Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

Words, words — nothing but words. What am I doing? Playing with words when life is about to ebb from her. I must at least prove to myself that I am not a lamb being led to the slaughter, that I made my choice long ago and I must now protect this choice . He went to his father’s room, beyond the long, silent hall. He knew every piece of furniture in it, and he ransacked the glass-paneled case by the window. The gun was there, all right, where he had returned it when Santos had urged him to carry it — and a cartridge box, too. He weighed it in his hand and deftly flipped its chamber open. It was fully loaded.

He was ready now, and he went back to Trining, the gun at his hip, the cartridge box in his hand. She was sitting on the bed. He went to her and told her to lie down and not move. “When it is light, the soldiers will come. Then it will be safe and we can return to the city.”

“You have told me that—”

“But it is true, it is true!”

“No.” Her voice was soft but firm. “I am going to die, and you will, too, if you don’t escape now. I have thought about it, my husband. It is better that you live. You cannot escape if you carry me — you will be slow, you will be spotted, and they will kill you. Please go now while you still can. You can leave by the back.”

He shook his head. Her hands reached out to him, and he embraced her. She had become cold. She sank back into the bed, and although he could not see her eyes as she turned away from him, he knew she was crying.

“Do not cry,” he said, holding her close. “I cannot leave you. I will die first.”

“My husband, my Luis, we cannot fight,” she told him. It was the first time she admitted the truth about themselves. Tenderly he kissed her again. “What is going to happen to you?” she asked.

As if it still mattered, when long ago the primeval sore had claimed him — and yet here she was, like the others who called him friend, worrying about him. He went to the window. The fires had now become wilder, as if the whole center of the town, the market, were now engulfed in flames.

“You can escape. It is so simple,” she insisted behind him.

He went back to her. “One thing is sure,” he said. “I will not leave you. Why should I? This is the least that I can do for you, and this I did not do for the others.”

“Do not talk like that.”

“It was so easy to hate—”

“It was not hate,” she said, reproaching him softly. “Its other side is love.”

Luis laughed drily. “The difference is now very hard to draw, although everything started out so pure. Look at it this way — the muddy lowland river gushes out of clear springs in the mountains. The world began with two sinless people.”

“Don’t talk like that,” she said, pressing his hand to her breast.

“I am sorry,” he said, bending over and caressing her hair. It smelled of freshness and life. “There is an old saying: In vino, Veritas— in wine, truth. I think it should be changed to: In violence, truth. The truth now, my dear wife, is that I have sinned, not just against all those whom I loved, including you, but most important, against Mother and all that she was. I forsook her, but I will not forsake you now. She was everything — Mother — the grace and the patience of the earth. How she sacrificed for me, but what did I do for her? No, I will not leave you.”

It was as if he had intoned an ancient prayer, the oracíon that warded off evil, for the great weight on his chest seemed lifted at last. He had decided that this was his fort, that they must not touch her, the contemptible mob. He heard her sigh, and bending over her, he touched the bandage on her breast. It was wet and warm, and fear rushed back, massive and all-engulfing, but he tried to ward it off, speaking softly: “What do you feel? God, do not leave me. You cannot leave me,” he cried, holding her tightly, and he glanced at her face, but her eyes were closed. “My wife, do not leave me. There are just the two of us now — just the two of us.”

“Luis.” It was a soft, gurgling sound that escaped from her lips, then she was limp, and although her face was still warm, he knew that she was dead. He held her more tightly now, sobbing loudly as he had never cried before, for this was the girl he had grown up with, who knew him as no woman had ever known him, and she was dead. He kissed her lingeringly on the lips, which were still warm, then slowly he laid her down, folded her hands neatly on her breast, smoothed out her hair, and gazed at her face, lighted now by the glow of the fire and quiet in repose.

He went out into the hall. Near the window the bronze statue of the farmer with a plow gleamed in the light of the burning town. There was a shuffle of feet in the street below, raucous peasant voices and the snort of jeeps. He turned to the azotea , and through the broken glass windows, the town — all of it — seemed ablaze. The sky was clear but scabbed with clouds. The air was cool. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.

Would death hurt? The knowledge would be meaningless, but even then he wanted to know how it would be in that last moment when that wakeless sleep would come at a time when all his faculties were working — and it was just as well, for there would be no real life in old age when the bones would have become brittle, the mind senile, and the flesh shorn of its nerves.

Down the street the howling of dogs increased. The shuffle of feet on the asphalt had heightened. Like him, they were young — these peasants, riffraff, the aimless generation, which had finally found something to latch on to. These were the young who would always be marched off to a tree and hanged, the pawns who must answer always for their father’s dementia. And the young could do nothing really but accept or forget, as he, too, must now accept.

The shuffling of feet had ceased. The voices below the house were a murmur. They were there, waiting, waiting. It would be simpler if he went to the window and shouted his defiance at them, but that would be foolhardy. It pained him to use the gun, for he had never used one before, never aimed at any man, although as a boy he had gone hunting in the delta with his father, and during the war he had fingered captured Japanese rifles — but to grip a gun and point it at another human being was to play God, to pass irrevocable judgment. He crouched below the statue of the farmer with a plow, the cartridge box on the floor before him. The base of the statue was wood, but it was thick molave and it would give him some measure of protection at least. Protection? What high wall, what bastion could protect him now from this primeval anger that had been released? Yet it was an anger that he had shared and fed on, because he believed in it, because it represented that bleak and trackless waste from which he had come. But this anger was not a mover or a compulsion. It was some effete luxury that titillated the mind and adorned his prose, his poetry, as frills adorn a curtain.

Now this anger had come to claim him, and strangely aware of this, he felt no impulse to reject it. He no longer felt rancor for his father nor for Dantes, nothing but an overwhelming indifference. Now he was simply tired.

What a waste — the thought crossed his mind: If I should live longer and if there still be plenty of potent chemistry in this flesh, I would be like that son I leave behind. I would only bring rot to those whose lives I will touch. Better, then, to be exorcised from this land, better to succumb finally to the avenging fires that I have fanned. What have I known that would convince me that life has meaning? My wife, the dearly beloved life and youth that she gave up for me; the beautiful world of Sipnget, the mornings washed with dew; Mother’s touch … If I die tonight, it will be just a physical death, for I have long since died and only memory has framed me, here where I have trod, and searched and searched but found nothing .