Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

“Will you tell me why she did it?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Did you love her enough to want to elope with her — marry her?”

Luis’s slight laugh was hollow. “It never crossed our minds. I don’t want to make it look as if she was not beautiful, that she had no virtues. Yes, maybe — the friendship could have been more than what it was, but marriage was out of the question. As you can see, I got married — but not to her. No, it was not like that at all. Something I cannot explain — something more.”

“What could be more?” Dantes whined, and balling his fists, he struck the glass top of his desk, shaking the big flower vase and the menagerie of blotters, inkstands, and clay figurines that cluttered it. He was now sobbing uncontrollably, and he turned away, his lean frame shaking. “She had everything she wanted. I wanted her to marry properly and be comfortable and not have a single worry in the world! This is how fathers are — wait and see.” He turned expectantly back to Luis, his eyes misty and red. “Tell me that you loved her — it would be the best way, and I would understand.”

Luis closed his eyes, and in the dark, incongruous depths of his mind there formed slowly, clearly, the image of Ester, just as it was the first time he drove her out to that lonely beach in Cavite and she lay in the shade of the low, thorny trees, listening to the pounding surf. “No,” Luis said, gritting his teeth. “It was not that kind of love, or else I should have asked her to marry me way, way back. She knew that, sir. It was something else, just as tender and precious.”

Dantes had calmed down. He blew his nose and walked to the window again. “The funeral will be tomorrow afternoon,” he announced. “Don’t send anything.”

Luis looked at the thin, broken man and pitied him. “I am sorry, sir,” he said. “Perhaps I can say this: I’ll miss her more than you ever will.”

As Luis opened the door Dantes called him back. “Don’t tell anyone about this — for Ester’s sake.”

He nodded, then shuffled out.

Dear Ester ,

I have never written a love letter and it seems rather late and funny for me to write one, but this is a love letter and my regret is that you will not read it. We are so much alike and so, although you will not read it, I will keep it and go over it every once in a while .

I will not forgive you, for you have caused me unspeakable grief, and more than this, you have planted in my mind the suspicion that I am responsible, not for your life but for your death. Maybe your father is right — I have killed you, and in the process I will also kill myself, not because I love you, which I do, but because we are one .

I will try to write this letter minus the obscurity and ambiguity that you said are my faults. I do agree with you that sometimes obscurity simply is a camouflage for illogical thinking or, worse, bad writing. So, you see, you influenced me, perhaps in a manner that you never realized .

When you were around I had some sense of security in feeling that I could just pick up the telephone and talk with you. I know now that I miss you as one who has lost his sight will always miss the light. So I now feel this overwhelming sense of loss. It is as if I could have been able to save you if I had not procrastinated, but I could not have done anything really except — as did that stupid king — stand before the surf (remember how it was in Cavite?) and bid it stop. I have one royal vice — a self-assurance that is engendered by ignorance .

If I cannot forgive you, it must be you who must forgive me, for I was ignorant and I did not understand the great wrong I had done. There is no way now, however, by which it can be undone, and not even God’s mercy can put back in place what I have diminished within myself — and so I must now move about, the incomplete man .

Yet I must atone for myself I must do this as a cripple and compound my misery by begging. This is not manly. It is degrading, but with you I now have no pride .

I love you, Ester, I love you and it is only in words, for this love is beyond deed. I can only relive the hours we were together, the needless conflict, the intimacy of love’s supreme act, and I must now ask why you are gone when you could still be alive, not my little harlot but this earth’s most precious gift .

I must now give death — not yours but mine — the contemplation that I have not given it, for your death will also be mine. It is the riddle of the unlived experience, the great emptiness of time that is not yet imprinted in the senses or etched on paper and stone. It is the riddle that we cannot unravel, not because it is a compulsive challenge but because the mind seems somehow incomplete, a vacuum that cannot be filled .

I have always felt that the emptiness of my life stems not from the absence of memories or events but from the lack of courage to go after life itself, the way a hunter would go after the most dangerous game, which is death, the way a seeker would challenge the loftiest peaks. We do not conquer life, no one can conquer what one cannot define, but at least it is there and it is ours to shape and to possess fully, with all the senses working, with all the powers of the heart surging, as we search for the answer to the greatest riddle of them all — death, the ultimate end, the enemy of all men, the final quietus to the noblest of emotions, the tenacity and ethereal creativity of faith. You have found the answer and I have found love .

I have asked my brother, whom you have never met, not to hate but to love. I did not mean it. I had meant to ask you, too, not to hate, but I could not do it. You trusted me and in so doing asked me, too, to have faith. Must this, then, be all? Should we drag our feet, believing that our bones will hold our puny frames against everything — the tyranny of fathers and the perfidy of those who practice treachery? You said that we must love because only by love can mankind be saved and the savages amongst us elevated to the realm of the gods — but how can we love when we are nourished on hate? The old virtues no longer suffice. The world moves farther away from the orbit that was plotted out for us by the great religions. We will not be machines, but we will be something worse — we will be pigs .

It’s not five years since the end of the war, and as you know, the theology of self-immolation has fascinated me, more so now that I can see it impinge upon my life. I will not know — never — what really made you do it, for it was not in the name of honor, nor was it failure to serve that compelled you to kill yourself, as it did the samurai. I would flatter myself if I surmised that it was love. I do not think that you were a weakling, either in body or in spirit, to have expressed by this act your rejection and abhorrence of our reality — the sadhu who encases himself with ashes and sends away the spirit from the body also dies. Nor do I think that it was loss of comprehension, for if there was anything that has really impressed me about you, it was your intelligence, which was more than intellect and intuition. It was, I think, an intelligence of the highest order, for it was conditioned by compassion .

I do not know and I cannot know, but this I do know — I will enshrine you here in my mind and in my heart, and I will hate you for tormenting me, but I will cherish you nonetheless, for enkindling, even just for an instant, the faith that had long died in me, so that I can and will escape the fate of pigs .

Thank you, my dear Ester, for humbling me, for making me less the man I thought I was but more the human being I aspire to be .