Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

She returned, looking anxious, and placed the cold drinks on the low table. “Pineapple juice,” she explained. “I was tempted to fix you a bourbon, but I want to break your old habits.”

“You are incorrigible, Ester,” he said lightly, “just like me.”

“What do we do now?” she asked as she sat before him. “Shall we go see a movie or talk, or shall we go for a ride, like old times?”

“Anything you say.”

She started sipping her drink, and sometimes she would look furtively at him. Their talk drifted to Rosales, to his father, to Trining. “Why didn’t you bring your wife with you? That’s a bit unfair, isn’t it?”

His casual reply: “She has to take care of Father for the time being. Besides, she will be with me perhaps on weekends.” They rambled on — about the new book she was reading and how difficult it was to get certain titles because of the import controls, until she suddenly apprehended him: “Luis, you are not listening!”

His mind had wandered away to Sipnget, to what he had written and sent down to the press — the utterance of his anguish. He turned to her. The brightness in her eyes had dulled, and in them he saw the shadow of a hurt. She folded her hands serenely on her lap and admitted, “It is difficult to talk as if nothing has happened, when we have really been set apart. Luis, why did we have to quarrel?”

“I don’t know,” he said dully. “It couldn’t be helped, I guess.”

“Why did you come to see me?”

“You asked me to.”

“You did not have to come.”

“I owe you at least an explanation.” It was not really that which he owed her; he was drawn to her because she was truth, because she was the mirror in which he could see himself, and he had come to her for sustenance. Indeed he would need her now as man needed light.

“I don’t need your sympathy,” she told him. “I was wondering — just wondering — I wanted to tell you yesterday, but I couldn’t. There are many things you have not been aware of.” She turned away, as if she was sorry that she had again taunted him. “I didn’t mean to spite you,” she added hastily. “Shall we go now for that drive? I promise to keep quiet most of the way.”

He smiled at her and held her hand, and her breath was warm and fragrant on his face when she drew near. “I’ll get my bag,” she said, and went up to the porch again. She came back with a fresh coat of lipstick.

It was dusk when they reached the boulevard. The wind flowed into the car and whipped strands of Ester’s hair to his face. They had driven many times along this stretch of asphalt, and it no longer had any surprises for them. The restaurants, the tawdry nightclubs, and the neon lights had long been etched in his mind as props of the nightmare that he now shared with Ester.

“You know,” she attempted to say above the steady hum of the car, “we could coast along like this, pretending that we would reach some place — but there’s no such place. It’s limbo.”

“Don’t talk like that,” he said. “We must stop fighting.”

“All right,” she said. She sat erect and silent beside him. When they reached the other end of the boulevard, where the stone embankment sloped into an incongruous pile of rocks, beyond which was the sea, she tugged at his arm. “Take me to your house, Luis,” she said.

“You must be fooling,” he said.

“I’m not.”

“No.”

“Please, I like it there,” she insisted. “We are not going to make love — if that is what you are worried about. It’s just that somehow in your room I can tell you things that I cannot say in any other place.”

“It won’t do any good,” he said, trying to dissuade her and swinging the car around the curve, past the Baclaran church. “I am taking you home.”

Her voice was pleading. “Please, just this once.”

He glanced at her, at the dark eyes pleading. “All right, but it will not do any good.”

“I know.” She sounded contrite.

The house was unlighted save for the twin gate lights. Marta and Simeon had probably stepped out. As he groped for the switch at the top of the stairs she held him back. “Let’s keep the house dark,” she said. “I want it this way, so I can’t see your face and you can’t see mine either.”

“What are you afraid of?”

She mumbled something about the darkness making people equal. She followed him to his room, and he opened the window to let in the air. In a while his eyes became accustomed to the darkness that was punctuated by the headlights of cars making a turn at the next curve, and he could see her quite distinctly in the soft dark. From the sandy stretch before the seawall the eager laughter of promenaders, mingled with the cries of peanut and balut vendors, floated up to them.

“Luis, will you be honest with me? In my own way I have been honest with you.”

“You are asking too much. You don’t only want me defenseless, you also want me emasculated.”

“Luis, that’s not what I want — you have misunderstood. I am committed to you. You must trust me as you would yourself. We are the same, Luis; it’s so very clear to me now.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Why do you work for my father?”

It was a question he had not expected, and it startled him. Yes, why did he work for Dantes? “Why do you hate your father?” Luis asked instead.

“I could ask you the same question, Luis. Please answer me now.”

“Well, it is a compromise with what I believe in and what I can really do,” Luis said. “I know that your father is no angel, but I need his paper so that I can air my views. That is one reason.”

“And the other?”

“I am human, Ester.”

“Thank you for admitting it, but I know my father as you have never known him — and I know, too, why you accepted his offer.”

“Tell me.”

“No, you tell me.”

“He said I could do whatever I wanted — and he meant it.”

“You missed the point, Luis. How could you have missed it! He was flattering you, and you fell for it.”

For a while he did not speak, and when he finally did he could not bring himself to be angry with her. He asked instead, “Why do you humiliate me? You are so good at it, you will reduce me to nothing.”

She held his hand tightly and brought it to her lips, kissed the lean fingers one by one and then pressed his palm to her cheek. “I love you,” she said. “I am just trying to help you see how things really are — how my father really is — my family, even me. Can’t you see how humble I am before you?”

“I can’t,” he said but without conviction. The barrier between them was beginning to crumble.

She let go his hand. “You must see it,” she said. “It is not easy for me to talk like this, to hurt myself and my family. We are very proud. My father, he would rather lose all his money than surrender, but I–I would have come back to you crawling if I had to do it. Now, let me tell you why Father got you. He said you were one of us, that you would understand and would not make any trouble, like forming a union and that sort of thing.”

“I find it extremely uncomplimentary, even insulting, that I was not taken for my own talent,” Luis said. “I am not humble and I know I have a little.”

She pressed his hand but did not look at him. “I am sorry, darling, I have to tell you this. Papa said the magazine was not making money and could use someone courageous and enterprising, but the first editor did something Father would never condone — form a union — and that was why he had to go.”

It all came back to him — his first day in the office, the dirty looks of some of the boys in Editorial at this young whelp of a mestizo, this hacendero ’s son who was going to run a liberal, leftist magazine. He was a scab, and he knew it now.