Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

“It is all up to you, sir,” Luis said after a while, “but there will be no retraction from me. It is not a question of me and my father involving your publication. That is between my father and me, and we will settle it our way. I will have to resign, and they can sue me as an individual if they want to.” He had not really given the idea much thought, but it came as natural as breathing.

“You have made a most difficult choice, Luis,” Dantes said, still looking out of the window, a touch of sadness in his voice. “I knew it would be this way, but I hoped that you would see it my way. We really don’t have much choice. We can do what they want us to do, or they can come at us in a big way. I will pull strings to save the magazine, but among my priorities — and I am speaking frankly to you — the magazine is not the first. You know very well that I have other interests. I had thought that it would be just some sort of hobby. Perhaps I am speaking much too candidly, making a hobby out of your life, your career — but there it is. Never underestimate the power of the government — nor the bureaucracy as such. I have enemies, too. Perhaps you don’t know, but more than fifty percent of your ads have already been withdrawn from your next issue. The advertising department will inform you this afternoon on this when they give you the listing. You know that the government controls newsprint through the release of foreign exchange. That is just the beginning.”

“All these simplify matters, then, Mr. Dantes,” Luis said calmly.

“But we can back up a bit, Luis.” Dantes turned to him. “The world is not really as cold-blooded as you picture it. Look at you — aren’t you yourself a paradox? In between is a broad meeting ground, so wide we can both rest on it and give no damn to anyone …” Dantes’s eyes were expectant.

“I am very sorry I have caused you a lot of trouble, sir, but you know, if Ester were alive”—he choked on the words—“if she were here now and I could discuss this with her, she … she would agree with me.” He stood up, but Dantes held him back.

“We cannot end this way,” he said. “I think we understand each other better now. You spoke of Ester — she was an only daughter, and I was very fond of her. I want you to stay, Luis.”

He walked to the door. “It has to be resolved, sir — and I see no other way.”

Dantes went to him and they shook hands. The publisher’s grip was tight and cold. “You can print the retraction, sir,” Luis said. “Eddie is a very good man, and if you decide to close the magazine, I hope you can keep him.”

“You want a final statement or something?”

“No, sir,” Luis said. The publisher’s grip relaxed, and Luis walked out.

Eddie was pacing the office when Luis went in and sat wearily on the sofa beside his desk. “Well,” Eddie asked, “what happened?”

“I put in a good word for you,” he said simply. “It’s the most I could do.” He stood up and started clearing his desk, sorting out the articles that he should have attended to. “I don’t know if the old man will keep the magazine. If he does, you will most certainly be running it. If he decides to let it go, you will be absorbed in his other ventures.”

“How did it come to this? I didn’t think it would come to this. Isn’t it too much for an exposé?”

Luis went to his desk. “That’s the Army for you,” he said. “As for Dantes, we are not tops in his system of priorities, that’s all.”

“Well,” Eddie said grimly, “I cannot see what is important and what is not. If he doesn’t think twenty dead people important, I cannot work for him. I’m used to the gutter, Luis.” He stretched himself on the sofa, flipped off his brown slip-ons, and wiggled his toes.

“I’m sorry, Eddie,” Luis said, emptying his drawers of letters, manuscripts. It was like combing into the past — only the past could not be dredged from his drawers and dumped like clips or knick-knacks on his glass top, where he could pick them out one by one and say: This fragment of my life is important.

Eddie watched him wordlessly. “But in a sense Dantes is right, Luis. You are bitter, you know.”

Luis threw a fistful of junk into the wastebasket and glared. “I knew the village, I could name everyone in it. They were not just casualty figures — they were people.”

Eddie sat up. “I do not deny that,” he said. “They must mean very much to you. Look at what you are doing to yourself. Let us not go into that cliché about obligations and righteousness and justice, but you have obligations to yourself, too, and your relatives — your father, most of all. Why should he disagree with you?”

The trash from Luis’s drawers was now reduced to a small pile of mementoes. It hardly mattered now. Eddie had given him loyalty, respect, and that kind of relationship that could arise only from mutual trust. “There are things you do not know about me,” he said quietly. “It is not that the massacre is not true. God knows it is, but I did not tell you why I have been shaken by it to the very core. My grandfather, he was one of those killed. And my mother, she was betrayed and lost. You may have heard from me that my mother died long ago — that was a convenient lie.”

“Luis, it cannot be,” Eddie said. “If it is true, then it is not enough that you write about the massacre.”

Luis smiled wryly. “How I wish that I could really do something — but what, Eddie? As my father said, it is not the truth that gives us strength. I’m not even half the man that I should be. I am a godforsaken bastard. Go to my hometown and ask anyone you meet in the street. He will tell you how my mother was a maid in my father’s house. I had to live that lie in this city, and I tried to belong. Everything is a sham and I wish I’d never been born.”

Eddie stood up and embraced him, but Luis pushed him brusquely away. “I don’t need your sympathy,” Luis said.

“It is not sympathy,” Eddie said. “It’s gratitude — for trusting me.”

“I don’t have to be a hypocrite anymore. I can now live the way I like. If I must, I will tell the story all over again. Let us say that I am a mourner and that nothing can comfort me except the truth and the damnation that goes with it.”

Dear Father ,

Today I thank you not only for this life but also for helping me clear the cobwebs in my mind, so that I may yet know the answer to the riddle that I have for so long tried to unravel. I am, thanks to you, slowly escaping from delusions. Indeed it was most easy to delude myself, to mask a deep and private fear with public avowal of virtue or dedication to some noble folly. Do I really love humanity or truth or that abstraction called freedom? How deceptively simple it was for me to address myself to these ends, and how illusory they are finally becoming .

The reality is not quite like this. In truth I am afraid of losing my comforts, the certainty of the wealth you will give me, all the opulent dreams that are already real, for I know, no matter what I do, that you will not disown me. Your dream, too, is your own mishmash of virtue. You, too, have found it convenient, perhaps, to forget .

When you sent me off from Rosales to a Catholic college you knew it was absurd, for I had never touched a rosary before, and if I had, it was in the manner Grandfather prescribed. (You should have known the old man — you have too many things in common: bullheadedness, love of the good life, and a certain earthy approach to living.) He always looked with skepticism at the many who went to church on Sundays and holy days of obligations, for he felt that most of them desecrated the temple — the cheap, fornicating slobs whose minds, preceding their bodies, committed another mortal sin even as they knelt in the pews to ask that their sins be forgiven. He believed in prayer, of course, but only if it was addressed straight to God. He believed — just to make sure — in the spirits, too, which abounded in the fields, the trees, and the mounds .