eyes swollen and red from crying. “I am back,” he said simply, stepping away from the bier and the heavy, nose-clogging scent of funeral wreaths. Arm in arm, they went to their room, where the murmur in the hall diminished into an almost imperceptible hum, and they looked at each other.
“I was afraid you would not come,” she said. “I was not thinking of myself but of you. Everyone knows you are all that remains, and if you weren’t here, what would people think?”
“Let them think whatever they want,” he said. “I was not present when they buried my grandfather, was I?”
She did not answer, and he told her what had happened in Manila—the confrontation in Dantes’s office and how he had been eased out. He told her, too, about Ester—not the anguish he felt over her death but the simple fact of it and how it was just right that in the end he had severed all connections with her family. “It’s all over,” he said, sitting on the stool before her wide narra dresser.
She took everything calmly, as if no tragedy could ever faze her, and she went to him and held his head in her arms, her large belly nudging his shoulder. “Luis, what is happening to the world? I only hope that, no matter what, you will be with me. Do you think you can endure living with me all your life?” She moved away from him and lay on her bed, her face contorted with pain. “Come.” She beckoned to him, trying to smile.
He sat by her side. She took his hand and held it to her belly. “Feel it,” she said. He could feel the smooth swelling, the slight movements of the life imprisoned there, and a swift, physical sensation akin to joy lifted him.
“Feel it?” she asked.
He nodded. “Does it hurt?”
“Only when it moves so much,” she told him. He laid his hand again on her belly until the movements ceased. Then, bending over, he kissed her and buried his face in her breast, murmuring, “My wife, my wife.”
This is me inside, this is me living, complete, a proof that I am here—now. I can say that I have lived and planted well, although the soil was barren and the air was polluted. I can explain this nameless life, but how can I explain myself?
“I need you, my husband,” Trining was saying softly. “I hope you will give him a happy childhood.”
CHAPTER
33
They buried Don Vicente Asperri the following morning. It was a warm May day, and a fierce sun bathed Rosales with a searing brightness. All the town officials were gathered in the house, five congressmen from the province and three senators, all in dark suits or barong tagalogs, and the whole front of the house was lined with big black cars. Luis received their condolences with indifference and fretted at the toilsome length of the funeral service in the hall. When the coffin was brought down the marble stairs the senators and congressmen vied with one another to hold the carved silver handles as if the chore was a privilege for a chosen few. If only his father could see it all now, he would be pleased at such fawning gratitude from the big men whom he had helped. Now it was to ingratiate themselves with Luis, the next Asperri, the only Asperri, and around him they hovered—powerful men—knowing that the mantle had been transferred to him.
With Trining, Luis was the last to descend, and at the landing the solicitous crowd milled around them, recreant favor seekers all. In the driveway, which was cleared so that the couple could pass, the town police, in starched khaki uniforms and black armbands, formed a two-file honor guard, and beyond the gate, in the street—where the coffin was pushed into a shiny funeral coach drawn by four black horses—were the inconsequential people of Rosales, the tenants, the mob that had come to pay the great man their last respects. The shuffling of stolid feet and the low, hushed voices merged into one depressing hum. It was warm in the yard, too, and the sweaty smell of people was heavy in the air. The brass band started the Funeral March, and the policemen in the driveway moved to the gate and into the street, where they led the procession, their flag drooping in the immobile air.
Behind the funeral coach, Luis and Trining, in their Chrysler, led the mourners, followed by the politicians, the provincial and town officials. Behind them, inching their way along the main street, were three trucks from the rice mill, all bursting with funeral wreaths, with streaming black ribbons, purple lotus flowers, and greens. Behind the trucks the multitude, on foot, kept pace.
The Catholic priest, who lived on Don Vicente’s grace, timed his arrival perfectly. Accompanied by two acolytes, the young priest walked down the street with burning incense. He went to the rear of the funeral coach and intoned a prayer, then the funeral procession moved on.
Trining turned to Luis. Above the dragging cadence of funeral music and the shuffle of feet on the asphalt, she whispered, so that Simeon would not hear, “You must forgive him. He is dead and cannot hurt you anymore.”
But it is the dead who hurt us most, for we cannot ask them questions, bring them to heel, or confirm with them what it was that made them what they were. Even in death, something of the man lives on—the visitation of his sins. What he did is not confined to himself. The wars he sanctioned go on long after every bone in his virulent body has become one with the soil. Upon this soil we feed and we imbibe the same virus. Death is the ultimate truth, not for him who is gone but for us who still live. “Yes,” Luis said softly, “he can still hurt us, perhaps not so much by what we remember but by what others will expect of us—Asperris. We carry his name, you know, and that is a burden.”
The procession left the asphalted street and proceeded to the dirt road leading to the cemetery. The street was now lined with sorry-looking houses roofed with thatch and walled with buri-palm leaves. People came out of their houses to line the street and gaze at this most impressive display of big cars. Never again would Rosales have a funeral of such magnitude. Never had it had so many politicians and officials gathered together, all in the name of Vicente Asperri.
Had it not rained a few days back, dust would have risen to suffocate all of them. As it was, only a thin, powdery cloud rose, and it covered the coach ahead, the carved cherubs on its hardwood door, while the black wooden wheels creaked in their slow turning. In about half an hour the procession reached the cemetery at the southern end of the town, and the crowd made way for Luis and his wife and all the personages gathered around them as they headed for the small visita in the center of the cemetery—a dilapidated structure with a rusting tin roof and four posts gone awry. Near this the Asperri mausoleum stood on a lot wide enough for a house. It was walled with white Romblon marble. Here lay Don Vicente’s father, his brother, and his sister-in-law, their black marble tombs shaded by lowland pine. There was a tenant whose sole duty was to look after it, to trim the gumamela hedges and water the plots of African daisies and amarillo shrubs, so that, although the whole cemetery had not yet responded to the touch of May, this particular plot was green and abloom.
The politicians vied with one another in hoisting the coffin out of the coach. They carried it to the chapel and set it on a low platform. Santos walked over to Luis and asked if he wanted the cover removed. Luis shook his head. Out of the tightening circle that surrounded them the priest came forward and stuttered the last ritual. When it was over he went to Luis, his breath stinking of tobacco, and said that he hoped everything would be well, that Luis would continue to be the Catholic that his father was. Then the politicians and their wives crowded around Luis, asking him and his wife to visit them in Manila. We have known your father’s greatness, they all said; and we hope that you will not forget us … The band played “Nearer My God to Thee,” and the tomb was sealed. It was time to leave; he took Trining’s hand, turned listlessly to the assemblage, and attempted a smile, after which they walked to the car.
They were silent all the way, and when they went up to the house Trining said, “I know what you’re thinking of.” They washed their feet with warm water, which a servant had placed at the top of the stairs, and they shed their outer clothes of black. Marta had i
nsisted that this be done, so that no abomination would visit them.
Luis remained silent, and in their room Trining repeated, “Luis, how much better it would be if you just talked.”
The warm water had banished the tiredness from his feet, and he sank into bed. The heat in the room descended on him like a solid mass, pressing down and seeking every minute pore of his skin. Trining went to him and sat on the edge of the bed. She was wearing a comfortable maternity dress, which she had ordered from her dressmaker in Manila. Although the dress was chic, it could not hide the contour of her belly.
“My grandfather … Father is there in that handsome mausoleum—and my mother, I don’t even know where she is. Can’t you see how terrible it is? So now I am the lord and master of this castle—hah!” He laughed without mirth. “Did you see how they came to me, the politicians? Have you ever seen such a funeral? Can you not imagine the power I now hold—to do with as I wish? Stop the waves, do not dirty the hem of my royal robes—”
“Luis, what are you talking about?” Trining was distraught.
He sat up beside her, pressed her hand, and said softly, “Even a king does not have all the power in the world, sweetheart. There are things I must do myself, with no help from anyone.”
“I’m your wife. Do let me help.”
He held her face and kissed her softly. “How do we go about living with this blot in our minds?”
“We can try,” she said hopefully. “There must be a way we can get to those who knew what really happened. Santos—he should be able to help.” Her eyes shone.
“They are all cowed,” he said. “Do you think you can find even one who would stand up to the constabulary? They have never been on the side of the people—all those officers are always on the side of the rich.”
“Which we are,” Trining said flatly. “So there must be a way that we can find out. We start here, in this house, and if we cannot get anything here, we can go to Sipnget, or that refugee village.”
“Aguray.”
“We can even go to the mountains, if the answers can be found there.” She was looking at him intently, searching his face, and he marveled at her tenacity—this frail creature, reared in comfort, who now, in his moment of need, was by his side.
After lunch they hastened to Don Vicente’s bedroom, which would be dismantled, and the maids hurried out, emptying it of its memories of sickness and death. When the room was finally bare and Don Vicente’s clothes were packed in mothballed lockers, Luis called Trining and pointed to the spiral staircase that went to the tower. Like him, she had never been up there. It had been locked all these years. He had once asked the servants about the tower, and they had told him that it was there where Don Vicente Asperri’s wife had lived and wasted her years in lunacy, cursing her husband who lived in the room below and slept away from her, on their wide matrimonial bed, cursing him for having failed to give her a child.
Luis slowly led Trining by the hand up the iron spiral stairs that were wiped clean, as were the wooden steps. They reached the top of the flight, and slowly Luis opened the door, which he thought would be locked. It was not. They stepped into the room in awe, expecting to see things they had never seen, perhaps old and rusting lockers brimming with unspeakable secrets. The room was airy, not cobwebbed and musty, and it looked lived-in. There was a writing desk and a sofa, and there was a shelf of folders, which, he soon found out, contained all the issues of Our Time published from the time he took over its editorship. There also were carefully bound issues of the college paper that he had edited. There were scrapbooks containing Luis’s letters when he was in high school, old pictures of himself on a picnic by the river and with his school debating team—and wonder of wonders, there were the poems he wrote in his teens, poems that seemed so effete and unreadable but that sent a pang of nostalgia coursing through his being. He had often wondered where he had placed all these, and now here they were, all neatly arranged and bound together, as if they were meant for posterity. So it was here where his father had cared for him in his own fashion. It must have been an effort, going up the stairs in his condition, but here he had peace—and communion with his son, which had not been possible in person.
“Oh, Luis,” Trining said, “he loved you. He wanted so much to know you. Can you see it now? Can you forgive him now?”
Luis strode to the window, a hundred thoughts crowding in his mind. Beyond the acacias and the coconut palms the whole town was spread around him. Through the clear glass panels he could see it all, even where Sipnget was and the river like a silver ribbon in the sun. And every day that his father spent here he could see the village, too. Luis shook his head. “I was something special, perhaps,” he said softly; “I can understand that, but I am not just an Asperri. I come from that place over there.” He pointed to the distance.
They went down to the library, which adjoined Don Vicente’s room. It was here where all the important papers were filed—the Torrens titles, the stocks in the mines and in the brewery.
Santos came up to explain things. “You know, señorito,” he said, “I owe everything I have to your father. I will serve you as well as I served him, and whatever little knowledge this ignorant brain holds is yours to use.”
Luis said, “I want the truth. I want to find out what really happened to Sipnget. More than this, I want to find my mother and to see where my grandfather was buried.”
“But what good would it do, Apo?” Santos asked. “The dead are dead—they cannot be brought back to life, and it really matters little where they have been buried or even how they died.”
“It does matter,” Luis said, “if they are your relatives!”
“I am very sorry, Apo, but sometimes, for someone like me, silence is the only answer. You understand, Apo, I will serve you in the best way I can, but there are things I cannot do, for I am not strong.”
“All right, then, where are the civilian guards? Who pulled the triggers?”
“They have been disbanded, Apo. The constabulary disbanded them after you left.”
“We cannot find even one?”
“Even if we did find one, would he speak? You are asking him to swing from the loftiest tree.”
“Would you be a Judas to me?”
“Even the weak have a right to life, Apo.”
Even with Santos’s rebuff, Trining was doggedly serious about going to Sipnget and beyond—to Aguray. She was hardly in any condition for the walk—and not even a jeep could go to Aguray, for it would mean not only fording the river where it was shallow but also walking the dunes on to where they became alluvial.
As she prepared in the evening for the trip—lunch basket, walking shoes, umbrella, and thermos bottle—Luis hoped that she would at least know how it was with his grandfather, although he had now become thoroughly skeptical that he would find even a trace of the exhumation and reburial.
Trining had her own defense against disappointment—the walk would do her good, and she needed it for the baby. They started out early in the morning with Santos at the wheel of the jeep. The sun was not yet up, and the town still slept in that brief coolness that always preceded the humid onslaught of May. Santos drove slowly over the road, which had begun to rut. Trining had dug out from the closet a green parasol and sneakers that she had used in her physical education class in college. The walk would be nice and cool if they got to Sipnget before daybreak.
Luis did not have a single worry about his physical safety, and he refused the pistol that Santos said he should carry. When they reached Sipnget, however, a little apprehension came to him. He was, after all, no longer Luis from the village. He was now one of the region’s wealthiest men. The sun broke through the thin morning haze. The air was rich, compounded of morning dew and the earth that had begun to stir. A new bridge made of unsplit coconut trunks lay across the irrigation ditch, which had been dredged. Santos assured him that the bridge was sturdy, and they drove over it. Then Santos carefully eased the vehicle down the uneven path, ove
r deep ruts made by carabao hooves, which were beginning to disappear. They drove slowly, knowing that Trining in her condition would be uncomfortable at every little bump.
The dry season was over. The huge blotches of burned fields were now mottled with touches of green. The mud holes and even the irrigation ditch alongside the path had dried up, and water lilies, matted and dead, clung to the uneven floor of the ditch. Soon everything in the waterways would stir and the brown would disappear under a blanket of green.
“I came here once, long ago,” Trining said when they were near the dike. They had not spoken much on the camino provincial. “It was November, and harvest time.”
Luis knew well that season when the whole land seemed ablaze with golden fire and the air was brilliant and scented. It did not last more than a month, for the scythe subdued the fields in no time and the fire of torches blackened the fields, singeing the hay to the very skin of the earth.
The trail made a curve, and there, beyond the thin veil of grass, stood the dike. The old duhat tree and the buri palms were gone. Luis was not surprised. With the people of Sipnget no longer there, it was natural that the landmarks would also be erased. They stopped in the shade of a stunted camachile tree, and Luis helped Trining out of the jeep. She smoothed the creases from her skirt, and for a moment, as if in pain, she held her belly and did not move. “Don’t you think you should stay here with Santos and wait for me?” Luis said. “I can go alone, I know the place. It is quite a walk, but I should be back in three hours.”
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