Dantes had listened, but his was the last word nonetheless: “And what army in the world, ever, has been an instrument of the poor? It has always been, will always be, the instrument of the state—and therefore of the powerful!”
The dialogue was over. Dantes strode to his desk and reached for the intercom.
Two officers, a fat balding colonel and an ascetic-faced major, came in. They did not extend their hands when Dantes introduced them to Luis. “Colonel Cruz, Major Gutierrez.” They looked at the Old Man’s beady eyes, which did not soften, even when everybody was seated.
“These gentlemen have gone to your town, Luis,” the publisher said, “and they want to disabuse your mind about the massacre.”
“There is nothing to talk about,” Luis said. “Everything was in the magazine, Mr. Dantes. There is no point in discussing it—unless they have something new to add to it. If they have a reply, we will, of course, as a matter of policy, print it.”
The colonel took the bluster from Luis. “Yes, there are still many things we can discuss,” he said, his voice perceptibly hostile. “Inaccuracies, omissions—all of which have put us in a very bad light. You should have checked all your facts first before you wrote that trash.”
Dantes acted swiftly. “Please,” he addressed the two officers, “let us go into this dispassionately.”
The old hate pulsed in Luis. “There was nothing to check,” he said. “I saw the grave where the victims were deposited without decent burial. I’ve talked with some of the villagers who escaped from your men and my father’s guards. I saw the place where the houses stood—a whole barrio, mind you—leveled. I need no further proof.”
The colonel was unimpressed. He lighted a cigarette, inhaled casually, and turned to Luis with contemptuous self-confidence. “Since you are so sure, I hope you will consent to hear our side. These you didn’t mention—that the villagers were active Huk supporters, that one of the leading Huk commanders in central Luzon is from the village—and I think you know him well. You did not mention that there was an encounter—that the villagers fired first—”
“And twenty villagers were killed and not one casualty among the civilian guards or the troops.”
“Only because they were trained well.” The major laughed, although his ascetic face remained expressionless. He opened his portfolio and handed Luis a sheaf of papers. “Read it,” he said.
Luis took the sheaf and skimmed through it. The report was obviously prepared by a staff member and was an arid bureaucratic piece.
“This is your side,” Luis said, “but you are big, and who will take the side of the people—the small people—whose interests, since the government should serve the people, should be your concern?”
The colonel grinned. “You talk as if you were their anointed spokesman. Why don’t you be yourself, Mr. Asperri?” Luis could sense the scorn in the appellation. “You know very well you are not small. You are very big, sir.” The colonel got a fat envelope from the portfolio. Turning to the publisher, he said, “Perhaps this will prove our point. Read it, sir. This is the handwriting of our editor’s father, who is the biggest landlord in the province. It seems hardly possible that he has sired someone like his son. If a father does not believe in his son, who will?”
Dantes read the first page carefully, then the second. He stopped reading. “Your father, Luis,” he said bleakly, “feels you were prejudiced when you wrote that article. There was no massacre—just an encounter. So many of them taking place in central Luzon, you know. Even in the Visayas, in Negros, they have started. Furthermore, your father says that these two gentlemen know why you are prejudiced. Would you care to tell me why? Here, read it yourself.”
The two officers turned to Luis. “I don’t personally want to talk about your past or your personal life,” the major said. The ribbon on his chest showed that he was a Bataan veteran. “I can very well understand why you are bitter, but we will have to break our silence …”
Everyone knows, everyone! It was a time when he should not have cared, when neither contempt nor praise should have affected him, when nothing should have eroded his belief, but in this moment of truth, he felt clammy and small.
“… and expose you,” the major continued. “Tell the world the reason for your bias, your prejudice. Maybe you do not think that this is fair, but what, then, is the reason for your inability to see it our way? We should ask you, as an editor, to be impersonal, but this you have not been. Well—everything is now in your hands. The future …”
The future—did it really mean anything now? His lies—his denials of Sipnget and his mother—had caught up with him.
“What do you say, Luis?” Dantes asked, pointing to the document that Don Vicente had written. “Your own father refutes you.”
“We had the whole barrio site examined.” The colonel laughed casually. “There was no grave at all. Yes, the village was burned. You know these things happen when houses roofed with thatch are close together. That the whole village was plowed—that is not our doing. It was his father’s. We do not deny that two villagers were killed—just two—and I think our editor knows who they are. They were taken away by the villagers themselves when they left. They were buried decently, according to them. I dare someone to go there and dig the land inch by inch and show me the mass grave!”
All is done. Luis gritted his teeth; my own father, he has gouged out my brains and squeezed the air out of my lungs. “Call it what you want,” Luis said. “How do we know how you may have exhumed the refugees when I am sure that by now you may have dispersed them? How can I gather testimony from the people who are afraid? The dead will bear me out if the living won’t.”
The major laughed again in his humorless manner. “I see that you are even superstitious. I do not think that is good for journalism.”
The officers stood up, ramrod-straight, and made ready to leave, their Pershing caps in their hands. “You have a very interesting story,” the colonel said. “I hope that someday we can have a really long talk.”
“In the stockade?” Luis asked contemptuously.
“You misunderstand us,” the colonel said, “but perhaps you will be able to explain to me why Filipinos would kill their own brethren. This, in principle, seems to be what you insinuate. We are not wealthy like you, Mr. Asperri. Without the government in which your father has a very strong say, we are really nothing—and who made this government, Mr. Asperri? It’s the people of Rosales and Sipnget—and your father and you yourself and Mr. Dantes.”
He was beyond the reach of anger, and his voice was clear as he echoed his father: “It is the strong who make the laws, and the laws are not for the weak.”
“Your political beliefs,” the colonel said, “seem straight out of medieval times. I am sorry, but we did not come here to talk politics. We merely came here to give you a chance to retract before we start any action. It is but proper that you should know where we stand. You are being given the choice, and in your own language, you have a deadline. Mr. Dantes knows …”
They tipped their Pershing caps in mock politeness, shook the publisher’s hand, then marched to the door. Luis sat back and stared at the papers on Dantes’s desk, the affidavit that his father had signed, which the officers had left for him to read. Even the phrasing was unmistakably his father’s; so was the uneven signature.
“I hope that you listened carefully to what was said,” Dantes said scowling. “We are in a mess. They were here yesterday and told me what they would do. Eddie said you haven’t been coming to the office, and I understand. Now this.”
“It is part of the job, sir. The risks go with it,” Luis said.
Dantes walked to his side and placed an arm on his shoulder. “Luis, let us not make it difficult. I don’t want my back against a wall. I don’t want to be forced to select the kind of ax my executioner will use.”
“Isn’t that what they have already done?”
The publisher’s brow knitted, and his thin lips compresse
d into a line across his tired, aging face. “What is it that really happened, Luis? What is it you hold against your father? After all, one reads in the papers every day about encounters like this, and one must learn to take them in stride. It is not the end of the world if one village is burned down and twenty people—like you said—are dead. You get more killed in traffic accidents in one day in the country.”
“We have learned to take murder as an everyday occurrence,” Luis said. “When we do this we may just as well stop worrying about whether or not we will ever have law and order. We die when we stop being angry.”
“But that’s not the point, Luis,” Dantes said, moving away and facing the young man. “There is a limit to our capacity. We cannot fight all battles as if they were of the same magnitude. That is the way things run. In some we use high stakes. Others we just ignore—or file away while we wait for a more propitious time. Now, this is what those officers want us to do—print a retraction and declare that there was no massacre, unless we are willing to conduct an investigation ourselves.” He walked slowly to the wide glass window through which the sun streamed in. “You have to make the decision,” he said softly.
“It is all up to you, sir,” Luis said after a while, “but there will be no retraction from me. It is not a question of me and my father involving your publication. That is between my father and me, and we will settle it our way. I will have to resign, and they can sue me as an individual if they want to.” He had not really given the idea much thought, but it came as natural as breathing.
“You have made a most difficult choice, Luis,” Dantes said, still looking out of the window, a touch of sadness in his voice. “I knew it would be this way, but I hoped that you would see it my way. We really don’t have much choice. We can do what they want us to do, or they can come at us in a big way. I will pull strings to save the magazine, but among my priorities—and I am speaking frankly to you—the magazine is not the first. You know very well that I have other interests. I had thought that it would be just some sort of hobby. Perhaps I am speaking much too candidly, making a hobby out of your life, your career—but there it is. Never underestimate the power of the government—nor the bureaucracy as such. I have enemies, too. Perhaps you don’t know, but more than fifty percent of your ads have already been withdrawn from your next issue. The advertising department will inform you this afternoon on this when they give you the listing. You know that the government controls newsprint through the release of foreign exchange. That is just the beginning.”
“All these simplify matters, then, Mr. Dantes,” Luis said calmly.
“But we can back up a bit, Luis.” Dantes turned to him. “The world is not really as cold-blooded as you picture it. Look at you—aren’t you yourself a paradox? In between is a broad meeting ground, so wide we can both rest on it and give no damn to anyone …” Dantes’s eyes were expectant.
“I am very sorry I have caused you a lot of trouble, sir, but you know, if Ester were alive”—he choked on the words—“if she were here now and I could discuss this with her, she … she would agree with me.” He stood up, but Dantes held him back.
“We cannot end this way,” he said. “I think we understand each other better now. You spoke of Ester—she was an only daughter, and I was very fond of her. I want you to stay, Luis.”
He walked to the door. “It has to be resolved, sir—and I see no other way.”
Dantes went to him and they shook hands. The publisher’s grip was tight and cold. “You can print the retraction, sir,” Luis said. “Eddie is a very good man, and if you decide to close the magazine, I hope you can keep him.”
“You want a final statement or something?”
“No, sir,” Luis said. The publisher’s grip relaxed, and Luis walked out.
Eddie was pacing the office when Luis went in and sat wearily on the sofa beside his desk. “Well,” Eddie asked, “what happened?”
“I put in a good word for you,” he said simply. “It’s the most I could do.” He stood up and started clearing his desk, sorting out the articles that he should have attended to. “I don’t know if the old man will keep the magazine. If he does, you will most certainly be running it. If he decides to let it go, you will be absorbed in his other ventures.”
“How did it come to this? I didn’t think it would come to this. Isn’t it too much for an exposé?”
Luis went to his desk. “That’s the Army for you,” he said. “As for Dantes, we are not tops in his system of priorities, that’s all.”
“Well,” Eddie said grimly, “I cannot see what is important and what is not. If he doesn’t think twenty dead people important, I cannot work for him. I’m used to the gutter, Luis.” He stretched himself on the sofa, flipped off his brown slip-ons, and wiggled his toes.
“I’m sorry, Eddie,” Luis said, emptying his drawers of letters, manuscripts. It was like combing into the past—only the past could not be dredged from his drawers and dumped like clips or knick-knacks on his glass top, where he could pick them out one by one and say: This fragment of my life is important.
Eddie watched him wordlessly. “But in a sense Dantes is right, Luis. You are bitter, you know.”
Luis threw a fistful of junk into the wastebasket and glared. “I knew the village, I could name everyone in it. They were not just casualty figures—they were people.”
Eddie sat up. “I do not deny that,” he said. “They must mean very much to you. Look at what you are doing to yourself. Let us not go into that cliché about obligations and righteousness and justice, but you have obligations to yourself, too, and your relatives—your father, most of all. Why should he disagree with you?”
The trash from Luis’s drawers was now reduced to a small pile of mementoes. It hardly mattered now. Eddie had given him loyalty, respect, and that kind of relationship that could arise only from mutual trust. “There are things you do not know about me,” he said quietly. “It is not that the massacre is not true. God knows it is, but I did not tell you why I have been shaken by it to the very core. My grandfather, he was one of those killed. And my mother, she was betrayed and lost. You may have heard from me that my mother died long ago—that was a convenient lie.”
“Luis, it cannot be,” Eddie said. “If it is true, then it is not enough that you write about the massacre.”
Luis smiled wryly. “How I wish that I could really do something—but what, Eddie? As my father said, it is not the truth that gives us strength. I’m not even half the man that I should be. I am a godforsaken bastard. Go to my hometown and ask anyone you meet in the street. He will tell you how my mother was a maid in my father’s house. I had to live that lie in this city, and I tried to belong. Everything is a sham and I wish I’d never been born.”
Eddie stood up and embraced him, but Luis pushed him brusquely away. “I don’t need your sympathy,” Luis said.
“It is not sympathy,” Eddie said. “It’s gratitude—for trusting me.”
“I don’t have to be a hypocrite anymore. I can now live the way I like. If I must, I will tell the story all over again. Let us say that I am a mourner and that nothing can comfort me except the truth and the damnation that goes with it.”
Dear Father,
Today I thank you not only for this life but also for helping me clear the cobwebs in my mind, so that I may yet know the answer to the riddle that I have for so long tried to unravel. I am, thanks to you, slowly escaping from delusions. Indeed it was most easy to delude myself, to mask a deep and private fear with public avowal of virtue or dedication to some noble folly. Do I really love humanity or truth or that abstraction called freedom? How deceptively simple it was for me to address myself to these ends, and how illusory they are finally becoming.
The reality is not quite like this. In truth I am afraid of losing my comforts, the certainty of the wealth you will give me, all the opulent dreams that are already real, for I know, no matter what I do, that you will not disown me. Your dream, too, is your own mishmash
of virtue. You, too, have found it convenient, perhaps, to forget.
When you sent me off from Rosales to a Catholic college you knew it was absurd, for I had never touched a rosary before, and if I had, it was in the manner Grandfather prescribed. (You should have known the old man—you have too many things in common: bullheadedness, love of the good life, and a certain earthy approach to living.) He always looked with skepticism at the many who went to church on Sundays and holy days of obligations, for he felt that most of them desecrated the temple—the cheap, fornicating slobs whose minds, preceding their bodies, committed another mortal sin even as they knelt in the pews to ask that their sins be forgiven. He believed in prayer, of course, but only if it was addressed straight to God. He believed—just to make sure—in the spirits, too, which abounded in the fields, the trees, and the mounds.
Those were four tedious years during which I grew up without family and the pleasures of Sipnget. I was in high school—a junior—when the war came, and you had, at first, thought of going to Rosales but, on second thought, decided that Manila would be safe. You were right; the conquerors did not bother us, and we were adequately supplied not just with the amenities that you were used to but with the same dogged loyalty that your encargados and your tenants had always shown you.
I will now recall, dear Father, some aspects of those years that I know you did not particularly relish but that, if you understood better, would have explained to you why things were changing, why I, myself, knew that we must change not only because by doing so we would continue to occupy the positions that we always coveted but because by changing we would also be able to live.
You must remember that day when Santos and other men from Sipnget came and told you that they needed medicines, that the countryside was alive with guerrillas. I had listened and asked if I might go to Sipnget, if only to see my mother, whom I had not seen in years. And you told me to go with them so that I might see for myself and tell you how it was.
Don Vicente Page 39
