Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

It was more than I could bear. I did not go to school the whole day. The following morning, my associate editor came to the house and said that they were printing the paper on orders of the father rector and that I should go with him to the rector’s office, for they wanted to clear up the whole mess. I knew most of the priests quite well. I even learned my Spanish from them. I had no foreboding of what was to happen. They were waiting for me, seated before the large molave conference table in the rector’s office, looking solemn in their white cassocks. In the center of the table stood a black crucifix, and before the priests was a high-backed chair, which was apparently reserved for me. It was the Inquisition .

“Sit down, Mr. Asperri,” the rector said amiably. I took the chair and faced the priests — the rector with his double chin; the father dean, lean, ascetic; and the father moderator, his face burdened with a granite jaw .

“You understand, of course, why your editorial was censored,” the father moderator said. He was from the Basque, like you, although he was not Basque and his Spanish had that Catalan quality of resonance. “It was too strong, and besides, you were really stepping on territory quite alien to you. You know, Mr. Asperri, you have a lot of freedom because we knew you were responsible — but as said, this is now alien territory …”

“Truth is not alien to me, Father,” I said .

The father dean shook his head. He was a nice man, really, from Seville, and there were times during his lectures in aesthetics when he would close his eyes and be carried away by ideas, the transcendental beauty of faith. Now he was wide-eyed. “Let us not be academic,” he said, lisping, his yellowish and filmy eyes probing into me .

It was, of course, useless arguing with them, for they were masters of logic and they led me through a maze, pummeled me, battered me, and humbled me. I said, “I know that you would push me into a corner, as you now have done, but I repeat, I am speaking of one who fought for this country when others who would have fought better did nothing. I felt that I had to do something in this life, which you said would determine the next. I knew in my conscience that it was not wrong.”

“You will continue disobeying rules, then?” The father rector leaned forward, all his superior equanimity gone .

“It is not a question of disobeying rules,” I said. “It is a question of belief.” The father moderator held his thick hand to his lips in mock despair, and the father dean shook the yellow pamphlet, the Rules of Discipline, saying, “You know that there is only one thing left to be done.”

I picked up the threat and said, “You may want to kick me out of the college, but you cannot do this, for when I did not come to school yesterday I had already quit school. I have come here as a matter of formality, to tell you about my decision.”

I bolted up, unmindful of their confused and inane protestations, and headed for the door, the sunshine and the free air. I stopped by the office and told my colleagues what I had done, and somehow, the next morning my story was in the papers. Trining came to the house, and in tears she shook her fists at me. One week later Mr. Dantes gave me a job .

I was, of course, worried about how you would react, you being almost wholly Spanish and quite close to the priests in whose hands you had entrusted me. However, you accepted my youthful rebellion, which, as you now know, was also directed against you. I wish it would be easy to attribute this to the phenomenon of growing up, in which we all kill our fathers in order that we may become men, but it is more than this. I will never really be able to accept the fact that as my father you could condemn me and yet expect me to carry on the function of an heir. The line has been broken. It was rent asunder when you denied my mother. I am now free from you, Father. I know this, for I can now damn you to your face .

And yet I do not really hate you or wish you harm. It is what you stand for that rankles — the privilege, the apathy, and the alienation from the people, including me, who have made possible your safe pinnacle. No, Father, you are not ten feet tall. If you can look down on us, it is only because you stand on a pile of carrion .

A part of me shriveled when I left college and still another when I read your letter . Our Time will go on, but I must leave it in order to appease power. I have finally made use of it, although not in the fashion you wanted, for now I have become free .

When trining called up and told him of his father’s death he was saddened by it just the same. He expected himself to be indifferent to it, his final release from the encumbrances of the past. Before he received the news he had hoped that he could once more go home and face the old man and tell him what a dastardly act he had committed in condoning the fate of his mother and his grandfather. But now that the old man was dead, now that a heritage of land and power was his, he was touched by melancholy nonetheless.

“He asked for you, Luis,” Trining said between sobs. “He said that you should promise not to hate him — that if he had more to give to you, he would give it. He loved you, Luis, in his own way …”

Luis remembered how he had gazed at the flabby mass that was his father, his half-closed eyes that had lost their luster, the hands that no longer gestured or groped for the folds of the sheets. He remembered him prostrate on the high carved bed, his head never steady, as if he were in the midst of a nightmare. He had expected a note from him to return to Rosales, so that his father could explain everything, but no such letter arrived. He did receive letters from Trining, aside from the occasional phone calls, telling him that Don Vicente had bided his time, hoping, perhaps, waiting, perhaps, for his only son to yield to the compulsive call of blood, but not for the world could Luis have said: Father, in this moment when truth and forgiveness — and even love perhaps — are within easy power for us to release from the prisons of our dark, tormented minds, I come to you.

Luis did not go. The old man had lost.

Luis did not bother Eddie with the news. It was shock enough for Eddie that Dantes had announced Luis’s resignation. Shortly after the phone call from Rosales, Eddie visited him. It was early evening, and although he had nowhere else to go, Eddie did not want to linger. “I just dropped by to tell you that you need not worry about me anymore,” he said. “I have been given a new job by Dantes — just like you said. I said some things I should not have said.” He sounded very wretched. “I owe you many things, Luis. Do not think that I am disloyal — but I am poor, unlike you, and I need a job to eat—”

“You don’t have to apologize,” Luis said. He asked Eddie inside, for they had been talking on the porch, but Eddie drew back and, fidgeting, said, “I didn’t mean to stay long.”

“You can’t risk being seen with me anymore?”

“That’s not fair,” Eddie blurted out.

“It could be true, you know,” Luis said, “but don’t look so guilty and crestfallen because you are still working for Dantes.”

“I really must go—”

“Don’t,” Luis begged him. “I just got a phone call from my wife. I should regard it as good news.” He held Eddie and drew him up, and soon Eddie was his old self again. He immediately went to the bar and poured himself a Scotch.

“What is the good news?” he asked without interest.

“Father is dead,” Luis said simply.

“You should grieve.” Eddie was aghast.