Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

“You are beginning to sound like Father,” he said.

“I am only trying to help. Aren’t you glad?”

“God, I’m glad,” he said. “I am glad for the food you stuff me with, but do not pamper me. I can leave today if it will make things easier for you. I can return to Manila or go back to Sipnget and start building again. Perhaps that is the best way. You know, I married you so that our house and our landholdings wouldn’t fall into other hands. With me out of the way, you can have it all.”

She stepped away, staring at him, her lips quivering. “Luis, how horrible can you get! Is that the reason — the only reason?” She was frightened. “Please let us not quarrel. If you want me to stay away, I will — but don’t say these things. Do you really mean them? Then why didn’t you tell me before?”

The outburst had left him shaky but elated somehow. Now he was calm. “I’m sorry, Trining,” he said quietly. “I am not myself anymore. I cannot think straight anymore. Please leave me alone.”

She stood before him, speechless, then turned and walked out of the room. As the door closed after her, the cold, hostile silence came back, stronger than the rain. He went to the bed and lay down. If anybody could give him comfort, it was his wife, and yet he was shutting her off, hurting her. There must be something bestial and satanic in me to make me hurt like a sadist those closest to me. Ester, and now Trining . He rose quickly and called out, “Trining! Trining!” When she did not answer he went to his old room, to the kitchen, then to his father’s room. She was not in any of the rooms. One last place — the library. He flung the door open, and there she was, on the couch, her eyes wet with tears, her faced contorted with pain.

“I’m sorry, my darling,” he said, bending low. “Have I hurt you?” She nodded but smiled, then kissed him. “I am in pain, Luis. I think I’m going to have the baby soon. This is a different kind of pain I’m feeling now.”

He rushed out of the room, called for Santos, and told him to get Trining’s doctor. When he got back she had wiped her face. Although her eyes were red, she was smiling. “It doesn’t happen that fast,” she said. “The pain comes in several intervals. Maybe I should go to the provincial hospital or leave for Manila, whichever you think is best.”

When a woman gives birth, he remembered the saying clearly, one foot is in the grave. Why did he not even have the decency to be more attentive to her in this time of need? “You are all I have now,” he said, “and I have not been a good husband to you during the last few days. Forgive me.”

“There is nothing to forgive,” she said.

He held her hand. “I have committed many crimes — I mustn’t commit one more. I cannot go around sending to perdition those whom I love.”

“Don’t talk like that,” she said, trying to rise from the couch, but he restrained her.

“It is true,” he said sadly. “Ester, I have a feeling I was the cause of it all. Before she did it — the last night she was alive — she was with me. I feel responsible, for I could have stopped her. I don’t know why she did it — I can only suspect. She did not expect us to get married, Trining, and she loved me. Please do not be angry now, but I think she killed herself because there was no future for us, or because she — she was pregnant, because she was carrying my baby. I cannot be sure. I can never be sure …”

Trining closed her eyes and shook her head vehemently. “Stop telling me. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear it!”

“I am sorry,” he said, “but it’s better this way. You will get to understand me better, know what I am. I feel that I hurried Father, too, to his grave, that I did not help Mother and Grandfather. Now I am also hurting you. God, I don’t want to hurt you!”

“Then stop talking. Stop talking about Ester!”

“It was not love, Trining,” he said. “I didn’t promise her anything. I could have promised her something from the beginning. You were the first girl whom I asked to marry me. With Ester it wasn’t love, it was something else.”

She half sat and covered his mouth with her hand. “Don’t talk anymore,” she begged him.

“All right,” he said, shaking his head. “I am like rust. I destroy everything I cling to. The dog in the street that bites its master’s hand might be forgiven, but not me.”

She swung down from the couch and stood before him. “You won’t leave me?” she asked. “No matter what, you will not leave me?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I just want to know how long you will be needing me. It will not be forever. If you say so, you are lying. You don’t have to put up appearances, not with me. I will just assume that someday you will leave me. Luis — that I won’t be able to stand!”

The light from the open window grew dimmer; the steady thrum of rain presaged high waters. He rose and embraced her awkwardly, for her belly stood in the way.

“Don’t promise me anything,” she said.

“I love you. You will be the mother of my child.”

“You don’t have to kill me if you don’t want me anymore. I will leave you in my own way — and it will be forever, too.”

He bit his lower lip, kissed her, and drew away. All my life I have made no sacrifice. I have never given up even one fingernail. All my life people have shown me the truest measure of their devotion. Love — if to love is to be willing to be used, then I do not know love. Nothing throbs here within, not a heart, only a cold and mechanical pump .

“No, I will never leave you,” he said, but he knew he was not telling the truth.

Dr. Reyes, who owned the small hospital in the town, was shivering when he arrived. He was the town’s best doctor, and although he was short and lean, there was energy and skill in his meager frame. “It is not yet your time, Trining,” he said as he entered their room and brought out his instruments. He was very casual about it all. “The blood pressure is normal, respiration is normal — but the pain, how long are the intervals? More than thirty minutes? But this is so soon — you are not due until about six weeks from now or thereabouts. Did you exert yourself? Did anything excite you? This could be a premature birth, you know, but thank God, we now have good hospitals.”

“No,” she lied, not looking at her husband. “Nothing exciting has happened, but I did go for a long walk last week.”

It was not necessary, said Dr. Reyes, that they go to the hospital immediately, but Luis was insistent.

“Well,” the doctor said, “I wish I could say that my clinic is good, which it is, but really, if we are going to any hospital at all, we might just as well go to Dagupan. It has one of the best in the north. There is a very good obstetrical staff there, and it has the latest instruments. I don’t want to take any risks.”

Santos drove them in the Chrysler. The rain was coming faster; it covered the land completely, and at times Santos had to switch his headlights on. There were ruts in many portions of the provincial road, and each bump was mirrored in Trining’s twitching face.

By the time they got to Dagupan, it was already night, the streetlights were on, and the rain had diminished to a drizzle. One foot in the grave — and he had settled for the provincial hospital when it should have been that specialists’ hospital in Manila, with its array of the country’s best doctors, anesthesiologists, and pathologists. It was a consolation that Dr. Reyes had assured him that although it would be a premature birth, he expected the delivery to be quite normal. Trining was as healthy as a cow, he had whispered to him.

He got a suite and a couple of private nurses to take care of Trining as her pain progressed. She did not deliver on that day or the next but on the third day, after Dr. Reyes and his team had finally decided that she needed a cesarian section. Luis followed her to the operating room. He would have watched it all had he not felt sickened. He had to go back to the suite, a wad of cotton drenched with ammonia clasped to his nose as he felt nausea coming.