Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

The war was over — we thought there would be no more killing. But we were wrong, for now, all around us in the plain, the men who had fought the Japanese so well as Huk guerrillas now fought their landlords and the Army, which they perceived as instruments of the landlords to perpetuate their ancient, miserable lot.

But even if this was so, Father’s tenants did not seem affected by the dissidence that had broken out in their midst; they went about their duties promptly, and for all the memories of Tio Baldo, they seemed as docile as always. Yet I knew that it was not so — the surface calm was deceptive.

It had been growing — I am conscious of that now — like the yellow, poisonous yam; and though there were mere tendrils above the earth, crawling and withered, underneath was this root, massive and deformed, with appendages of the most grotesque shape, burrowed deep. To bring out the whole would require careful prodding and digging, so that all of the root would be lanced from its mooring, for any remaining shred could well be nurtured again by the rich and loving earth, not just into life, but into something bigger than the original root wherefrom it had sprung.

“It is so clear,” Cousin Marcelo said. “The war showed the farmers, the poor, how they could survive and how the rich and the powerful could not. Look around you — the tenants are no longer the cowed starvelings they used to be. They know that if they are united and if they have guns, they can do almost anything. Anything! We have to be aware of these changes and adjust to them. We cannot live in the past forever.”

Indeed, the war altered many things but again not us, not us. We knew no hunger as did our neighbors, who lived on buri-palm flour; no lack of clothes as did many of our tenants, who learned the feel of sackcloth on their backs.

“We are fortunate,” Cousin Marcelo continued. “But look at the thousands of young people with no future. They either become soldiers or bandits in the hills whom the soldiers seek without pity. Look at Angel, and you’ll know what I’m talking about.”

I knew what Cousin Marcelo meant. I also know now that the changes that came upon the country were very profound and much more all-embracing than we had the courage to perceive. The farmers, the tenants — we did not realize then how they saw and understood that the power of the rich, of Don Vicente and Father himself, had been eroded, that in those four abject years it was really each man for himself. The old loyalties held insofar as we were concerned, but they were rendered fragile, as only time would soon show. For what the Japanese did was not to destroy the landlords; they were not interested in social change, in the restructuring of classes; they were interested only in the produce of the land, and they got the rice and whatever bounties the land gave and in the process leveled everyone.

But with the Japanese gone, the old arrangements were quickly resumed — or so we thought — little realizing that what had been broken could never be brought together again. And all these now come sharply to mind as I think of Angel and that morning during the dry season, when Father woke me up with his swearing in the garden. I rose and went to the window.

Below, Angel struck the stone bench by the balete tree with his straw hat and stirred the dust and dry leaves that covered it. As if he were a participant in a primal ritual, without looking at Father poised before him, Angel lay flat on his stomach.

I hurried down the flight in time to see Father lash the horse whip across Angel’s buttocks for the last time. The servant’s lips were drawn, his eyes were shut, and he did not rise. Panting and cursing still, Father flung the whip to the caked earth and with his forefinger scraped off the beads of sweat that glistened on his forehead.

Father was a tired shadow of his former self; he forgave the servants their manners, their barging into the sala before the guests, tongue-tied and fumbling for words, when he asked what brought them there; he did not mind their forgetting to polish his boots when he galloped off on his castaño to the fields. But it seemed that the mistake Angel had committed was beyond reprieve.

“And you say you will soon buy a cédula , ha?” Though Father’s wrath was spent, his voice was threatening still. “Not in ten years will a stupid one like you need one!”

Angel finally stood up. He passed a hand over his buttocks and mumbled, “It won’t happen again, Apo.”

Father did not hear him, as he turned away and stomped back to the house.

Since he came to serve us, Angel was to tend Mother’s garden — the roses, dahlias, and sparse rows of azucena that had survived the rainy season. He had failed to water the unpotted roses to which Father was particularly devoted because the rose plots were what Mother had lavished her care on. Father himself padded them with horse dung from the stable, but now the rose plots were whitish patches of dry soil.

Father had found Angel behind the bodega , sitting on a sled and gazing at the faraway hills, unable to explain why he was there on a morning when he should be working and — most of all — why he neglected the rose garden.

After his whipping, Angel returned to the garden and sprinkled water on the wilted plants, shielding each with his palm.

“It won’t do any good,” I said.

He turned to me and smiled sadly. “I shouldn’t have forgotten.” He dropped the tin can back to the water pail. “I just couldn’t forget what happened to Father and Mother. It seemed so impossible …” He drew the can from the pail again and, his palm over the withered plants, sprinkled them. “These are difficult times,” he murmured.

Angel was eighteen, but he looked shriveled and lines of premature age furrowed his brow. He stood up when his pail was empty and returned to the artesian well by the kitchen stairs, where three soldiers stationed in the town plaza were filling canvas buckets. They belonged to a company supposed to patrol the nearby foothills, which were now alive with Huks. Angel was soon conversing with them.

He was back in the garden in the late afternoon.

“Will you teach me now?” he called. I was at my window watching him. I went down to the back of the storehouse where Father had seen him loafing. We sat on a ledge; against the back of an old chair, he balanced the dog-eared primer I gave him and turned to its last pages.

He tackled a few sentences, and after one page he paused and leaned on the warm stone wall. His eyes wandered to the tamarind tan of May that covered the land. From his shirt pocket, he dug out the last frayed letter from Mindanao, which, as one would a Bible, I had read to him many times before. Exasperated at the thought of reading it again, I said, “No, not this time.”

He seemed hurt, and he thrust the letter back into his pocket without unfolding it.

“What can you do now?” I said, feeling badgered. “You should burn it. All the other letters, too.”

He came close to me, smelling of the stable and the dry earth. His voice trailed off: “About this morning, when your father saw me here, I was thinking …” Again his eyes were on the barren land beyond the barbed-wire fence and farther, the mountain half-hidden by coconut trees. He spoke brokenly. “I just cannot believe it. How they both died …”

I looked at the dust where with his finger he had spelled his name wrong. I did not want to remember the stooped, pallid woman, his mother, and the slight balding man, his father. “You never learn!” I said, and stood up to leave.

Angel was to serve us for ten years without pay. In the ledger in Father’s room, on the list of debtors, was the name of his father. As with all the other tenants, Angel’s father had often been in great need.