Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

“No, no.” Eddie gestured with his hands. “Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself, thank you.”

“No, not you personally,” Luis said. “Not just you and me, but our generation itself. It is a generation that really is aimless. We say that we have been sobered or matured by war, the generation that could be the trailblazer, for it is the generation that has known the first years of independence. But for a few exceptions, we are headed nowhere. The generation that preceded us was interested in independence. What are we really interested in?”

“Milk and honey. The opium of Hollywood. The chariots of Detroit. Babylon, Rome — the depravity of dying empires.”

“We are dying, yes — but where is the empire? We cannot even develop the rural areas, for we really do not care — and those who care want to bring a holocaust first that will sweep away weed and seedling.”

“You can lose your equanimity, just thinking about the magnitude of our problems, Luis,” Eddie said. “I am sure that Lenin and all those fabled revolutionaries often laughed at themselves. I think they enjoyed a good screw when it was time for screwing — and a good fight, too, when the time for it came.”

“I envy them of course — the young people whom we know and who are now in the hills. Of course everything has been simplified for them. Perhaps it is easier that way. We who are left behind are cowards.”

“Now, now,” Eddie objected, “be careful with that word— coward . Don’t generalize. Suppose you have a heart condition or you can’t shoot. Suppose you are a man of words and you can do more just by opening your mouth. What is total war but total politics, too?”

“Justifications,” Luis said. “You are right, of course, but I am tired of justifications. Those who rationalize — and God knows how often I do that myself — are merely draining their blood, and bloodless, they get corrupted.”

“Call it justification,” Eddie said edgily. He had finished eating and was apparently getting bored. He stared out of the shop door into the street that lighted up with green when the neon sign of the newspaper office flashed. “But doing what we are doing is not exactly a cowardly thing, Luis. Maybe for you it is, for you have everything — but what about people like me? I will be branded the rest of my life, I am sure — and I really cannot afford it.”

“You will end up as executive vice-president of the Dantes Shipping Company when the time comes,” Luis said, humoring him. “Don’t worry. At least you will deserve it, but look around you and who do you see? It’s the scum who are getting the largest part of the cake — the thieves, the grafters — and we know it. The traitors, those who collaborated with the Japanese — and it’s only five years after the war — it is they who are now in power, and they even call themselves patriots.” Luis paused and a chill passed through him. He was merely parroting what his father had told him. The old man was not wrong, he was affirming the truth. He said sadly now, “Yes, it was always the opportunists who destroyed the revolution. It was they who sided with the Spaniards. It was they who shaped our relationship with the Americans and who sold the Filipinos to the Japanese. I am sure that even now, as the Huks grow in strength, a lot of them are pandering to the Huks.”

“But this is nothing exceptional,” Eddie said. “I am sure that the Romans found the same kind of panderers when they were building their empire. It is simply survival and preservation of interests.”

“The revolution lives, but the dream dies — and we cannot do anything, we who were nourished on that dream, for we are too puny or too involved in the system itself. So my dearly beloved and dying father keeps a company of civilian guards and deems it a necessity, even when his guards kill innocent villagers. We cannot even perish in leisure, for the pain of waiting will be worse than death itself. If we must die — pardon the heroics — death must come, swift and painless, in the manner in which we were reared, afraid of pain.”

“I am sure that those whose memories of the Occupation are bitter will disagree with you,” Eddie said. “They knew what pain was.”

“Not that kind, not that kind,” Luis said. “Physical pain is much too simple, although there is nothing quite like it.”

“Whatever it is,” Eddie said boorishly, “keep it away from me.” Then seriously: “Luis, I hope that you will get over it very soon. Just remember, the magazine is your baby now. You gave it life. Of course I can always put it out, but then it will no longer have the personality that you have given it.”

Luis stirred his coffee. “I wish you wouldn’t talk like some damned preacher, giving me motivation and all that jazz.”

“I mean it,” Eddie said. “Perhaps I’m also thinking of myself, but I am really trying to tell you that there is no sense in your acting like this. It was not your fault any more than it was Ester’s. No one in the office blames you.”

Luis leaned forward and glared. “But it was mine, more than Ester will ever know,” he said. “I did not give her strength, sympathy when she needed it. I was just too damned concerned with myself.” He stood up, went to the counter, and paid the check. Eddie followed him to the door, and in the lobby Luis said, “All right, I will try and make it tomorrow.”

When they parted, they shook hands, which they rarely did. The rain started again — a slight drizzle — and Luis ducked in the shade of the marquee. Holding the jacket closer to his chest, he sat on the base of one of the columns. Beyond the ebony pavement came the clop-clop of horses’ hooves on the asphalt. Every once in a while a car sloshed past, its lights flat and bright on his face. When the rain finally stopped he crossed the street and walked toward Plaza Goiti. He looked up; it was midnight and Eddie was still upstairs, working. It had become chilly, and at Plaza Goiti he hailed a cab and gave up the idea of walking until he was tired and could easily go to sleep. He did not stop before his house. He got off a long way from it and walked the deserted seawall. Beside him was the sea, black and formless but heaving and alive. The walk would be long, and it would end in the gumamela-lined driveway. He would go up to the porch, unlock the door, and walk past the silent living room, with its muted piano, which Ester used to play, and its record racks, and beyond, to the bedroom, where he would lie listening to his breathing, to the click of lizards on the wall and the scurrying of mice in the recesses of the ceiling. He would remember what Ester had told him, recall the warmth of her arms around him, the taste of her tears and the thrashing of her heart against his own. God — we were one, as close as no other two people have been, and she had to run away, not so much from life as from me .

He sank on the rain-drenched seawall, and bending over, he gave way and finally found release in a grief that wrenched from him a moaning loud and unmanly. He was still sobbing when a policeman emerged from the shadows, tapped him lightly on the shoulders with his truncheon, and asked him if he was drunk. He turned to the anonymous face, and in the first flush of turquoise dawn — for it was almost daybreak — he rose slowly and murmured a flat and level “No.” He went up the boulevard and straight and steadily to his house, as if drawn to it by the power that makes a criminal hie back to the scene of his crime.

In the five days that Luis did not go to work there had piled up on his desk letters, telegrams, and other messages, most of which he would have enjoyed, for many of them were congratulatory. Seeing them now, he felt no sense of fulfillment, no affirmation of his righteousness. They were merely reminders of a turmoil that had uncoiled. He went over them perfunctorily, then dumped them all in a side drawer.