Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

“What has happened to the world?” Tio Baldo cried. “Since when could justice be bought, and men have become strangers to honor? And we who have been marked for this kind of life, shall we be slaves forever? I am your son and will always be; why do you fling me now to the dogs? Tell me, oh my elders, who are wise!”

Still they did not speak.

Then, from their ranks a cry broke out — very soft and plaintive — and in the light of the storm lamp, as I stood there in their midst, I could see tears in many eyes. Numbly I looked at the ancient, careworn faces. Someone started to sob aloud, and he was quickly joined by three or four, and I could feel each sob being torn out of chests, for they were only old men, enfeebled and ready for the grave, crying now that their last dream had gone to waste. And as I looked at them, at Tio Baldo alone atop the mortar, as I listened to their grief, I felt a vise tighten in my throat; I knew I did not belong here, that I had to join Father in our comfortable house.

It was to it that I returned. And there, from the balcony, I watched the farmers slowly scatter and head back for their homes. In a while the night was quiet again and the light in the small house was snuffed out. The crickets in the balete tree started whirring, and from the asphalted provincial road came the muffled clatter of bull-cart wheels and carabao hooves carrying the harvest to the storehouse of Chan Hai.

“How did Baldo take it?” Father asked as I passed him on the azotea on my way to my room.

“Bravely, Father,” I said.

I knew how right I was, even when, the following morning, we woke up to shrill cries from outside, in the wide yard, where people had gathered to see Tio Baldo hanging by the neck from one of the lofty branches of the balete tree.

A man’s suicide is the ultimate violence he can fling against the granite circumstance he could not vanquish. It is a lonely and desperate act of supreme courage, not weakness. But it is also an admission of total failure; the destruction of the self is the end of one person’s struggle, an end wherefrom there will be no rebirth or resurrection — nothing but the blackness, the impenetrable muck that hides everything, sometimes even the reason for death itself.

Tio Baldo never left a note, and I can only surmise the depths of that despair that had claimed him. It was not, I think, that Don Vicente had defeated him; that would not have dented his courage so much, for someone like Don Vicente — all-powerful and all-devouring — could have done that and that would be explainable. It was, I think, Tio Baldo’s complete destruction at the hands of his own people that not only humiliated him; their mistrust — though not so widely voiced — simply destroyed his last shred of dignity.

But when a person commits suicide, he does not do violence only to himself; he inflicts his death upon those whom he least considered would be so afflicted. I have thought of Tio Baldo a lot, admired him, the simplicity of his final response; he has taunted me and haunted me in a way no wraith ever will, for I saw in him not just a way out of my own dilemmas but the capacity of man to have in his hands — and in no other — his own destiny. But in thinking this way, I also realized how finite everything is, how vulnerable a human being is as I now know — victim that I am, not just of memory but of that accursed attachment that I have felt for all those who have been good to me.

As for Father, he, too, was not inured to the turmoil of conscience and self-blame. In the days that followed, he became more morose and withdrawn. At the dinner table, he would stare blankly, his face drawn and haggard. He seldom spoke, and when he did, even when he was not really angry at anyone, his words had a cutting edge.

There were nights, too, when sleep eluded him, and once I heard him curse: “Ungrateful wretches! I gave you everything and you give me hell!” He moved about in his room, his slippers scraping the floor, and I slept through, then woke again to listen to him still awake and moving about.

He did not have breakfast with me that morning, and when I saw him again late in the day after school, his eyes were deep-set and glazed, and for the first time I realized that he was drunk; his breath stank.

He had called me to the azotea , where he reclined on his armchair, the ash from his cigar scattered on the front of his white coat.

“Son,” he said, “when you grow up, don’t think of other people. Think only of yourself. Others don’t matter, because they don’t think of you anyway.”

It was comments like these that, more than anything, showed how Tio Baldo’s death had now warped Father’s thinking. There may have been occasions when his spirits were buoyed up, but they were far between. I thought, for instance, that the coming of Miss Santillan to our house would brighten our lives, and it surely did, but only for a while.

Miss Santillan was brought to the house by the high school principal. She was a young, handsome woman, a teacher. They talked with Father for some time in the sala , then the principal left and Miss Santillan stayed to board with us. Father told her to make herself really at home. I’m sure the gesture was but a nicety; Father could not have meant what he said, because he loathed intrusions into his privacy. The only reason, I presume, why he took Miss Santillan as a boarder was that she was the only teacher in the high school who was not a native of our town. The principal had suggested to her that nothing but the best boardinghouse would do for her.

And the “best,” actually, was our house.

Miss Santillan was around twenty-four. Her complexion was clear brown like a baby’s, and she wore her hair short like a movie actress. Her shoes had high heels, and her toenails, like her fingernails, were painted red. She did not, however, wear the slightest smudge of rouge or lipstick. In spite of this, her lips and her cheeks shone with the pale pink of macopa .

During the holidays, when the wooden schoolhouse beyond the plaza looked haunted, she stayed in her room. And if the weather was balmy, she would read, comfortably seated on the bench shaded by the balete tree. She came up only when the sun finally toppled over the foothills and the leaves of the acacias that lined the provincial road had closed.

On this particular evening, a few days before the celebration of our high school concert, we were idling in the sala , having finished supper. Miss Santillan was feeling exuberant the whole day, and though it was Saturday, she did not shut herself up in her room or read in the yard. She had puttered around the house instead, joking with the maids in the kitchen and with the boys in the storehouse. The echo of the Angelus had waned; I had kissed Father’s hand, and he had taken his silver-handled cane and gone down for the stroll that would lead to Chan Hai’s. Sepa had lighted the bronze Aladdin lamp in the sala . The cool blue haze steadied, and Sepa dropped on the sofa and leafed through the Bannawag , which she could not read but whose pictures and Kulafu comics attracted her.

Miss Santillan, who was looking out into the town slowly succumbing to the dark, turned and beckoned me.

“You want to know something?” she asked. She held my hand and pressed her forefinger to her lips as if to warn me to share with no one her beautiful secret. “It is supposed to be a surprise,” she said.

I nodded.

“You won’t believe it, but Mr. Sanchez and I—”

“You are getting married?”

Her face reddened; she drew back and laughed. “No, of course not.” She stopped laughing, but her voice was still rich with happiness. “For the high school program, the principal has asked us to sing. A duet.”