Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

I cannot now forget the last time Feliza, his mother, came to our house. Balanced on her head was the same old load of greens to sell at the market, but she didn’t put it down. After Ludovico finished drinking, she suddenly started to cough.

Ludovico took the basket off his mother’s head and placed it on the ground, then patted his mother gently on the back.

“I told you not to come,” he said. “Now look — it has started again.”

Feliza stooped and beat her flat chest with her knotted fists. She shook convulsively, then spat out something red, very red.

“What is that?” I asked.

She sat down and gurgled. Seeing that she had nothing to use, I got a glass from the kitchen shelf and handed it to her. She thanked me when her coughing ceased.

Father came out then. He asked what the matter was, and reluctantly, I told him.

Father said, “Don’t carry so heavy a load, Feliza. After all, Ludovico is a big man now and he can do that for you. Or is Ludovico lazy?”

Ludovico reddened. “No, Apo,” he said softly, “I am not lazy.”

After they had gone, Father asked me if it was I who had given the glass to Feliza. He instructed Sepa to immerse the glass in boiling water, then he turned to me: “Don’t give Feliza any of the things we use.”

Once, perched on Ludovico’s shoulders, I asked him: “What would you want to be when you grow up?”

He replied he was already “almost a man” like his father, but I insisted there must be something, someone he would still want to be.

“All right,” he said, laughing. Behind us was Rosales, and in front of us were sprawled the hills of Balungao.

He jabbed a finger at them. “I want to own one of those. You have never been there. You don’t know how it is to own a few trees. Giant trees that can mean a lot of firewood. Sagat and parunapin. These make good house posts, too.”

He went on talking about the trees, how they were felled and later tediously dragged down the slopes. And how he caught the slippery mudfish in the creeks, how his father had a row with an uncle over the irrigation ditches, how his cousin was hurt in a drinking spree. Then, unconsciously, his mother was sucked into the whirlpool of his thoughts, and he told of the work she did at home, which might as well pass for that of a carabao ’s — washing clothes, pounding rice, helping in the tilling of the soil.

The harvest season passed. The tenants littered the yard again with their bull carts filled with grain. They tucked the jute sacks in neat piles in Father’s storehouse. And one morning, Chan Hai drove into the yard with his trucks, joked with Father, weighed the palay, then took most of it away. Father counted over and over the money the Chinese had handed him and placed it in the steel safe in his room.

Father always bought a lot of things when he made a sale. Even the servants were provided with new clothes, and a new set of furniture found its way into the house. I wondered what Ludovico’s father did with his share of the crop, for when Ludovico came to town on Sundays, he still wore those faded denims.

Then the rains came. Now the mornings were cool and refreshing, and the world had a sharp, clean aroma that made one glad to have a nose.

Ludovico’s father and the other tenants came to Father’s bodega , talked of the planting season and the harvest. It would be something to be reckoned with, they said. That was immaculately clear in the stars, in the aura of the full moon, in the red-blood sun as it sank beyond the coconut groves of Tomana. When they left, they carted a few sacks for seed.

It was in the first week of October that Ludovico stopped coming to our house and headed for the hills to gather more firewood to make charcoal with. His mother was very sick, and she needed all the money he could earn. His father suffered in his stead with the firewood — small branches of madre de cacao and twigs that were damp and did not kindle so easily.

He apologized when Sepa fumed because the firewood he brought did not give off charcoal for broiling.

He does not know much about firewood, I mused.

He came one Thursday in the hush of twilight with the same two bundles. Since his usual day to come was Sunday, from the dimly lighted kitchen Sepa inquired why he was rather early. He said he was going to the hills the following day.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can. Sunday, probably,” he said complacently. “I am just going to take Ludovico home. He caught something bad over there. Typhoid, I think.”

That Sunday, as he said he would, Ludovico’s father did return. He came to the house with a black piece of cloth tied around his head. He had freshly ironed, well-starched pants folded at the ankles.

His peasant feet, big and spread, were washed and clean.

Father, whom he sought, emerged from the front door. Father did not ask why he had the black piece of cloth tied around his head. Instead, the first question Father prodded him with was: “Has the rice started to flower already, and has the dike in the west end of the farm been fixed?”

“Everything is all right, Apo.” Ludovico’s father smiled broadly, but almost as precipitately as it came, his grin vanished as he now spoke in low, even tones. He had come to borrow money for a funeral. Ludovico had died.

Father went to the house, shaking his balding head. When he returned, he handed some bills to Ludovico’s father, who in his relief pocketed them at once.

“There will be the usual interest to that,” Father reminded him.

Ludovico’s father nodded and was all smiles. Then his voice faltered. “But Apo, I cannot return this after the harvest this year. Feliza, my wife … Next harvest time, maybe …”

“And why not, may I know?” Father demanded.

Ludovico’s father explained hurriedly. At first, Father was unmoved. Then he said. “All right, next harvest time. But don’t forget, the interest will then be twice.”

I did not quite understand what it was all about, so I tugged at Father’s hand. He did not mind me — he went his way. I did not attend Ludovico’s funeral, but Sepa, who was fond of him, did, and she described how Ludovico was brought to church without the pealing of bells, wrapped in an old buri mat and slung on a pole carried by his father and a farmer neighbor.

And only afterward did I understand why there was not even a wooden coffin for Ludovico, why the next harvest, which might be bountiful, would be meaningless. I remembered Ludovico’s mother — so tiny and thin and overworked, her wracking cough, her pale, tired face, and the ripening grain that she would neither harvest nor see.

All the lures of Carmay and its feeling of space seemed dulled after Grandfather and Ludovico were gone. Even when the irrigation ditches were finally shallow and the fishing there with bamboo traps was good, even when the melons in the delta were ripe and beckoning, I did not go there. The dry season was upon us — a glaze of sun and honeyed air; it touched the green mangoes and made them golden yellow, took the roar and the brownish tint from the Agno and made it placid and green. The dry season and school vacation also brought to Rosales my Cousin Pedring (on Father’s side) and my Cousin Clarissa (on my mother’s side). Pedring had just finished law school in Manila and had come to Rosales ostensibly for some quiet and to review for the coming bar examinations. He was about twenty-four. He must have been miserable, cooped up in the city for so long, and on his first day in Rosales he got me to go with him to Carmay “to fill his lungs with clean air.”

He was handsome and fair, and he recalled how once he had vacationed in Rosales when I was still a baby; he had bathed in the irrigation ditch in Carmay then, and now he wanted to relive that experience. But in the dry season all the irrigation ditches had dried up except in spots where the water was stagnant and green. This did not deter him; he would have immersed himself the whole morning there like a carabao if I did not tell him that we had to return to town before noon. Gathering his clothes, his hair still streaked with bits of moss, his pale skin shiny with a patina of mud, he dressed hurriedly. We boarded the next caretela that passed.