Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

“Our star is no more,” Hilda’s mother wept bitterly, casting a beseeching look at Father, who turned away. “She always did it right — she could do it even with a blindfold on.”

Hilda opened her eyes again, and briefly our eyes locked. She opened her mouth as if to speak, and I bent low only to hear her say, “I hate you,” almost in a whisper. But her mother heard, and she cried, “You naughty girl!”

I wheeled and ran to my room. Father followed me there. I did not know what to do, what to say. “She came to Carmay with me this morning,” I said. “I did not want to bring her along, but she insisted—”

“I know,” Father said, sitting on my bed. “David told me.”

“I did not do anything,” I said.

Father nodded, then bade me go to sleep. Outside, the rain and the wind grew stronger. The leaves of the balete tree rustled, and there were sounds of people scurrying below the house seeking shelter in the wide sweep of the media agua . They would be drenched if they went under the balete tree; its cover would not be enough. Above the monotonous patter on the roof, the merry music of a brass band somewhere beyond the plaza drifted into the house, and the dusky magic of June clung like a wanton spell to my troubled mind.

In another two days the fiesta was over, but the circus did not wait for the last rocket to be fired. The morning after the accident, it packed up, leaving the plaza looking sullen and desolate. The bamboo arches in the street corners and the paper buntings that were soaked and frayed were not dismantled till after a week, but when the circus left I was miserable. Not even the strong afternoon rains, which brought my friends out — racing in the streets and shrieking and splashing in the solid jets of water from the roofs — could lure me away from the sad, sad thought that bedeviled my mind.

My depression would have lasted much longer, but by the end of the month, another celebration came. After more than ten years in America, Tio Benito finally returned home.

Among our many relatives, only he could claim the distinction of having been to America. He went there in the 1920s at the age of eighteen when many Ilokanos were lured by the promise of high wages on the sugar plantations in Hawaii and in the orange orchards of California. There was also the dubious expectation of being able to go to bed with an Americana . It was the question often asked of Tio Benito when he settled down to talk with old friends and neighbors.

Grandfather had objected to his leaving, for it meant Tio Benito’s denying himself a college education, which his brothers and sisters had. But Tio Benito was bent on his adventure; he pilfered cavans of grain from the bodega over which he kept watch, sold them to the Chinese comprador , then scampered off to Manila and across the Pacific.

Grandfather was very angry, not so much at the minor thievery as at the fact that Tio Benito had gone without bidding him good-bye. But the old man was quick to forgive, particularly after Tio Benito’s letters started coming and with them an occasional dollar bill or a shipment of clothes that, alas, may have been all right for Alaska and Northern California but certainly not for Carmay.

But in his letters Tio Benito asked for money more often than he sent it. He got, of course, what he wanted, plus pleadings from all in the family that he hurry back to the land of his birth because Grandfather was becoming old, and there was need for him to look after his inheritance, for his brothers and sisters were too involved with their own.

Everything about Tio Benito was wonderful and done with style. But Tia Antonia, on the occasions that she visited us, always derided him for having gone wrong; she said he had become a “pagan.” She had an ally in Sepa, our cook, who believed in religion as convert Protestants devoutly do. Almost all of my relatives were a religious lot, though they were very democratic about their beliefs; they went to any church of their liking. It was almost a rule that hardly anyone stayed home Sunday mornings — all must go to church. I found this not too disturbing, for I was serving then as sacristan to Padre Andong, the Catholic priest — a chore I appreciated, as I always managed to swipe a few coins when I passed the collection plate on Sundays.

Tio Benito’s explanation for his “paganism” was pragmatic. “Look,” he would say. “What is the need for one to go to church or pray to God? He is everywhere. God knows that when something miserable has happened to you, you need help. Why go to church and make the preacher or the priest grow rich? God knows you are thankful for the things He has done for you. Besides, He isn’t like a young girl whom you must flatter every day with words so that His love for you won’t diminish. He isn’t like that because He is God. He is good. He knows that you like Him, and there is no need to be repetitive — mumbling prayers over and over, prayers said yesterday or a thousand years previous. He gets tired of that.”

Still Tia Antonia insisted that he did not even know how to make the sign of the cross. It was hard to believe that a man as old as he did not know that.

Father, however, recalled that Tio Benito was quite religious before he left for the United States; consequently, he explained his brother’s sanctimonious behavior as a result of American influence.

To this, Tio Benito retorted, “Don’t you dare say that the Americans have no religion, that they don’t know how to worship. Yes, they do worship — and it is the buck, the dollar, they revere. It is the end and the beginning — an American without money has nothing, not even God. And that is why America is strong — because it worships money. And look at all of you, worshipping something that cannot help you. Is God responsible for the droughts, the typhoons that destroy the crops?”

Tia Antonia looked at his recalcitrance in a slightly different manner: “America is rich and, therefore, licentious and without God. Look at the absence of modesty of its women.” And then she would go into a tirade against the magazines showing American girls in the briefest of bathing suits.

“And that is precisely what I like,” Tio Benito admitted to me one day when he was regaling me again with his stories about the United States.

“But surely, Tio,” I said, “there must be something in America that you did not like.” He was silent for a while, then, in quiet tones, he told me of days of hunger, how difficult it was to get a job because he was brown, how he was treated no different from the Chinese, and how he pitied the Negroes most. “They are not regarded as people,” he told me.

“But America is the land of equality, of the free—”

“Bullshit,” Tio Benito said, raising his voice.

I quoted at length from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which I had already memorized.

“It is the land of opportunity — that is right,” Tio Benito said. “If you are white, if you are Protestant, and you are Anglo-Saxon.”

“Meaning you cannot play the saxophone?”

He laughed and tousled my hair. “You are too young to be discussing religion with me,” he said. Then off again he went, this time to Carmay to be with Grandfather. But after being there for a month, the farm must have bored him, for he moved into the house again, this time sharing Cousin Marcelo’s room on the ground floor. He did not seem to have a care in the world. He had obviously saved some money to fool around with, and he continued his meanderings, holding court in the marketplace and at the town barbershop, and ready with the bottle even for the slightest acquaintance. Spending as he did, his savings soon petered out but not the heckling, particularly from Tia Antonia and from Sepa. His impending bankruptcy and the unrelenting nagging about his profligate ways must have done something, for one Sunday morning he decided to give God a chance.