Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

When we played dominoes in the azotea , they would often get to talking and it would be difficult for me to catch the thread of what it was all about. More and more, they would clam up when I asked what it was that they were so secretive about.

At the end of the month, before the town fiesta and the opening of the school year, the parents of both Clarissa and Pedring came to Rosales. With Father joining them, they talked far into the night, while on the moon-drenched balcony Pedring, Clarissa, and I played a listless game of dominoes. I won most of the time, for they did not have their minds on the game; they did not speak much, for they seemed all ears, instead, to the talk and the occasional laughter that went on in the living room.

The following day the tenants came, and with isis leaves and wax they cleaned every nook of the house; they also polished the silver that had started to tarnish. All through the week the preparation went on, and, when it finally came, it was the grandest wedding Rosales had seen in years. There was a battery of photographers, and two days after the wedding, I saw our picture in the papers, Pedring looking bewildered, Clarissa radiant and pretty as always, and I in my white suit looking dandy — too dandy and too old to be a ring bearer.

Pedring took his bride to Hong Kong, and from there he wrote to Father and to me saying they would return to Manila, where they would make their home, then visit us before Christmas. He also took the bar examinations and passed.

I did not see them again until I went to Manila to continue my studies, and then and only then did I realize what I had done, what fate I had helped to shape.

Lack of household help was one problem we never had to face. In fact, Father used to have some difficulty turning away many youngsters who wanted to serve in the house, the sons and daughters of tenants who wanted their children to be with us, so that they would be assured of three meals a day, particularly during the lean months of the planting season — June to August — when many a rice bin was empty. Some of those who came to work, of course, knew that their servitude was payment for debts incurred, debts that their fathers had accumulated through the years. They all came to Rosales without much education, barefoot, their brown, emaciated bodies slowly putting on flesh after the first few weeks of eating regularly, their blemished skin becoming clear, their deportment less awkward as in the first few days when, awed by Father’s presence and the proportions of the house, they would walk or go about their chores in reverential silence.

Not Martina; of all the maids who came to serve us it was she I remembered best, for there was a brashness in her ways that was self-confidence rather than arrogance; it was not that she did not respect Father or that she looked with condescension at the timidity of the other help. She was, from the very beginning, herself, untrammeled by convention and uncaring toward those who thought she was without the refinements that any growing girl — barrio-born or from the heart of town — should have. They said that no good would ever come to her — that she would end up in the streets; I cannot believe this conclusion, and though I never saw her again after she left us, I am sure that wherever she is, she can cope with most of the problems life would shower on her.

She was fifteen when she came to the house. She had had some schooling, for she knew how to write her name and many a time, too, did I see her go over the old papers Sepa used to kindle the firewood. She was well on the way to becoming a woman, and I remember the ogling of the boys in the barbershop when they watched her go to market and the guarded language they used when they spoke with her. She never bothered with them. She would flop on the bench in the yard in a most unwomanly manner, exposing her thin thighs. Sometimes, too, I would catch the other boys in the house stealing glances at her low neckline and her small firm breasts, as she bent doing her chores, sweeping the yard or pumping water from the artesian well.

At first she came to the house only on weekends to do odd jobs, and she would do them as fast as she could, sweeping the wide yard cluttered with acacia and guava leaves and the dung of work animals when the tenants brought their bull carts in. She also helped clean the bodega , which was always in disarray, and once her chores were done, she would disappear. She did not seem to bother with her looks, her hair hanging in damp, uncombed locks, her face stained with dirt, although I was sure with some care and with a little bit more to eat, she would be good-looking.

Once, as Old David told me, her father operated Father’s rice mill, but by some accident, his feet got caught in the gears. It was a miracle that he survived, but he was maimed for life. Earning a living with both legs gone was impossible, so Father gave him an annual pension of twenty cavans of palay, more as a result of a court order, I think, than of sympathy.

Martina always took the shortcut from her house, which was a distance, and hurdled the tall barbed-wire fence in the rear of the bodega . Seeing her scrambling over the fence one afternoon, Father shook his head and said, “Knowing that girl’s future is like being sure that tomorrow the sun will rise from behind the Balungao mountain.”

One afternoon I saw her up a guava tree in the yard; I had refrained from climbing it for one week so that by the end of that time the fruits would be ripe. She had tied a piece of string around her waist, then filled her dress with the hard green fruits so that her tummy bulged out front.

“Get down there!” I shouted. “Or I’ll call Father and he will flog you.” She did not mind me, and angered by her insolence, I started to whimper and cry. As she scurried down, the string around her middle snapped; the fruits all came tumbling out.

“Cry — cry all you can,” she said, jumping to the ground. I stopped crying and scrambled after the fruits, grabbing with both hands all that I could and stuffing them into my pockets until they were full. And while I was at it, she never made an attempt to take anything; she just stood there watching me. When I could no longer gather more fruit, I looked up to meet her gaze, contempt, pity, perhaps, in her sullen eyes. She turned and walked to the house.

There seemed to be a gulf between us after that incident, but somehow, in another week we were friends again. She told me little about herself, but she did talk a lot about her father, who was not feeling well, so that she had to go home for about an hour every day to see him. She was not hindered from doing so; after all, she was not needed much in the house, and I think that Father tolerated her presence only because he felt some obligation toward his former employee.

I went with Martina to the river, too, and we bathed there, her clothes sticking to her thin body, her hair wet and dripping. We dove into the cold depths and tried to stay there as long as our breath could hold, and in the murky greenness, I would open my eyes to see her flapping and holding her nose. After the swim, we crossed the fields glinting brown in the sun and took the path that went by the rice mill, climbed the barbed-wire fence, and then we were home, dry and ruddy from the swim.

I had not seen Martina’s father, and once or twice I asked her to take me so that I could see how a man without legs moved about, but she always said, “Some other time.” Her mother died when she was a baby, and she did not remember her; she was more like a shadow in the past, without any importance.

Martina was very clumsy but could be very gentle, particularly with animals. She was cleaning my room one morning when she tipped the china vase — my bank — from my aparador top, and it fell with a resounding crash on the hardwood floor. She had said earlier that her mother brought bad luck to her father, that her father said so, and now that Martina was growing up, she, too, was bringing bad luck to him.