Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

“Excuses,” Vic said coldly. “I could kill you now if I had the hatred to do it, but what would that do for us? My enemy is larger than you and all your grandiose plans, which made it possible for your father and you to be what you are and for us — our mother and myself and all the people of Sipnget — to be what we are.”

“It is history you want to destroy, then,” Luis said. “You cannot destroy what you have not created — and the past is bigger than any of us.”

“We make our fate,” Vic said with a laugh. “Did you not make yours? And all the time you ran away. In the war you were safe in the city and no one could touch you.”

“I had difficult times, too,” Luis said, “and I was with you, too, though briefly.”

“Excursions,” Vic said contemptuously. “That was what they were — you were having fun. It was life or death for us. We were hounded like dogs then. It is the same now, only the hunters are no longer Japanese but our own brothers. I am alive, maybe because I ran, but we will not run anymore. Now we have to kill.”

“How easily you say it,” Luis said. “Is it all that necessary? The world is changing, and what really is a few decades in history? The wealthy that you rail against — they will disappear in time. Look at me, Vic. I work — I am not really all that interested in the land Father has passed on to me. You are welcome to as much of it as you want. The wealthy who do not work will be replaced by young ones who have brains, whether they come from the lower class or from the middle class. It is really a cycle — that’s a very good Buddhist symbol.”

“I only know that this is my time,” Vic said with conviction, “and I know that it is wretched.”

“There will always be the poor among us,” Luis said, and remembered what Dantes had said: “The Communists have not abolished poverty. In fact you can say that the Scandinavians and the Americans have done a better job of that. And the poor sometimes get to love their chains.”

“That is what we are here for,” Vic said. “To break the chains for them.”

“The chains will be broken when the time comes — not by you,” Luis said. “Look around you. The changes are coming. You cannot tell hundreds of talented young people that they cannot use their talents. They will.”

“Talent is not enough,” Vic said. “They are not men of the future. It is the new men who will bring change, and their future is not in America but here. Did you ever think about the foul legends that our generation has fed on — that when God created the world and was fatigued by His labors He sat down to shit, and this shit is this group of islands? This is just one of the myths that we will destroy. I will forget the past; no, more than this, we will destroy this past, whatever the Spaniards and the Americans left, whatever they planted in your minds. We will do this — start anew, from a clean and empty sheet. We will write what the future should be. This is necessary, and urgent, for we cannot build until we have destroyed this past. Can you not see? It taunts us with its false promises, it corrupts us with its evils—”

“And I will quote to you an old Ilokano saying,” Luis said. “He who does not know where he came from cannot know where he is going.”

“But I know! I know!” Vic said, his voice rising with emotion. “If I did not know, how would I know what to destroy? How would I know my enemies?”

“Enemies?” Luis asked. “Who are your enemies really, Vic? Across the street, in the schoolhouse, are soldiers. They are farm boys. Their parents could be like those in Sipnget, and they are just as poor. Do you want to kill your own kin?”

“Do you think I like it?” Vic asked. “ ‘Any man’s death is also mine’—you have quoted that idea to me before. How can I forget that the soldiers we fight could have come from Sipnget? But they are not people — they are instruments of the rich.”

“How facile you have become with words,” Luis said.

“No, Manong,” Vic said. “It is you who are good with words. You are the poet, but sometimes I wonder if you really have a purpose, if your poetry is worth anything at all. You have a wonderful home and friends who appreciate your talent, but you grow fat, you grow old, and soon you will discover that you are nothing but skin and bones. What is the reason for your poetry?”

Luis said sincerely, “I do not know. As a matter of fact, I don’t even know why God created us. We are very poor likenesses of Him, you know.”

“I did not know that words — and you are a master of them — had sharpness and poison. With words you have also killed perhaps, although more slowly and more painfully. With us it is the body that dies, it is the body that will kill — faster and therefore more kindly,” Vic said.

Words, words! Luis felt a cold rage rising in him. “You cannot take words and isolate them any more than you can say that you have killed a man and destroyed an instrument. This is reducing man to an object — and you are more than that.”

“Yes,” Vic said. “I know I am more than an object, but in this process I am just an instrument, too. Therefore I must be useful — and I will be useful not only to myself but also to thousands like me, who may never get the opportunities you have.”

“You are also my brother,” Luis said sadly, the anger ebbing out of him. “You are the boy I grew up with, who swam the Agno with me, the friend who gathered camachile along dusty streets, caught frogs in the cracks of the rice fields. You are not mindless, you are not heartless, you are not a machine.”

“Manong, my brother, how beautifully you express yourself. But when you left Sipnget, when you left Mother, you left her forever. You were the son who was loved, because you needed love, and we loved you, but this love has not been returned. You know it and only you can explain to yourself why this has been so. I realized this when I saw you last time. I had come to ask that this love that you said you had be expressed in sacrifice. But you were incapable of sacrifice. If hate is strong, all the more should love be. My coming here shows this. It is in memory of our boyhood that I come here, wanting you and your wife to live. You cannot ask from me anything more. I have nothing else to give.” Vic was silent and transfixed before Luis — and tears were streaming down his dark, sunburned face.

Luis embraced him. “My brother, my executioner,” he whispered.

Vic pushed him away and without another word walked to the door. Luis did not follow him. He did not see where his brother disappeared.

He did not know who guided him out of his fortress. When he sank into his bed a thought coursed through him like ice: all these years he had always felt himself superior to his brother, maybe because he had more education and had seen more of that broader landscape extending beyond Sipnget, and what he had seen and experienced had imbued him with more knowledge, more sensibility. He was, after all, a poet, and he could be really capable of love that was not love of self but love of life — and therefore of death — so that he should be able to give himself to death’s embrace and mock that which is also the end. He knew now, however, that this was not so, that this was self-deception instead, and that, as his brother had said, he was incapable of sacrifice. And the poetry that he had written — which could hardly be understood even by those with facility in English — of what use was it? Of what use was life? He had believed that he had simplicity, but now he knew that he was obscure instead, not because he did not know what he was saying but because his own feelings were inchoate and therefore devoid of real passion. What, then, was in his arteries?