Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

She gasped, flung herself at him, and burst into tears. “Luis … Luis …” She was sobbing softly. “I am so happy, so very happy.”

Her heart thumped against his chest. She took his hand and pressed it against her belly. “You are here, darling,” she whispered. “I wanted to tell you, for some time now, but I couldn’t. I simply couldn’t — but now I can.”

He drew her away. “Why did you not tell me?”

“Maybe you will say that I am proud,” she said softly, “but I wanted to be sure of many things. We have always been close. We have done many things together — and naturally. Even making love — it was the most natural thing, and finally”—she paused and did not seem to want to speak further.

“Tell me,” he prodded her.

“Well, I could see you paying attention to Ester. I thought that maybe — oh, I suffered. I couldn’t go to sleep. You can see I’ve lost weight, thinking …”

He held her close again, and she hugged him, covering his face with kisses. “It must have been that time you didn’t ask me about my period. You are so damn fertile.” She laughed softly. “Oh, Luis, how many children do you think we should have? I’d like to have a dozen — and they will know more companionship than we did. But I am not complaining. Did Tio threaten you or argue with you about us? I want you — God, how I want you — but of your own free will.”

His hand wandered down the silky valley of her thighs, up the mound and unmistakable feel of pubic hair, onto her belly, which he now rubbed ever so gently. He was filled with tenderness and compassion for this girl who had been his companion as well. “I hope we will have a boy,” he told her.

They were married in the hall the following evening. The town judge, who had once clerked for his father, performed the ceremony. He was a short, paunchy man, and he stuttered badly; his hand was wet when he congratulated Luis and Trining. The town knew about the wedding, and in no time all of Luis’s office mates would learn about it, for Luis had sent a telegram to Eddie telling him that he would be absent for a few days, perhaps a week, since he and Trining would be getting married — and would he please look after everything?

There were no guests. For Luis to have invited his mother and his grandfather was unthinkable. Besides, Don Vicente wanted it as quiet as possible, so only Dr. Collantes and Santos’s wife stood as witnesses. Don Vicente permitted the servants to watch the ceremony, but they did not file into the hall. Simeon stood at the dining room door, looking in, and Trining wished Marta was present, too, but she was in Ermita, unaware that the girl she had saved was happiest at this moment. Don Vicente did not leave his room, but his door was kept open so he could see everything. When the ceremony, which Trining said later was so brief and unromantic, was over, the newlyweds went to Don Vicente’s room and kissed his hand. At seven they had an ordinary supper, and after reciting the rosary in Don Vicente’s room they retired to Trining’s bedroom, for her bed, as she herself had whispered to him, not only was wider but also did not squeak.

Now there were just the two of them, and with the sounds of evening muted, they sought each other and put the quietus to the waiting and the uncertainty of the past. The window was open. The sky was cloudless, deep black, and sprinkled with stars. The cold of January evenings was in the air. Trining wanted to switch the light off, but Luis stopped her. “Isn’t this one time,” he said, running his hand across the valley of her breast, “that we shouldn’t care if the light is on?”

“I don’t want to feel sorry,” she said, her face close to his, so that the fine contours of her nose, her cheeks, and her forehead were blurred.

“But I’m not,” Luis assured her. For a while they did not speak. In the silence he could feel himself flowing out to her, his whole body lost in the welcome of her being.

“Do you think your mother and your grandfather will approve of me?” she asked afterward. She had asked him to bring them from Sipnget, so that they would be present at his wedding, but Luis knew that they would never set foot in the big red house.

“I’d like to go with you this time — to meet them. She is also my mother now, remember that.”

“You will do nothing of the kind. Besides, you cannot walk very far.”

She did not bother him again about meeting his mother and his grandfather. He turned on his side and reached for the switch near the bedpost, and as darkness claimed them Luis thought: This is not wrong, for if it were, then I would feel wretched. Even if it was Father who planned it this way, this is also what I want . For a while Luis forgot the cancerous hatreds that had embittered him. With Trining beside him, a sense of peace finally came over him, and with it, sleep.

It was a dreary walk from the camino . All around him were the newly harvested fields. There were still a few golden patches waiting to yield to the scythe, and the fields smelled richly of grain and of cut grass. When Luis finally reached the dike his legs were numb. Once, this dike was no more than a rise of earth that followed every bend of the river, but in a few years the path astride it had become a dirt road and the saplings of camachile and acacia on both sides had grown into trees, which helped to hold the earth in place. The narrow road carried no more than bull carts, horse-drawn calesas , and an occasional jeepney. On both sides, down to the bank of the river, spread patches of ripening tobacco plots, gold and green, topped with white where the blossoms had not yet fallen. The sun was high, and in the still afternoon the earth seemed to simmer. Astride the dike, he could see the distance he had traversed, and he cursed himself for not having worn sneakers. His aching feet must be blistered by now. His shoes had been newly polished by Simeon, but after he had crossed the muddy harvested fields, they had, like the cuffs of his gray pants, become dusty, the mud having dried on them. He walked on. Weeds were beginning to obscure the path. There were no quarter-moon marks of carabao hooves or the fine polished lines made by sled runners, and the earth was crusty under his feet. The path had not been used for some time, he mused. He stopped and looked back to where he had come from — the wide, flat fields splotched with high mounds of hay, and in the distance the lash of white country road where not a single bull cart or calesa moved and the lomboy tree at the edge of the depression from where the earth that formed the dike had been excavated. That tree — he was not wrong — years ago he had climbed it, defying the bees that hived in its trunk to gather its black juicy berries. This was the path, and holding on to a thick stand of grass, he bounded up onto the flat broad back to the dike.

As he stood in the heat of day, he saw before him the barren land. How lonely and empty Sipnget had become — a few buri palms, the bamboo brakes that lined the riverbank, the green puffs of acacia, rows of broken buri-palm trunks left to rot near the riverbank, the water shining in the sun, the broad stony island, and the stubborn reeds, jutting above the water with their catch of moss and water lilies.

Sipnget as it used to be was gone — the store below the dike, the house where he was born, where he had heard the halting screech of his mother’s scolding and the soothing remonstrances of an old man. An infernal machine had thundered past Sipnget, leveled the trees and the palms, and furrowed the land into a flat and ugly wound. In a moment of doubt and faltering he retraced his steps — no, he was not wrong, he was in Sipnget, but gone were all the little things that had enmeshed themselves with his life. How could he bring back the village that he knew — blow life upon a desert of brown, so that it might bloom with the old and familiar scents? He ran down the dike, away from the vanishing traces of the path. A sprout of grass caught his foot, and he stumbled on the hard plowed earth. He picked himself up, cursing, shaking the clod that dug into his palms. He hurried to where he knew the first house used to stand. When he reached the place he stooped and examined the ground. Curled up with the dry, upturned soil were cinders and white-bleached roots of acacias and buri palms, like maggots feasting on his past.