Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

After Padre Andong had sprinkled holy water on the assemblage, our relatives who were not related directly to Grandfather took off their black mourning clothes, but we who were direct descendants still wore black bands on our sleeves or wore black for another year, after which the period of mourning would end.

At around ten in the morning, the prayers concluded, someone in the yard ignited a rocket, which swished up and exploded — the signal for the festivities to begin, for the gin and the basi to flow; it would need another minor calamity for the clan to gather, and for this occasion the town photographer was on hand. His camera, a bulky contraption, staggered him when he carried it up the stairs and posed us all at one end of the hall. “It is not bright,” he complained after he had peeped out of his red velvet shroud, so he poured some powder on a rack, told us to stand still, and at the appropriate signal sent an orange flame spurting up. For some time the smoke and the acrid odor filled the hall. It was then that Father said he would like a bigger picture, which would show part of the house, so we broke up, the cameraman bundling his huge camera again, and filed after him in one burbling procession down the stairs into the yard. There was much laughter and joking as he lined us up on one of the benches before the eating table, the morning sun blazing on our faces.

Looking about him, a bit uncomfortable perhaps in his close-necked alpaca suit, Tio Doro said aloud above the sonorous talk: “We are such a big family, why don’t we have a coat of arms like the great families during the Spanish times?”

Cousin Andring, the perennial jester, shouted: “That’s an excellent idea, Tio. I suggest that our coat of arms shows a demijohn of basi , which shall symbolize our hardiness and, of course, our pleasant disposition.”

In spite of his mother’s angry glare, Cousin Andring was unruffled, and his remark was greeted with prolonged laughter. “And we will have Tio Marcelo do the design, too,” he continued.

My relatives must have considered his second joke in bad taste, for now most of them scowled. It was not difficult to understand their reaction; Cousin Marcelo, though he was pleasant and reliable to some extent, had long been regarded as “the problem” in the family because they considered him unstable. He was the only one who greeted the reference to him with laughter.

Tio Doro was alive with ideas. “We should have someone chronicle our lives, our successes and failures.”

“Mostly the failures — particularly when there is too much gin,” Cousin Andring remarked, happy again.

Tio Doro turned around to look at his relatives, almost all of us still in identical black. Then his eyes rested on me.

“Espiridion,” he called to Father, who sat on the bench behind me. “That’s the job for your boy — he may grow up to be a writer and give us some permanence.”

The blood rushed to my head, and I glowed all over. Behind me, Father said happily, “You can depend on him to do that.”

The photographer shouted that he was ready, and everyone preened. Almost everyone. I saw them then in the shade of the balete tree — the servants, Old David, Sepa, Angel, Tio Baldo — all of them watching us and seeming left out. I turned to Father, who was straightening the creases of his white alpaca suit. “Father, couldn’t we have Sepa and all the others with us in the picture?”

He frowned at me.

“Just one,” I pleaded.

“All right,” he said, still frowning, then he called out to them to stand on the low benches in our rear. They hastened to their places, smiling.

Now the picture is before me. Where are they now, these familiar faces? Tio Baldo, Ludovico, and, perhaps, Angel were already dead. Others have left for places unknown — perhaps to Mindanao and the promise of new lands, perhaps to the labyrinths of Tondo and Santa Cruz, where they would work as drivers and house servants, in places where there will be little light and they, too, will be among strangers just as I am now in this blighted town. I knew this from the very beginning — that oil and water could not mix, just as Teresita had told me once.

I am also my father’s son.

All who served us used to tell me that I was born under a dark cloud not so much because my mother died giving birth to me, but because I never saw her. She was, they said with candor and reverence, the most beautiful woman they ever saw, and whenever they would start talking about her who nourished me in her womb, I listened attentively. I would be vastly proud and at the same time feel this sense of loss and futility, and foolishly I would wish to see her even though she be but a pallid ghost.

But I never did, although she lingered in every nook of the house, among the old iron pedestals and the tarnished mirrors, in the garden she once tended, and most of all in the big and troubled room that she had shared with Father. Her portrait there, by Cousin Marcelo, the servants told me, was lifelike. I often stood before it and marveled, for in the light that came in a flood when the sash shutters were open, I could almost feel her long hair, her benign smile upon me, her oval face, her dark eyes. Her expression exuded tenderness, patience, and that virtue of compassion, of forgiveness for even the deepest hurt such as that which Father could inflict.

The painting hung before Father’s writing desk — an old narra masterpiece with a cover that slid down. Cousin Marcelo knew how to capture every nuance in a person’s face, but more than this, he had also rendered in paint my mother’s luminous skin, the very flutter of her eyelashes.

Seeing me there gazing at the picture once, Sepa said: “Don’t you ever think she was that homely; she was much prettier than that — and her hair, her beautiful hair!” Then she called me to the kitchen, and among her shining pots and pans, she told of those times when she helped my mother wash her hair with lye from straw ash, treat it with coconut oil when it was dry, and comb it slowly as if she were combing fragile threads of gold.

Sepa was past fifty and stout like a pampered sow. Like Old David, who looked after the horses, she could not read or write. She used those black, thick slippers called cochos , and she always wore the traditional Ilokano handwoven skirt and rough cotton blouse. She had served the family all her life, and she spoke to Father and me with an intimacy none of the other help ventured to imitate. “If your mother were here now — if she were only here now.”

I remember my first visit to my mother’s grave on a windy October afternoon a few days before All Saints’ Day. I was five or six years old. I was chasing dragonflies in the yard under the watchful eyes of one of the maids when Old David scooped me up in his arms and took me to the house, where Sepa gave me a good scrubbing. She dressed me in my sailor suit, and when I was ready, Father emerged from his room in a white drill suit looking as if he was going to an important feast, for his hair was neatly combed and his robust cheeks shone.

Near the family altar in the sala he picked up a bouquet of roses wrapped in palm leaves. They came from my mother’s rose garden, which Father now tended. Then, taking my hand, he led me down to the yard, where Old David was waiting for us in the calesa . The drive to the cemetery was pleasant; the afternoon was mild, and the smell of grass, the good earth, and the fields yellow with grain filled the air. The wind whistled in the bamboo groves by the side of the road, and Old David sang snatches of his favorite Ilokano song, “If You Still Doubt.”

Father was silent all the way, his eyes at the distance. The road narrowed and was now devoid of gravel; rutted in the rainy season, it was now drying up, the deep lines drawn by bull carts and sleds hardening into neat furrows. We reached the cemetery, its low stone wall shrouded by vagabond cadena de amor . The earth was carpeted in amorseco weeds, and in the empty spaces stood leafless sineguelas trees. The cemetery was busy with people painting the crosses and the slabs with white lime. At the dead end Old David stopped, jumped down, and helped us off.