Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

“Trining,” he told her softly, holding her by the shoulder, “no one can help us. This was their last refuge, and they had no cause for leaving it. I do not think even Santos knows where they have gone.”

He turned to the hills at his left, the rugged bluffs that loomed so near although they were kilometers away. “There’s only one place they could have gone to, and we cannot follow them there.”

“We can!” she cried. “If you want to — and I want to — we can follow them wherever they have gone to.” She freed herself and walked away, her steps rigid and straight, as if in a trance, then she broke into a run for the river and Sipnget. He called to her to stop, and when she did not he sprinted after her. Catching her, he held her quivering body close to his, sought her warm, pained face, and kissed her — her lips, her damp nose, her eyes, her hot, salty tears — and when she tried to break away again, he pinioned her arms until her struggling ceased and she started to moan and the sound that came from her was the anguished cry of a wounded animal. “She is my mother, too. Isn’t it so, Luis? And I have not even seen her and presented myself to her. I want to thank her, my dear husband, for bringing to this world the person I love …”

He slipped an arm around her formless waist and let her cry. When she quieted down he led her back to the river. He picked up the empty lunch basket, the scarf, and the umbrella that she had left at the bottom of the gully, and shielded her from the hot westering sun.

They were on the riverbed again. The sun was hidden now behind an ominous mass of clouds that spread out across the sky. “It’s going to rain — if the wind does not blow those clouds away,” he said. She looked up at a sky that had darkened. Soon it would be June, and if the rains came on time, there would be grasshoppers on the wing, mushrooms in the bamboo groves, and spiders in the bushes at dusk. If it rained on time, the seed would also sprout on time, and somewhere in this vast and blighted land, unmarked by a cross or hedge or man’s lament, lay his kin — and somewhere, too, his mother would be walking, searching …

“I don’t care anymore whether or not it will rain,” Trining said in a strained voice. “I just don’t care anymore.”

Rain fell the following afternoon, preceded by incessant thunder. The four o’clock whistle at the rice mill had not yet blown, but the shower hid the sun completely and it seemed as if dusk had come. Luis had not closed the windows in their room, and the gusts had made a wide wet gash on the floor. He dragged the high-backed narra chair across the floor and set it by the window. With a towel he mopped up the water on the sill. He flung the towel to a corner, where the maids would pick it up, together with his soiled clothes. He took a bedsheet, and wrapping it around his shoulders, he sat by the window and gazed at the town raked by mist and wind. He hoped that he could write, and he had a bookcase carried in from the library. In it were most of the books he had brought home from his city shelves. He found out, however, much to his discomfiture, that running the farm, along with the host of other responsibilities that he had inherited from his father, was turning him into a drudge involved not just in looking at figures but also in dealing in a very personal way with tenants, overseers, and even some of the townspeople and officials themselves. The first few days after his father’s burial were spent in meeting people, in trying to remember faces and first names, the way his father did. Even the smallest decisions were left to him; making them was what his father did, and this was not entrusted to the lawyer, the accountant, or Santos. This fact impressed upon him how authoritarian his father had been and how, therefore, his father must have been responsible for what had befallen Sipnget.

No new desires moved Luis in his new position, and the mind that had prowled the past terrain of anger and of remorse and dwelt briefly on those few moments of happiness with Ester could not find a moment of inspiration. He was a fugitive in the silence of his house. The time he now had on his hands was not time at all, for the essence of life eluded him and what he wrote was no more than a jumble of phrases, a few typewritten pages, verbose, clumsy, clipped together, or crumpled into little balls in the mesh wastebasket near his desk.

The dry season was not really over. Beyond the wet sweep of the azotea , the wide garden with its azucena pots was starting to sink in a flood. Beyond the pall of rain the adobe walls and the wide asphalt ribbon had acquired a polish and the neighborhood children had rushed out, naked, and were running up and down, shouting, holding their faces to the sky taut with storm. Some of them climbed the short banaba trees that lined the street, all the way down to where the gray-green hulk of the municipio stood; they plucked twigs off the trees, which they shook at one another. It was wonderful to be young and splashing in the rain. In Luis’s mind he raced with the children, and he felt the slosh of the rain on his bare feet and the tingling drops on his skin. But this season of fresh green would not last — the rain would pock the plaza, and there would be muddy craters where the pigs would wallow. The weeds would grow everywhere, and the green would acquire a dirty hue.

He did not see his wife come in. He became aware of her only when she sat on the broad arm of his chair and rested a shaky elbow on his shoulder, her breath warm on his cheek. “You will never make a good housekeeper,” she chided him. “Look at the floor — it is all wet. And your things piled up there. And all that waste paper. You forgot to close the window again.”

“I was asleep,” he said, his eyes still on the children on the asphalt, who had started playing leapfrog. “Besides, I want it open.”

“Aren’t you cold?”

“You see I have a blanket about me.”

She brought her swollen body closer to him. “I thought you might want to be more comfortable.” She was soft and warm, her breast against his arm, a strand of hair across his cheek. “I am having some coffee brought in. You should go out. Do not confine yourself so much in this room. You will end up being a monk if you don’t watch out.”

He leaned on the sill. “Must you recite the things you do for me? Must you always be giving me advice?”

Her hand was cool on his nape. “Please do not be vexed with me,” she said. “I just cannot bear seeing you like this — an hour or two in the office below and the rest of the day here. Do you want to go to the sea? To the beach in Dagupan? Or to Baguio for the weekend? Or do you want to see the latest movie in Manila? Whatever you say, but please do not shut yourself up here. This was just what Tio did.”

“You don’t have to tell me that. I know.”

“You used to wake up early — in Manila — and stroll down the boulevard, and at dusk you would walk to the Luneta. This is not a time for walking, but tomorrow, if the sun comes out, we will go for a walk. I need it. We can follow the dike, and as you used to do, we may be able to get some saluyot for lunch.”

“No, Trining,” he said, “what I want is peace.” Rain lashed the ditches; the huge leaves of the lilies in the garden trembled, and gusts of wind swept the media agua .

“You will get wet here,” she said, tugging at his pajama sleeve.

“The worst that can happen is for me to catch pneumonia,” he said.

“You do not appreciate the fact that I care,” she said bitterly.

“But I do,” he assured her, trying to hide his irritation, “but I need time for myself.”

“It is not time for yourself that you really want,” Trining said, bending so low that her cheek brushed his. “You are looking for something you will not find. After that trip to Aguray, Luis, I have come to accept it — that we cannot find them. There are things that we must accept because we have no choice.”