Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

And never again did I do it. After Father died I kept the trunk, and it has always been closed as he had willed it; with the years its locks rusted, and there came a time when the key no longer worked and it would take a crowbar and a sturdy hand to open it — but that hand would not be mine.

Next to December and its holidays, June was the most welcome month in our town. The floodgates of heaven were finally opened, the rains started, and the rice planting began. The fields that were brown began to stir with the emerald of new grass. Grasshoppers were on the wing, and the frogs came alive. But more than these, June was the time when we celebrated our town fiesta. A full month before the festivities, they had already started coming, the feria people who erected tin sheds near the church, in which they sold cheap dolls with plump cheeks and bright eyes, and ran shooting galleries and stalls for other forms of gambling.

It was during this time, too, that the comedia players — the farmers and their children — from Carmay came and stayed in the bodega , where they practiced their prancing and their lines before they acted them out on the stage in the plaza. As fiesta patron, Father provided for their meals, their mirror-spangled clothes, the papier-mâché helmets and wooden swords, as well as the five-piece band that accompanied their acting.

The year I was twelve, two weeks before the fiesta, a circus came. Three big trucks immediately transformed the plaza into a mud puddle as they manueuvered into position. I did not know anyone from the circus except a girl about my age; she walked the tightrope — so well, up there in the heights, she could have been walking on even ground. Her name was Hilda.

She and I did not have much in common, but during the two weeks that she was in Rosales, we became friends. I lived in a big house with old people. The young sons of Father’s tenants acted ill at ease in my presence, but Hilda did not. She lived in a tent — that was the home she knew — with old people, too, who did not care about what went on inside young minds, what made them want to go swimming even in dirty creeks the whole day, or what drove them, naked, splashing and singing in the rain.

I should not have told Hilda about my going to Grandfather’s house, but we got to talking about where we would like to be most; she had come that morning as usual to draw water from our artesian well, and I was waiting for her there. She had a ready answer for me: “I would like to be up there, feeling the height, knowing that people are looking at you — tensely, waiting for you to fall.”

She said she started walking the tightrope when she was five years old along with her parents, who were trapeze artists. She did not sound boastful at all. At six, when she should have been in school, she was already earning, starring in the circus act.

I described to her what Carmay was, and I did not exaggerate. I told her about the buri palms, how in the dry season they were tapped and the sap was boiled in huge iron vats into sugar or drunk sweet and cool and soothing in the sweaty afternoons. Cornfields laced Carmay, and water lilies decked its irrigation ditches in flaming violet. Beyond the village was the Agno, swift and murky during the wet season, and in its wide delta, corn and watermelons grew. In Grandfather’s yard were fruit trees — santol, duhat, and orange — all of which I climbed. I also often went with the men to the river to watch them fish till their bamboo baskets were full. And now that the rains had come, the banabas lining the paths were flowering. It is a heavenly place, Carmay!

“I must go with you,” Hilda said.

During the first week of June, the vacant lot beyond the house, which was often regarded as an extension of the plaza — which it was not — was transformed into a field of green amorseco weeds that had started to flower. Before Father built the storehouse behind the house, his tenants used to fill the place with their loaded bull carts while waiting for Chan Hai, the Chinese merchant who came for the grain with his battered truck and a huge weighing machine. But every time there was an athletic competition of the grade schools in the district, the town mayor always asked Father’s permission to use the place in addition to the plaza. Father did not ask for any rent, and perhaps in recognition of his charity, his name was always prominently included in the programs.

The balloting for the fiesta queen was not yet over — it was usually held two weeks before the fiesta — when the circus came. The trucks — their radiators spewing steam, their tops brimming with poles, trunks, and people — rumbled past the house, drawing the servants from their chores to the windows. They proceeded to the plaza and to Father’s vacant lot and started to unload.

Father saw the crates spilled on the grass, the wooden stakes piled high, the lot now churned by heavy tires. Shaking his head, he went on with his figures. In a while, three policemen from the nearby municipio approached the visitors, who had already started driving stakes on Father’s land. They went into a huddle and finally broke up, the policemen leading the way to our house.

Ever correct and polite, Father met them in the hall where they piled in with their muddy shoes and flopped on the rattan sofas with their brash city ways. From their ranks, a well-built man with a balding top came forward; his tone was apologetic, and he was saying how sorry he was that they had used Father’s land without realizing it was not part of the town plaza. A girl tugged at his hand continually, and when he could not ignore her anymore, he said, “This is my daughter. She walks the tightwire.” Another tug. “And she is the star of the show.”

She was not even ten, I think; she certainly was no taller than I. She preened her faded overalls and grinned exuberantly, her big eyes shining, then she stepped back a little and executed a neat curtsy. Everyone broke into laughter, even Father, then she walked away from the assembly. I followed her to the middle of the hall near the picture of Father’s grandfather; from it her gaze turned to the chandelier in the rose-colored ceiling as it tinkled to a slight breeze, then she walked to the grandfather clock by the foot of the stairs, and finally, catching a glimpse of me watching her, she came to me and asked if I lived in the house.

I nodded.

“It looks so big,” she said, scowling. She was on the verge of another question, but the circus people seemed to have obtained Father’s permission, for they started for the stairs, her father still profuse with thanks. Hilda joined them.

“Please come when we start,” her father said at the top of the stairs. “We have a good program, and it is known through all of the province. There will be people from as far as Lingayen, Dagupan, and, of course, from Urdaneta.”

Father nodded, then went back to his seat in the sala .

“It is not much of a circus,” he told me afterward. It was dusk, and I had lingered by the window watching the men work, listening to the rhythmic pounding of their sledgehammers on the wooden stakes. A stage took shape, and a wire fence, and within the enclosure they rolled out a mound of canvas that occupied one whole truck. Amid shouts and creaking pulleys, they hoisted the giant tent.

“When you go to the city,” Father continued, “you will see a real circus at the carnival. This is just a big sideshow, although it is quite famous. A circus has wild animals, maybe five elephants, lions, and tigers. And look at them — they have only two elephants.”

“Father said yours is not a real circus,” I told Hilda the next morning. She had come to the backyard where the artesian well was, as did the other members of the troupe before her. They had also parked some of the trailers near our bodega , and in the wide threshold of the building they had set up some of their cots. “A real circus,” I went on reciting what Father had said, “has lions and tigers.”