Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

He stood up reluctantly and changed his shirt while she, too, brushed her dress, although it was not crumpled. That was a beginning, he thought, and before he opened the door Trining tiptoed up to him and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “I think I have been forgiven,” she said with a smile.

The dining room that adjoined the hall was lined with glass cabinets varnished rich brown and filled with silver and antique china that his father had brought from Italy and England. On the severe mahogany walls were still-life paintings of ripe guavas, mangoes, and chicos in gilt frames. At one end of the glass-topped table in the center of the room Don Vicente sat, and behind him on the wall hung a large silver-framed painting of the Last Supper. A maid stood by with a cut-paper wand, which she occasionally shook over the table.

Don Vicente stopped slurping his soup and bade them sit. Trining paused before her place at Don Vicente’s left and with head bowed said grace. Don Vicente looked at his niece, then turned to Luis, who had not observed the ritual but instead had sat down immediately.

“Ah,” Don Vicente murmured, “it’s wonderful to have someone in the family who will save us heathens.”

The girl made the sign of the cross. “I can’t eat without praying,” she said, sitting down. “It’s a habit, more than anything.”

“You will go straight to heaven,” Luis said. Trining glared at him.

“I do my only son honor,” Don Vicente said. “This is the first time I have come out to eat in weeks.”

“Thank you, Father,” Luis said. My son, my only son —the words roiled in his ears. Father, what is the love you know — you who sent Mother away and took me here? I can go on living, accepting your presents, your protestations of affection — but is this love ?

A beneficent dinner — stuffed chicken, fruit salad, mushroom soup, spaghetti, and roasted eggplants in tomato-and-salted-fish sauce — but Luis had no appetite. Maybe, he thought, picking at his food, at this time Mother, Grandfather, and Victor would be through with supper — perhaps just boiled camote tops and rice — and now Mother would again be before the sewing machine, stitching in the poor light of the kerosene lamp. He turned to the table laden with food, to the servant waving the cut-paper wand to keep the flies away, the cook glancing in through the screened kitchen door, waiting for the signal that meant his masters wanted more. I see a sullenness in their faces as they serve me. Even in my cousin’s eyes and in the face of this man they call my father, I see ridicule and contempt .

“Anything the matter, Luis?” Don Vicente’s voice jarred.

“The trip, Father.” Luis had a ready alibi. “All those checkpoints, the delay … I’ve lost all appetite …”

His father sighed. “I know, I know, but what can we do? Now, that chicken.” Don Vicente pushed toward him the serving tray filled with brown chunks of chicken in gravy. “Try it, just the same.”

Luis placed a drumstick on his plate. It was strange how his mother used to do the same, push her plate to him, saying, Here, son, I’m not hungry. His grandfather, too, saying after her in a crude attempt at levity: I am full. Finish this catfish or the house lizards will beat you to it.

Supper was extremely long. After the macapuno ice cream and a few more explanations about his work (a good magazine, one that seeks the truth and, having found it, isn’t afraid to print it) he asked his father if he could leave for a walk.

“Where to?” Don Vicente asked, putting his dessert spoon down.

“I was wondering how things in Sipnget are,” he said simply.

Don Vicente’s face became thoughtful, and his red, baggy eyes narrowed. He shook his head. “I don’t want you walking alone — not these days. I’ll have Simeon go with you.”

“Can I come along?” Trining asked.

“You stay here,” Don Vicente told her.

Luis was embarrassed telling his father where he wanted to go. He stood up, avoiding his father’s eyes, which he felt clung to him even as he walked out of the dining room. He paused in the foyer. The night was calm, and beyond the long tiled sweep of the porte cochere, the stars were luminous. He went down the stairs, the marble banister cold and smooth in his hand. In the garden the crickets were alive and the scent of azucenas and roses met him like a welcoming wave. Deep inside him he cried: If I can go to Sipnget and climb another stair, would I belong there, I who have long disowned them ? He remembered with a twinge of regret, of sadness, how he had told all his city friends that his mother had long been dead — she was not, she had done him no wrong except to carry him in her womb when he did not want to be born.

“Luis,” Trining said softly.

He turned around. Trining hurried down the landing after him. “Must you really go? Please bring me with you! I would like to meet them.”

He shook his head. “Yes, I want to go. That’s my family there, can’t you see? And you need not meet them. They do not matter to you.”

“Oh, Luis,” she said, holding his hand.

Does she know, does everyone know the sore that festers in me ? “They matter only to me, and you don’t know how much I really miss the place,” he lied. He would have added: That was where I was born, and all that I remember or need to remember is there — but the words just did not take form, for there was this rock in his throat choking him and all he could say hoarsely as they were parting was, “That is where I belong!”

Simeon had an almost paternal feeling for the big car, and in the mornings and late afternoons, when there was no more driving to be done, he would clean and polish it till the black paint was glossy. He would lift the hood and wipe clean the carburetor, the wirings, the steel hump of the engine, and even the backside of the hood. He and his wife — the chubby, cigar-smoking barrio matron who looked after the house in Manila — were childless, and they had transferred their affection to other things, even to Luis, whom they looked after with devotion. It was Marta, too — then a maid in the old Asperri house — who had clasped the frightened Trining, four years old, to her breast, telling the madmen who had already killed the girl’s father and mother and were now setting the house on fire that they should spare her who was without sin.

Luis sometimes tried to fathom what went on in his driver’s mind, but Simeon was quiet most of the time and there was this meaningless smile plastered on his face when Luis called him down for some small misdemeanor. Luis was almost sorry; the car had already been thoroughly cleaned, and a thick powdery coat would cover it again by the time they returned.

Simeon drove slowly, his headlights picking out the stray pigs along the main street, then they turned right to the narrow camino provincial . It had not been maintained; the sides were covered with weeds, and the gravel undulated in piles where it was not swept back by the camineros to the center of the road. The night was calm, that vaporous kind, which transfixes the land during the dry season. The dark was pervasive but for a few flickering orange lamps that marked the houses. In the backseat Luis tried to catch a firefly that had been blown in, its pale luminosity popping up and down — but the firefly was soon sucked away and once more Luis was immersed in expectation and apprehension.

“I should be cooling off in a brook now,” Simeon said without turning to Luis as the car crawled on.

Luis peered at the left side of the road shrouded with night. They had passed the last kerosene-lamp-lit house, and the road sloped down into the farmlands, anonymous and black around them. All this distance, this vastness, belonged to his father.