Don Vicente
Page 1
PRAISE FOR F. SIONIL JOSÉ
“The foremost Filipino novelist in English, his novels deserve a much wider readership than the Philippines can offer. His major work, the Rosales Saga, can be read as an allegory for the Filipino in search of an identity.”
—IAN BURUMA, The New York Review of Books
“America has no counterpart … no one who is simultaneously a prolific novelist, a social and political organizer, an editor and journalist, and a small-scale entrepreneur.… As a writer, José is famous for two bodies of work. One is the Rosales sequence, a set of five novels published over a twenty-year span which has become a kind of national saga.… José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, published in Spanish (despite its Latin title) in the late nineteenth century, was an influential Uncle Tom’s Cabin-style polemic about Spanish rule. The Rosales books are a more literarily satisfying modern equivalent.”
—JAMES FALLOWS, The Atlantic
“One of the [Philippines’] most distinguished men of letters.”
—Time
“Marvelous.”
—PETER BACHO, The Christian Science Monitor
“[José] never flattens his characters in the service of rhetoric.… Even more impressive is José’s ability to tell important stories in lucid, but never merely simple prose.… It’s refreshing to see a politically engaged writer who dares to reach for a broader audience.”
—LAURA MILLER, San Francisco Weekly
“Tolstoy himself, not to mention Italo Svevo, would envy the author of this story.… This short … scorching work whets our appetite for Sionil José’s masterpiece, the five-novel Rosales Saga.”
—JOSEPH COATES, Chicago Tribune
“The literary work of José is inseparable from the modern politics and history of the Philippines.”
—Le Monde
“José’s writing is simple and direct, appearing deceptively unsophisticated at times. But the stories ring true, and taken together, they provide a compelling picture of the difficulties of modern life and love in this beleaguered island nation.”
—STEVE HEILIG, San Francisco Chronicle
“[José] is the only writer who has produced a series of novels that constitutes an epic imaginative creation of a century of Philippine life … a rich, composite picture.”
—LEOPOLDO Y. YABES, Contemporary Novelists
“[José is] one of the best and most active writers of contemporary Philippine literature in English … [H]is stories are moving portraits of Philippine society.”
—JOSEPH A. GALDON, S.J., Philippine Studies
“In Filipino literature in recent years, the creative work of Francisco Sionil José occupies a special place.… José is a great artist.”
—IGOR PODBEREZSKY, Institute of Oriental Studies, Moscow
“The reader of this slim volume of well-crafted stories will learn more about the Philippines, its people, and its concerns than from any journalistic account or from a holiday trip there. José’s book takes us to the heart of the Filipino mind and soul, to the strengths and weaknesses of its men, women, and culture.”
—LYNNE BUNDESEN, Los Angeles Times
“Sionil José has the ability to write evocatively … his descriptions of the rural environment have an intense glow and a lyrical shine … truly an emancipated stylist, an interpreter of character and analyst of society.”
—ARTHUR LUNDKVIST, The Swedish Academy, Stockholm
“[José is] an outstanding saga writer. If ever a Nobel Prize in literature will be awarded to a Southeast Asian writer, it will be to F. Sionil José.”
—The Mainichi Shimbun (Tokyo)
“Considered by many to be Asia’s most likely candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature.”
—The Singapore Straits Times
“F. Sionil José could become the first Filipino to win the Nobel Prize for literature … he’s a fine writer and would be welcome recognition of cultural achievement in his troubled country. [He] is widely known and acclaimed in Asia.”
—JOHN GRIFFIN, The Honolulu Advertiser
“[José] captures the spirit of his country’s sullen and corrupt bureaucracy [and] tells the readers far more about Philippine society than many, far lengthier works of nonfiction.”
—STEVE VINES, South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)
“The plot [of Ermita] is unfolded by concise, vividly picturesque, sometimes humorous, often tender prose. The candor with which Sionil fleshes out his sensuous earthy characters is balanced by his breathtakingly surgical dissection of their minds and souls.”
—NINA ESTRADA, Lifestyle Asia
“José is one of Asia’s most eminent writers and novelists. His passionate, sometimes transcendent writings illuminate contemporary Filipino life in graceful and historically anchored narratives of power brokers and the brokered, of landowners and the indentured.”
—SCOTT RUTHERFORD, Islands Magazine
“He has achieved a unity in his writings such as that seen in William Faulkner in his stories relating to Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi or in the Monterey stories of John Steinbeck.”
—DOUGLAS LECROY, St. Louis University Research Journal
1999 Modern Library Paperback Original
Afterword copyright © 1999 by F. Sionil José
Tree copyright © 1978, 1981, 1988 by F. Sionil José
My Brother, My Executioner copyright © 1988 by F. Sionil José
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
Random House, Inc., New York.
Modern Library and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published, in English, as Tree and My Brother, My Executioner by Solidaridad Publishing House, in Manila, Philippines.
Don Vicente is a work of fiction. The characters and events are products of the author’s imagination. Where actual historical persons or incidents are mentioned, their context is entirely fictional.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
José, F. Sionil (Francisco Sionil).
[Tree]
Don Vicente : two novels / by F. Sionil José.
p. cm.
Contents: Tree—My brother, my executioner.
eISBN: 978-0-307-83031-9
1. Philippines—History—Fiction. I. José, F. Sionil (Francisco Sionil), 1924– My brother, my executioner. II. Title.
PR9550.9.J67D66 1999
823—dc21 99-10319
Random House website address: www.modernlibrary.com
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Tree Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
My Brother, My Executioner Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Afterword
Glossary
&nb
sp; Dedication
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
A WORD TO THE
READER
These novels contain expressions and words—some Spanish, some specific to the Philippines—that may be unfamiliar to the reader. A glossary has been included at the end of the book.
Tree
CHAPTER
1
This is a journey to the past—a hazardous trek through byways dim and forgotten—forgotten because that is how I choose to regard many things about this past. In moments of great lucidity, I see again people who—though they may no longer be around—are ever present still; I can almost hear their voices and reach out to touch them—my friends, cousins, uncles and aunts, and most of all, Father.
My doctor says it is good that I should remember, for in memory is my salvation. I should say, my curse. This, then, is a recollection as well, of sounds and smells, and if the telling is at times sketchy, it is because there are things I do not want to dwell upon—things that rile and disturb because they lash at me and crucify me in my weakness, in my knowledge of what was. So it was—as Father has said again and again—that the boy became a man.
I am a commuter, not between the city and the village, although I do this quite frequently; I am a commuter between what I am now and what I was and would like to be, and it is this commuting, at lightning speed, at the oddest hours, that has done havoc to me. My doctor flings at me clichés like “alienation,” “guilt feelings,” and all the urban jargon that has cluttered and at the same time compartmentalized our genteel, middle-class mores, but what ails me are not these. I can understand fully my longing to go back, to “return to the womb”—even the death wish that hounds me when I find it so difficult and enervating to rationalize a middle-aged life that has been built on a rubble of compromise and procrastination. It is this commuting, the tension and knowledge of its permanence, its rampage upon my consciousness, that must be borne, suffered, and vanquished, if I am to survive in this arid plateau called living.
At times it can be unbearable, and neither pills nor this writing can calm my mind; but then, I must go on—that is what the arteries and the gonads are for—so I hie back to this past wherefrom I can draw sustenance and the ability to see more clearly how it was and why it is.
I was born and I grew up in a small town—any town. I suppose that from the very beginning, I have always been thus—a stranger to Rosales, even to the people who knew me—relatives, friends, tenants, and all those fettered beings who had to serve Father as he, too, had to serve someone bigger than himself. A stranger because that is how I feel now; the years have really numbed a host of memories—dew-washed mornings, the tolling of church bells, the precision and color of my own language.
Sometimes, when I go north to Baguio to recuperate, I stop by Rosales; it cannot be missed, for Carmen—perhaps the town’s biggest barrio—sits at the crossroad before the long bridge that spans the Agno; turn right, through Tomana and its makeshift houses, along what is now an asphalted road, and drive on till a thin line of decrepit houses forms by the road. They are roofed with nipa and walled with buri leaves; then the houses multiply—wooden frames with rusting tin roofs, the marketplace, the main street and its stores. I sometimes stop here, walk the familiar streets—how narrow, how weed-choked they are. I pass the creek where I swam, and its banks are littered with garbage. The old cement schoolhouse still stands—how shabby it looks, surrounded by scraggly acacia. I go past broken-down bamboo fences, meet people who sometimes smile and greet me but move on. Many of them I do not recognize, but I know those faces and the stolid endurance imprinted in them.
My steps lead to the middle of the town, and there, by the side of the road, the balete tree stands—tall, leafy, majestic, and as huge as it has always been. Our house, at one end of the wide yard, is no longer there; it was dismantled long ago, shortly after Father’s death, and so was the old brick wall. But the balete tree will perhaps be there for always. There are very few trees of this kind in this part of the province. It has taken decades, perhaps a century, for it to reach this spread and height, taller than the church, than any building in the town—its trunk so huge and veined with vines that six men with their hands joined could not embrace it.
All my life, it has always been to me what Father said it was meant to be—a shade. It was this to countless farmers who came to our yard with their bull carts loaded with grain, or with their problems that only Father could solve—debts that had not been paid and debts that were to be incurred because somebody was dying, somebody was getting married, somebody was born. It was shade from the sun and also from the rain when they who had come to ask Father’s favor would get wet under its canopy rather than presume to enter the house.
No one could really say who planted the tree; it seemed ageless like the creek that courses through the town. Father’s grandfather had told him he had seen it already crowned with fireflies at night, and though Father did not believe him, he respected the feelings of people, they who believe that this giant tree was endowed with a talisman, that it was more than a tree—it was a guardian over the land and our lives, immemorial like our griefs.
In time, therefore, when the harvest was good, there would be offerings at its base, rice cakes in tin plates, embedded with hard-boiled eggs and hand-rolled cigars between the big roots that cascaded down the trunk and looped into the earth. There were offerings, too, when someone got sick, for the farmers did not consult the town doctor—they relied first on the herbolario and sacristan, who recited Latin phrases and plastered the forehead and other afflicted parts of the body with nameless leaves, and then they brought their gifts to the balete tree and, in solemn tones, invoked the spirits—“Come now and accept this humble token of our respect—and please make our dear and loved one well again …”
It had provided shade for politicians, for during election time meetings were held beneath it. In the light of kerosene lamps, the politicians would harangue whoever was there to listen, and they would shout their virtues and vilify their enemies. They would butcher a carabao or two, and with Father’s amen, they would mount wooden planks beneath the tree, spread banana leaves on them, then feed the electorate. Here, too, no less than Quezon had met with the provincial leaders at the behest of Don Vicente, the wealthiest landlord in our part of the country and the man for whom Father worked. And there was the photograph in the living room for all to see—the great man in his drill de hilo suit, Don Vicente—plump and smug beside him—and Father at Quezon’s right, looking frightened and stiff, and all around them the provincial great. Father had recounted it so often, how the train from Paniqui got in late and how a thousand waiting people had dispersed and Don Vicente would have been put to shame had not Father ridden in great haste out to Carmay and the other barrios, asking the people to return.
During the town fiesta—June 12 and 13—the feast day of San Antonio de Padua, it was shade again for the farmers who rested in the wide yard, unhitched their bull carts, and did their cooking there so that for two days they could watch the freak shows, the garish coronation night in the public market, and the comedia, in which brightly clothed farmers and their sons and daughters acted out and danced the ancient drama of the Christian and Moro wars.
Beyond the balete tree and the yard, down the incline of barren ground, is the river, marked on Tio Baldo’s maps as the Totonoguen Creek, but because its waters were always swift during the rainy season, I always called it a river. When the rains started in June, continuing all through the early days of the planting season, its waters would be deep and muddy brown. As the rains intensified, within a matter of hours after the first downpour, we could see it rise in a rage of whirlpools, and it would carry the flotsam of the Cordilleras where it had started—the gnarled and twisted roots and branches of trees. Men would line the banks and the wooden bridge, and with wire loops at the end of long poles they would ensnare these gifts of the mountain for firewood. There were times wh
en the river would rise so high it would flood portions of the town and even the bodega, which at this time would be quite empty of grain, for almost everything would have been sold by then to Chan Hai. Once it even swept away the wooden bridge, and for weeks the village of Cabugawan was isolated. The floods delighted us, for then we could float our wooden fishes in the ditches.
As the rains subsided and the fields turned green, the mud settled and the river acquired a clear, green hue. It would no longer be swift; it flowed with a rhythm, broken by small ripples in the shallows. It was at this time that we bathed in it and dove to its depths to discover what secrets it held. Now, too, the women took their washing to the banks; they would squat before wide tin basins and whack at clothes with wooden paddles. Where the banks were even and stony or sandy, they laid the clothes to bleach, for now the sun came out not only to help the washerwomen but to ripen the grain. It was also at this time of the year that, once more, Father could go down the riverbank and follow it down, down and beyond to the village of Cabugawan, to a place everyone in town knew; he usually went down at dusk, perhaps because at this time few people would see him, and he did not have to smile at those he met or wave his hand in greeting, for they all knew that at the end of the trail was his secret place.
It was also at this time that Old David, who took care of the horses and the calesa, would go to the river with his fine mesh net and kerosene lamp, and before midnight he would be back with a basket of shrimp and silverfish.
By November, the river ceased to move. The smaller streams up in the Cordilleras would have dried, too, and now its sandy bed would be burned, and in between, where there were slivers of earth, thorny weeds and the hardy cogon would thrust out. The depths where we swam would now be shallow pools turned murky with moss that laced the river bottom. It is here where the mudfish and a few silverfish have sought final refuge from Old David’s net. Beyond the river that was now dead, the fields would be golden brown and ready for the scythe, and the banks and the narrow delta that could be planted on would be now laced with eggplant, tomato, and watermelon plots that are also ready for harvesting.