He should not have suffered defeat as often as he did. It was not because he squandered on campaigns, filling the insatiable stomachs of voters, for his wife’s and his own resources were quite formidable. There was nothing questionable, either, in the way the ballots were counted, for the time when birds and bees could vote was yet to come. It was just that he had a horde of implacable enemies.
In his town the Chinese up to this day carry considerable influence. Tio Doro did not have a single Chinese friend then, and he derided Father for being on affable terms with Chan Hai. He attacked Mon Luk, the rice merchant in his town, whenever he could and at his political meetings accused him of controlling the retail trade. Tio Doro never failed to point out how many people owed money to the Chinese middlemen.
Tio Doro would not have won in the 1934 elections if the Nacionalistas had not split and backed two other candidates for the presidency. As town executive at last, he effected no radical changes during his term. Many had thought he would forcibly padlock all the Chinese stores or do something equally drastic, but he did not. On the routinary side of his term, he sliced a narrow graveled road behind the cockpit and named it after himself, as was the practice of almost all town presidents. He built a new wing for the elementary school building, planted rows of ornamental bougainvillea in the town plaza, erected a water tank, and dug drainage ditches on the sides of the streets.
Anyone would have asserted that Tio Doro truly loved himself, but no one could deny him his charity when in 1934 he gave half of his rice harvest to the poor, as the great storm of that year ravaged the crops. At the close of his term, the Commonwealth was inaugurated. He expressed his usual skepticism about the new arrangement, but he did not run for reelection. Not that he was tired of politics. I used to see him limp often. Now his legs were paralyzed, and that ultimately meant he could not campaign anymore. This did not mean, however, that he left politics completely. His heavy hand was still felt as he welded the Democratas in his district as the last phalanx of the opposition. Though none of his weakling protégés got elevated past the municipal council, he scrupulously supported them to such an extent that he became a local power broker.
Being a true Democrata, Tio Doro would not support President Manuel Quezon, but when Quezon made his now oft-quoted “Better a government run like hell by the Filipinos than a government run like heaven by the Americans,” Tio Doro tersely commented: “Tama!”
After high school, Cousin Emma continued her piano studies at the state university conservatory. Tio Doro might have at times been smothered with loneliness in his big house, and the wheelchair to which he was tied might have depressed him no end. Emma was not around to play his nostalgic kundimans, the nonpopularity of which he lamented. “These songs,” he said, “express the soul of our people.”
I seldom went to see him, but on those occasions that I did, he spoke to me of the conflict between Japan and China as if I were now grown-up. But clearly the flare-ups loomed nearer, darker. Mussolini had attached Ethiopia to his empire. In Spain the civil war raged. Then Germany invaded the Balkans. Developments came quickly: Japan joined the Axis, and he predicted that, with Japan now on one side and America on the other, Filipinos would soon be involved more precariously than ever in the whirlpool of the White Man’s destiny.
Hitler must have slightly piqued Tio Doro’s interest, for he bought a copy of Mein Kampf. He never trusted foreigners, and now he justified the racism of the totalitarians as long as national progress was their goal. When the Atlantic Charter was promulgated, Tio Doro was inclined to be sarcastic about it. It is a very interesting scrap of paper, he averred, but the Americans and the British have common imperialistic designs, as history had proved in Cuba and India. Do you think they will come to the succor of the colonials without considering their private interests first?
War engulfed the Philippines shortly afterward. The Japanese landed on the beaches of my province, and Tio Doro’s town, like ours, was one of the first to be occupied. Father saw no reason for us to leave the province. We were not molested, and we had enough to eat. But the transportation was slow and difficult, and I rarely visited Tio Doro and Emma, although Father did see him frequently.
Cousin Emma wrote to me occasionally. In her letters she could not say much because the mails were censored. For Tio Doro, however, his writing days were over; the dread paralysis had crept to his hands.
Then Emma’s letters ceased. The country was liberated, and we weathered a few scary nights. When the fighting was over, Emma wrote in one long letter everything of importance that had happened. She told of how her father had been humiliated by the Japanese. His frailty had proved to be no shield. He had been asked to serve as town mayor, a figurehead, but he had flatly refused. Yet, before the war, he had appreciated the Japanese love of country and emperor that amounted to fanaticism, and he believed in the validity of the Japanese catchword: Asia for the Asiatics, the Philippines for the Filipinos. Then, inconsistently, he secretly gave most of his harvest to the guerrillas rather than sell it to the Japanese rice agency, the BIBA. Cousin Emma recounted some gory episodes, among which was how the only son of Mon Luk in their town was executed for underground activities, and how the rice mill of the Chinese had been razed to the ground, transforming the Chinese merchant into a pauper. To all these incidents Tio Doro had been an eyewitness. At one time he was a prisoner, too.
But for all that happened, Tio Doro’s absorption in politics had not waned. Although the war had added to his worries, he still managed to dabble in politics. His health was deteriorating, and his resistance was petering away. He was sick most of the time from complications of his paralysis so that the doctor’s visits became more frequent. He was never really physically strong; even when his legs had not yet succumbed, his frame was meager and he was susceptible to colds, so that when he made his nighttime speeches he was always wrapped up. Emma asked if I would like to see the old invalid before he passed away.
I arrived on an Army truck transformed into a bus. The Balungao municipal building was a gaunt remnant of a once imposing edifice, and beyond it, Tio Doro’s blue house still stood above the rubble of the other residences, which had not been as fortunate. At my right loomed the chimney of Mon Luk’s rice mill, a monolith pointing to a sodden sky as a reminder of a once-flourishing business, over which Tio Doro would have pleasantly chuckled years ago if by some occult and terrible power it suddenly collapsed.
I passed through the stirring May streets, felt the cool whiff of the rainy season through the thick afternoon heat, recalled how every house once stood, how edges of gumamela had not yet sprung up in the yard of the demolished schoolhouse, which was now alive with American GI’s. The acacia trees that lined the main road were bigger—they had been but puny saplings once. The asphalted road, which they lined, was rutted and scarred by the tracks of tanks and bulldozers. A couple of makeshift bars were filled with soldiers in olive uniforms, laughing boisterously and singing “You’ll Never Know.”
As I neared the blue house—its paint peeling off, its fence shabby and crooked—jazz welled up from within. I pushed the heavy iron gate that squeaked open with a metallic tinkle from the bronze bell above it. Up the graveled path I hurried, and from the direction of the back-door stairs, Cousin Emma came beaming.
I hurried up the polished stairs, on each side of which stood little statues of discus throwers. Cousin Emma took me to the spacious drawing room and told me that the old man’s days were numbered.
We went to the room where Tio Doro was confined. He was propped up in a wheelchair near the wide-open window. The afternoon sun streamed in. His cheeks were sallow, the crop of distinguished white hair sparse. He was apparently resigned, as would be the earth to the whims of the elements. But now in the room were two middle-aged American officers and Tio Doro’s former archenemy, Mon Luk, who, I later learned, had just borrowed a little capital from him to start business anew.
I held his soft, nerveless hand and kissed it, and almost
forgot to answer when he inquired how Father was.
At that time when no explanations were possible, I was hurtling back to those blurred yesteryears, to that conspicuous Rizal Day program long ago, when as the main speaker he discoursed despicably on all foreigners, when on his election platform he damned all Chinese. And now, in the privacy of his home—in his own room—were these strangers laughing with him as if they were his long-lost brothers.
CHAPTER
14
What happened to Tio Doro was one of those profound transformations that the Occupation wrought. Rosales itself underwent irreparable changes—the great fire that burned down the business area and Father’s commercial buildings, the guerrilla war that brought death to more Filipinos, I think, than to Japanese. For me, neither death nor suffering was trivialized. I had seen both and was touched, but not by lesser forms of travail. Father had seen to it that his family and those under his wing were well provided for. He had also played superb politician by keeping away from entanglements either with the guerrillas or with the Japanese puppets. As I heard him say all too often, “The bamboo survives by bending to the storm.”
As for the balete tree, it weathered the war handsomely. The belief of the people in its sacredness, in its being the embodiment of spirits that watched over us, was even reinforced. At one time, the Japanese needed some poles or timber for additional construction in the schoolhouse they had taken over, and they ordered some civilian laborers to cut down a few branches. The laborers—as was to be expected—ran away for fear that they would displease the spirits. Faced with having to do the job themselves, a couple of bald-shaved Japanese proceeded to the tree with their handsaws. No one really saw what happened, but the two soldiers were killed by a grenade that exploded while they were up in the tree. How the grenade got there is one of those riddles that will never be unraveled. Then, when the Americans came, they pitched their tents in the plaza and had a bulldozer level or cover up the bomb shelters with which the Japanese had pocked the plaza. The bulldozer had grazed the balete trunk—much to the shock of the people who were watching the machine work, for they had warned the American sergeant driving it not to go near the tree. He had, perhaps, never heeded the warning. As he turned around, an explosion rent the air, and after the smoke had cleared, the bulldozer was in shambles and the American was seriously injured. He had hit a land mine that had lain there all the time, undisturbed, planted by whom, nobody knew. The American detachment in Rosales left soon after the accident, and the bulldozer lay by the tree in a crumpled heap. It was there for some time, rusting in a pile of scrap, till someone dismantled it, testimony again to the sorcery of the balete tree.
The war was over—we thought there would be no more killing. But we were wrong, for now, all around us in the plain, the men who had fought the Japanese so well as Huk guerrillas now fought their landlords and the Army, which they perceived as instruments of the landlords to perpetuate their ancient, miserable lot.
But even if this was so, Father’s tenants did not seem affected by the dissidence that had broken out in their midst; they went about their duties promptly, and for all the memories of Tio Baldo, they seemed as docile as always. Yet I knew that it was not so—the surface calm was deceptive.
It had been growing—I am conscious of that now—like the yellow, poisonous yam; and though there were mere tendrils above the earth, crawling and withered, underneath was this root, massive and deformed, with appendages of the most grotesque shape, burrowed deep. To bring out the whole would require careful prodding and digging, so that all of the root would be lanced from its mooring, for any remaining shred could well be nurtured again by the rich and loving earth, not just into life, but into something bigger than the original root wherefrom it had sprung.
“It is so clear,” Cousin Marcelo said. “The war showed the farmers, the poor, how they could survive and how the rich and the powerful could not. Look around you—the tenants are no longer the cowed starvelings they used to be. They know that if they are united and if they have guns, they can do almost anything. Anything! We have to be aware of these changes and adjust to them. We cannot live in the past forever.”
Indeed, the war altered many things but again not us, not us. We knew no hunger as did our neighbors, who lived on buri-palm flour; no lack of clothes as did many of our tenants, who learned the feel of sackcloth on their backs.
“We are fortunate,” Cousin Marcelo continued. “But look at the thousands of young people with no future. They either become soldiers or bandits in the hills whom the soldiers seek without pity. Look at Angel, and you’ll know what I’m talking about.”
I knew what Cousin Marcelo meant. I also know now that the changes that came upon the country were very profound and much more all-embracing than we had the courage to perceive. The farmers, the tenants—we did not realize then how they saw and understood that the power of the rich, of Don Vicente and Father himself, had been eroded, that in those four abject years it was really each man for himself. The old loyalties held insofar as we were concerned, but they were rendered fragile, as only time would soon show. For what the Japanese did was not to destroy the landlords; they were not interested in social change, in the restructuring of classes; they were interested only in the produce of the land, and they got the rice and whatever bounties the land gave and in the process leveled everyone.
But with the Japanese gone, the old arrangements were quickly resumed—or so we thought—little realizing that what had been broken could never be brought together again. And all these now come sharply to mind as I think of Angel and that morning during the dry season, when Father woke me up with his swearing in the garden. I rose and went to the window.
Below, Angel struck the stone bench by the balete tree with his straw hat and stirred the dust and dry leaves that covered it. As if he were a participant in a primal ritual, without looking at Father poised before him, Angel lay flat on his stomach.
I hurried down the flight in time to see Father lash the horse whip across Angel’s buttocks for the last time. The servant’s lips were drawn, his eyes were shut, and he did not rise. Panting and cursing still, Father flung the whip to the caked earth and with his forefinger scraped off the beads of sweat that glistened on his forehead.
Father was a tired shadow of his former self; he forgave the servants their manners, their barging into the sala before the guests, tongue-tied and fumbling for words, when he asked what brought them there; he did not mind their forgetting to polish his boots when he galloped off on his castaño to the fields. But it seemed that the mistake Angel had committed was beyond reprieve.
“And you say you will soon buy a cédula, ha?” Though Father’s wrath was spent, his voice was threatening still. “Not in ten years will a stupid one like you need one!”
Angel finally stood up. He passed a hand over his buttocks and mumbled, “It won’t happen again, Apo.”
Father did not hear him, as he turned away and stomped back to the house.
Since he came to serve us, Angel was to tend Mother’s garden—the roses, dahlias, and sparse rows of azucena that had survived the rainy season. He had failed to water the unpotted roses to which Father was particularly devoted because the rose plots were what Mother had lavished her care on. Father himself padded them with horse dung from the stable, but now the rose plots were whitish patches of dry soil.
Father had found Angel behind the bodega, sitting on a sled and gazing at the faraway hills, unable to explain why he was there on a morning when he should be working and—most of all—why he neglected the rose garden.
After his whipping, Angel returned to the garden and sprinkled water on the wilted plants, shielding each with his palm.
“It won’t do any good,” I said.
He turned to me and smiled sadly. “I shouldn’t have forgotten.” He dropped the tin can back to the water pail. “I just couldn’t forget what happened to Father and Mother. It seemed so impossible …” He drew the can from the pail
again and, his palm over the withered plants, sprinkled them. “These are difficult times,” he murmured.
Angel was eighteen, but he looked shriveled and lines of premature age furrowed his brow. He stood up when his pail was empty and returned to the artesian well by the kitchen stairs, where three soldiers stationed in the town plaza were filling canvas buckets. They belonged to a company supposed to patrol the nearby foothills, which were now alive with Huks. Angel was soon conversing with them.
He was back in the garden in the late afternoon.
“Will you teach me now?” he called. I was at my window watching him. I went down to the back of the storehouse where Father had seen him loafing. We sat on a ledge; against the back of an old chair, he balanced the dog-eared primer I gave him and turned to its last pages.
He tackled a few sentences, and after one page he paused and leaned on the warm stone wall. His eyes wandered to the tamarind tan of May that covered the land. From his shirt pocket, he dug out the last frayed letter from Mindanao, which, as one would a Bible, I had read to him many times before. Exasperated at the thought of reading it again, I said, “No, not this time.”
He seemed hurt, and he thrust the letter back into his pocket without unfolding it.
“What can you do now?” I said, feeling badgered. “You should burn it. All the other letters, too.”
He came close to me, smelling of the stable and the dry earth. His voice trailed off: “About this morning, when your father saw me here, I was thinking …” Again his eyes were on the barren land beyond the barbed-wire fence and farther, the mountain half-hidden by coconut trees. He spoke brokenly. “I just cannot believe it. How they both died …”
I looked at the dust where with his finger he had spelled his name wrong. I did not want to remember the stooped, pallid woman, his mother, and the slight balding man, his father. “You never learn!” I said, and stood up to leave.
Don Vicente Page 14
