Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

How clear it had become. It was as if his father had been skinned and his insides turned out, so that Luis could look into each internal sore.

“You must understand,” Don Vicente continued. “Perhaps I can put it better this way. Look at you, at your friends — the five-centavo guerrillas. Where are they now? Who are those who made money during the war, who survived? The collaborators, the buy-and-sell men who did business with the Japanese.” A long pause. “I am not saying that you should be an opportunist, but at the same time you cannot go against the wave. You must ride it and reach some place. To shout against injustice, to oppose it, is sometimes good for the spirit; but be sure it does not destroy you. Just remember this: the laws are made by the strong, not by the weak.”

Luis nodded dumbly. There was nothing more that his father could say that he did not already know. He rose, and as he headed for the door again Don Vicente called, “The blinds, Luis. Put them down.” But although he clearly heard his father’s command, he did not turn back.

Trining had awakened when he got to her room. She was sitting by the azotea door, and in the soft light of the late afternoon she was reading Marquand’s Point of No Return , which he had brought with him from the city. She stood up and kissed him. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

When he did not reply she asked, “How are they? What did your mother say?”

Luis probed into her anxious face, into the soft brown eyes that were always expressive and alert. She did not know what had happened to Sipnget, and somehow he was glad, for if she did and had not told him so, he would have hated her, too. He sat beside her and told her how the whole village had been burned, that there was nothing in the barrio now but ashes and plowed earth. When he had finished she embraced him, her heart thumping against his chest. “The soldiers and Father’s guards,” Luis said, “it was a mistake and that’s that.”

“Did you fight with him?”

“I was afraid once,” he said softly. “I stayed away from him, because I might say something I need not say. Now I am not afraid anymore. I can even damn him now without caring about what he will say.”

Trining shook her head sadly. “You will end up hating everyone, even me.”

“How else do you expect me to react?” he asked. He closed his eyes and held her close. Hate — but isn’t this the strongest force man has ever fashioned? The father rector argued forcefully once that love was far stronger, that it was the basis of Christian action and forgiveness its bedrock of virtue. Love, however, does not commit people. It does not draw them together in the same way that hate does. You cannot be Christian and forgive or love the tyrants around you, for in doing so, you will yourself institutionalize their brutality. There is nothing un-Christian about hating those who are unjust. I am a vengeful God — read the Bible again; I come bringing not peace but the sword. So let there be hate, so that we can exorcise the evils that plague us. Only with the cleansing catastrophe of fire can we renew ourselves .

How readily he agreed now with his brother — but only because the agony was now his.

But what of this girl, this woman who was to bear his child, who had turned to him as her savior and master? He stroked her hair and said, “Don’t say that — how can I ever hate you? You are the most wonderful thing that has happened to me.”

“If you are filled with anger today,” Trining said, “I hope you will have it in your heart to forgive. There is hope, Luis, and time is on our side, because we are young. I have memories, too, or have you forgotten? When they killed my parents and my brother I should have grown up hating those who killed them, but I do not, for you have helped me grow and understand.”

Time is not on our side , the thought formed clearly; time is certitude, time ordains us all to die, as Father will die — but why has he lived so long to warp my life? Time was his friend, not ours .

There had always lurked somewhere in the shadows of this house, compounded with its musty odors and clammy surfaces, a pall of inevitable decay so real that Luis could feel it hovering over him. What did his father say? What was it that had curdled all the warmth that once coursed through him? The Asperris were destined to be tormented, to be flailed and torn in spirit. Look at Don Vicente’s Spanish wife, whose body was wasted by abortions, whose days were lived in madness. In the end they would all die, and nothing, nothing would remain of them. This was not spoken but implied, understood by the people in Rosales and Sipnget who had watched what transpired in this big red house, who had seen how the Asperris were born, debauched, and how they then passed away — his father’s father, the uncles and aunts, until there was no one but Don Vicente.

Luis, however, was not an ordinary Asperri. From the very beginning, a deep, dull ache in his heart told him that he had not really forgotten, that he was still capable of more than kindness. He would be saved from damnation as long as he dispensed with tokens of virtue as he knew virtue when he was young, but as long as he was capable of kindness he would also be an easy victim of deceit. Kindness — as his father had said — was just another form of emotion that man must free himself from so that he would be strong. How much easier it would be if he merely followed what the old man wanted and dismissed the agonies of conscience with the thought that he was committed to something just as necessary — the well-being of no other than himself. This self, however, this bundle of nerves and flesh, this mirror of the inner consciousness that had long been cracked, was the prison from which he would now flee, for it was not just rotten tendon and bone — it was also blood that had been poisoned.

This blood nurtured in a distant corner of Spain was no longer what it was, and its perversion was in him, nagging him, reminding him that in this house was his destiny. He must now take leave of it.

He had already packed and was waiting for one of the boys to fill up the radiator and clean the seats of the car. Trining had made a cup of coffee for him, and he was ready to go. “What will you do now?” she asked.

“I will avenge them, that’s all,” he said simply.

“Oh, Luis, you will end up fighting your father.”

He walked to the azotea . The east was paling, and in the orange light the jagged rim of the distant hills stood out. Beyond the sprout of coconuts at the right a dog barked, then the silence of early morning descended upon the town again, punctuated by the crowing of cocks.

Her arms closed around him, and her voice trembled. “I am afraid, Luis, not just for myself but for you. Please take me along.”

He kissed her on the forehead. “We have already talked about this. For the moment your place is here. He is sick, and that is a concession I am giving him. It is foolish, you being here and I there, but this is not forever.”

She was silent. Then, after a while: “I will call you up as often as I can. Will you try to write down whatever is happening over there, whatever comes to your mind?”

“Every day,” he promised. They went down together and she kissed him passionately. “Tell me everything he does,” he whispered. When the car drove down to the gate and into the street it was already morning.

Luis arrived in the city before noon and proceeded to his office at once. As he had expected, everyone at the desk had heard about his wedding. He had no time for the bantering, and although there was this emptiness in his stomach, he tried to smile. All the way he had carefully planned how he would play up what had befallen Sipnget — the crisis in the rural areas, the immediate need for land reform, and the renovation of the armed forces. It would be one issue devoted to nothing but political reform, and the touchstone would be Sipnget.