Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

We cooked liver broth and gave it to him at lunchtime together with his medicine that the doctor had prescribed. He was grateful for the broth, but he did not take the medicine. In his rasping breath, he said, “Prayer is good medicine, particularly if you are as old as I am.”

That evening I offered him a prayer.

The fever left him, but he never regained his strength. He was pale and listless. One afternoon a nun came to the convent, and I learned afterward that she was Padre Andong’s youngest sister. They talked in Tagalog, some of which I understood. The nun was saying that it was time for him to go to the hospital, or to retire in the hospicio in Manila, where he would be taken care of in his old age. He could no longer say mass regularly, listen to confessions, or visit the villages where there were no churches; Rosales needed a younger priest. This was the way not only of the world but of the church itself.

That afternoon, after Padre Andong had made his decision, he told me to go fetch Father.

“He is leaving Rosales for good, Father,” I said, not quite sure that Father would come. “He is a sick man.”

Father tousled my hair. “I am going to see him,” he assured me.

The old priest’s room was airy and light, but it was bare except for his ancient rattan bed and his shabby clothes in the open aparador . He asked Old Tomas to draw from under the bed an old wooden trunk, to which he had a shiny iron key always in his pocket. Bending over, he opened it and removed from the top the same old black soutane that he wore frayed at the cuffs and the hem but pressed and clean.

And beneath this was a heap of coins and paper bills — many of the coins already greenish with mold. I had never seen so much silver in my life, and I looked at it in sheer wonder. Then, Padre Andong’s cracked voice: “All of it I have saved these many years — the new church will not leak … you don’t have to kneel in a puddle anymore, Espiridion. And you will come back … The new church I will leave … and it is what the people shall have built.”

So they came that week, the carpenters and the masons, and they dumped their lumber and their cement in the churchyard. They tore the façade off the old church first, then the tottering belfry, and through the hellish sound of building, Padre Andong seemed pleased with the world. He rose early, staggered to the churchyard, and looked at what was taking shape, and until the last day of his stay in Rosales, he seemed to want to linger a moment longer.

The day Padre Andong finally took the train to Manila and his resting place, I asked Father during the evening meal, “What happens when old priests can no longer say mass? Who will take care of them, since they have no children?”

Father was in a quiet mood. “Then it is time, I suppose,” he said with a wry smile, “that they sprout wings and go up there.”

I am sure Padre Andong would have preferred it down here, in the new church, if he only could have stayed.

A week before Padre Andong left, the new priest arrived in Rosales. He was a young Pangasinense with short-cropped hair and a bounce in his walk. He had just graduated from the seminary near the provincial capital, and Rosales was his first assignment. During his first week in town, he was always up and about, visiting his wealthy parishioners and supervising the completion of the church.

He came to the house, too, and after losing two successive games of chess with Father, he practically got Father to promise that henceforth he would hear mass again.

He must have made some impression not only on Father but with the townspeople as well, for on his first Sunday mass, the church was filled to overflowing and the crowd spilled all over the sacristy and beyond the open doors onto the lawn.

Shortly after his arrival, however, I stopped serving in the church. I no longer relished working for him; for one, he turned down Cousin Marcelo’s plan to paint murals. He wanted the wall plain. But what really angered me was his refusal to give Tio Baldo a Christian burial. I know that the laws of the church are steadfast, but still, I believe that Tio Baldo — because of his goodness — should have been given a church burial, and that he should not have been buried as if he were a swine.

It is easy to forgive a person his faults when he is dead because in death he atones for his sins somewhat before the eyes of people who are still living and who have yet to add more on the parchment where their sins are listed. But even if Tio Baldo had lived to this day, I would not nurse within me the slightest displeasure toward him for his having taunted Father. I would, instead, honor him as I do honor him now, although in the end his courage seemed futile.

It happened that year when the harvest was so good, Old David had to remove the sacks of rice bran from the bodega so that every available space there could be used for storing grain. I thought that Father’s tenants — and also those of Don Vicente — could buy new clothes at last, but they did not; all they saved they gave to Tio Baldo, who, I’m sure, spent it wisely and well.

Tio Baldo was not really an uncle. In fact, he was no relation at all. He had lived in a battered nipa shack near our house with his mother, who had been, like him, in Father’s employ. She took in washing and did odd jobs for as far back as I could remember.

Tio Baldo helped Father with the books. He had gone through grade school and high school with Father’s money and insistence, and when Father was in a gracious mood, he spoke of him in terms that always brought color to Tio Baldo’s dark, oily face.

He would be a teacher someday if he continued enjoying Father’s beneficence. Indeed, Tio Baldo was made for teaching. He used to solve my arithmetic and my spelling problems in such a lucid manner that he never had to do the same trick twice. He also taught me how to fashion a well-balanced kite out of bamboo sticks, so that once it was airborne, it would not swoop down — too heavy in the nose. He taught me how to make the best guava handle for a slingshot, how to ride curves on a bicycle without holding the handlebar, and most important, how to swim.

One hot, raw afternoon he came to the garden and saw Angel, one of the houseboys, squirting the garden hose at me. He asked if I wanted to go with him to the creek. No invitation would have been more welcome.

We stripped at the riverbank. From a rise of ground on the bank, he stood straight and still, his muscles spare and relaxed, then he fell forward in a dive that hardly stirred the cool, green water as he slid into it.

When he bobbed up for air, he looked up at me and shouted: “Come!”

And seeing him there, so strong and ever ready to protect me, it did not matter that I did not know how to swim, that the water was deep. I jumped after him without a second thought.

One June morning, Tio Baldo came to the house with his mother — an aging woman with a crumpled face, whose hair was knotted into a tight ball at her nape. They talked briefly with Father in the hall; then the old woman suddenly scooped up Father’s hand and, with tears in her eyes, covered it with kisses.

The following day Old David hitched his calesa , and we picked up Tio Baldo at his house, loaded his bamboo valise, and took him to the railroad station. He was to stay in Tia Antonia’s house in the city, and while he served her family, he would go to college to be an agrimensor —a surveyor.

For the next two years that he was in the city, Tio Baldo never took a vacation. He returned one April afternoon; he went straight to the house from the station, carrying a wooden trunk on his shoulders all the way. He had grown lighter in complexion. His clothes were old and shabby, but he wore them with a confidence that was not there before.