Don Vicente

by F. Sionil Jose

  The day before the feast of San Antonio de Padua, Hilda came as usual to the artesian well. I was in the yard, waiting for Old David to hitch the calesa; beside me was my air rifle and my canvas bag. Father had expected a few guests to arrive in the afternoon for the fiesta; as a matter of fact, some of the tenants had already appropriated places under the balete tree and others were camped inside the bodega. We needed some chicken and fresh vegetables, perhaps fruits from the farm. We fell to talking again about Carmay, and when the calesa was ready, Hilda cast her pail aside and said firmly, “Take me with you.”

  “But your folks might look for you,” I tried to dissuade her.

  “They won’t,” she replied. “They do that only if they don’t see me on the high wire. I haven’t been to any farm, really. You know, I have ridden two elephants in the parade, but I have not ridden any carabao yet.”

  All argument was useless. She clambered up the calesa after me, and we drove out. From the asphalted main street we veered to the left, to the graveled provincial road and Carmay three kilometers away. The calesa jerked over the ruts, but Hilda did not mind. Beyond the town, Father’s fields lay green and vast, extending to the banks of the Agno. Some of these he had bought from Don Vicente, whose lands were in the opposite end of the town; some were cleared by his grandfather, who had come with the first settlers from the Ilocos; some he had taken bit by bit from farmers who owed him money and could not pay. The sun punctuated every tree, the buri palms, the mounds that dotted the fields and on whose crests tall grass waved with each breath of wind.

  We reached Carmay, a neat huddle of farmhouses beside a creek. She crinkled her nose and said it was not much—just like all the other villages in this part of the country. We dipped down the provincial road into a narrow path and got off before the biggest house in the village, the only one roofed with tin. We found Grandfather knitting fishnets by the stairs. In his old age, he should not have been living alone, but he preferred the Carmay, where he was born and where he grew, where he worked and saved enough not only to buy out his other neighbors’ farms but also to send all his children to college, so that they would not be farmers like him.

  I kissed his gnarled and wrinkled hand, then embraced him, smelling once again his tobacco. Old David told him what we had come for, and while our servant tended to his chores, Hilda and I went to the irrigation ditches, which had begun to fill. We romped in the newly stirring fields and chased grasshoppers. For lunch, Old David had brought hard-boiled eggs and broiled catfish; he then broiled a slice of dried carabao meat, tough as rubber, all of which we ate with our hands in Grandfather’s cluttered kitchen. After this, we went back to the cornfields and gathered a few ears, which we roasted over coals that Grandfather had kept alive for us in the shade of one of his mango trees. Under the tree, with the scent of June and the living world around us, we were shielded from the sun, which was shining on the rich brown earth, freshly plowed and shining still where the plowshares had ripped into it. I went to the furrow and picked up a clod. It was warm and moist.

  Hilda was lying on the sled. I sat beside her and told her to raise the hem of her dress up to the navel. She turned to me, half-rising, and said angrily, “I will not do such a thing.”

  I told her then, “I want you to belong to Carmay, to be free from the sickness of other earths. I will rub this on your stomach”—I held the clod before her eyes—“and just as Grandfather said, you will never get sick, not while you are here.”

  She seemed apprehensive, but she smiled. Though she did not seem fully convinced about the efficacy of my magic, she finally raised her dress. “You are like an old man,” she said, shaking her head. “You believe in spirits.”

  I did not speak. Her legs were white and clean, and her skin was smooth. I crushed the clod and let particles trickle on her skin. The grains fell on her navel and rolled down her sides. With my palm, I spread the clod on her belly, slowly, softly, and when this was done, she snapped her dress down and pinched my hand. “Foolish!” she said, laughing.

  It was late afternoon when we headed for home. Shortly before dusk, rain fell in torrents and flooded the newly dug canals along the streets. When she saw the clouds darken, Hilda had hoped it would not rain so hard so that the tent entrance would not be muddy. She had asked me to go see her again, but I was tired, and besides, the program would not be changed till the morrow—on the first night of the fiesta—when there would be some variations.

  I went to bed after a supper that we shared with Father’s talkative guests from Manila. The rain stopped, but soon there was a slight insistent patter on the roof again. Occasionally a streak of lightning knifed across the sky. I closed the sash shutters and went to sleep. The patter was still on the roof when I woke up and discerned weighted voices in the hall. They persisted, anxious and harried, not the soft sounds of a dream. I rose and walked to the door. The hall was ablaze, and even the big chandelier, which was used only on special occasions, was lighted. Beyond the balcony, however, the plaza was dark and quiet and the lights of the many vendors and dice tables were out.

  I recognized at once the members of the troupe. Hilda’s father paced the floor, still wearing his baggy pants and multicolored coat, but the paint was erased from his face. Hilda’s mother was a forlorn figure near the sofa where most of them were gathered.

  Catching a glimpse of Father, I went to him and asked what it was all about. He told me to go back to sleep, but I could see that he was greatly disturbed. “Who is it, Father?” I asked. He said it simply: “Hilda, the girl from the circus, the tightwire artist. She slipped.”

  “Isn’t the doctor coming?” one of the women asked. She did not get any reply. The others slouched on the sofas, their faces tense with waiting, and soon they started mumbling. Hilda’s father told them to be quiet. He approached Father and said softly, “I hope you don’t mind the inconvenience we are causing you, but the plaza, with all those people, and the rain …”

  Father dismissed him with a nod. Then I saw her. I went to the sofa where the older women were gathered about. Hilda lay there, pale and motionless, and in the corners of her mouth were little streams of red that had dried. As she opened her eyes, her mother bent over her, whispering, “My poor, poor darling …”

  She was not listening; she closed her eyes again, and as she stirred, she moaned. “Don’t crowd around her,” Father said when they started hurrying to the sofa again. With the exception of her mother, they went back to their seats.

  “Our star is no more,” Hilda’s mother wept bitterly, casting a beseeching look at Father, who turned away. “She always did it right—she could do it even with a blindfold on.”

  Hilda opened her eyes again, and briefly our eyes locked. She opened her mouth as if to speak, and I bent low only to hear her say, “I hate you,” almost in a whisper. But her mother heard, and she cried, “You naughty girl!”

  I wheeled and ran to my room. Father followed me there. I did not know what to do, what to say. “She came to Carmay with me this morning,” I said. “I did not want to bring her along, but she insisted—”

  “I know,” Father said, sitting on my bed. “David told me.”

  “I did not do anything,” I said.

  Father nodded, then bade me go to sleep. Outside, the rain and the wind grew stronger. The leaves of the balete tree rustled, and there were sounds of people scurrying below the house seeking shelter in the wide sweep of the media agua. They would be drenched if they went under the balete tree; its cover would not be enough. Above the monotonous patter on the roof, the merry music of a brass band somewhere beyond the plaza drifted into the house, and the dusky magic of June clung like a wanton spell to my troubled mind.

  CHAPTER

  4

  In another two days the fiesta was over, but the circus did not wait for the last rocket to be fired. The morning after the accident, it packed up, leaving the plaza looking sullen and desolate. The bamboo arches in the street corners and the paper buntings tha
t were soaked and frayed were not dismantled till after a week, but when the circus left I was miserable. Not even the strong afternoon rains, which brought my friends out—racing in the streets and shrieking and splashing in the solid jets of water from the roofs—could lure me away from the sad, sad thought that bedeviled my mind.

  My depression would have lasted much longer, but by the end of the month, another celebration came. After more than ten years in America, Tio Benito finally returned home.

  Among our many relatives, only he could claim the distinction of having been to America. He went there in the 1920s at the age of eighteen when many Ilokanos were lured by the promise of high wages on the sugar plantations in Hawaii and in the orange orchards of California. There was also the dubious expectation of being able to go to bed with an Americana. It was the question often asked of Tio Benito when he settled down to talk with old friends and neighbors.

  Grandfather had objected to his leaving, for it meant Tio Benito’s denying himself a college education, which his brothers and sisters had. But Tio Benito was bent on his adventure; he pilfered cavans of grain from the bodega over which he kept watch, sold them to the Chinese comprador, then scampered off to Manila and across the Pacific.

  Grandfather was very angry, not so much at the minor thievery as at the fact that Tio Benito had gone without bidding him good-bye. But the old man was quick to forgive, particularly after Tio Benito’s letters started coming and with them an occasional dollar bill or a shipment of clothes that, alas, may have been all right for Alaska and Northern California but certainly not for Carmay.

  But in his letters Tio Benito asked for money more often than he sent it. He got, of course, what he wanted, plus pleadings from all in the family that he hurry back to the land of his birth because Grandfather was becoming old, and there was need for him to look after his inheritance, for his brothers and sisters were too involved with their own.

  Everything about Tio Benito was wonderful and done with style. But Tia Antonia, on the occasions that she visited us, always derided him for having gone wrong; she said he had become a “pagan.” She had an ally in Sepa, our cook, who believed in religion as convert Protestants devoutly do. Almost all of my relatives were a religious lot, though they were very democratic about their beliefs; they went to any church of their liking. It was almost a rule that hardly anyone stayed home Sunday mornings—all must go to church. I found this not too disturbing, for I was serving then as sacristan to Padre Andong, the Catholic priest—a chore I appreciated, as I always managed to swipe a few coins when I passed the collection plate on Sundays.

  Tio Benito’s explanation for his “paganism” was pragmatic. “Look,” he would say. “What is the need for one to go to church or pray to God? He is everywhere. God knows that when something miserable has happened to you, you need help. Why go to church and make the preacher or the priest grow rich? God knows you are thankful for the things He has done for you. Besides, He isn’t like a young girl whom you must flatter every day with words so that His love for you won’t diminish. He isn’t like that because He is God. He is good. He knows that you like Him, and there is no need to be repetitive—mumbling prayers over and over, prayers said yesterday or a thousand years previous. He gets tired of that.”

  Still Tia Antonia insisted that he did not even know how to make the sign of the cross. It was hard to believe that a man as old as he did not know that.

  Father, however, recalled that Tio Benito was quite religious before he left for the United States; consequently, he explained his brother’s sanctimonious behavior as a result of American influence.

  To this, Tio Benito retorted, “Don’t you dare say that the Americans have no religion, that they don’t know how to worship. Yes, they do worship—and it is the buck, the dollar, they revere. It is the end and the beginning—an American without money has nothing, not even God. And that is why America is strong—because it worships money. And look at all of you, worshipping something that cannot help you. Is God responsible for the droughts, the typhoons that destroy the crops?”

  Tia Antonia looked at his recalcitrance in a slightly different manner: “America is rich and, therefore, licentious and without God. Look at the absence of modesty of its women.” And then she would go into a tirade against the magazines showing American girls in the briefest of bathing suits.

  “And that is precisely what I like,” Tio Benito admitted to me one day when he was regaling me again with his stories about the United States.

  “But surely, Tio,” I said, “there must be something in America that you did not like.” He was silent for a while, then, in quiet tones, he told me of days of hunger, how difficult it was to get a job because he was brown, how he was treated no different from the Chinese, and how he pitied the Negroes most. “They are not regarded as people,” he told me.

  “But America is the land of equality, of the free—”

  “Bullshit,” Tio Benito said, raising his voice.

  I quoted at length from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which I had already memorized.

  “It is the land of opportunity—that is right,” Tio Benito said. “If you are white, if you are Protestant, and you are Anglo-Saxon.”

  “Meaning you cannot play the saxophone?”

  He laughed and tousled my hair. “You are too young to be discussing religion with me,” he said. Then off again he went, this time to Carmay to be with Grandfather. But after being there for a month, the farm must have bored him, for he moved into the house again, this time sharing Cousin Marcelo’s room on the ground floor. He did not seem to have a care in the world. He had obviously saved some money to fool around with, and he continued his meanderings, holding court in the marketplace and at the town barbershop, and ready with the bottle even for the slightest acquaintance. Spending as he did, his savings soon petered out but not the heckling, particularly from Tia Antonia and from Sepa. His impending bankruptcy and the unrelenting nagging about his profligate ways must have done something, for one Sunday morning he decided to give God a chance.

  To please Sepa, he went with her to the Protestant chapel. He played no favorite, for on the following Sundays he tried them all—the Catholic church, the Seventh-Day Adventists, even the Aglipayans. Not one of the denominations, however, appealed to him. After he had tried them all, he did not hide his loathing for “the stuffy crowdedness in the churches—even God would have been uncomfortable there. With all those many converts, they have no need for me. The priests talk in a language I cannot understand,” he said. He complained, too, of people with bad voices singing.

  “What did you do in California on Sundays, Tio?” I asked.

  “I had a good time,” he said, a grin breaking across his rotund, oily face.

  “Did you play games? Cockfights?”

  His eyes twinkled. He looked at me expansively. “Cockfights—yes, although the Americans never liked them; they always tried to haul us to jail for it. And games … yes.” He turned to Father and to Sepa, who was hovering by, ready with another helping of his favorite dinardaraan. “I will tell you later … later …”

  That afternoon, I cornered him in the bodega, where he was making an inventory of the sacks of grain gnawed by rats. “We followed the crops in California,” he explained. “We would be picking beans, tomatoes, lettuce. Then strawberries and grapes. And apples, yes, apples. I would smell of apples even on Sundays.”

  I could picture him munching an apple, although he said apples made him sick. On Sundays, he went on, he had plenty of money. He brushed his teeth, wore his flashiest suit and his black Stetson, then boarded the silver bus that was fast and smooth, and soon he was in town. He went around a corner, and when he came out, he was holding the waist of a tall blonde, who was, all the while, laughing and immensely enjoying herself.

  I did not like her laughter. I did not like her looks, even if she was as white as a newly washed radish. She destroyed the picture of baskets and baskets of golden apples that Tio Benito had pi
cked.

  A year after Tio Benito had returned, I noticed that the talk about his ways and the questions that were posed to him diminished, then almost disappeared. Everyone began to accept him for what he was—even his profanities, his showing off, and his attachment to his black Stetson when a lighter, airier hat would have sufficed. On Tio Benito’s part, he seemed to have become more morose each day, for he had finally spent all his money and had started to sell some of his things; he even tried to sell his woolens, which no one would buy. Now he often asked for money from Father, but knowing his ways, Father would only give him pin money; after all, Tio Benito was assured a roof over his head and meals every time he was hungry. More than that, he had his share of the harvest, which, alas, was months away. He wandered less and less to the marketplace and to the barbershop on the main street and kept more to the house, talking with Sepa, Tio Baldo, and Old David, for they listened dutifully to his jokes and his stateside stories. Sometimes he also ventured to Carmay to be with Grandfather on weekends.

  Then one day he announced pompously at the breakfast table that he would go to the neighboring town to look after a business deal involving the buying and selling of the mongo harvest, and would Father be gracious enough to advance him a small loan of fifty pesos, which he would repay within the month? Father was a bit puzzled but was pleased nonetheless; at last—American commercialism had made its mark in a time of need.

  Tio Benito was away for a week, but on the next Sunday he returned at about lunchtime. He looked pleased. His shirt was wet with perspiration, for the sun was bright and the streets were baking in the heat. He did not seem to mind, although I knew him to curse even at the slightest rise in temperature. Now his eyes danced with a light I had never seen before, except when he described his Sundays in America.