Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

Father — he was young and handsome then — appreciated beauty and took it where he found it, and a year later the girl from Sipnget returned. The village was asleep. Only the insects in the grass and the owls in the buri palms were awake. She returned with her shame, which all the village came to know, and this shame became more than just the bones and the veins in me; in time it also became this passion that cannot be vented, these thoughts that cannot be spoken — all that I cannot be .

Grandfather dreamed. Looking at the hollow creeks and the mouth drawn like a line, I knew that the maculate dream would endure, but it had to confront another dream — my father’s .

They drove back to Rosales in great haste, and the road, white and shimmering in the afternoon heat, vanished behind them in billows of dust. The car rattled, but they did not slow down until they reached the main street and were past the open gate to the bodega of the rice mill behind the house where Santos, the perennial ledger under his arm and a pencil stuck behind his ear, was looking after the weighing of the sacks of palay before they were carted to the mill.

Luis bolted out of the car. “Mang Santos!” he shouted.

Santos laid his ledger on the small table beside the wooden platform of the weighing machine and met Don Vicente’s son. He avoided Luis’s angry eyes.

“Why did you not tell me? Why didn’t you?”

Santos turned furtively to the men heaving the jute sacks from the platform of the weighing machine into the queue of bull carts. They had paused and were watching with quiet interest.

“Please, Luis,” Santos tried to quiet him, “let’s not talk here.”

“Why did you not tell me?” Luis repeated.

Santos did not answer. He placed a placating arm around Luis’s waist and led him to the room beside the garage. Santos offered him a chair, but Luis refused it.

“You are all liars,” Luis said. “You came to me, all smiles, wishing me happiness and a long life on my wedding day, although you knew my mother was lost, my grandfather dead. Have you no heart at all?”

The torrent subsided and Santos asked, “What good would it have done if I told you?” The caretaker’s hands were shaking. “I am no one here, Luis — just an ordinary servant, like the rest.”

The caretaker’s face was frightened, and Luis pitied him. Like the others, he had grown old serving his father, and now another master was taking over. “You lied to me — with your silence. You did not say a thing, but you lied to me, just the same,” he said wearily.

“Always remember this,” Santos said meekly. “You are your father’s son. What happened to Sipnget, to your mother and your grandfather — there was a time I knew them all — was an injustice that cries out to God for vengeance, but who am I to say this? Who can right the wrongs that people do in their anger or in their blindness?”

After some silence, Luis said, “And Victor, do you know where he is? What has become of him? He wasn’t in Sipnget when it happened.”

Santos rose and went to the grilled window. “We don’t know where he is, but the civilian guards and the constabulary think he is the new Commander Victor. They thought he was in the village when they attacked it.”

So it was my brother who brought death and destruction to Sipnget, Luis thought grimly. My brother …

“A happy day has come, Luis,” Santos was saying. “On your wedding day, how could we have told you? Besides, I should not be the one to tell you. Your father knows what happened. Our guards were involved, perhaps less than the constabulary, but they were involved, just the same.”

He knows, the whole town knows — and how will I face him now who strapped these clothes on my back ? Santos had more to say, but Luis wheeled around and rushed out.

In the shiny, heat-laden hall the calla lilies that had been brought from Baguio for his wedding had wilted in their crystal vases. A garland of bridal bouquet that a thoughtful maid had strung on the statue of the farmer with a plow had dried, and its small petals had fallen, dotting the base of the statue with white. Trining was asleep in their room. He wriggled out of his sweat-soaked clothes and sat on the rattan sofa by the window. The fatigue had reached his limbs, and in a while he rose and bent over his wife, kissed her gently on the cheek, then went out and crossed the hall to his father’s room.

Don Vicente was slouched on his bed. As usual, the blinds were down, but the depressing dimness of the room no longer dulled his vision. His father’s eyes were closed, mere slits below the black bushy patch of eyebrows. His arms were dumpy at his sides. On his head, as if it had been grafted to the round, fleshy lump, the ice bag was precariously propped, and running down the side of his mouth to his chin was a thin line of saliva. If he had as much as nodded, the ice bag would have fallen, but it did not fall even when he stirred. “Speak, son — what is it that you want?”

Now the baggy eyes were half open and were glued on him.

“I have just returned from Sipnget,” Luis said, sitting on the wrought-iron chair beside the bed, watching the rising and falling of his father’s broad chest. “I found out that my mother has disappeared and my grandfather is dead — killed by your guards.” He thought of sterner words to say, but now this was all he could utter, as if all fight had been drained from him and he had become puerile and timid.

“I knew you would go there,” Don Vicente said softly. “I was waiting for you to come and see me, to tell me you finally did go. It is a very tragic thing, Luis — this I must tell you.”

Luis bit his lower lip. “There were others killed.”

“I know,” Don Vicente said, shaking his head. “Tragic thing.”

“I have heard of things like this,” Luis said, “but in the city, where one is detached from the barrios, I always thought these were exaggerated.”

Don Vicente propped himself higher on his bed. “Now perhaps you will tell me what wrongs are to be righted?” The father peered at his son, his thick, pallid lips drawn across the flat expanse of his corpulent face. “Luis—” The old man’s voice was almost pleading. He tried to smile, so that the corners of his mouth no longer drooped. “Luis, I have never told you about my past. I did not want to talk about it, but now, now I must. You are my son, you have a right to know it. You know that I am dying and perhaps I deserve to die unloved and — and hated, even by you. However, I was once young, too, and the young have their own weaknesses.”

“I have never claimed that I have no weaknesses,” Luis said simply.

The old man did not heed him. He went on, his face bathed with the luminosity of remembrance: “I was young when I traveled all over Europe, and I was curious and virile then — not like now. It has been two years since I have had a woman, because I am no longer capable. Oh, what I would give to have one erection! But this diabetes, this drug that works on my heart … Yes, it was different then, hijo . I traveled all over Europe and had a good share of prim English girls and healthy Nordics, but there’s nothing like a Filipina in the way she holds a man, loves him, satisfies him. I should know. God forbid that you become a homosexual — that’s becoming so fashionable nowadays — with all that literary life you are living. Oscar Wilde was a homosexual, wasn’t he? There must have been others.”

“Must I prove my manhood all the time, Father?”

Don Vicente shook his head. “No, hijo —I am explaining myself more than anything else. You see, Rosales was not big enough, nor was Pangasinan, perhaps not even Luzon. Your grandfather knew that. He knew I was bright. So off I went to Manila, to high school, like you did, and then I came back to this town and its stupid peasant ways and its ugly peasant women.”