Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

“You are sure Papa won’t be looking for me? I think I should call just to let him know.” But there was no urgency in her voice.

“He wouldn’t care,” Luis murmured. Ester lay on her back, her feet resting on the floor. Her eyes were closed, and a dreamy peace suffused her face. “I’m tired.” She sighed. “I can go to sleep now and not wake up until tomorrow.”

He did not speak. He knelt on the floor, bent over her and kissed her. He felt the warm parting of her lips and tasted the salty sweetness of her mouth. As he fondled the front of her dress she tried to push his hand away and he could feel a tremor course through her. “No,” she said with feeling, “I am not ready for it, Luis.”

But he did not heed her.

“Louie …” her complaint — it if was one — died on her lips.

Long afterward, when he drove Ester home, they were silent most of the way, and although he tried to make small talk, he just could not make himself regard the night as a time of conquest. Even in the depths of his passion, he had not really been unconscious of another reality. She had made the proper motions of pain, of distress, before the final surrender, but a man knows — he can feel this in his bones — and Ester was acting out something that she had already done, although not with him. A man knows, just as Luis knew it with Trining. It was not fair, of course, for him to ask. He had, after all, gotten what he wanted. But why did she have to lie? It would not have mattered much, but what was important was the honesty of the relationship.

Seeing him brooding, she squeezed his hand and asked, “Luis, aren’t you happy? Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Yes,” he said without feeling. “I am the happiest man in the world.”

“I’m the happiest girl in the world,” she said, snuggling close.

And so they piled high the hollow dreams and the senseless talk over many a ruffled moment. The relationship was intense. Although she was barely past twenty, Ester had refined sensibilities and an intelligence that sometimes surprised Luis with its depth and lucidity. She asked him questions that he was afraid to ask himself, needling questions that had to be answered honestly, for they were matters of conscience, and even if his answers often did not reveal his thoughts, to himself at least he was honest. Why did he write poetry — was it out of some deeply felt need to express what he could not express in prose, or was poetry a search for that basic truth without which men could not live with themselves? Why did he sound so private in some of his lines — speaking only to himself? Was his involvement with social justice based on what he perceived to be unjust, or was he obsessed with it because he himself had committed an injustice and was, in a sense, flagellating himself for his final atonement? At times, when he was pushed to a corner, squirming and shorn of defenses as his innermost privacy was gouged, he would be angry at her with a cold and persistent wrath and he would ask her the same question but rephrased — or buttressed, rather — with the sharpness of torture. Why did you surrender yourself to me? Is it because you think I would be some cheap and easy conquest? When we make love, is your orgasm real or make-believe? Suppose I tell you that I am your lover only because I’m interested in inheriting the Dantes publishing empire someday ? Remembering all these sometimes filled him with remorse, and he would wonder how deeply he had hurt her, but then she always went back to him, like some masochist, and their quarrels, although pitched and bitter, always ended in a passionate reunion, which both of them hoped would not be marred anymore by the kind of disagreements that exposed their nerves raw to the wind. He failed to understand that in many ways Ester, too, was unsure of herself, that she was groping for something to hold on to, apart from the ready pattern that school, social position, and her father’s wealth had made for her. If she could not express this in poetry, the way Luis did, she could at least express it in her relationships — and the deepest, the most human, and the most touching of all was her commitment to him.

They were bound to drift apart, however — irrevocably, inexorably. There came a time when to make up was such an effort it drained them of feeling, of expectation. After they had disagreed on his leaving school, on ideas about art and the future of the Huk rebellion (Ester felt that it was justified, but Luis felt that there were other equally effective methods that could be explored and experimented with), the arguments deteriorated and turned to trifles — movies that they saw and novels that they read — and by the time some rash words were exchanged they would be like two beasts, fangs and claws ready to strike.

Their last quarrel concerned the tritest of things — his latest poem, “The Changeless Land.” She had read “The Waste Land,” and she felt that the similarity was so obvious — but Luis was no Eliot fan and had not even read Eliot’s poem. She said that it was unthinkable that someone writing in English in the twentieth century, involved with social change and manners, could avoid Eliot. They were on the azotea , and it was past sunset; before them the lights of ships blinked in the wide, blackening bay. Before finally going up they had strolled down the grassy shoulder on the boulevard, following the sweep of the seawall, then when sunset came they danced between sips of Coke and sandwiches Marta had prepared. Now they were estranged again. It was their last quarrel, and Ester declared without rancor, “All is finished — I suppose it is best this way. I am tired of it all, always having to eat humble pie.”

“And what about me? Do you think I have no self-respect at all?”

The year had ended — the December picnic, the clinging smell of the sea. “I have tried my best at least to see that we are headed for somewhere, but I will never know. The way we are quarreling over trifles — there’s no future for us, Luis, and the best we can do is call it quits while our personalities are intact.” She sounded so cool, so detached, and this infuriated him, for he could not feel the same way. It was as if she had robbed him of his manhood and that he had let her do it at will. He watched her every move, her gestures as she sat on the azotea ledge and spoke, and he did not know whether he would walk to her and push her, or take her in his arms and end the silly argument with a kiss, or stomp away in superior rage and let her go home alone.

“If I keep up with you, what is going to happen? You will probably drive me to suicide. You are, as I have said before, simply, hopelessly self-centered,” she said, trying bravely to still the quaver in her voice.

It was then that he laughed. “You committing suicide? Ester, you have no sense of honor as the Japanese have. It’s not in your upbringing. You know very well where you will end, you and your Catholic clichés. You will roast in hell — that is what you believe — if you try as much as pull one pubic hair!”

She was fairly shouting back, taunting him: “You will probably gloat over your victory, for you will then think that I have given my soul and my body away to you.”

It was she who stomped out of the house, not even bothering to close the door after her. He heard her car crunch out of the driveway. For a while he was really vexed; he loathed the way she had treated him, but his anger slowly turned to regret that he was not really able to answer her. Finally he came to realize that he had a part in fueling the quarrel and that the decent thing for him to do was to call her up and repeat the same pat apology. If they could never be together again, at least they could part on a note of civility, if not affection. He decided to wait until morning, but when morning came he found no chance to make amends, for as he prepared to go to the office the telephone rang and the message was to alter his plans.