Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

Luis slowly led Trining by the hand up the iron spiral stairs that were wiped clean, as were the wooden steps. They reached the top of the flight, and slowly Luis opened the door, which he thought would be locked. It was not. They stepped into the room in awe, expecting to see things they had never seen, perhaps old and rusting lockers brimming with unspeakable secrets. The room was airy, not cobwebbed and musty, and it looked lived-in. There was a writing desk and a sofa, and there was a shelf of folders, which, he soon found out, contained all the issues of Our Time published from the time he took over its editorship. There also were carefully bound issues of the college paper that he had edited. There were scrapbooks containing Luis’s letters when he was in high school, old pictures of himself on a picnic by the river and with his school debating team — and wonder of wonders, there were the poems he wrote in his teens, poems that seemed so effete and unreadable but that sent a pang of nostalgia coursing through his being. He had often wondered where he had placed all these, and now here they were, all neatly arranged and bound together, as if they were meant for posterity. So it was here where his father had cared for him in his own fashion. It must have been an effort, going up the stairs in his condition, but here he had peace — and communion with his son, which had not been possible in person.

“Oh, Luis,” Trining said, “he loved you. He wanted so much to know you. Can you see it now? Can you forgive him now?”

Luis strode to the window, a hundred thoughts crowding in his mind. Beyond the acacias and the coconut palms the whole town was spread around him. Through the clear glass panels he could see it all, even where Sipnget was and the river like a silver ribbon in the sun. And every day that his father spent here he could see the village, too. Luis shook his head. “I was something special, perhaps,” he said softly; “I can understand that, but I am not just an Asperri. I come from that place over there.” He pointed to the distance.

They went down to the library, which adjoined Don Vicente’s room. It was here where all the important papers were filed — the Torrens titles, the stocks in the mines and in the brewery.

Santos came up to explain things. “You know, señorito ,” he said, “I owe everything I have to your father. I will serve you as well as I served him, and whatever little knowledge this ignorant brain holds is yours to use.”

Luis said, “I want the truth. I want to find out what really happened to Sipnget. More than this, I want to find my mother and to see where my grandfather was buried.”

“But what good would it do, Apo?” Santos asked. “The dead are dead — they cannot be brought back to life, and it really matters little where they have been buried or even how they died.”

“It does matter,” Luis said, “if they are your relatives!”

“I am very sorry, Apo, but sometimes, for someone like me, silence is the only answer. You understand, Apo, I will serve you in the best way I can, but there are things I cannot do, for I am not strong.”

“All right, then, where are the civilian guards? Who pulled the triggers?”

“They have been disbanded, Apo. The constabulary disbanded them after you left.”

“We cannot find even one?”

“Even if we did find one, would he speak? You are asking him to swing from the loftiest tree.”

“Would you be a Judas to me?”

“Even the weak have a right to life, Apo.”

Even with Santos’s rebuff, Trining was doggedly serious about going to Sipnget and beyond — to Aguray. She was hardly in any condition for the walk — and not even a jeep could go to Aguray, for it would mean not only fording the river where it was shallow but also walking the dunes on to where they became alluvial.

As she prepared in the evening for the trip — lunch basket, walking shoes, umbrella, and thermos bottle — Luis hoped that she would at least know how it was with his grandfather, although he had now become thoroughly skeptical that he would find even a trace of the exhumation and reburial.

Trining had her own defense against disappointment — the walk would do her good, and she needed it for the baby. They started out early in the morning with Santos at the wheel of the jeep. The sun was not yet up, and the town still slept in that brief coolness that always preceded the humid onslaught of May. Santos drove slowly over the road, which had begun to rut. Trining had dug out from the closet a green parasol and sneakers that she had used in her physical education class in college. The walk would be nice and cool if they got to Sipnget before daybreak.

Luis did not have a single worry about his physical safety, and he refused the pistol that Santos said he should carry. When they reached Sipnget, however, a little apprehension came to him. He was, after all, no longer Luis from the village. He was now one of the region’s wealthiest men. The sun broke through the thin morning haze. The air was rich, compounded of morning dew and the earth that had begun to stir. A new bridge made of unsplit coconut trunks lay across the irrigation ditch, which had been dredged. Santos assured him that the bridge was sturdy, and they drove over it. Then Santos carefully eased the vehicle down the uneven path, over deep ruts made by carabao hooves, which were beginning to disappear. They drove slowly, knowing that Trining in her condition would be uncomfortable at every little bump.

The dry season was over. The huge blotches of burned fields were now mottled with touches of green. The mud holes and even the irrigation ditch alongside the path had dried up, and water lilies, matted and dead, clung to the uneven floor of the ditch. Soon everything in the waterways would stir and the brown would disappear under a blanket of green.

“I came here once, long ago,” Trining said when they were near the dike. They had not spoken much on the camino provincial . “It was November, and harvest time.”

Luis knew well that season when the whole land seemed ablaze with golden fire and the air was brilliant and scented. It did not last more than a month, for the scythe subdued the fields in no time and the fire of torches blackened the fields, singeing the hay to the very skin of the earth.

The trail made a curve, and there, beyond the thin veil of grass, stood the dike. The old duhat tree and the buri palms were gone. Luis was not surprised. With the people of Sipnget no longer there, it was natural that the landmarks would also be erased. They stopped in the shade of a stunted camachile tree, and Luis helped Trining out of the jeep. She smoothed the creases from her skirt, and for a moment, as if in pain, she held her belly and did not move. “Don’t you think you should stay here with Santos and wait for me?” Luis said. “I can go alone, I know the place. It is quite a walk, but I should be back in three hours.”

Trining was resolute; she left several sandwiches for Santos and followed Luis toward the dike. The path that led to Sipnget was completely obliterated. The dying grass hid every trace of the old path. Even the clean straight lines that sled runners and bull-cart wheels had etched upon the dike had been wiped out. He held her hand as they went up. The sun was still soft and mild, and although they had both walked a considerable distance, they were still fresh, free from the ravages of heat and humidity. Once she stumbled as she stepped on a loose clod, but she quickly braced herself and, clinging to Luis, went up the dike. How thorough the destruction of Sipnget was! Not a single tree, acacia or palm, stood where the village used to be. The tractors of his father had done a tidy job — the furrows were immaculate and straight. They went down to the stubble field, and for Trining, the walk on the plowed earth was extremely difficult. There was no path to the river except through that brown serrated land. They reached the riverbank after great difficulty and looked down on the delta, silver and brown in gashes of sun. He turned around and saw how all the trunks of buri had been removed. There was no curtain of grass, no mound.