Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

I am your son but also my mother’s . Luis turned over the silent reply; the land that you ravaged has claim on me, too, and not just your ancestors from a distant and rocky peninsula .

“And I want my blood and my life to go on when this mortal frame is no more. I want you, Luis, to marry and have an heir before I go. I want you to look again at your cousin. It is important that this land, this wealth, should not leave the Asperris. It should not go to these tenants who do not understand what it is to carve something out of nothing, who have no pride in their families, in their race. They are treacherous, they are ingrates — they killed my brother, don’t ever forget that.”

The old man was angry; he was also afraid. Luis could understand it better now — the civilian guards, the patrols, and checkpoints. The Army was never there to protect the poor — it had always been an institution for the preservation of privilege.

“I know, Father,” he said, “but if they do want to kill you or me, do you think your civilian guards—”

“Our civilian guards, Luis. Our civilian guards.”

“Would the Army be able to defend you? This is not the best defense, Father; it has never been—”

“You have the traditional loathing and distrust of the intellectual for anyone who carries a sword. You have been mesmerized by that old saying, the pen is mightier than the sword. Did it ever occur to you that it was, perhaps, a poet who coined it? People believe it but it is nonsense. The man with the gun is the state, and the state is everything. Can there be progress without order? Without the state and its stability, you have to go back to the jungle …”

“This is the jungle, Father,” Luis said, surprised that he could now openly contradict his father. “It has always been thus.”

“And the predators are people like me?” Don Vicente shook his head ruefully. “And what are you?” he asked. “Will you be the savior of the oppressed and the weak? My son, there are no oppressors, there are no oppressed. There are only people who seize opportunities to make their lives better. The poor are virtuous? The worst enemies of the poor are their own kind — because they are lazy, because they refuse to change.”

“It is we who refuse to change, Father,” Luis said. “We have grown used to our comforts, to habits of the past.”

Don Vicente’s voice lifted. “But I have changed, Luis, not just in the flesh. I am no longer the youth who loitered in Europe, who lived lavishly in Manila and loathed every moment I spent in this town. My views — they have changed as well. You don’t have to tell me that everything springs from the land and what we have gotten from it must be returned.”

Did his father finally believe in justice, then? Or was he again indulging in rhetoric?

Another uneasy silence, then Don Vicente thrust his chin to the door. The interview had come to an end.

The sun-flooded hall was blinding after his stay in the old man’s darkened room. In his own room, near the end of the hall, the floor appeared newly waxed and the bed smelled clean, the sheets freshly starched. Beside his bed his suitcases were lined up, and he unpacked them, arranged his clothes in the tall aparador in the corner. He walked to the azotea and sat on the stone ledge. The faint rustling in the eaves and the sonorous chug-chug of the rice mill behind the house came to him. The brown fields lay beyond the walls of timeless adobe; so, too, did the river dike and the brown dots of buri palms far away.

Trining came out of her room and joined him. He did not notice her until she sat by his side, their arms touching. He turned to her and saw that she had changed from the brown starched uniform she had worn on the trip. It was sloppy and had given her no identity. Now she wore a yellow silk dress that accentuated the soft lines of her young body blossoming into womanhood.

“You seem to know everything — just about all the wrong things to tell him,” Luis said petulantly.

Trining looked at him incredulously. “But he knows, Luis — everything — even without my telling him. Do you think Tio is a fool even if he sits in that room all day? He wrote to me about your quitting school. He knows you quarreled with your father rector. Prerogatives — was that what you called it?”

Luis did not answer.

“Besides, it is true. You didn’t visit me often enough. I would have seen more of you if only you tried. I am really proud of you, Luis. Just ask my classmates what I always tell them. Why, they say”—she paused and blushed—“I am in love with you. It was very embarrassing for me to appear to like you so much, and you never came as often as I wanted you to — and when you did, you didn’t want to take me out.”

“You talk too much,” he said, dismissing her prattle, walking away from her. He went to the bedroom and flung himself on his bed. The sheets were fresh and cool. Above, from the ceiling, as in all other rooms of the house, dangled a small pink chandelier, and it tinkled as a slight breeze from the open azotea door flowed in.

Trining followed him and sat on the edge of his bed. “Well, if you don’t like me, at least you could have been sociable with my friends. Ester, for instance — she is your publisher’s daughter, and when we came to your office you didn’t even notice her. Then at that party at the Cielito Lindo — I had begged you to take me there. Who will take me, Luis? My friends think you are a snob. I had to explain that you are not.”

“I am sorry,” he said, pressing her hand.

Trining stood up and walked to the door. “Do you want to walk with me around the town?”

“What is there to see?”

“They will see us,” she said, smiling. “Four years you’ve been away. The people would like to see the difference—”

“No,” he said brusquely.

“I’ll call when supper is ready,” she said. The door closed, and he heard her soft humming as she padded down the hall.

So this was home, this mass of unfeeling masonry, this alien room. But the people that he loved were not here. They were in another time and place, and the fact that he had not written to them for a long time or given them more than the few tidbits that he had thrown their way filled him with remorse. Maybe at this hour his mother would already be cooking supper and his grandfather, as usual, would be by the window that opened to the west, trying to make use of the last faltering light of day, knitting fishnets. Vic would be herding the work animals to the corral if he was with them, if he had not left Sipnget so that he could get some education and improve himself as he had vowed he would. Luis had not written to them for months, and he was sure they did not even know he was home. On his last visit to Sipnget four years ago his mother had cried, saying how tall he had grown. “Jump up you did, like a bamboo shoot!” she said, her eyes laughing and yet filmy with tears. They had tried to make him comfortable as best as they could. His grandfather even vacated his chair by the window and offered it to him.

Trining slipped back into the room quietly. He had closed his eyes but had not really fallen asleep, just drifted into that dulled consciousness between waking and sleep. She was bending over him and shaking his arm. “Supper is ready. Wake up, lazy one,” her voice droned pleasantly.

His displeasure with her recent conduct was gone, and looking at her in the gathering darkness, so near and smiling, he raised his hand and caressed her face. She held his hand and brushed his open palm against her lips, her cheek. He rose and pulled her to him, felt the trembling of her lips, tasted their sweet honey-salt, felt her breath warm and soft on his face, smelled the scent of her hair. She did not object. Instead, her arms encircled him slowly, tentatively, almost shyly. Then, with a swiftness that surprised him, she pushed him away and stood up. Her eyes were serious, but they were not angry. “Tio,” she whispered. “He is waiting for us.”