Don Vicente

by F. Sionil Jose

  The steady glow of the Aladdin lamp above him lighted up Father’s face. It was very red. “You accuse Don Vicente of being a thief? You might as well shout to the world that I’m a robber, too, because I’m his overseer.”

  “You are his employee,” Tio Baldo said.

  “And that I’m only doing my job?” Father screamed. He flung his spoon to the wall, and Sepa picked it up quietly.

  Tio Baldo nodded.

  “What are you doing, Baldo?” Father asked, his face distorted with rage. “What has gone into your head?”

  “You knew my father,” Tio Baldo said simply. “You said he was not impoverished until Don Vicente took his land. I’m locating the old Spanish markers. The old men are very helpful, Manong. Please don’t be angry with them.”

  As if by an unknown alchemy, Father’s anger slowly diminished, and when he spoke again after a long silence, his voice was calm. “Well, then, so that is how it will be. I’ll tell Don Vicente about this, of course. You will have lots to answer for, Baldo. I only hope you know what you are doing.”

  Tio Baldo nodded.

  Father looked at him with resignation. “I don’t know what to do with you, Baldo,” he said finally. “You have so much to learn. I’m sorry for you.”

  That night I could not sleep for a long time. Father stayed up late in his room, writing, pacing. Occasionally, he would curse aloud and slap his writing desk. When morning came, he roused me from sleep and handed me a fat envelope to mail. It was addressed to Don Vicente.

  Four days later, a woman came.

  It was early November then. The first harvest was being brought in by the tenants, and their bull carts were scattered in the wide, balete-shaded yard.

  She arrived in Don Vicente’s black Packard, and from the balcony, I saw her step out with the lightness of a cat. She must have been Father’s old acquaintance, for she shouted his name in greeting when she saw him padding down the stairs to greet her.

  They embraced effusively. “Ah, Nimia!” Father sighed. “I didn’t expect you. This is a surprise.”

  She grinned and tried to press away the wrinkles on her elegant blue dress. She went up to the house, sat daintily on Father’s rocking chair in the sala, and shucking off her high heels, curled her toes. Her toenails were as brightly painted as her lips. She must have been near forty and used to having her way, to getting what she wanted, and the very way she talked with Father, the coyness of her gestures, the instances when she touched his arm or smiled at him, suggested not just how well she knew how to use her femininity but how well prepared she was to go all the way if that, too, was the ultimate necessity. That she was brought to Rosales in Don Vicente’s own car from Manila indicated just as well the extent to which the rich man would go to protect his interests; he knew the people in the country who mattered, men who made the laws, who rendered justice, but, more than all of these, he knew, too, the primordial weakness of all men, and I suppose that included Father.

  Nimia, as Father called her, fascinated me—how she swung her hips when she walked, how she crossed her legs when she sat down, revealing just a bit of thigh, how everything in the world seemed pleasant and beyond cavil, for there was this smile plastered on her face and it never seemed to leave her.

  She came to me when she finally saw me, her perfume swirling around her, and kissed me on the cheek—a wet, motherly kiss—then looked at me with those black witch eyes kindling with delight. “How you have grown!” Then to Father, “He was just a baby when I saw him,” and I thought she would talk more with me, but she wheeled around and relegated me to limbo, while she asked Father about the town, about the problems of Don Vicente and his tenants, and finally about this Baldo.

  Father lingered around her with his light talk, ignoring her question. He asked what she would have for refreshments—a glass of sarsaparilla or halo-halo? “Nothing,” she said, then in all earnestness she asked, “Tell me, what does Baldo look like?”

  “You have handled worse people.” Father patted her arm. “He is not handsome, of course. A little bit on the lean side, with an average peasant’s face, but I’m sure you’ll have a hard time with him.”

  “Vicente always says that in the beginning,” she said, waving Father away with a deft motion of her hand.

  “I know Baldo better than you,” Father said.

  “After I’m through, I’ll know him better. When do I start?” she asked.

  “Right now, if you want,” Father said.

  But she did not start at once. Like a bat, she waited for the dark. After supper, she peered out the window; light burned in the sala of the small house, and before a big table there, Tio Baldo was poring over maps.

  She smiled confidently at Father, then she went down to the house.

  I did not notice her return, but after breakfast the following morning, she started packing her things. Her face was sour when she bade Father good-bye at the gate.

  “Don Vicente must try something new,” Father said.

  “I’ll tell him you can do just that, but you aren’t lifting a finger,” she said angrily.

  Father waved as she boarded the Packard that would take her back to Manila. “I have limitations, my dear,” he said lightly.

  She did not wave back.

  After the woman left, things moved quickly. November tapered off into December, and the harvest came in a steady stream. Shortly after lunch one afternoon, the black Packard with a uniformed chauffeur drove into the yard, its horn blaring.

  Father dressed hurriedly. Our visitor was Don Vicente himself. It was the first time I had seen him, although almost every day his name was mentioned in the house. Father tried to talk him into getting up into the house, but he firmly refused. He sat inside his car, gesticulating, his fat white face tightly drawn. Occasionally, he would shake a stubby finger at Father, and though I could not understand much of their conversation, which was in Spanish, I knew that the rich man was very angry.

  Don Vicente concluded his tirade by thrusting a cardboard box in Father’s hand, and then, at a wave of his hand, his chauffeur started the car. Father stood stiffly and said good-bye, and the car sped away.

  After we had supped, Father bade me follow him to his room. He handed me the box, then we went to Tio Baldo’s house.

  I had not been in it for some time, and now I noticed how really small it was. The sala was bare except for the big table and a sorry-looking bookcase made of packing crates. The only costly fixture in the house was the Coleman lamp hanging from a rafter, and below it Tio Baldo was drafting. When he saw us, he stopped and came forward to meet us.

  “You know why I’m here?” Father asked.

  “Does it matter, Manong?” Tio Baldo said. “It is always good to have you visit.”

  Father took the cardboard box from me, and ripping its cover away, he spilled its contents on the large blue map on which Tio Baldo was working.

  “It’s all yours. There’s five thousand pesos there. Count it. Not a centavo less.”

  “If you say it’s a million, Manong,” Tio Baldo said, “it’s a million.”

  “Don Vicente brought it this afternoon.”

  “I heard he was here,” Tio Baldo said. “But I didn’t expect this.”

  “All the money you got from the old men—you can return it now, and there would still be enough left to tide you through five lifetimes. Is the price all right?”

  “Don Vicente hasn’t enough to buy us out,” Tio Baldo said. “We have all the proofs we need now. We will charge him for damages, too, when we get the land back.”

  “You are not taking this money, then?” Father asked, moving toward him.

  Tio Baldo did not speak.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Father asked sternly. “Don’t you know an opportunity when you see it? You’ll never earn this in a thousand years. Think of it!”

  Baldo gathered the bills and returned them carefully to the box. “If you were in my place,” he asked, facing Father, “would you take it?
”

  Father blanched and his lips quivered.

  “Tell me,” Tio Baldo pressed. “Would you take it?”

  Father picked up the box and, muttering, he stomped to the door.

  The next morning, Father left for the city. When he returned the following day, the first thing he did was tell me to call Tio Baldo to the house.

  He came obediently. I followed him to Father’s room and stood guard at the door to see to it that no one ventured near.

  “Well, Baldo,” Father said, a hint of sadness in his voice, “I’ve done everything I could. That money … if you want it, it’s still available.”

  “I have all the maps and papers ready,” Tio Baldo told Father quietly instead. “I’ll leave for the city tomorrow. The old people who have opened their bamboo banks—all of them—they are expecting so much. I think we have enough to present to the officials. They’ll give us justice, I’m sure.”

  Father spoke calmly. “So you think you can win. You are at the end of your road, Baldo.”

  “I’m not afraid,” he said with conviction. “There are people on our side.”

  Father controlled himself; the veins in his temples were bloated, and his fists were balled. “Do you think you’ll matter?”

  “You are wrong to think otherwise,” Tio Baldo said.

  “You think I am?” Father brought his fist down on the small table beside him and sent paper clips and pencils flying around the room.

  Tio Baldo simply looked at him.

  “You think I’m afraid, too?”

  Tio Baldo turned away from Father and walked to the window. The yard below was littered with bull carts. A cool wind sprang and wafted up to the house the heady scent of harvest.

  “Am I afraid?” Father held him by the shoulder.

  “I never said that,” Tio Baldo said, without making the slightest move to shake off Father’s hold. “I think you are only acting your age.”

  “Now I’m old!” Father said. “Now I’m a fool. But let me tell you this. Need I remind you it’s not only me you are destroying but yourself, and, perhaps, all those dear to you?”

  Tio Baldo, still gripped by Father’s hands, smiled wanly. “I owe you for many things,” he said. “An education, but above all, a sense of right. Please don’t take the last away.”

  Father’s hands dropped from Tio Baldo’s shoulders.

  “Baldo,” he said softly after a bit of silence, “I’m not taking anything back. Education and righteousness, they are good.” He slapped his thigh in languid resignation. “But we have to live. All of us. All right, I have a few hectares to my name, a rice mill, some houses. But still, I’m nothing. And you know that. Don Vicente—he has everything. He can ruin not only you or me but all of us—not because he wants to, but he may be forced to.”

  “We have nothing to lose,” Tio Baldo said. Tears began to well in his eyes.

  Father took him to the door. “There’s nothing more I can say,” he said.

  Tio Baldo’s gait quickened as he crossed the hall. He hurried down the stairs and stepped into the afternoon.

  We did not hear from him the whole month that he was in the city. Christmas passed, and we would not have known that he was finally home had not Old David seen him hurry from the railroad station to his house without speaking to anyone.

  The news must have reached Carmay, for at dusk Don Vicente’s tenants started coming, some riding their work animals to town straight from the fields and bearing still the strong odor of earth and sun. The young ones came, too, but there were more old men, farmers who had known nothing but the cycle of plowing and planting. They gathered in the yard, talked quietly among themselves, and wondered perhaps why Tio Baldo did not come out at once to speak to them.

  At about eight, he finally came down from the hut and walked among his people. From underneath his house, he rolled out a wooden mortar into their midst and perched himself on top of it. His mother took a kerosene lamp from their kitchen and strung it up on a low branch of the balete tree.

  It took him some time before he finally spoke, louder now than the mere whispers with which he half acknowledged those who welcomed him. No sound rippled from the crowd; they hung on to each word, and each was like a huge, dull knife plunged into their breasts.

  Then, when he paused, someone spoke, loud enough for all to hear: “And our money, have you cheated us?”

  Tio Baldo exclaimed, “All my life, I’ve lived in virtue, but now, with you condemning me, I’ll crawl in the dust to beg your forgiveness.” Lifting his palms to a darkened sky, his voice shaking with his grief, he turned around into the silent crowd that flowed beyond the yard of the little house to the street.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me, you who are older than I, upon whose brows wisdom sits. I’ve tried, but we cannot fight money with money, nor force with force because we haven’t enough of these. Where have I failed? Have I not been true to all of you? Tell me, my fathers who are old and wise, tell me what to do. I have no money to pay you back. Even the house where I live is not mine. But my blood—take it. Tell me, my elders, if it’s enough.”

  But they did not tell him; they stood like many stolid posts, unable to speak.

  “What has happened to the world?” Tio Baldo cried. “Since when could justice be bought, and men have become strangers to honor? And we who have been marked for this kind of life, shall we be slaves forever? I am your son and will always be; why do you fling me now to the dogs? Tell me, oh my elders, who are wise!”

  Still they did not speak.

  Then, from their ranks a cry broke out—very soft and plaintive—and in the light of the storm lamp, as I stood there in their midst, I could see tears in many eyes. Numbly I looked at the ancient, careworn faces. Someone started to sob aloud, and he was quickly joined by three or four, and I could feel each sob being torn out of chests, for they were only old men, enfeebled and ready for the grave, crying now that their last dream had gone to waste. And as I looked at them, at Tio Baldo alone atop the mortar, as I listened to their grief, I felt a vise tighten in my throat; I knew I did not belong here, that I had to join Father in our comfortable house.

  It was to it that I returned. And there, from the balcony, I watched the farmers slowly scatter and head back for their homes. In a while the night was quiet again and the light in the small house was snuffed out. The crickets in the balete tree started whirring, and from the asphalted provincial road came the muffled clatter of bull-cart wheels and carabao hooves carrying the harvest to the storehouse of Chan Hai.

  “How did Baldo take it?” Father asked as I passed him on the azotea on my way to my room.

  “Bravely, Father,” I said.

  I knew how right I was, even when, the following morning, we woke up to shrill cries from outside, in the wide yard, where people had gathered to see Tio Baldo hanging by the neck from one of the lofty branches of the balete tree.

  CHAPTER

  11

  A man’s suicide is the ultimate violence he can fling against the granite circumstance he could not vanquish. It is a lonely and desperate act of supreme courage, not weakness. But it is also an admission of total failure; the destruction of the self is the end of one person’s struggle, an end wherefrom there will be no rebirth or resurrection—nothing but the blackness, the impenetrable muck that hides everything, sometimes even the reason for death itself.

  Tio Baldo never left a note, and I can only surmise the depths of that despair that had claimed him. It was not, I think, that Don Vicente had defeated him; that would not have dented his courage so much, for someone like Don Vicente—all-powerful and all-devouring—could have done that and that would be explainable. It was, I think, Tio Baldo’s complete destruction at the hands of his own people that not only humiliated him; their mistrust—though not so widely voiced—simply destroyed his last shred of dignity.

  But when a person commits suicide, he does not do violence only to himself; he inflicts his death upon those whom he least con
sidered would be so afflicted. I have thought of Tio Baldo a lot, admired him, the simplicity of his final response; he has taunted me and haunted me in a way no wraith ever will, for I saw in him not just a way out of my own dilemmas but the capacity of man to have in his hands—and in no other—his own destiny. But in thinking this way, I also realized how finite everything is, how vulnerable a human being is as I now know—victim that I am, not just of memory but of that accursed attachment that I have felt for all those who have been good to me.

  As for Father, he, too, was not inured to the turmoil of conscience and self-blame. In the days that followed, he became more morose and withdrawn. At the dinner table, he would stare blankly, his face drawn and haggard. He seldom spoke, and when he did, even when he was not really angry at anyone, his words had a cutting edge.

  There were nights, too, when sleep eluded him, and once I heard him curse: “Ungrateful wretches! I gave you everything and you give me hell!” He moved about in his room, his slippers scraping the floor, and I slept through, then woke again to listen to him still awake and moving about.

  He did not have breakfast with me that morning, and when I saw him again late in the day after school, his eyes were deep-set and glazed, and for the first time I realized that he was drunk; his breath stank.

  He had called me to the azotea, where he reclined on his armchair, the ash from his cigar scattered on the front of his white coat.

  “Son,” he said, “when you grow up, don’t think of other people. Think only of yourself. Others don’t matter, because they don’t think of you anyway.”

  It was comments like these that, more than anything, showed how Tio Baldo’s death had now warped Father’s thinking. There may have been occasions when his spirits were buoyed up, but they were far between. I thought, for instance, that the coming of Miss Santillan to our house would brighten our lives, and it surely did, but only for a while.