The Emperor's General

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by James Webb

In my insistent quest I had lived inside the dream of what might have been. But now I was facing the stark reality of what the past had brought us, at a time in our lives when we both lacked a future in which to change it. Yes, inside one of these ankle-length, long-sleeved brown tunics, with her hair, ears, and even her once-lovely neck hidden by a white coif headdress, labored the brilliant and beautiful woman who still represented my life’s greatest love and at the same time its most inescapable tragedy.

  I waited for her in a small garden, surrounded by blooming, aromatic flowers, underneath a white marble statue of Saint Therese. I recognized her immediately when she exited the front door of the chapel and looked across the paved courtyard toward the garden. Even her hands were hidden as they clasped a crucifix behind the brown scapular that went over her shoulders, covering her tunic front and back. I could see nothing of her except the circle of her coifed face and her leather-sandaled feet. But the tilt of her head when she surveyed the courtyard and the certainty of her firm stride as she headed toward me were unmistakable, even after fifty years.

  Finally, finally, it was she.

  I stood speechless and awkward, waiting for her to reach me. Oddly, at this moment I found myself thinking again of MacArthur. Not MacArthur the General, who brought me to the moment where I had discovered her, or even MacArthur the supreme commander, who tore me from her and set into motion the ignominious seductions and rewards that caused me to lose her. But MacArthur in his deathbed, telling me in his rasping voice how in those final, helpless months he could somehow feel all the great events of his life at the same time, so sensually that they were real, and yet so unreachable that examining them was a form of cruelty. Because as she neared me the past forced itself forward until it became indiscernible from the present, and she herself became ageless.

  Perhaps it was the heat. My knees were trembling and I was growing light-headed. Perhaps it was my age, for I had waited so long to see her that I knew there would be little time left to savor the rediscovery. But as she walked toward me I could see in her eyes the same unflinching, bold curiosity and bright intelligence of the first time I had come upon her in my jeep, as she sat proud and erect in her caratela while her small pony lay in the mud twisting and snorting and the bombs burst around us and her servant boy nervously prepared to shoot the animal.

  And suddenly it all erupted before me. Divina Clara in the caratela, lush and fecund even with her breasts bound, demanding my name and service number, then lecturing me about courage as we drove to Pampanga, and finally inviting me to dinner in her home. Divina Clara in the yawing, overfilled Papa boat as we crossed the river on the way to Subic, laughing as she invited all the passengers to ride in my jeep, then merrily instructing us on the mysteries of love. Divina Clara with her grandmother, explaining the certainty of her feelings for me, announcing that truth and even love are like the wind, unviewable but somehow tangible. Divina Clara swaying gorgeous and full above me on the soft sheets of my bed as the moon burned through the window, smelling faintly of sampaguita from the garland her mother had woven into her hair, then crying when I left again for Japan, then pulling my hands into her ever-filling belly upon my return. Divina Clara struggling to believe, bursting with such honesty that the truth itself somehow made her fragile, forced her to see more than was before her eyes, to feel less than was in my heart, until finally the very power that had impelled her love caused our world to permanently implode.

  Yes, even old nuns were young once. And some of them have lived wondrous, unrewarded dreams.

  I reached my hands out to her. “Divina Clara.”

  She stopped abruptly a few feet in front of me, looking wide-eyed at my hands. “I’m sorry but you cannot call me that. You must call me Sister Thaddeus Anthony. And I am not permitted to touch you. I have been instructed to tell you that if you will not obey the rules of the convent they will not let us talk. And you will have to leave.”

  She said it kindly but firmly, in a soft voice just above a whisper. I became uncertain and for a moment thought that she actually might have wanted me to leave. But looking into her eyes I could see that they were inviting, somehow swollen with gladness.

  “I’ve waited all this time,” I said. “Of course I will obey the rules.”

  “I knew you would.”

  She was smiling softly now, almost possessively. In that moment I could tell that she had never stopped knowing me, that her memory of me was as clear as the day I had left, and more important, that my answer had confirmed for her that her memories had not deceived her.

  I shrugged helplessly, looking around for someplace where we might sit. “What shall we do?”

  “We have to go inside. Those are the rules.”

  She turned and began walking toward the convent house, and I dutifully followed. It was so quiet that even the sound of the cars on Gilmore Avenue seemed too near, vulgar and intrusive. Watching her from behind I suddenly remembered our tearful, uncertain predawn farewell before I had first left for Japan, sitting in my jeep and seeing her disappear through the vine-covered walkway that led into her house. In a way, that parting had been the last pure moment, the last breath of simplicity in my life. And what had it been for her?

  We walked under a pillared archway, onto a concrete corridor that connected the chapel and the convent house. Reaching the house, she opened a near door. Only then did she turn around to see if I had followed. Saying nothing, but smiling happily at my nearness, she then led me into the dim-lit, concrete-floored visitors’ lounge.

  Her very happiness caused me to be overcome with regret. I had sought this simple meeting for decades but there was a tragedy in my victory, one that I could not properly define. How many people had she been permitted to see and converse with over the last half century? In this darkened void that was her home my own last fifty years leaped before me, all the grand flourishes, great debates, and bitter defeats that had informed my life as she swept and planted, ate and prayed. All I knew was that we were two lives that might have been lived together, split like an atom by anger and misunderstanding until one was propelled into constant motion and the other driven into permanent retreat. And that I had never stopped thinking about her, not even for one day.

  A low wall ran across the visitors’ room, dividing it. Atop the wall was a prisonlike, grilled partition. She walked to the other side of the wall and then waited expectantly, smiling at me from behind the wooden grill as if there were a normalcy in such meetings. Her hands were back inside the scapular, holding the hidden crucifix. Her eyes were intent, ravenous, feasting on me as I slowly approached her, taking in every piece of me from my shoes to my thinning hair, as if she were furiously working a camera, capturing all the details to be gone over again and again like a scrapbook for the remainder of her years as she meditated and prayed and remembered.

  “I am so proud of you, Jay,” she finally said. “You became a very famous man!”

  Her compliment conjured up an emptiness inside me, a lament that I could not even articulate. “I have never stopped loving you,” I said, searching her face.

  “Please. You are not allowed to say that. Those are the rules. And my love is now in Christ.” Her eyes caught the deep scar that still creases my right cheek. “That is where he cut you?”

  She asked me as if it had happened yesterday. Without thinking, I absently touched my cheek, where every morning I must pause when shaving to work around the cleaving. Yes, every morning, just as he predicted when he sliced me deep and ragged, I must stop for a moment and think about her father.

  “Yes.”

  “I never saw it—before.”

  “I know.”

  “He should not have done that.”

  She held my eyes. I tried to search behind her face for something that might tell me how she felt, or used to feel. I wanted to ask her. We were alone in the room. But there were, as she kept reminding me, the rules. “How did you pick your names?” I finally managed to say.

  “Saint Th
addeus is the patron saint of lost causes,” she answered simply. Then she hesitated, a small cloud passing before her eyes. “And Saint Anthony is the patron saint of barren women.”

  My knees began knocking again. My hands were trembling anew. I wanted more than anything to reach through the grill and clasp her to me, to try again to explain, to beg her for forgiveness. I knew it was fruitless at this point but still I felt a call for justice, an anger that life does not always reward the right intentions, that the cycles of days and years and seasons lull us into thinking that in all things there will be second chances, and even thirds, when in some things we have only one. And sometimes we never know we had that single chance until it disappears.

  “The reason that he cut me. The reason that you—became sick. It was not what it sounded like,” I said. “It’s important to me that you understand that.”

  “You should not carry this burden in your heart,” she said simply. “I have forgiven you, Jay. But you should also forgive my father.”

  Suddenly I relaxed. I felt myself smiling, because I knew now that it had been right for me to come. I knew that behind the layers of clothing, inside the heart and brain of the person before me, was indeed Divina Clara, ever logical and constant, always trying to mend and to heal, even here, so near to the end. We stared at each other through the impenetrable wooden grill and across the unrecoverable years. Outside the church bells began ringing. I sensed that soon she would have to leave. Her nearness, the ringing of the bells, the sweet smell of flowers, my fingers pressing into the scar upon my cheek, the very city in which we had loved so fiercely, all combined to surround me with the memory of the day our lives had so completely turned.

  “I forgive him for what he did to me,” I said. “Because I know that you were precious to him, and he had his pride. But I have never been able to forgive him for what he did to you.”

  “Please,” she said, almost as if she were counseling me. “We are not permitted to talk about this.” And so for a long moment I stopped speaking. But although we could not speak about it, it was indeed before us, tangible and alive, held in the space between our staring eyes.

  “I tried to find you. They kept me from you.”

  “I did not know that.”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “No.” In her eyes I saw not regret, for what good would that emotion have accomplished? Instead she slowly smiled, her face overcome with gladness, as if I had vindicated some distant, undisturbed memory. “But anyway, now you are here.”

  Indeed I was. She stood before me, too distant and too late, but mine at least to see, if only for one brief moment that might confirm the grandeur of our loss. She continued to smile at me through the grill, then reached through it to briefly touch my hand. In her cloistered world it was an act of utter boldness. “I have always prayed for you. Every day.”

  I held her fingers briefly, remembering their touch with an aching clarity. Surprised by the intimacy of my gesture, she pulled them away. “Do you really believe there is a reason for everything?” I asked.

  “It does no good to question the will of God.” She eyed me carefully. “You do have children, do you not?”

  “Yes,” I answered, almost embarrassed to speak of them in front of her. “Two.” I watched her pleased smile and knew she was happy for my good fortune. “I married late in my career.” I took a deep breath. “It took me a very long time, you know.”

  “Like MacArthur!” she suddenly said. She seemed happy in her discovery, as if it brought a final balance to her life. “Did you know that Consuelo Trani did not die until the year after MacArthur did? Yes! It is still a grand love story in the Visayas. For the rest of her life she prayed after him and remembered him and looked after his soul. Even though she could not have him.”

  I found myself smiling sadly with her, for I knew that she was not simply talking about Consuelo. “Waray waray,” I said.

  Her face brightened. “You remember, even after all these years! Yes, that is the way of our people. To the last drop of blood. To the last breath of air. To the last beating of the heart. This is how we fight. This is how we pray. This is how we love.”

  Listening to her and watching her smooth, full face become so animated as she spoke left me overwhelmed with the greatest certainty of my life. “I will always love you. Always, always.”

  Her face became firm, but in her eyes I could see a young girl, forever handing me her heart. “You are not permitted to say that!”

  “I know. But how can I wait this long and still keep it inside me?”

  Outside a clock began to chime. The bells rang again and from the chapel I could hear soft female voices beginning to chant the Angelus.

  “Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae …”

  “I am late,” she said. There was duty in her voice but also regret. Her eyes were scanning me again, soaking up memories that might have to last her forever. For who knows, on the far side of seventy, how quickly God might take us?

  She walked with me along the concrete drive way until we reached the iron gate that for a half century now had defined the boundaries of her life. Behind us the bells and the chanting voices called her. In front of me my driver waved, jumping down from his perch on the front hood of my hired car and running to open a door. Divina Clara stood next to me, just as she might always have stood had I not been pulled away from her into the chaos of war-bombed but ever-resilient Japan.

  If it had not been for MacArthur I would not have lost her, I thought. And then I stopped. For I had done it to myself. And if it had not been for MacArthur I would never have found her, either.

  We reached the gate, and I could control myself no more. I turned suddenly and embraced her, no longer caring about the rules. Surprisingly, she held me tightly, and from deep within her I heard an involuntary groan. She was still firm, even at this age, but far too slender. I thought I might tell her to eat more food, to take care of herself, but then I realized how silly that all would sound.

  She sought to push me away but I held on to her, not wanting her to see me weeping. “I will never stop loving you, Divina Clara.”

  “My name is Sister Thaddeus Anthony,” she said simply, now freeing herself from my embrace. She wiped my eyes with the front of her scapular, as if tending to me. “You will have to get used to that, Jay. Now, I must go.”

  I watched her from the gate as she walked back toward the chanting voices. “Divina Clara!”

  She stopped for a moment and turned back to me as if to scold me.

  “You are my guardian angel,” I said.

  She waved sadly to me. Her dark eyes were swarming with unquenchable memories. “I have thought about that,” she said.

  Then she walked away from me. And as I watched, she disappeared inside the chapel.

  A SPECIAL ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  Many people helped through their encouragement and advice as this book moved forward, but it would not have achieved its full majesty without the continuous support of my agent, Nick Ellison, who brings to his trade a rare combination of intellect, publishing savvy, and personal warmth. I am also indebted to his assistant, Faye Bender, who was generous in her time and honest in her comments as the manuscript moved forward.

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  FIELDS OF FIRE

  A COUNTRY SUCH AS THIS

  A SENSE OF HONOR

  SOMETHING TO DIE FOR

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JAMES WEBB, combat marine and author of four bestselling novels, is an attorney and Emmy Award-winning journalist who has served as secretary of the navy, assistant secretary of defense, and full committee counsel to the U.S. Congress. He lives in Virginia.

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    James Webb, The Emperor's General

 

 

 


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