Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

“Please do not be angry with me,” she begged him. Tentatively he held her by the shoulder — this woman who loved him and understood him — and slowly drew her to him.

“I felt funny at first, reading you. Then I thought maybe you were blind or that you had your own reasons, but I look at myself and I am so unhappy. With you there is a way out, but not for me — I will always be a Dantes. I live the good life, I go to Europe every vacation, wherever my fancy takes me, but I also live in Negros where I grew up, knowing how my family — all my father’s friends — make their living. I know some of our workers’ children. I played with them.” She paused and seemed to choke on her words. “I know poverty, Luis — the most terrible and degrading form. It is right in our hacienda, behind our house, in the cuartels of the sacadas , in the villages of our plantation workers. And I am eating so well and enjoying it and loving the stage in London and the museums in Paris. I cannot live with myself like this.”

“You were born to it,” Luis said, “but you know , Ester — and wisdom is the beginning of sadness.”

“No,” she said. “Love is the beginning of sadness.” She turned and kissed him on the chin. “Did it ever occur to you,” she asked, “that you were not the first?” She looked at him, and in the soft dark he could feel her eyes probe into him deeply, passionately.

“It does not matter really,” he said, relieved and also sad that what he had suspected all along was finally confirmed. “But why tell me?”

“I don’t really know,” she said humbly. “It was very easy to say that I did it to get at my father, to hurt him, but I love you, Luis. When I am not with you something happens to me. I am uneasy. I cannot sleep. I’m tense. Maybe because we are so much alike. Do you want to know—”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said again and meant it.

She did not mind him. “He was the son of one of our workers,” she said, pressing close to him. “I was fourteen, perhaps — and he must have been eighteen. He came to the house every morning to water the rose garden, and I used to wake up to his soft singing — you know, melodious Visayan songs. I would open my window — the garden was below — and watch him work, and although he knew that I was up there, watching, he never turned to me. It was a girlish crush — he was dark, he had good teeth, and his face was warm. I wanted to be near him. One afternoon I went to the group of shacks where he lived. He was there, playing a guitar, when I walked by. There was a duhat tree with fruit — it was not very high — and I asked him to get me some of the fruit. He wanted to climb the tree, but I wanted to feel his arms around me. I told him just to lift me up, so I could reach the fruit. He was strong and gentle, and I will never forget how it felt to have his arms holding me.”

She paused, and in the darkness, when he looked at her, her face had become grim. “That was when Father came by on his horse, and he shouted at him to put me down, which he did immediately. There, in my presence, with his riding stick, Father lashed at him, at his head, his back, his chest, and he just stood there, taking everything, not whimpering, not warding off the blows. I screamed at Father, saying that I had asked him to lift me so that I could reach the fruit, and he told me, in Spanish, so he wouldn’t understand, ‘Go back to the house, you little harlot.’ ” She paused again, then said, “Perhaps I really am a harlot, Luis — but only to you now, only to you.”

“What happened to him?”

“It was a month later that I finally saw him for the last time. By then I had to leave Negros to come to Manila for school — the vacation was over. It was on my conscience — God, how it bothered me! I stole money from my mother, from my father — not much, maybe a thousand pesos, something they would not notice. Then I got my biggest diamond ring. Early one evening, when Father was in Bacolod with his mistress and I knew that he wouldn’t be back until dawn, I went to the cane field. He did not want to, he was afraid, but I–I am a little harlot. It hurt, but I didn’t mind. I gave him the money and the diamond ring and told him to run away, never to come back, and never to see me again.”

“So I must run away, too,” Luis said sadly, “and never see you again.”

“No!” she said emphatically. “You will do no such thing.”

“We are both wiser now,” Luis said. “You cannot be my—”

“Little harlot,” she finished the sentence with a nervous laugh. “No — not your fault, Louie. And don’t get ideas from all the novels you have read — that I am a nympho. I am not and will not be one. And more than this, remember that the Danteses are proud. Very proud.”

“What will you prove?”

She rose and brushed the wrinkles from her dress. “Nothing,” she said, her eyes shining. “I am not trying to prove anything. I just want to be able to live honestly — with myself.”

She did not want him to drive her home, so he walked with her to the boulevard, where she hailed a taxi. And when she had gone, Luis went back to the porch, the darkness above studded with stars. In the tall leafy acacias beyond the high, serrated wall, cicadas were lost in the city.

Words, nothing but words, but they were Ester’s, and remembering them, he was filled with gratitude and humility; she had given him a gift of love, which, however she might define it or gloss over it or diminish it, would always be more than what he could give.

It was one of those cool January mornings. The sea breeze and the scent of roses blooming in the patch below his window flooded the room; the sun splashed on the floor and on the cream-colored walls; and the white voile curtains breathed in and out of the wide, bright frame of a window. Marta had switched on the radio in the hall at half volume, and it was playing a schmaltzy tune: “Stardust” again. Mayas twittered in the rubber trees in the yard, and cars hummed on the boulevard.

Luis sat on his bed, then bent low, pressed his forehead to the mattress, and let the blood flow to his brain. After a while in this position, he rose and went to the bathroom. He let the shower run, and soon delicious slivers of cold tingled his nerves. When he came out Marta was already making his bed and fluffing up his pillows. “Are there tomatoes in the refrigerator?” he asked.

“I’ll see, Apo,” Marta said, walking to the door.

“Slice and sprinkle them with salt. If there are salted eggs, that’s more than enough for breakfast.”

I am a woman conceiving —he was amused by the thought. Tomatoes, salted eggs. There’s nothing like starting the day with something salty. His body had awakened. Luis went to the dining room, his hair glistening with Vaseline. He ate the tomatoes with relish, and the hard golden yolk of the salted duck eggs was still in his mouth when he glanced at the hall and saw Simeon waiting for him in the foyer, twirling his khaki driver’s cap. “I’ll go down now,” Luis told him. The gold-numeraled clock in the hall indicated that it was past ten. He was late and mildly irritated. If Ester did not talk so much — and thinking of her kept him awake through most of the night — he would have gotten to bed earlier. He dressed quickly, threw his robe on the bed, and hurried down.

Simeon drove fast, but as they neared his office the car got meshed up again in the morning traffic. “Any instructions, Apo?” Simeon asked as he parked.

‘Just leave the car and go back home,” he said. Ester might visit him again, and he could not tell her to leave. Now he needed her, not as a woman but as sustenance. She should leave him well enough alone, she could not go on fooling herself or him, but the compulsion to be with her was stronger now. “If Ester comes to the house,” he told the driver, “tell her to call me up in the office — that is, if I am not home yet.”