Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

He slid into the shadows, down the garden slope, where the bougainvillea thinned out toward the rocky promontory. He stood there and watched the city in the distance, aglow like embers, kindling a sky flecked with summer clouds. His back was turned to the music, and soon, so soon, he was hurtling away from this precinct to another time, in a far and forgotten place, and the music was the twang of guitars: I always go back, back to where it all started, to Sipnget, and the village fiesta, lighted by kerosene lamps, the hardened earth for a dance floor, the woven palm leaf for decor, divider, and shade, and the village girls …

“At last, I’ve found you.” It was Ester behind him. He turned around, stepped down the rock, and said, “The view from here is lovely. Manila looks like a spread of jewels.”

“Not in the daytime,” she said. “There’s a haze over it, and it looks quite ugly.” Then, seriously, “Why did you leave the party?”

“I’m still here, am I not?” he asked.

“I should have asked what you are doing here.”

“Not again,” he said. He held her arm as they went down the incline. “Don’t you know that you make me feel so eccentric?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Well, I just wandered around and I got to thinking about the town I left, the music I used to listen to. You know, just rambling around in my thoughts — I often do that. It’s quite exhilarating.”

“How far did you go?”

Luis did not know what to make of her, whether she was making fun of him or was sincerely inquisitive. He decided to be honest. “I was thinking of the very recent past — the war. I had to stop high school, and I commuted between Manila and the province, you know. Looking at Manila from here, with all those lights, and listening to the music, I am aware that time has really gone by.”

They went down a terrace and were now on the edge of the dance floor. Luis sat with her near the garden wall.

“We have to live in the present,” she said simply, “and thank God we are here, waiting for the morrow.”

“You are an optimist, I can see,” he said. “But the present is an extension of the past. The connection is not broken at all, and the war — what a big word it is! — it is an extension of peace.”

But what did he really know about the war? He was too young to have been in the Army and too old to be with the women. He spent the four war years in Ermita, where he grew up to be a young man, pampered, all his wishes granted. He was frightened, but he was never really in danger. It was Vic who knew war, who told him about its starkest details. It was Vic who was in Rosales and Sipnget, who helped to take care of Don Vicente in the earliest days of evacuation. Vic saw the Japanese enter the town, and he saw the pile of Filipino dead — their hands tied behind them with wire — loaded into pushcarts by civilians and taken to the plaza, before the whitewashed Rizal monument, and like so many diseased and butchered cattle, dumped into a common grave. Vic was in Sipnget, too, when the Japanese entered the village, herded the young men together, and picked out the prettiest girls. Now there was another war, and it was being fought in the mountains, in the plains, in Sipnget and Rosales, in dark, unknown warrens of the city, in newspaper offices, and most of all, in the convoluted recesses of minds such as his.

“You are young only once, but you want to grow old before your time,” Ester was saying.

“Our tragedy,” he said, trying to sound very light, “is that, as a famous writer once said, youth is wasted on the young.”

“But I don’t think you have really started to live.” Ester was prodding him. She had struck at the root of his ennui, and perhaps, he thought later, she was right. He had not begun to live — or love. He had not seen life as Vic had seen it; all that he had seen were the freaks, both of the imagination and of living reality. He had listened once to his grandfather’s tales, of aswangs making gold out of children’s blood, of winged men who could with a wave of a kerchief vault mountain and valley.

“I guess you’re right,” he said. “Why don’t you help me live a little?” He glanced at his watch.

“It is still early,” Ester said, “and you asked me to help, didn’t you?”

It was a dare he must pick up sometime. Right now he could not stay for another moment. The night was lost, no matter how amusing the conversation and enchanting this girl. In that inner self there was no light; there was this scourge of the searching mind that could not be eluded.

“I have to be up very early,” he said. “Aren’t you happy that I’m such a thoughtful employee?”

“That’s not a nice thing to say,” she said. “You are trying to put me in my place, and I am not spoiled.”

“I’m sorry.”

Ester tried to be light. “And speaking of Father, he sleeps until lunchtime sometimes but still manages to work the whole night. Aren’t you really going to meet some of my friends?”

Luis smiled and stood up. “I’d rather be with you,” he said solemnly. He had intended to flatter her, but now that he had said it he meant every word. “I really would like very much to be with you again when I can have you all to myself.”

Her eyes shone, and he felt that they were looking right through his permeable skull, into the recondite corners of his brain, reading his thoughts as if they were in blazing neon.

“I’m not really a snob — even if you did call me one.”

“I did not,” she objected vehemently. “Whoever gave you—”

He pressed his forefinger to her lips to stop her from talking further. “I think I am beginning to love you,” he said.

Even as he drove away it seemed as if Ester was still beside him. He could still smell her fragrance, her hair, and most of all, he could envision those dark, sad eyes that would — he was now sure — always hound him.

When Luis drove up the graveled driveway and saw that the lights in his bedroom were on, he decided that Marta must have forgotten to turn them off again. It was her duty to turn off all the lights except those in the foyer whenever he went out in the evening. He would remind her in the morning about her wastefulness. He went up the stairs, fumbled briefly with his keys, then opened the door. Soft music flowed from the radio/phonograph in the study. It was almost midnight, and he did not remember having turned it on when he left. He hurried in and turned the radio off; glancing into his bedroom, he saw Trining, asleep in his bed. He gazed at her with some vexation, which quickly turned into amusement. Trining was in a pink negligée, the hem of which was raised, so that her beautiful white thighs gleamed creamy and soft in the light. He could also see the clean slopes of her breast and its rising and falling as she breathed. He went into the room, bent over her slowly, and kissed her lips. She stirred, stretched her arms, then opened her eyes.

“Oh, Luis,” she murmured, purring like a kitten disturbed from a nap. Her displeasure with his having left her was gone, and a smile lit her face. She swung her legs down and stood up.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, wondering how she had come — and so soon. “Had I known you also wanted to return to Manila, I would have waited for you.”

“I told Tio that I wanted to be with you — and he put me on the bus. You should take the bus sometime. It is quite an experience. Tio wanted me driven over, but why should it matter how I came?”

Luis started taking off his barong tagalog .

“How were the dukes and the princesses?”

“I never met them. Ester said you should have come.”

He took his pants off and put on his pajamas. He could undress before her without embarrassment, for they had grown up together, known each other for so long.