Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

Shortly after the Angelus, Sepa came to the sala , where, beneath the new Coleman lamp, I was reading. “Angel has something for you,” the old woman said, and gestured that he was waiting for me in the bodega . I went down to the silent yard. Inside the big building I flashed a light on the broad wooden board where Angel sat leaning against the wall.

“Do you want ointment for blisters?” I bantered, playing the light on his face.

He did not answer. I turned the light off, and in the pale haze from the barred window above him, his gaunt, tired face became softer.

He stretched his hand to me. “Here,” he said in a tone that was supplicating. I took from him the battered cardboard box where he kept his mother’s letters. “Keep it for me.”

I climbed to his side and sat on the pallet. I flashed a light on the stone floor, saw that his trunk fashioned out of packing boards was tied. He wore shoes, too, the worn-out pair Father thought he had thrown away.

“Are you leaving because Father whipped you? Why, he whips everyone. Even me!”

Angel shook his head.

“Where are you going, then?” I asked, gripping the box.

“Don’t tell Apo,” he said. “I am leaving tonight. With the soldiers.”

“But where?”

The alien sounds of evening filled the storehouse. In its blackness rats moved. Outside, in the balete tree, cicadas were alive.

“I don’t know where they will send us,” Angel said carelessly. “I am not going to Mindanao, though. Maybe, someday, I’ll go to the United States, like your Tio Benito. But for the next few years …” He turned reflectively to the barred window and pointed to the starlit west where the mountains loomed. “We will go there. Fight there.”

In my mind flashed the vivid sight of the uncovered bodies of soldiers brought to the town plaza after the all-night fighting in the nearby hills — the stiff, half-naked dead, some barefoot, all their faces anonymously stolid in death — dumped by the camp roadside to be identified.

“You are stupid, just as Father said.”

“I am eighteen,” he retorted.

“You don’t know what is waiting there for you. You’ll die.”

His rough hand slid into mine. “It doesn’t make a difference.” His voice quavered. “But what can I do? Will I stay here forever like David, tending the garden, feeding the horses? I would have joined the Huks if they came and asked me. I am sure that with them I’d be in a place other than here. Can’t you see? I have to go. Where I am going I’ll have my own life. The soldiers have that much to offer. And they are here.”

“You are going to die.”

He let go of my hand. In the dark, his teeth gleamed in a quick smile. “That should worry your father,” he said with a trace of sarcasm, “but don’t think I’m running away from my father’s debt. My salary, most of it, will go to Apo. Until we are free.”

“You are going to die.”

His head drooped. He eased himself down the pallet and paced the stone floor. “Yes, but I’ll die decently,” he said, pausing. He leaned on his elbows and faced me. “Isn’t that what we should live for?” His questions had a quality of coldness, of challenge.

I swung down the pallet and beamed a ray across the black void to the open door. His letters were in my hand. I walked away without answering him, Angel, my servant, my friend.

In the morning the household was agog over Angel’s sudden departure, the servants speculating on where and when he would die.

“I can’t understand it,” Father said at the lunch table. He was angry and perplexed. “So I did whip him, but was that enough to make him leave?”

“Maybe he wanted to be free,” said Sepa, who was serving us.

“Free?” Father asked incredulously. “Wasn’t he free here to do his foolishness?” He turned to me. “You were the last one he saw. What did he tell you? Why didn’t you stop him?”

“He said he would send you the money, Father, to pay the debt of his parents.”

“And I’ll believe that? Why didn’t you stop him?”

I could not speak.

“So Angel is gone,” he said aloud for all the servants to hear. “Ingrate! I gave him a roof and three meals a day, and he could at least have come to me and said, ‘Oy, I’m leaving now because my belly is full and my limbs are strong.’ See what I get for my kindness to people. Nothing but insults that claw the mind!”

Father’s anger, however, did not persist, nor did the talk of the servants about Angel. In a week, all attention centered on the forthcoming celebration of Father’s birthday. It was not really for him alone; more than anything, it was an occasion for all of his tenants to come to town to partake of his food, and at the same time bring their children and grandchildren, so that Father would get to know them. It was a time for them to render us service, to fix the fences, clean the yard, and whitewash the walls.

For Father’s close friends, too, it was a time to gather in the house and share his liquor. For our relatives who lived in other parts of the province or in the city, this was a time for remembering old ties.

Among our Manila relatives, it was Tia Antonia and her children who came most often “to have a better whiff of air.” I suspect, however, that she came to Rosales almost every month not only for the country air but to save on groceries, for Tia Antonia was the prototype of the Ilokano housewife — a tightwad as only Ilokanos could be. For the big feast she was the first to arrive.

Old David and I met her at the railroad station. I was peeved at Father’s sending me there, for it interrupted my mouse hunting in the storehouse. Tia Antonia and her children needed no welcoming committee — Rosales was practically their home. As we came within sight of the red brick station, Old David’s horse paused and its bony head dropped. He prodded its skinny rump with his big toe and whacked the reins on its back.

“Thank heavens, this calesa is not for hire,” he sighed as the horse finally lifted its head and plodded on.

The old man turned to me and grinned. His breath stank with nipa wine, but he talked soberly: “If it were, no one would use it. You can’t expect much from horses now. But you should have seen the horses I tended then in your grandfather’s stable. Colts, roans, all spirited, from the provinces of Abra and Batangas. They could race the wind and come out winners by how far the east is to the west!”

The train from Paniqui had long come in and was now leaving the station, the steel bumpers of its three dilapidated coaches whanging as they lurched forward. Calesas filled with passengers were pulling out of the parking lot under the acacias, and the platform was almost empty of people. We could have reached the station earlier, but through the main street, along the shrub-lined road that skirted the creek to the station, though Old David always clacked his tongue, never once did his horse perk up.

“There they are,” I said, nudging the old man as we reached the shade of the acacias where now not a single calesa was parked. Even from a distance it was easy to recognize Cousin Andring, with his paunch and round balding head, and Tia Antonia, who always wore a severe chocolate-colored terno , her gray hair tightly knotted.

Old David tied the reins to one of the posts that palisaded the station yard. I jumped down and ran to Tia Antonia, who was standing by the ticket window, and kissed her bony hand. She was past fifty and looked ascetic but still used perfume liberally, a brand that had a particular scent similar to that of crushed bedbugs. Andring tousled my hair.

“If I didn’t know you were coming,” Tia Antonia said drily, peering down at me through her steel-rimmed eyeglasses, “we would have taken one of the caretelas .”