Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

“Any message?” Luis asked.

“Yes, Miss Vale asked if you had arrived. She seemed very anxious. It was Dantes’s daughter who asked for you. Say, you are moving up very fast.”

He wondered if Ester had been instructed by her father to inquire or if she had done it on her own, but Miss Vale, Dantes’s old-maid secretary, never went into details. She gave out only the barest information, and it seemed that her head was full of secrets but that she stored them for no one but Dantes.

Even when he was in college, Luis did not swallow everything said in the classroom. The family, the teacher, the church — everything was authoritarian, but there was a far more impressive schooling that he had gone through, where one learned freely: the years in Sipnget, which taught him how important relationships were, how people were what they were. It took only a few weeks in the Dantes offices, therefore, for him to know and to latch on to knowledge that was not dispensed in his sociology or political science classes, to amass the information that was never printed in the papers — not even in his own, noted though it was for its liberalism and steadfastness to truth as Dantes — not his staffers — saw it.

As Don Vicente had said, Dantes was no patriot who would sacrifice for freedom and nation; he was a power merchant, selling dreams in his media complex and manipulating men with power at the same time. He could have had his main office in his shipping company and trading firm, which occupied one building in that new community called Pobres Park going up somewhere in Makati, or in his electric and communications building — but no, he chose to have his main offices here in this newspaper building, for it was with his newspapers that he wielded the most influence.

He was an astute politician, although he did not make speeches or run for any public office; in the highest echelons of both the Nacionalista and the Liberal parties, men vied for his favors and trembled at the slightest rumor of his displeasure. It was also believed that he was supporting the Huk movement and that his politics for the future was voiced by his leftist writers like Abelardo Cruz and Etang Papel, fire-breathing “liberals” who knew whichever way the wind blew.

Luis had amazed both of these writers with his insights on rural life, the mute aspirations of those who work the land. Cruz and Papel were city-room revolutionaries who had romanticized their ignorance with facility, and in a sense Luis saw himself in them, for he, too, for all his protestations, was just as comfortable and incapable of sacrifice as they. But there was one major difference, which he prided himself on — he had lived on a farm, knew of the sun’s rage, the cold of the waterlogged paddies, and he had exposed Abelardo Cruz’s rural knowledge as a book-learned sham. “Do you know how to catch freshwater crabs in the fields?” he had asked the pugnacious editor one evening when they were having coffee after the paper had been put to bed. Cruz claimed he did and even went into the motions of how he did it as a boy, until Luis asked the most important, the most crucial question: “And what if there is no water in the hole?” It was one of the first things any boy in Sipnget learned, for it spelled the difference between life and death. And Luis explained it to them, these champions of agrarian change, these lovers of the poor: “When there is water in the hole, stick your hand in. The crab could be there. But in heaven’s name — don’t stick it in if there is no water. A snake may be there.”

Etang Papel had insisted with her Manileña ignorance and colegiala impertinence that the lower classes were the makers of revolution; after all, she read and echoed the Manchester Guardian and those books that were difficult to come by but could easily be had if you had friends in New York or in London. But Luis knew that the indolence of the masses was real, that their volcanic angers were the accretion of repressed feelings, for he had seen dogged patience and docile servitude that had numbed their capacity for scrutiny. He had seen them troop to his father’s house to borrow money, to reaffirm their bondage — that they were secure in it, that his father could do no wrong. Where, then, was the massive force that could be harnessed? It certainly was not in this city room, it certainly was not in Sipnget; wherever it was, it had to be nurtured, lavished with care, so that it would sprout and grow. And only then …

In many ways, he was very glad that he had Eddie to work with; he had met him at one of the college-editors conferences in his junior year. They had gone to the south and stayed for a week as guests of Dantes at one of the publisher’s island retreats off the city of Iloilo. And one night the two of them had wandered down the empty beach, and Eduardo Sison, the editor of a small college paper, had talked with him, questioned him, rather, about many of his assumptions, uncaring of the fact that he was a rich man’s son. Like Ester, he had asked Luis about his motivations, his insincerity. Eddie, after all, was a self-supporting student who clerked in a Chinese store in the daytime, then went to an accounting class in the evenings. He had a natural talent for writing, but he also had the peasant’s natural talent for survival, and because he was a farmer’s son, his instincts for what was right were also sharp. When this opening with the Dantes group came and Luis was asked to get a right-hand man, he did not hesitate in naming Eddie. The magazine was about three years old, and there was gossip that the former editor and his associate had been eased out for trying to set up a union. It was a weekly and their deadline was more flexible, but Thursdays were a travail, for the magazine came out on Friday, early enough, according to Dantes, to beat the Sunday magazines and yet interesting enough for the reader to go back to it for his weekend fare.

It was patterned after the staid English weeklies — Dantes affected a liking for British papers — but its presentation was bright and breezy. The writing was in-depth without being ponderous, and the contributors, whose numbers Luis built up through personal meetings, covered a wide spectrum — conservatives and radicals, campus literati and aloof Ph.D.’s.

He did not know it, but it was Ester who had brought his name to her father’s attention. She had heard of him often from Trining, had read his poetry, which Trining would bring surreptitiously to school, and the articles he had written in his college paper and in the other newspapers, for by the time he was in his senior year Luis had already caught the attention of the national-magazine editors for his forceful but elegant prose, and when he met them they were surprised that he was still in college.

Dantes gave his two young editors a free hand, and he was not disappointed. Luis was a good team leader, although there was not much of a team to lead — just Eddie and one staff member, two proofreader/copyreaders, and a layout artist. Most of the articles were solicited, but in spite of a growing list of distinguished contributors the editors still had a lot of topical writing to do themselves — and fashioning those subheads and those pungent captions was always a dreary chore.

Trining was right — the magazine was his life. Ester took him for a snob when they met for the first time, but he remembered her face, and it was not because she was Dantes’s daughter. There was a quality of frailty about her, of tragedy in her eyes. He remembered her, although she wore that anonymous brown, stiff-collared convent-school uniform. She had gone to her father’s office that morning and had interrupted a discussion on Hemingway’s latest fiction, The Old Man and the Sea .

“My daughter,” Dantes had introduced her, and Luis had turned to her standing by the table, notebooks in her arm. He merely nodded — an almost mechanical reaction — then went on with the discussion, saying that Hemingway’s simplicity was terribly misleading, that this was no simple fisherman out for big game, that the work belonged to the same classic mold as Melville’s Moby Dick , that it was the story of man searching for meaning, and Ester stood there, listening until it was time for Dantes to hand out his black gold-tipped cigarettes to the two young men, who took them although they never really smoked. He did not speak to her, and he did not even bid her good-bye when he left the publisher’s office.