Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

Luis Asperri could have gone home to Rosales every weekend if he had wanted to. There was a host of legitimate reasons for going home: his father’s birthday, the town fiesta in June, Christmas, the Holy Week. After all, Rosales was a mere two hundred kilometers away from Manila. But after he had left the town and gone through college, he had always found it inconvenient to go home, and though he knew the real reason for staying away, there were always excuses that were credible, so that in time he came to believe them. Seeming to understand, his father did not press him all through the four years. After all, it was easy for the old man to go to Manila, at least five times a year, to visit his favorite gambling den in San Juan, have a lengua dinner in the casino, of which he was one of the oldest members, and after that, polish off the evening with a visit to his whorehouse in Pasay.

The old man, however, had not come to Manila for the last six months. As Trining had said, Don Vicente was ill. He had always been robust and even obese, so it must have been the Carlos Primero, the pork asado , and the sin vergüenzas that had finally taken their toll. The thought that his father might finally die lingered in Luis’s mind with a touch of melancholy, although it did not strike him with apprehension. It was, after all, something that would happen someday to his father as well as to everybody else. Besides, the old man had gotten what he had wished for: a son who bore his name, though his complexion was not as fair nor his nose as aquiline.

Luis had picked up his cousin Trining from her convent school the previous evening to sleep in his house so that they could start early. Indeed, they had had a six o’clock breakfast, but the traffic in Balintawak, at the northern exit from the city, was overwhelming, and when they finally managed to reach the open highway the sun was already blazing down, its rage over the land white and consuming. It was March, and the fields were chico brown. The emerald green that burnished everything during the rainy season had long become faded except in patches of irrigated plots where grew watermelons and mongo.

He seldom went outside the city. There had been excursions to the south, to Negros, where some of his sugar-planter friends often asked him to spend the weekend, and a couple of shopping trips to Hong Kong, but no lengthy car rides like this one. Looking fretfully at the land around him, he realized that in all the years he had been in Manila nothing in the countryside had changed, not the thatched houses, not the ragged vegetation, not the stolid people.

Changeless land, burning sun — the words turned in his mind and he decided that they would someday make the opening line for a poem.

Changeless land?

He could see the blight sweeping over this land like a thunderstorm creeping over the near horizon. Quickly the sky above the line of trees darkens and the clouds start to boil. The muggy heat disappears, and the air is quiet and still. Then the wind stirs and the dust in the street rises in billows, as if some giant fan has been turned on. A blackness starts to descend and cover everything, the browned fields of May, the old cracked earth. A flash ignites the sky, and the crack of lightning hurtles across, reverberating into a long, roiling boom — and then silence, coolness, and blackness again. Now a rattle from the distance, like a thousand pebbles cast on tin roofs, on the steaming asphalt, on everything that has waited and waited. The rain has come, the season for green things.

It was not rain that was coming; it was another season, and he could see it as darkness, could feel its electric tension as he had felt the touch of life itself. But this was not life, not even the promise of it, and the fact that he was no longer part of this land, this changeless miasma from which he sprang, filled him with sadness and guilt.

His kind of life was not what he had sought; it had been thrust upon him. His consciousness hounded him, and it made all the difference, the nagging qualm, for though he had fled Rosales, there was no escaping this blight, and he saw it clearly as the Chrysler sped through the monotonous drabness of the plain.

This is the changeless land, scorched by sun and lashed by typhoon, and on it the peasant — as much a part of the land as the barren trees and the meager grain that grow on it — is changeless, too. Barefoot, ill-clothed, a fighting cock under his arm, here is the peasant, working with scythe and plow, plodding along, as slow and as patient as his water buffalo.

How to be completely free from this land — this was what he had sought, and yet he was going back now, not just to Rosales but to the beginning.

His cousin who was beside him would never understand what it was that cankered him. She had not bothered to understand; she welcomed his company — that seemed enough. She was eighteen, and the life in Manila was waiting to be lived. To her, going to Rosales was but the savoring of another life — and perhaps she could make the experience more sweet than it promised to be.

The two other men in the car, the driver and the encargado , were incidental, servants to be ordered around, to warrant a safe, comfortable passage, and they did their best, making small noises, running to the restaurant in Angeles to get cold drinks for them. Both these men, however, could have been his relatives, for they came from the village where he was born.

Santos, the caretaker, could have been an uncle. In his own self-deprecating way he hid a sharp mind and a capacity for observation that was both peasant and sophisticated. He had been his father’s caretaker for years and had maintained the position by sheer talent. Simeon, who was Santos’s cousin, was stolid like a buffalo but not dim-witted. He lived with his childless wife, Marta, in the garage behind Luis’s house on the boulevard. He was also part-time gardener, handyman, bodyguard, and messenger for the young mestizo. The two could be mistaken for brothers because they were both short and dark and their Ilokano faces were broad and solemn, as if they had never learned to laugh.

The big black car slowed to a stop, and the warm, gummy spell of the dry season rushed in. Luis stopped reading the manuscript and put it back into the brown pigskin portfolio beside him. Five soldiers in battle green were seated on a wooden bench in the thatched shed by the road. A tall, lean one with a steel helmet, his carbine dipping from the crook of his arm, approached the car.

“It will be night when we reach home,” Trining said edgily. “It’s more than two hours lost, these stupid checkpoints.”

Luis pressed her hand, then turned to the window. The soldier peered briefly into the car. He doesn’t even look eighteen, Luis thought as their eyes met.

The soldier moved toward the front and asked Simeon where they were going. Santos, the caretaker, answered, “To Rosales,” and turning to Luis and Trining, “we are taking our master’s children home for a vacation.”

“I didn’t ask you,” the soldier said gruffly. “You,” he said, thrusting a chin at Simeon.

“We are going to Rosales,” Simeon said.

The soldier looked at Luis again and then at Trining; on her, his eyes lingered. He waved his hand: “Roll!” The gears clashed and the car surged forward.

“Son of a whore,” Luis said softly under his breath.

“Don’t curse,” Trining admonished him. She was a sophomore in an exclusive girls’ college run by German nuns, and her obsession with clean speech bothered him.

“Whore,” he repeated. “That’s the truth, isn’t it?”

“You have been in the city too long,” Santos said. “There are many things in the province that have changed, Luis.”