Sins

by F. Sionil Jose

  Jake, my chief counsel, had to leave his golf game and had joined us for lunch in Sta. Mesa. He said the case was in the Court of Appeals. I asked him about our chances of winning, and he explained the new law on agrarian reform signed by the Leader, which we had not broken. Compensation was going to be paid to the tenants, and if they stayed on they would be hired as workers.

  “We have a fifty-fifty chance,” Jake said.

  It was such a trivial matter about which I should not have bothered, but it was now important only because of Delfin. If we had a fifty-fifty chance, with Nojok as our opponent, the possibility of our losing was great. My lawyers are corporate specialists and now that they were handling an agrarian case—a highly political one at that—I had some doubts about their ability.

  There are always ways, of course, by which we could win and even reverse the decisions of the lower courts. Should I let things be and make Delfin and his relatives happy? It was so easy to do—noblesse oblige again. I had done it so many times and it always gave me some pleasure, for it made me less a monster before my own people.

  Then it occurred to me that Delfin needed a lesson, to know the reality of power, of wealth. I would teach him that.

  I went to Europe, to America, for three months, to have my physical check-up in Houston, to firm up deals in Germany. In Hong Kong, Ann Lee was waiting; I spent a week with her. In San Francisco, a pretty niece was waiting. I took her everywhere I went in the United States. In Frankfurt, another niece. Finally, Tokyo, and Corito and Angela joined me there.

  In Tokyo, Jake reported to me on the hacienda case. The Court of Appeals decided soon enough in my favor. As expected, the Nojok law office elevated the case to the Supreme Court, where it could have languished forever. But in a month—such unusual speed indeed!—the highest court in the land decided also in my favor.

  The day after we returned to Sta. Mesa, Delfin came. Defeat, dejection, were all over his countenance. He asked if I knew what had happened to the hacienda case and I lied, saying I had yet to see the report of the lawyers. I implied that the case was not all that important, that I had returned to a pile of work that needed my attention more.

  It was the first time I saw my son break down and cry. Then he restrained himself. “Sir, I know—we know you bought the justices all the way to the Supreme Court. All the way. No case could have moved so fast as it did. I know now that the lives of people not important to you do not matter at all.”

  I was glad that in the library where we were talking neither Angela nor Corito were present. I barked at him, “Hijo, put in that narrow brain of yours that no one tangles with me and expects to win. No one!”

  “I know, sir,” he said softly. “You have so much wealth, so much power, you can buy everyone.” And without another word, he turned and left.

  I half-expected that reaction, risked it even. I then summoned my hacienda staff and my lawyers again. I will now give away a bit of the hacienda, the very same rice land that would be mechanized. Those who were tilling the land can now have it—Delfin’s relatives most of all. Give it away literally, for though there was a small mortgage, it was insignificant from my point of view. Not the tenants—the installments were small, but I knew they would not be able to maintain the payments.

  The surveyors came and, again, in only a few months, the tenants got title to the land—faster than any touted government program. The education of Delfin was continuing. He could not fault me with being unjust. Not anymore. But now, he resisted every effort I made to see him.

  Again, the old and nagging thought bores into me like some purposeful and avenging hex, condemning me, taunting me, and, again, I cry out—Severina, forgive me, lift this curse that you have cast upon me so that I will be free again.

  Oh, that I could release this atrophied body from its own prison, for the mind to wallow again in the luxury of sensuality now that the flesh cannot.

  I look around me and remember all the pleasures I have had and can no longer enjoy. So now, it is only the eyes that can absorb what is left. The sense of smell, of taste, are laden with possibilities, but even these I must reach for. Without my hands and feet?

  I begin to question my sanity. I turn in my mind over and over, a dozen plowshares ripping into the earth to expose the worm—is there one wayward word I have uttered, any action no longer commanded by sheer logic, by untarnished ethical consideration? But how can the mind be detached from itself? How can an eye look within itself? This self—how distant and infinitely incongruous it always is unto itself that demands self-dissection. Or is it self-destruction?

  My hands—inert, bloated, nerveless—how I long for them to feel once more the soft, pneumatic texture of a female breast, to grasp a pliant, fragrant body against my own, to feel the whole smooth contour of that living flesh pressed, welded to my own quivering flesh. I do it in my shriveled mind’s eye, remembering Severina most of all, glorifying again in remembered tastes and scents.

  Severina, forgive me!

  The shock of my life came the year Angela finished high school. As a graduation gift, I bought an emerald necklace for her at Bulgari’s and arranged for her and Corito to vacation in Europe; the houses in Spain were seldom used—they would stay for a month in the spring and early summer when Europe was truly beautiful. I had planned on sending Delfin with them, if I could see him. We had a small dinner at the Polo Club to which Angela invited a dozen of her friends, most of them since grade school. She had often spoken about her lawyer cousin to them and, now, she anxiously turned to the dining hall entrance every time there was a new arrival.

  She was regal in a cream-white taffeta dress, around her neck the new emerald necklace. When we were having dessert and Delfin had not yet appeared, she gave up.

  In the car back to Sta. Mesa, seated between Corito and me, she started to cry. “He didn’t care. He didn’t care,” she repeated in Spanish. And then, turning to her mother: “I love Delfin, Mama.”

  This cannot be! This must not be! I should have known—all the signals were hoisted before me. Why did I not recognize

  them? It was not just infatuation when she was a child; she had grown up nurturing the feeling.

  Corito’s silence revealed her unspoken disapproval, her shock as well. Was our sin coming back to mock us? Then Corito spoke softly, guardedly, expressing my own thoughts.

  “You are cousins, Angie dearest.”

  Her sobbing stopped. She turned to me, then to her mother. “I couldn’t help myself, Mama. It just happened.”

  “What does Delfin say?” I finally asked.

  “He knows! He knows! He said I must stop my juvenile infatuation. I am too young—and like you said, he also repeated it, we are cousins. But I know he loves me, too. Once, he kissed me …”

  Fear, consternation—all such unexplainable feelings clawed at me.

  “But now, I am not sure,” Angela said softly. “He didn’t come and I wanted so much to introduce him to my friends. They know about my feelings.”

  I tried comforting her. “It is me Delfin did not want to see, not you,” I said, but she would have none of it.

  At home, close to midnight, Corito and I went to Angela’s room. She was still up, in her party dress, looking pensively out into the night, at the city below glittering with light.

  I had had a harried talk earlier with Corito. She knew all the arguments. I let her speak. “Angie, dearest, do you know what it means to be married to a cousin? Look at yourself first, already so frail. Look at the children of the Danteses. Most of them misfits, crazies. And all because cousins in their family had intermarried.”

  “I know, Mama,” she said. “But if Delfin wants me, I will take that risk.”

  “Besides, he is much, much older than you. You are so young,” I said, “so protected from the world …”

  Before I could finish, she said. “But Delf is not. He will protect me. And I am seventeen!” She stood up, all that youth and shimmering beauty, the emerald necklace gilding the li
ly. “And, Tito, you think I know so little of reality. That’s not true, Tito. Delf helped open my eyes. And I am very observant.”

  What could I say? This was my Angela, now grown up, now making decisions on her own without coaching, without us pushing. I wanted to know how far the relationship had gone, the intimacy. Corito would find that out and she would tell me.

  She came to my room soon after. It was very rare for us now to embrace. Somehow I had managed to distance myself from her and her appetites. She did not know I had paid some of those handsome young gigolos who entertained her, unable as she was to bear a child. She knew I preferred much younger women, my nieces, for instance, and she also had become aware that she had become flabby with middle age. But she still smelled the same, all sweet femininity, and her closeness always brought me a sense of comfort—that is, when she was not raging with jealousy.

  I should not have bothered at all with Angela’s virtue. She had tried, but Delfin had resisted and that took some doing, knowing how beautiful my Angela is.

  We plotted. She and Angela would go on with their European vacation. Corito would be on the lookout for eligible men in Spain. I knew Isabel Pres, the former Manila girl who was now a social butterfly in Spain, having married and divorced three distinguished and rich Spaniards. I told Corito to get Isabel to introduce Angela to prominent bachelors. Isabel would do that in payment for past favors. Corito would also convince Angela to remain in New York (where I had just bought a Park Avenue condo) or in that house in San Francisco, take a course in business administration in preparation for the time when she would have a hand in running the business. I had lectured her, impressed upon her the responsibility that she would shoulder. I was not going to live forever.

  I do not know what transpired between her and Delfin. She saw him before they left and she did not seem so melancholy anymore.

  Corito left Angela in San Francisco as planned. It was not difficult for her to enroll at Mills. Her grades were good and I was very happy, for she would now be away from Delfin, and her chances of meeting a young man there not of Indio descent were also excellent.

  It was during her absence that the accident happened, not in Sta. Mesa but in my penthouse, where, as I already mentioned, I enjoyed my sensual distractions.

  She was Spanish, from Madrid, and had won some beauty contest there. As it often happened, I always tested each piece of merchandise before I passed it on to my avid customers. She was on a tourist visa and even before she left Madrid, she already knew she had a lot of entertaining to do in Manila. No riffraff certainly, but the richest, the suavest men in town and in a manner most discreet and refined in keeping with her status as a beauty queen. And even if she had not been, the same decorum was always observed.

  Luisita—she was nineteen. Her father clerked in a bank and her mother was a schoolteacher. There were eight of them in the family, and four were girls. She was the oldest of the girls and, according to my man who recruited her, the prettiest. Eight in the family—so I can easily imagine how much she wanted a better life.

  In the first two days after she arrived, I escorted her to a reception where, I am sure, she attracted a lot of attention. I knew then that she could even, as had happened, end up marrying into one of the mestizo families that craved strengthened racial ties with the old country. She had passed the physical examinations—a little bit embarrassing for her, but after what had happened to me, I did not take any chances.

  From the very start, I told her she could get married in Manila if that was what she wanted, and I need not parade her around, but she demurred. Nothing like Madrid, she said. She would go back to be a model. This was a vacation and nothing more, so she decided she would make the most of it.

  My man billeted her at the Manila Hotel but, tonight, and all the days that I wanted her, she would be with me. From the Club, we went to the penthouse. Even while we were still dining, I could already imagine how the evening would be. At fifty, I had taken good care of myself and was healthy and fit; I had even quite forgotten the dread disease I had contracted in my youth and the possibility that something in me had been damaged, an internal organ, my brain perhaps? There was one sure havoc it had wrought on me—I was no longer capable of procreation but, thank God, I was not rendered impotent.

  Martial law was well into its seventh year. But even in those days that curfew was imposed, the palace had given me a special pass to travel anywhere at any time I pleased. As a procurer—I would never permit anyone to call me that!—I had the gratitude of this nation’s highest officials.

  At the time, the Leader had already grabbed the properties of his political enemies and jailed almost all of them. As I said, I had known the man since his earliest days in Congress, and we had become friends, though not too close. There was always the possibility that he would also take over my Philippine properties—I had seen, long before he came to power, the necessity of diversifying abroad, of developing ties elsewhere. Had he grabbed what I owned, he would be sending the wrong signals to the international business community, the Americans most of all, the Japanese, the Germans. How little Filipino entrepreneurs understood the necessity of such connections!

  I read the Leader early enough, too. His heroic posturing, his military cant betrayed his lack of physical courage, but he had managed his life very well, his marriage, his alliances. The flaw in the man was hubris, intoxicating and illusionary; he believed he could get away with anything merely because he was able at the start to wriggle out of a death sentence.

  What a successful entrepreneur he would have been if he had merely paid attention to getting rich; but he personified unbridled conceit and every man should beware of this. Perhaps I cultivated that conceit, too.

  As for Delfin’s idol, Nojok’s incarceration must have been regarded by my son with some pride, justifying his faith in the man. The income of the law office suffered, but not once did Delfin come to me for help. I continued sending him money—not as much as I wanted to, knowing he did not use it himself. He never acknowledged it or thanked me.

  I inquired from my people in San Quentin if Delfin’s relatives were doing well. They had my money, but not the others, the former tenants who were given title to the land they tilled. They could not keep up with the amortization. I expected this. But not what they did afterward—they sold the land and, soon enough, they were tenants again. I hope this was not lost on Delfin.

  I was talking about the accident that crippled me, that forced me to look at my own mortality, that in spite of the means at my command, my existence on this earth is transitory and brief. But first, let me dispel the rumors that have spread about my accident, stories hallowed by gossip that I did not exactly regard as derogatory for they tend to confirm my machismo. It is not true that I suffered a stroke while being on top—that is, while performing man’s most delectable function. Nothing of that sort at all, as the doctors at the Makati Center will readily confirm, as my penthouse staff will also relate. The accident was caused by my carelessness, my anxiety perhaps, although no woman can make me anxious now at this age.

  It was not even nine in the evening. I was getting bored with Luisita’s account of her middle-class Madrid life. I wanted the dinner and the dull conversation to be done with, so we hurried to the penthouse. We had showered together, but I urged her to finish first so that she could proceed to the bedroom, ready herself for my grand entrance.

  I took my time—I always do—and had already rubbed myself dry. Then, as I stepped out of the tub, I was propelled into the air and my last sensation before I blacked out was a tremendous and painful whack on the back of my head as it hit the rim of the bathtub. I had stepped on the cake of soap that had slipped from the edge of the tub where Luisita had carelessly placed it.

  When I regained consciousness, it was as if I had awakened from a deep stupor, a sleep from which I was not rested. I was disoriented, my senses seemed awry and malfunctioning, and I could hardly recall what had transpired. I closed my eyes quickly and t
ried to put some order to my thinking, and it came with a sharp twinge of regret that I was unable to savor what Luisita had to offer. Luisita! I was in a suite at the Medical Center. My head, like my whole body, felt very light. I opened my eyes again; I was surrounded by half a dozen men in white—all doctors. They seemed very serious, unsmiling. I tried to raise my arm in a gesture, but it refused to move. My other arm was nerveless, too, and so were my legs. It was then that I realized I was paralyzed. I screamed, heard the animal sound that escaped from me. I could talk, I could smell the sharp, peculiar odor of the hospital, I could hear their low conversation. They told me that I had been in a coma for three days, that my head wound required five stitches and that I had suffered brain damage.

  I was now convinced I was possessed by some malignant and inexorable spell cast no less by my dear Severina before she died. I was defenseless against that dark, unseen power that she wielded; surely, she must have hated me for having abandoned her. Who was the harbinger of her hatred? Could it be Delfin? But my son, my son—my flesh is his flesh and I love him—I realized this from my own scabrous depths, within the knotted tangle of my own emotions. Surely, he could not be the instrument. The amulet that dangled from his neck, did it really protect him, and from whom? Certainly not from me who loved him, who wished for him the endless plenitude of the earth!

  Corito came and sat on my bed. She was crying, but not only over what had happened to me. “Carling,” she sobbed, “Angie has left San Francisco—and the maid does not know where she went. She has disappeared and I don’t know where to find her.”

  Here I was, a useless cripple, and my Angela gone. There was only one person she would go to, but Corito was too distressed to think properly.

  “Go see Delfin,” I said. I could speak clearly without slurring the words.