Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

Vic had returned. That could have been his message that Luis had seen, that could have been his sling. Then it occurred to him that he was ignorant of his brother’s movements. If Vic had changed somehow, Luis had helped in the transformation, for it was he, after all, who had sent Vic the books to read and had helped him find the answers. Vic did not have to search far if he had desired to find answers himself, for they were all here in Rosales amidst the implacable poverty and the dullness of the herd.

Luis was free at last from all these, thanks to his benevolent father. He could roam and reap the harvest — but not Vic, although at least Vic now had the freedom to create, to travel an expanse unlimited by geography or vision. Luis prayed to God that in spite of everything Vic would retain this thought at least: that they were brothers and that Luis had not forgotten the jungle’s torment. Vic was courage, and what did Luis have to show to redeem his manhood, to attest to his creativity? A few poems? He had the beneficence of a name he was born to bear. If he could only turn back, he could now be by Victor’s side as he should be, for his brother was also his fate.

Luis changed his mind about not saying good-bye. He had expected his father to hold him back, but Don Vicente was more than understanding. He even tried to be blithe about it.

“I see, I see,” he said, nodding and grinning, so that the double chin quivered and the bags under his eyes broadened. “Rosales is very dull except for what happened this morning. What is more, you cannot miss the party of the year — yes, I have read about all those European dukes coming. In any case I have already told you what needs to be said. Do not forget—”

“I won’t,” Luis said, holding the pudgy hand to his brow. His suitcases were packed, Simeon was waiting downstairs, and outside his father’s room Trining was pacing the hall, waiting for him. “I won’t,” he repeated, then he wheeled out.

But what was there to remember? It was a story he had heard so many times, the call to duty and the land, that his future was in politics. It was of course difficult to understand his father’s attachment to the land. As a young man, Don Vicente had lived in Spain, visited the old village near Bilbao where his great-grandfather had come from. There was not much now in the Asperri lineage to suggest that it was Basque, nothing but the name, the fair skin, and the demeanor, and those did not matter. His exhortations were sown on barren soil, on the arid reality of Rosales itself. The life of the mind, which beckoned to Luis, was in Manila. It was better to revel in it, to seek the kindred vitality of the young who revolved around the editorial offices, and the nearness of Trining, Ester, and her friends. Although he did not want to indulge in it, he basked in their flattering attention — a result of not only his looks but also because as a poet he exuded some kind of exotic magnetism.

He wanted to spend some time with Trining, but she had waited in the hall only to find out if he would be permitted to leave, and when she found out, she had rushed to her room. He knocked at the door, pleading, but she would not open it. From within came a mumbling sound that could have been her weeping.

He reached the city at dusk. Depressed, he had dozed through most of the checkpoints, and Simeon, still displeased that Luis had cut his vacation short, had been sullenly quiet. The depression lasted for some time, and it was not banished even after Luis had finished the homework he had brought with him.

He developed in his mind a master dummy of the next issue of Our Time . There would be a couple of articles on the Bell Act, an exposition on the cultural resurgence in Southeast Asia, a couple of stories, and an essay on the crisis of the Filipino identity. The scenery no longer interested him as it did the previous day. The country was drab, dead brown. The dirty towns through which they passed were all the same, their asphalted main streets lined with wooden shops boarded with impieties of soft-drink signs.

“Do you want to pass by the office, señorito ?” Simeon’s voice startled him. They were now entering the city, and the traffic in Balintawak was tangled again — jeepneys and buses filled with office workers hurrying home. Toward the west the sky was a riot of indigo. Dusk finally brought a sense of peace.

“Home,” Luis said. He needed a shower more than anything, to wash away the fatigue. The car could not avoid Rizal Avenue and the snarl of traffic in Plaza Goiti, but in a while they were on the boulevard and Luis felt at home once more in the wide Luneta, now covered with dying grass, and to the right the sea, the stubby trees, all covered with the deep and onrushing dark.

The house was one of those prewar structures spared by the holocaust of Liberation that leveled much of the Ermita and Malate districts, south of the river. It was built by his grandfather in the twenties for Vicente and his Spanish bride.

Sometimes his grandfather drifted into his thoughts, particularly when Luis and his writer friends talked about the revolution of 1896 and how in the end it was usurped by the ilustrados . His grandfather was one of them; though he had always considered himself — according to Don Vicente — a Filipino, Luis knew that his loyalties were with that far-off peninsula from which his forebears had come. The old man had been an astute politician, although he did not run for any public office; he knew where the centers of powers were, and when he saw, for instance, the inevitability of revolution, he made the proper noises, which seemed to indicate that he, at least, sympathized with the ill-disciplined, ill-equipped Army. As a Basque, he had always regarded the Spaniard as inferior in the first place. But to avoid total involvement, he had feigned illnesses and was conveniently sick in Manila. The coming of the Americans ended the masquerade for the wily old Vascongado. He saw the inevitability of American suzerainty, and one of the first things he did was join the Federalista party. He would have gotten a very high position in the new government — friendly as he was with those in Manila — but he had decided, like all good Basques, that the future lay in the land, which had, after all, supported him in splendor all through the years.

He was not wrong; it was a time when the haciendas were being forged and sugar plantations in the south were being set up with American and other foreign money. He went back to Pangasinan and the vast lands he had laid claim to and built that region’s biggest house, which became a rest stop for any tired and visiting Americano . In the process, through the American cadastral surveys that were being made all over the country, he brought out his old Spanish titles, and with Spanish sherry and other forms of concession, he included into the Hacienda Asperri hundreds of small clearings that the Ilokano settlers had made.

The old man liked to consider himself a diviner, a plutocrat ahead of his time. He saw, for instance, the movement of Manila out of the strictures of Intramuros, and he bought lots in Santa Mesa and of course in Ermita, on the boulevard close to the sea. It was in the Ermita house he built where his son Vicente lived, his daughters having married Americans and Spaniards and left for wherever their husbands willed.

The hacienda in Pangasinan prospered, and he died a very happy man knowing that his other son was prepared to take over while Vicente hobnobbed with the rich and the powerful in Manila. He did not know of the ill will that exploitation had spawned, how the house would be burned by the same peasants who he thought were loyal to him. Don Vicente continued living in Manila, depending on the overseers who worked for him, knowing that though he was in the city, he wielded great power. He played poker regularly with Quezon and was on the best of terms with the mestizos who revolved around Malacañang.