Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

“Including my mother.”

Don Vicente shook his head sadly. “You misunderstand, hijo . Please do not misjudge me. In her youth she was very pretty, and as you would say, I fell for her. It was not like those popular stories you like to repeat in your articles, about landlords having their choice of the prettiest of their tenants’ daughters. She was working in the house, and I loved her — you do not know how much. My father knew, he heard about it — and that was why he sent me to Europe for college, and of course I could not but obey. It was difficult tearing myself away from her — you know, we couldn’t get married. There was not even a thought about it. For many months she was on my mind, always. You will understand the anguish. I did not write to her, nor did she write to me. I was in Europe. I was going around—”

“And you forgot all about her — and her son.”

His father shook his head sadly. “It was not like that, hijo .” His voice was soft, supplicating. “It was not like that at all. It was human frailty. I came back and wanted to see her, but I had gotten married in Spain, and I did not want to stay in Rosales. Would you want to live here after you have lived in Europe? How many times did I want to see her, to ask her about you, after I found out about you.”

“And yet you did nothing to help her when I was a baby — yes, she did tell me this.”

“I was away, Luis. I was away, and when I came back and her husband had died and I did see her again, she was no longer the pretty girl I remembered. Work and motherhood had destroyed her.”

“And suffering, too,” Luis said. “I look at myself in the mirror, and I see you.”

“And you do not like what you see,” Don Vicente said. “I do not blame you, Luis, but I want you, just the same.”

“And that is why I am here — because this is what you want.”

Don Vicente turned away, and sobs convulsed his body. “I am dying, and I don’t want you to hate me for what happened to Sipnget. I will do anything for you, because — because you are my son.”

Luis steeled himself. “Thirteen years, Father,” he said clearly. “Thirteen long years — you never had need for us. No, you didn’t love her or me at all.”

The old man turned to him, his baggy eyes red with tears. “What do you want me to do?”

“There is nothing you can do now,” Luis said. “My grandfather is dead. My mother, she is crazy and no one knows how she is. And my brother — only God knows where he is.”

“Your brother!” Don Vicente suddenly raised his voice. “He is my enemy. He is your enemy. All of them have become your enemy. Don’t you understand? She is a fine woman, but what could I do? I am no god, and I can’t dictate to the soldiers where they should go or to the civilian guards who are under their control — tactical, they call it — when they are in the field. They will not say it was a mistaken encounter, but that is what I suspect it was.”

“But why did they burn the village? Why did you send your tractors there to erase it?”

“ Our tractors!”

“Why?” Luis stood up and moved to the window. He raised the blinds a little, and fine powdery dust drifted from the blinds and dissolved as a little sun filtered in. The soldiers who made their camp in the schoolhouse across the plaza were cooking their supper in blackened cans and iron cauldrons.

“The memory must be erased, that is why,” Don Vicente said. “Do you think I am not sorry that this happened? But if you must know the truth, blame it on frailty, everything that is natural with men. I don’t regret that you were born, that I cared for you and gave you things you needed. You will understand.”

Across the plaza a soldier, naked from the waist up, his sweaty chest shiny in the late-afternoon sun, stirred one of the cauldrons with a big wooden ladle. A squad was preparing to leave at the camp gate.

“I didn’t ask you to take me,” Luis said.

“But am I taking back what I gave you — or boasting about it?” Don Vicente asked. “I couldn’t let you suffer, that was all. I was never happier than on the day Santos brought you here, and the other day, when you and Trining were married — what more can a father want than grandchildren?”

“I should have stayed behind, in Sipnget.”

“Do not be sentimental,” his father said. “What would have been your future there? The things that I give you, they are yours by right.”

But these were mine by right, too: the days when we had nothing but salt and rice and camote tops, days when I walked in the sun, looking for crevices in the fields where the frogs hid, so that I could spear them and have something to eat. These were my birthright, too .

The soldiers with their tin plates and spoons were filing out of the schoolhouse and finding themselves benches and writing desks scattered under the acacia trees.

Don Vicente continued, “But I have no regrets except that your mother—”

“Don’t talk anymore about her. You can’t give her sanity back,” Luis said, suddenly turning to his father. The old man was not looking at him. His eyes were raised to the ceiling. Luis strode to the door, but his father held him back. “Sit down,” he said sharply, his eyes now wide open. “I am not finished yet.”

Luis returned to his seat and met his father’s steady gaze. This was the gesture of courage that he had long wanted to make. It is said, his grandfather had told him once, that the field rat that can look at the deadly rice snake in the eye before the snake strikes is saved. Am I saved now when I have become so pliable in his hands ?

“Do not be rash,” Don Vicente continued. “Truth — that which you seek, which I cannot give you — is how we look at things, what we believe. Do not talk about injustice or wrongs. There is always an element of injustice in this world, and many wrongs are committed in the jungle. We all live in a kind of bondage until we die. This, too, is truth, and it is ugly, so we do not call it that.”

“How would you call it, Father?”

Don Vicente twiddled his thumbs. “How can I call it anything else? All I know is that we are alive, that you haven’t grown up. How about motives, why don’t you go into them, too? What is the motive of Dantes, for instance, in building up his image as the champion of liberalism and all that crap? You know that he is not, that he is a vicious plutocrat, but you work for him just the same. You asked me why I had the village plowed. It was not hate — it was remorse. I wanted to start anew, to wipe out the traces of a past that will bother us.”

“What about those who lived in the village?”

“ Their lives — what about mine and yours? Whose is more important? Your mother and your grandfather are no longer there. Don’t be sentimental. As for the tenants, they can be accommodated anywhere. The farms they tended — these will still be going to them.”

“They are frightened, Father. They will not come back.”

“And is that my fault?”

Suddenly Luis felt very tired and his head ached. “We have to have a conscience, Father,” he said feebly. “That is what separates us from the animals. It is not the soul or belief in God that distinguishes us—”

“Conscience is for the weak,” Don Vicente rasped contemptuously.

So this is what we are up against, Luis cried inside him. The primeval law, the glacial age.

“It is enough,” Don Vicente said, “that I didn’t approve of it, that I feel remorse about it. It is tragic that they were killed, but there was some firing from the village — don’t you understand? They fired back. And there is another thing you must realize — their minds were diseased and their death was inevitable. It’s they — or us.”