Don Vicente

by F. Sionil Jose

  Dantes’s lips were drawn. “You don’t care—and you say that you are her best friend or sweetheart—”

  “Don’t think of me that way,” Luis said softly. “I admired her very much and loved her in my own way, but not in the way you think. Not that way.” He was speaking with candor, and he could hear his heart pounding, the words rushing out in a torrent. “There were many things we had in common. We had a sense of communion although we argued and quarreled, but we were alive, Mr. Dantes. That you must understand. We were not two pieces of furniture. We were alive then, but now she is dead. Do you think this does not pain me at all?”

  “Will you tell me why she did it?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Did you love her enough to want to elope with her—marry her?”

  Luis’s slight laugh was hollow. “It never crossed our minds. I don’t want to make it look as if she was not beautiful, that she had no virtues. Yes, maybe—the friendship could have been more than what it was, but marriage was out of the question. As you can see, I got married—but not to her. No, it was not like that at all. Something I cannot explain—something more.”

  “What could be more?” Dantes whined, and balling his fists, he struck the glass top of his desk, shaking the big flower vase and the menagerie of blotters, inkstands, and clay figurines that cluttered it. He was now sobbing uncontrollably, and he turned away, his lean frame shaking. “She had everything she wanted. I wanted her to marry properly and be comfortable and not have a single worry in the world! This is how fathers are—wait and see.” He turned expectantly back to Luis, his eyes misty and red. “Tell me that you loved her—it would be the best way, and I would understand.”

  Luis closed his eyes, and in the dark, incongruous depths of his mind there formed slowly, clearly, the image of Ester, just as it was the first time he drove her out to that lonely beach in Cavite and she lay in the shade of the low, thorny trees, listening to the pounding surf. “No,” Luis said, gritting his teeth. “It was not that kind of love, or else I should have asked her to marry me way, way back. She knew that, sir. It was something else, just as tender and precious.”

  Dantes had calmed down. He blew his nose and walked to the window again. “The funeral will be tomorrow afternoon,” he announced. “Don’t send anything.”

  Luis looked at the thin, broken man and pitied him. “I am sorry, sir,” he said. “Perhaps I can say this: I’ll miss her more than you ever will.”

  As Luis opened the door Dantes called him back. “Don’t tell anyone about this—for Ester’s sake.”

  He nodded, then shuffled out.

  Dear Ester,

  I have never written a love letter and it seems rather late and funny for me to write one, but this is a love letter and my regret is that you will not read it. We are so much alike and so, although you will not read it, I will keep it and go over it every once in a while.

  I will not forgive you, for you have caused me unspeakable grief, and more than this, you have planted in my mind the suspicion that I am responsible, not for your life but for your death. Maybe your father is right—I have killed you, and in the process I will also kill myself, not because I love you, which I do, but because we are one.

  I will try to write this letter minus the obscurity and ambiguity that you said are my faults. I do agree with you that sometimes obscurity simply is a camouflage for illogical thinking or, worse, bad writing. So, you see, you influenced me, perhaps in a manner that you never realized.

  When you were around I had some sense of security in feeling that I could just pick up the telephone and talk with you. I know now that I miss you as one who has lost his sight will always miss the light. So I now feel this overwhelming sense of loss. It is as if I could have been able to save you if I had not procrastinated, but I could not have done anything really except—as did that stupid king—stand before the surf (remember how it was in Cavite?) and bid it stop. I have one royal vice—a self-assurance that is engendered by ignorance.

  If I cannot forgive you, it must be you who must forgive me, for I was ignorant and I did not understand the great wrong I had done. There is no way now, however, by which it can be undone, and not even God’s mercy can put back in place what I have diminished within myself—and so I must now move about, the incomplete man.

  Yet I must atone for myself I must do this as a cripple and compound my misery by begging. This is not manly. It is degrading, but with you I now have no pride.

  I love you, Ester, I love you and it is only in words, for this love is beyond deed. I can only relive the hours we were together, the needless conflict, the intimacy of love’s supreme act, and I must now ask why you are gone when you could still be alive, not my little harlot but this earth’s most precious gift.

  I must now give death—not yours but mine—the contemplation that I have not given it, for your death will also be mine. It is the riddle of the unlived experience, the great emptiness of time that is not yet imprinted in the senses or etched on paper and stone. It is the riddle that we cannot unravel, not because it is a compulsive challenge but because the mind seems somehow incomplete, a vacuum that cannot be filled.

  I have always felt that the emptiness of my life stems not from the absence of memories or events but from the lack of courage to go after life itself, the way a hunter would go after the most dangerous game, which is death, the way a seeker would challenge the loftiest peaks. We do not conquer life, no one can conquer what one cannot define, but at least it is there and it is ours to shape and to possess fully, with all the senses working, with all the powers of the heart surging, as we search for the answer to the greatest riddle of them all—death, the ultimate end, the enemy of all men, the final quietus to the noblest of emotions, the tenacity and ethereal creativity of faith. You have found the answer and I have found love.

  I have asked my brother, whom you have never met, not to hate but to love. I did not mean it. I had meant to ask you, too, not to hate, but I could not do it. You trusted me and in so doing asked me, too, to have faith. Must this, then, be all? Should we drag our feet, believing that our bones will hold our puny frames against everything—the tyranny of fathers and the perfidy of those who practice treachery? You said that we must love because only by love can mankind be saved and the savages amongst us elevated to the realm of the gods—but how can we love when we are nourished on hate? The old virtues no longer suffice. The world moves farther away from the orbit that was plotted out for us by the great religions. We will not be machines, but we will be something worse—we will be pigs.

  It’s not five years since the end of the war, and as you know, the theology of self-immolation has fascinated me, more so now that I can see it impinge upon my life. I will not know—never—what really made you do it, for it was not in the name of honor, nor was it failure to serve that compelled you to kill yourself, as it did the samurai. I would flatter myself if I surmised that it was love. I do not think that you were a weakling, either in body or in spirit, to have expressed by this act your rejection and abhorrence of our reality—the sadhu who encases himself with ashes and sends away the spirit from the body also dies. Nor do I think that it was loss of comprehension, for if there was anything that has really impressed me about you, it was your intelligence, which was more than intellect and intuition. It was, I think, an intelligence of the highest order, for it was conditioned by compassion.

  I do not know and I cannot know, but this I do know—I will enshrine you here in my mind and in my heart, and I will hate you for tormenting me, but I will cherish you nonetheless, for enkindling, even just for an instant, the faith that had long died in me, so that I can and will escape the fate of pigs.

  Thank you, my dear Ester, for humbling me, for making me less the man I thought I was but more the human being I aspire to be.

  CHAPTER

  30

  Now I’ve done it, Luis reflected bitterly when the first copy of Our Time, with the story of the Sipnget ma
ssacre, was brought up by the copy boy. The article on agrarian reform was written by a rural sociologist, and the complementary piece on political stability and social change was a contribution from a scholar just returned from Harvard. His own article was extremely calm. He had been worried that it would be truculent and emotional, but it was simple, eloquent reportage, and even Eddie, who did not believe in I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine, had gushed over its polish and forcefulness. Writing it, however, had been more than a drudge. The fury that kindled his vision had made the first draft easy to do. It was the rewriting that had drained him; it had been difficult to speak ill of his father and of the civilian guards, but he had done it with objectivity, and now that the anger had been dissipated a nameless void took its place.

  He did not go to the office the day the magazine came out. It was as if he had done the last useful thing for the month and work itself had become some fetter around his neck. Eddie called many times, telling him of his visitors, particularly the team of officers from the constabulary and the imminent trouble that he had raised. Never before had the house where his father once lived seemed so wide and forlorn. In a moment like this it was best that he was alone, so he had hurriedly told Simeon and Marta to go to Rosales on the flimsiest of reasons—that Trining needed them—and told them that he would just call them back. He would miss the couple, but they must have guessed his torment, for they left without complaint.

  The nights were most difficult. Between the sombrous dark and moments of fitful sleep he damned himself. Now it was not three jiggers of bourbon but five, sometimes ten. On the fourth night that he had not gone to his office it was half a bottle before he could sleep—and he did not even sleep long.

  When he woke up, the bedroom burst in a bright yellow slash and he shaded his eyes with his palms and turned on his side. It had rained—one of those brief, unusual showers in February—and a slow, sinuous breeze filled the room and toyed with the voile curtains. Outside, beyond the rain-polished window, the night was dark.

  It was ten o’clock by the timepiece on top of his dresser. He had not slept for more than thirty minutes, but somehow he felt a bit refreshed. He sat up stiff and straight and passed his hand over his thick, uncombed hair. Slowly the hand, which he could not fully control, fingered, too, the stubble on his chin. His toes curled at the edge of the bed, he groped for his slippers and, finding them, stood up. He felt a little dizzy, and he clung for a moment to the bedpost to steady himself. He had brought the typewriter from the library to his bedroom some months ago when Ester had suggested that he work in the bedroom while she was there. Ester loved listening to the hypnotic clacking of the keys. Now his eyes were on the machine and on the crumpled sheets on the floor. He had written the letter, bits of his thoughts, and some stray lines that would go into a new poem, but he had not really worked out anything whole.

  He went back to the mirror and peered into it. The face that confronted him looked wan. Around the eyes were bluish rings that he had never seen before, and as he peered at his face, he caught sight of Ester’s picture on top of the low aparador. He wheeled around, and holding the picture in the light, he examined the swept-up hair, the lips parted in a smile, and the pensive eyes—all her fragile beauty held in a simple aluminum frame. Her dedication was simple: For Luis … Sincerely, Ester. He cursed himself again for not having kept her letter, for giving it to her father when it was really his. He must write another letter, another poem, anything that would express this emptiness. He picked a sheet from the ream beside the typewriter and sat down. He was surprised to find that his fingers were unsteady. On an empty beach, he typed, sand and sky and sea—all beyond my reach. He paused. That was all he could write, for although they burned in his brain, words would not shape into lines and he sat helpless before the machine. He stood up after a while, went to the bathroom, and splashed water on his face. The refreshing coolness was brief. His stomach started to twinge, and he went to the kitchen and opened the cabinets and the refrigerator. There was plenty to eat—tomatoes, oranges, canned stuff, and leftovers in the freezer—but the sight of food now sickened him.

  He went back to his room, combed his hair, put on a fresh shirt, then went down. He switched the lights on in the garage. His car was dirty, and although the Chrysler was only last year’s model, it looked drab with its thick coat of dust. He had driven through the bad, dusty streets the first night that he did not go to work, and with Simeon and Marta gone there was no one to clean the car. He pressed the starter twice, and the engine obligingly purred—but only for a while. Its hum died into a sputter. He pressed the starter again, then saw that the fuel tank was empty. He cursed and slammed the door.

  He hailed the first cab that came along. He had nowhere in mind to go to, so he said to the driver, “Derecho.” Perhaps there was something to see in the office, although it was already past ten. There would be a few persons still at the desk of Dantes’s daily newspaper. When he reached the publishing office he did not bother to get his change. He raced past the parked delivery trucks near the entrance and into the lobby, where the elevator boy was drowsing. There was not much of a crowd in the editorial section, and beyond it, in his office, there was light still. Eddie was working late, reading a batch of galley proofs, when he went in. “Luis, I hope that you are feeling better,” Eddie said. “I know how you feel, so I didn’t want to bother you, but now that you are here—”

  “I came for a few things,” Luis interrupted him.

  “Take your time,” Eddie said. “Would you care to treat me to a cup of coffee? I’m sleepy and I need to go over this.” Then Eddie became businesslike. “Can you make it tomorrow? There are a lot of people who want to see you. I have all the names and messages there.” He thrust his chin at the pile on Luis’s desk. “Tomorrow, particularly, some constabulary officers will be coming. Dantes said you cannot hide from them anymore.”

  “I have not been hiding,” Luis said angrily.

  “I know,” Eddie said, “but that is the impression one gets, especially after the massacre story came out.”

  They went down to the ground-floor coffee shop, which catered not only to the Dantes employees but also to the pedestrians and window shoppers. They went to their favorite corner, and Eddie ordered an egg sandwich and coffee.

  “Make mine just coffee,” Luis said.

  “You aren’t having anything to eat? You look famished,” Eddie said. Luis smiled grimly and shook his head.

  The waiter brought Eddie’s order. As he started eating he became thoughtful. “This should not go on,” he said. “It won’t do you any good. Do try to come back to work as soon as you can. There is no therapy as effective as work. About Ester, you should not blame yourself. It was not your fault. The reasons are far more complex than both of us can understand.”

  “It’s not just Ester,” Luis said, shaking his head.

  “Who else, then?”

  Luis sipped his coffee and glanced around at the few customers in the shop and at the waiters looking sleepy and bored—they would have about an hour more to work, for the shop closed at midnight. Luis looked at Eddie and said, “I’m worried about us.”

  “No, no.” Eddie gestured with his hands. “Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself, thank you.”

  “No, not you personally,” Luis said. “Not just you and me, but our generation itself. It is a generation that really is aimless. We say that we have been sobered or matured by war, the generation that could be the trailblazer, for it is the generation that has known the first years of independence. But for a few exceptions, we are headed nowhere. The generation that preceded us was interested in independence. What are we really interested in?”

  “Milk and honey. The opium of Hollywood. The chariots of Detroit. Babylon, Rome—the depravity of dying empires.”

  “We are dying, yes—but where is the empire? We cannot even develop the rural areas, for we really do not care—and those who care want to bring a holocaust first that will sweep
away weed and seedling.”

  “You can lose your equanimity, just thinking about the magnitude of our problems, Luis,” Eddie said. “I am sure that Lenin and all those fabled revolutionaries often laughed at themselves. I think they enjoyed a good screw when it was time for screwing—and a good fight, too, when the time for it came.”

  “I envy them of course—the young people whom we know and who are now in the hills. Of course everything has been simplified for them. Perhaps it is easier that way. We who are left behind are cowards.”

  “Now, now,” Eddie objected, “be careful with that word—coward. Don’t generalize. Suppose you have a heart condition or you can’t shoot. Suppose you are a man of words and you can do more just by opening your mouth. What is total war but total politics, too?”

  “Justifications,” Luis said. “You are right, of course, but I am tired of justifications. Those who rationalize—and God knows how often I do that myself—are merely draining their blood, and bloodless, they get corrupted.”

  “Call it justification,” Eddie said edgily. He had finished eating and was apparently getting bored. He stared out of the shop door into the street that lighted up with green when the neon sign of the newspaper office flashed. “But doing what we are doing is not exactly a cowardly thing, Luis. Maybe for you it is, for you have everything—but what about people like me? I will be branded the rest of my life, I am sure—and I really cannot afford it.”

  “You will end up as executive vice-president of the Dantes Shipping Company when the time comes,” Luis said, humoring him. “Don’t worry. At least you will deserve it, but look around you and who do you see? It’s the scum who are getting the largest part of the cake—the thieves, the grafters—and we know it. The traitors, those who collaborated with the Japanese—and it’s only five years after the war—it is they who are now in power, and they even call themselves patriots.” Luis paused and a chill passed through him. He was merely parroting what his father had told him. The old man was not wrong, he was affirming the truth. He said sadly now, “Yes, it was always the opportunists who destroyed the revolution. It was they who sided with the Spaniards. It was they who shaped our relationship with the Americans and who sold the Filipinos to the Japanese. I am sure that even now, as the Huks grow in strength, a lot of them are pandering to the Huks.”