Don Vicente

by F. Sionil Jose

  “Please,” I said, rapping on the bamboo post by the door, “I have to see you. I wanted to talk with you at the cemetery, but you left so quickly.”

  A shuffle of feet, then she flung the door open and I saw her—not she who was gay and laughing but a tired and unhappy woman, her eyes swollen from crying. Her hair, which would have looked elegant if it were combed, cascaded down her shoulders. She was dressed in a dark shapeless blouse. From her neck dangled a red bead necklace whose medallion of polished gold rested in the valley of her bosom.

  “What do you want?” she asked, glaring at me. Then recognition came, and the annoyance in her face vanished.

  “You are his son,” she said simply.

  “I want to talk with you,” I said.

  She came to me. “Why did you come? You don’t have to. It is not necessary.”

  “I have to,” I said. “Maybe, because we both lost someone. Maybe …”

  “But you didn’t love him,” she said, looking straight at me.

  I was too surprised to answer.

  “I suspected it all along,” she said sadly. “Many did not like him, and I wouldn’t blame his only son for feeling the same way. Sometimes blood isn’t really enough.”

  “You are wrong,” I said. Coherent speech was mine again. “I respected him.”

  “Respected him! What a difference!”

  I did not know how to argue with her; she did not give me a chance.

  “Let me tell you,” she said hastily. “He was not good and he was not kind, and that is why they killed him. But he had virtues, and he was really good in his own way. Not many understood, but I did, and that’s why—” She brought the handkerchief to her eyes and started sobbing. She slumped on one of the chairs, her body shaking with her sobs.

  “Please don’t cry,” I said.

  She dropped the handkerchief on her lap and turned to me. “He loved you,” she said. “He used to talk so much about you.”

  “That’s not true,” I said, unable to hold it back any longer. “That’s not true at all!”

  “Ay!” She sighed. She rose and walked to the window. “If only we know the things that are hidden in the hearts of others, the world wouldn’t be such a sad place.” Outside, the sunshine was a silver flood. The birds on the grass roof twittered.

  “He never cared for me,” I said plainly. “He tried to but—”

  “But he did! And you call him Father! You didn’t even understand him!” she exclaimed. “You were very close to him, and you didn’t even know how he felt! And here I was, seeing him only once or twice a week, and I knew so many things. But maybe it’s because I’m a woman. I do know! You have to believe it now that he’s dead. We could have gotten married, lived together. He loved you, and he said he failed you because of me and many other things that he had to do, although he didn’t want to. The death of this Baldo, his helplessness before your Don Vicente. All these he told me and blamed himself. How will you ever understand? You have to be a man …”

  There was nothing for me to say.

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Seventeen.”

  “So young,” she said, “so very young!”

  I gazed out of the window, at the caved banks of the river. “I’ll be leaving, maybe tomorrow,” I said.

  She came to me again and held my arm lightly. We walked to the door. A breeze stirred the tall cogon grass that surrounded the house.

  “What will you do now?” I asked.

  She bit her lower lip, and when she looked at me, resignation was on her face. “What can I do?”

  “You’ll stay here?”

  Her voice was dry: “Yes. Where will I go? To the city, like you? I’ve been there. You are thinking perhaps that if I leave I can start anew? I ask you: what for?”

  She left me at the door and walked to her dresser. Before the oval mirror she examined her face, her swollen eyes. She was beautiful, even though grief had distorted her face.

  “If there is anything you need, you can go to the house, to my Cousin Marcelo. I’ll tell him to give you everything you need.”

  She turned quickly to me. “No,” she said sharply. “No, thank you. I don’t think I’ll ever go there. I’ve some pride, you know.”

  “I want to help.”

  “You can’t,” she said, trying to smile. “Thank you for the thought. I am ashamed, that’s all. But not with him. Only in the beginning. Then I wasn’t ashamed anymore, even when I felt a hundred eyes stab me in the market, in church; one gets used to it. The skin thickens with the years.” Fresh tears welled in her eyes. “But believe me, with him I was not ashamed. Never. Maybe I loved him deeply, although that didn’t seem possible.”

  “Please, don’t cry,” I said.

  She daubed her eyes. “Well, you see me crying now, but I will stop. I’ll powder my face and comb my hair, then go out. And should another man come up that path, do you expect me to shut the door?”

  I did not answer. I turned and stepped down the stairs into the blinding sunlight.

  So it must be; I left Rosales, relegating that town to a sweet oblivion in the mind. I left behind people who should not intrude into the peace that, I thought, I could build and reinforce with a wealth of means that is mine by inheritance.

  I have lived in pleasant solitude, breathed God’s pure air, and wallowed in sybaritic comfort, although, occasionally, I do think about those who were around me, and do feel deeply about the travail of my youth. But I see their anguish as something caused by human cussedness itself, that this is man’s certitude and destiny—irrevocable, final—that one cannot make anything different from it any more than I can stir ashes back to life.

  Yet, much as I am sure of these, I also know that the present, this now, is yesterday, and anything and everything that I find detestable are outgrowths of something equally detestable in this not-so-distant past.

  I wish I could be honest and true, but truth as I see it is not something abstract, a pious generality—it is justice at work, righteous, demanding, disciplined, sincere, and unswerving; otherwise, it is not, it cannot be truth at all.

  But the past was not permanent, nor is the present—who was it who said you cannot cross the river twice? Motion, change, birth, and death—these are the imperatives (what a horrible, heavy word!) of life.

  I sometimes pass by Rosales and see that so little has changed. The people are the same, victims of their own circumstance as Old David, Angel, Ludovico, and even Father had all been. God, should I think and feel, or should I just plod on and forget? I know in the depths of me that I’ll always remember, and I am not as tough as they were. Nor do I have the humor and the zest to cope as Tio Marcelo did, looking at what I see not as an apocalypse but as revelation; as he said once, paraphrasing a Spanish poet, he was born on a day that God was roaring drunk.

  I think that I was born on a day God was fast asleep. And whatever happened after my birth was nothing but dreamless ignorance. But there was a waking that traumatized, a waking that also trivialized, because in it, the insolence and the nastiness of human nature became commonplace and I grew up taking all these as inevitable. In the end, the satisfaction that all of us seek, it seems, can come only from our discovering that we really have molded our lives into whatever we want them to be. In my failure to do this, I could have taken the easy way out, but I have always been too much of a coward to covet my illusions rather than dispel them.

  I continue, for instance, to hope that there is reward in virtue, that those who pursue it should do so because it pleases them. This then becomes a very personal form of ethics, or belief, premised on pleasure. It would require no high-sounding motivation, no philosophical explanation for the self, and its desires are animal, basic—the desire for food, for fornication. If this be the case, then we could very well do away with the church, with all those institutions that pretend to hammer into the human being attributes that would make him inherit God’s vestments, if not His kingdom.

 
But what kind of man is he who will suffer for truth, for justice, when all the world knows that it is the evil and the grasping who succeed, who flourish, whose tables are laden, whose houses are palaces? Surely he who sacrifices for what is just is not of the common breed or of an earthly shape. Surely there must be something in him that should make us beware, for since he is dogged and stubborn as compared with the submissive many, he will question not just the pronouncements of leaders but the leaders themselves. He may even opt for the more demanding decision, the more difficult courses of action. In the end, we may see him not just as selfless but as the epitome of that very man whom autocrats would like to have on their side, for this man has no fear of heights, of gross temptations, and of death itself.

  Alas, I cannot be this man, although sometimes I aspire to be like him. I am too much a creature of comfort, a victim of my past. Around me the largesse of corruption rises as titles of vaunted power, and I am often in the ranks of princes, smelling the perfume of their office. I glide in the dank, nocturnal caverns that are their mansions and gorge on their sumptuous food, and I love it all, envy them even for the ease with which they live without remorse, without regret even though they know (I suspect they do) that to get to this lofty status, they had to butcher—perhaps not with their own hands—their own hapless countrymen.

  Today I see young men packed off to a war that’s neither their making nor their choice, and I recall Angel, who is perhaps long dead, joining the Army not because he was a patriot but because there was no other way. So it has not changed really, how in another war in another time, young men have died believing that it was their duty to defend these blighted islands. It may well be, but the politicians and the generals—they live as weeds always will—accumulating wealth and enjoying the land the young have died to defend. This is how it was, and this is how it will be.

  Who was Don Vicente, after all? I should not be angered then, when men in the highest places, sworn to serve this country as public servants, end up as millionaires in Pobres Park, while using the people’s money in the name of beauty, the public good, and all those shallow shibboleths about discipline and nationalism that we have come to hear incessantly. I should not shudder anymore in disgust or contempt when the most powerful people in the land use the public coffers for their foreign shopping trips or build ghastly fascist monuments in the name of culture or of the Filipino spirit. I see artists—even those who cannot draw a hand or a face—pass themselves off as modernists and demand thousands of pesos for their work, which, of course, equally phony art patrons willingly give. And I remember Tio Marcelo—how he did not hesitate to paint calesas and, in his later years, even jeepneys, so that his work would be seen and used, and not be a miser’s gain in some living room to be viewed by people who may not know what art is. I hear politicians belching the same old clichés, and I remember Tio Doro and how he spent his own money for his candidacy and how he had bowed to the demands of change. When I see justice sold to the highest bidder I remember Tio Baldo and how he lost. So honesty, then, and service are rewarded by banishment, and people sell themselves without so much ado because they have no beliefs—only a price.

  I would like to see all this as a big joke that is being played upon us, but I have seen what was wrought in the past—the men who were destroyed without being lifted from the dung heap of poverty, without recourse to justice.

  But like my father, I have not done anything. I could not, because I am me, because I died long ago.

  Who, then, lives? Who, then, triumphs when all others have succumbed? The balete tree—it is there for always, tall and leafy and majestic. In the beginning, it sprang from the earth as vines coiled around a sapling. The vines strangled the young tree they had embraced. They multiplied, fattened, and grew, became the sturdy trunk, the branches spread out to catch the sun. And beneath this tree, nothing grows!

  Baguio

  October 26, 1977

  My Brother,

  My Executioner

  CALVARIA

  Luis Asperri

  I

  This is the beginning—

  We started here and followed them,

  They who had their backs to us,

  They who began here, too,

  Who cut the trees and uprooted weeds.

  We prepared the fallow earth

  And planted the seed

  And all that had to be done is done.

  They will also begin here—

  They whose faces are young still,

  Whose deeds we cannot know.

  Will they also end here

  Like all of us, without meaning?

  II

  Land without change, claim me now—

  Grasshopper and dragonfly

  Beyond duhat tree, over the river,

  The greenest hill and plain.

  III

  The road is long, dusty and crooked,

  And at the end, a decrepit fence

  Around a straw house.

  What can it hold? A sun grown cold,

  Fruit of the field that is husk.

  I walked away from it,

  Morning dew that washed my feet.

  My eyes are clear and what do I see?

  A stone wilderness that wearies me.

  IV

  On my knees in Quiapo till my knees ache

  Lisping a prayer in Quiapo till my tongue numbs

  I shall lacerate myself till I bleed

  Because it is Friday—

  On my knees in Quiapo, in the poisoned air,

  Listening to hope that is not there.

  V

  Dark beneath this white—

  Thoughts curdle the mind;

  I was lost, searching among ghosts.

  Where have you been, my brother,

  What springs have you tasted,

  What mountains have you scaled?

  We are one in a pod

  But one will wither.

  Now we sow in anger

  And the thunder of words deafens us.

  Truth burns the mind, but how—

  Yes, how to utter it!

  VI

  I should hasten back to the cave

  Where there is no light, no presence,

  And perhaps no end.

  The mirror is not cracked

  Nor the mind with which I see.

  VII

  The shadow I cast is long;

  My forehead is moist, my hand is cold.

  I have gone to a field to glean

  And now, my pillow is a rock

  And night without stars

  Surrounds me.

  Even the trees are still

  Shriveled in the air …

  There is no dream.

  VIII

  I do not think there will be meaning

  To an end as trite as death

  Nothing really dies,

  Not this blue of the sea; nor will this breath

  Sour as long as loving

  And the brilliance you bring

  Tarry as you pass by.

  The wave we watched, the dunes we shaped,

  The grains of sand that slipped

  Through our fingers—

  What could I give?

  As long as we shun regret, and time remember,

  Then my life is blessed.

  There is no meaning now to death.

  I am secure in this treasure we share—

  We really dared, we dare.

  IX

  The eclipse passes

  And leaves no trace;

  We can deceive the eagle eye

  And draw rings around the sun.

  Filler of my need,

  Quencher of my thirst,

  We have scanned the twisted sky

  And dug a land that is scabbed.

  Where did we bury them—the hopes

  We could not hold?

  X

  God, when I was weak-kneed

  And frightened; when my voice was hoarse

  And
my breath was short,

  You did not come.

  If I was your son, blood of your blood,

  If you are true as blood is true

  Then, listen, God—

  Your feet are rooted on this earth

  On which I also stand.

  I hurl to you this gall

  To deafen you, to blind you.

  Leave now

  For you have long feasted on my rice

  And the bin has long been empty.

  These hands—gnarled and nerveless now

  Can serve no more,

  Nor this heart beat for you.

  You cannot feed me in my hunger

  Or comfort me in my cell;

  Dusk chokes my breath.

  XI

  We slept late last night

  Soaked in the heat.

  We marched on blistered feet

  And burnt-out lungs

  And our stomachs were cold and wrought.

  We knew where we were going

  As hungry dogs know the scent of home.

  The sky was black and ghosts wreathed our way

  And because we could not see,

  We plodded on to where we started

  As the others before us, and yet before us …

  When will we know how to pause?

  When will we know the quiet shade?

  Even in our deepest dreams we are awake

  Listening to the dreaded footfall of those who hate us.

  Even in our quietest peace we are awake,

  Tortured by the touch of conscience,

  Listless, because …

  We all slept late last night

  And now it is morning, but, God—

  Where is the sun?

  XII

  My Brother, the season is here;

  The earth is seared, the grass is browned,

  And dust covers everything.

  The carabaos call for their young;

  The dogs howl in the wind.

  The frogs are buried in the clod

  And the creek where we swam is dry.

  We whose wounds are tattoed on our breasts,

  Whose throats are aching and parched—

  When can we heal? How can we ever speak?

  All the laughter that rings

  Comes in the wake—

  The music that beguiles us

  Accompanies the parade to the north.

  My Brother, the season is here,