Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

“You are drunk again,” I said.

He dug his big toe into the sawdust and shook his head. “Ay — I knew them all. I watched them grow into big men, learned men. But no one lives forever — that’s what your cousin said. I can die here, where I saw them all grow. There is nothing like the land you belong to claiming you back. But everywhere the earth is the same.”

Father, his hands on the shoulders of Tia Antonia and Cousin Andring, walked idly to the gate where the jeep was parked. The servants were loading it with vegetables, two sacks of rice, chicken, and bunches of green bananas.

Cousin Andring turned to us. “And why isn’t David moving yet?” he shouted. “Is he drunk again?”

The old man stood up and tried lifting his valise, but it was cumbersome. I grasped its lashing at one end, and we carried it to the jeep.

“Does he have to bring all that junk to the city?” Cousin Andring asked, looking apprehensively at the jeep that was now overloaded. “I’ll bet anything it’s all bottles of nipa wine. A year’s ration, that’s what.”

Father smiled. “Let him,” he said.

“Hurry, David,” Cousin Andring urged the old man, “we’ll miss the train.”

We raised the suitcase, but the old man’s hold was not firm enough and the trunk fell. I stepped aside lithely just in time to avoid being hit by it. Its lashing broke, and out spilled his things — an old prayer book, his clothes, a leather case in which he kept his betel nuts, and a bottle of nipa wine. The bottle broke when it hit the ground, and its contents were spilled.

Tia Antonia buckled over laughing, but Cousin Andring was angry. “God,” he cursed, “can’t you be more careful, David?”

Pushing the old man aside, he picked up his things and dumped them into the open suitcase, then heaved everything into the jeep.

Old David’s face was pale and expressionless. He was the last to board the vehicle, and as it started, he turned briefly to me. I could not tell whether what glistened on his cheeks was beads of sweat or tears.

Shortly after Old David left to serve in Tia Antonia’s house in the city, I, too, had to pack my bags. I always knew that someday, after I finished high school, I would proceed to Manila and to college. In my younger days I had looked ahead to the event, but when the moment finally came, leaving Rosales filled me with a nameless dread and a great, numbing unhappiness. Maybe it was friendship — huge and granitelike — or just plain sympathy. I could not be too sure anymore. Maybe I fell in love for the first time when I was fifteen.

Her name was Teresita. She was a stubborn girl with many fixed ideas, and she admonished me once: “Just because you have so much to give does not mean it will all be accepted. Just like that. There’s more to giving than just giving.”

She was sixteen then, and looking at her made me think of moments bright and beautiful, of the banaba in bloom.

I did not expect her to be vexed when I brought her a dress, for it was not really expensive. Besides, as the daughter of one of Father’s tenants, she knew me well enough, better perhaps than any of the people who lived in Carmay, the young folks who always greeted me politely, doffed their straw hats, then closed-mouthed went their way.

I always had coins in my pockets, but that March afternoon, after counting all of them and the stray pieces that I had tucked away in my dresser, I knew I needed more.

I approached Father. He was at his working table, writing on a ledger, while behind him one of the new servants stood erect swinging a palm-leaf fan over his head. I stood beside him, watching him scrawl the figures on the ledger, his wide brow and his shirt damp with sweat. When he finally noticed me, I could not tell him what I wanted. He unbuttoned his shirt down to his paunch. “Well, what is it?”

“I’m going to take my classmates this afternoon to the restaurant, Father,” I said.

He turned to the sheaf of papers before him. “Yes,” he said. “You can tell Chan Hai to take off from his rent this month what you and your friends can eat.”

I lingered uneasily, avoiding the servant’s eyes.

“Well, won’t that do?” Father asked.

It was March, and the high school graduation was but a matter of days away. “I also need some money, Father,” I said. “I have to buy something.”

Father nodded. He groped for his keys in his drawer, then he opened the iron money box beside him, drew out a ten-peso bill, and laid it on the table.

“I’m going to buy—” I tried to explain, but with a wave of his hand he dismissed me and went back to his figures.

It was getting late. After feeding the hogs, Sepa was getting the chickens to the coops. I hurried down the stairs to the main road, which was quiet and deserted now except in the vicinity of the round cement embankment in front of the municipio , where the town loafers were taking in the stale afternoon sun.

The Chinese storekeepers who occupied Father’s building had lighted their lamps. From the ancient artesian well at the rim of the town plaza, the water carriers and servant girls babbled while they waited for their turn at the pump. Nearby, traveling merchants had unhitched their bull carts after a whole day of slow travel from town to town and were cooking their supper on broad blackened stones that littered the place. At Chan Hai’s store there was a boy with a stick of candy in his mouth, a couple of men drinking beer and smacking their lips portentously, and a woman haggling over a can of sardines.

I went to the huge bales of cloth that slumped in one corner and picked out the white silk cloth with glossy printed flowers. I asked Chan Hai, who was perched on a stool smoking his long pipe, how much he would ask for the material I had picked for a gown.

Chan Hai peered at me in surprise. “Ten pesos,” he said.

With the package, I hurried to Carmay. Dusk was falling very fast, the leaves of the acacias had folded, and the solemn, mellow chime of the Angelus echoed to the flat stretches of the town. The women who had been sweeping their yards paused. Children reluctantly hurried to their homes, for now the town was draped with a dreamy stillness.

Teresita and her father lived by the creek in Carmay. Their house sat on a sandy lot that belonged to Father, set apart from the cluster of huts of the village. Its roof, as it was with the other farmhouses, was thatched and disheveled, its walls were battered buri leaves. It stood alone near the gully that had been widened to let the bull carts and calesas through when the bridge was washed away. Madre de cacao trees abounded in the vicinity but offered scanty shade. Piles of burnt rubbish rose in little mounds in the yard, and a disrupted line of ornamental San Francisco ringed the house.

Teresita was in the kitchen, sampling the broth of what she was cooking. There was a dampness on her brow and a redness in her eyes.

“What are you doing here at this hour?” she confronted me. In the glow of the crackling stove fire, she looked genuinely surprised.

I could not tell her at once or show her what I brought.

“I wanted to see you,” I said, which was true.

“But it’s already late, and you have to walk quite a long way back.” She laid down the ladle on the table and looked puzzled. She must have noticed then that I was hiding something behind me.

“What do you have there?” she asked, moving toward me.

I laid my package on the wooden table cluttered with battered tin plates and vegetables.

“It’s for you,” I said. My face burned like kindling wood. “I hope you’ll like it.”

Her eyes still on me, she opened the package. When she saw what it was, she gave a tiny, muffled cry. She shook her head, wrapped the package again, then gave it to me. “I can’t,” she said softly. “It does not seem right at all.”