I was of course pleased to break away from the monotony of the house. We took the train to Rosales, then hiked for two days until we reached the range. We scaled a steep ridge, and in the glimmer of morning we saw the camp, a cluster of cogon huts at the bottom of a ravine. Trees covered the ridge and the narrow clearing from the air. The men were disappointed that we did not bring more medicines. They led me to the hut in the center, where they said their commander was. They called him, saying that Don Vicente’s son had come. The commander came out, a short, well-built man with a peasant’s simple, trusting face. His handshake was muscular and gnarled. Come in, Señorito, and make yourself at home in this humble dwelling, he said, grinning. His politeness irritated me. He was a leader of men whose reputation had spread well beyond Rosales. A hardened fighter, he had no reason to appear so meek. It was only afterward that I learned that he was not putting on a front, compared with the constabulary officers whom I had met. At one time (his men told me) he had a priest brought up to the hills because a spy whom he had ordered executed wanted the last sacraments. It was medicine that his men needed most. Malaria, typhoid, and dysentery had thinned their ranks, and they could not bring the sick down from the hills. I said that I didn’t see why they could not be brought down. At this his politeness vanished and he laughed aloud. He told a woman passing by with the day’s laundry to call someone in the nearby hut, and a one-armed man came. The man used to be a farmer, not a guerrilla, but a Japanese patrol had come upon him—and to the Japanese all those with malaria were guerrillas. They would have killed him had he not escaped. Wounded, he had fled to the hills to become a guerrilla.
I know, Father, that you did not want me to go to the hills again after that first trip, but I did go. I must tell you now that I went with my brother, Victor, and that when you thought I was in Rosales, in truth I was really with them for a few weeks. I saw them kill, but I was not appalled. In their company I was part of a wave. Without your knowing it I had forded rivers and stayed in mountain redoubts, where they made their own laws. It was a time for volcanic angers and it was a time for dreams, and Commander Victor dreamed that someday, when the killing was over, better times would come and he would go back to his farm.
Then peace came and I forgot Commander Victor. I returned to college, to cosmology and protoplasm, the reality and the activity of multiple beings and the place they occupied in the order of causality. I dozed through the devil’s rantings, metaphysics, and Father Aguirre’s Greek. My professors bored me. They had all shut themselves up in the drabness of their jobs, navigating in narrow circles. Each was placid and self-contained, mouthing dogmas and dieting on imagination. My classmates were of the same mongrel breed—rich, untouched by the war. If they were affected by war at all, they certainly bore no scars. I was the editor of the college paper, a job I relished in spite of the fact that I detested the restrictions imposed upon me by the invisible college censors, priests fastidiously occupied with word and symbol.
You returned to Rosales, too, to build the house that had been burned; you said you wanted to be closer to the land.
The war was over, and the last time I had seen Commander Victor was in Rosales. He was wearing an olive-gray GI fatigue, and he was with a group of nondescript men, drinking in one of the hole-in-the-wall bars that flourished after Liberation. He waved and cried—Señorito, I missed you!
I did not miss him. I had forgotten the men who killed—but not the killing. One morning I received a letter in pencil: “Dear Señorito, this shames me to the very core of my heart, but there is no one I can turn to but you. I need help, Señorito—money—and I hope you will not forsake me, as you never had in the past.” The mention of money sickened me, but I realized that he had quailed a lot to write to me. “I am not a recognized guerrilla. I received no back pay, nor have my men, but you recognized me and that is all that matters. My family is hungry. I cannot farm, because I have no carabao. My Garand and tommy gun were confiscated, but my automatic—if the worst comes and I won’t be able to pay—I’ll give it to you. It is the only valuable thing I have.”
I intended to send him a little sum, but somehow, with my schoolwork and other interests, I forgot about the letter. In the following week Santos came to inquire about my needs and to check the house to see if it needed repairs, and to pay some of your Manila taxes. We talked about Commander Victor—and of course Santos knew. Commander Victor is dead, he said. The constabulary had been investigating him for the things his men did during the war, and I would not be surprised if he was even investigated for killing the enemy. He was a poor man, and his wife, said Santos, had come to you to borrow money. You could not refuse, for it was for Commander Victor’s funeral. He had blown his brains out.
I can understand, Father, why you have been angered by the change that came upon Sipnget. Aren’t these the people you helped in their hour of need? But virtue—as the angels have always said—needs no reward, and if you are virtuous, your reward is not in this mundane world peopled by peasants.
I must now tell you what happened in college. You never asked me to explain, and I am grateful. In the press room that night, where I was closing the college paper, I junked my editorial and decided to tell the story of Commander Victor—his village, how he was delivered to his judges. If he was to survive, he had to use force, the same brute force with which he tilled the land. Wearied by his helplessness, by the weight of a future he could not carry, he surrendered his family to the brutality that he could not bear, and he ended his life with the same gun he had wielded to make secure the men who were his judges.
I justified, as I must now justify, the use of violence to secure justice—and self-destruction as the greatest virtue, for it is from death that we must rebuild.
I did not show the editorial to the college censors—not because I was afraid that they would blot it out but because there was just no time. I had done similar things in the past and received no adverse reaction from them. The following morning, however, the office clerk called me. The whole issue of the paper was being held in the office, and when I got there each news item, each article, poetry, and fiction was marked: Imprimatur, tribunal censorum. My editorial was crossed out in red pencil, and on it was: Donec Corrigatur, tribunal censorum. On my desk, too, were instructions to write another editorial or fill the editorial column with a news story.
It was more than I could bear. I did not go to school the whole day. The following morning, my associate editor came to the house and said that they were printing the paper on orders of the father rector and that I should go with him to the rector’s office, for they wanted to clear up the whole mess. I knew most of the priests quite well. I even learned my Spanish from them. I had no foreboding of what was to happen. They were waiting for me, seated before the large molave conference table in the rector’s office, looking solemn in their white cassocks. In the center of the table stood a black crucifix, and before the priests was a high-backed chair, which was apparently reserved for me. It was the Inquisition.
“Sit down, Mr. Asperri,” the rector said amiably. I took the chair and faced the priests—the rector with his double chin; the father dean, lean, ascetic; and the father moderator, his face burdened with a granite jaw.
“You understand, of course, why your editorial was censored,” the father moderator said. He was from the Basque, like you, although he was not Basque and his Spanish had that Catalan quality of resonance. “It was too strong, and besides, you were really stepping on territory quite alien to you. You know, Mr. Asperri, you have a lot of freedom because we knew you were responsible—but as said, this is now alien territory …”
“Truth is not alien to me, Father,” I said.
The father dean shook his head. He was a nice man, really, from Seville, and there were times during his lectures in aesthetics when he would close his eyes and be carried away by ideas, the transcendental beauty of faith. Now he was wide-eyed. “Let us not be academic,” he said, lisping, his yellowish and filmy eye
s probing into me.
It was, of course, useless arguing with them, for they were masters of logic and they led me through a maze, pummeled me, battered me, and humbled me. I said, “I know that you would push me into a corner, as you now have done, but I repeat, I am speaking of one who fought for this country when others who would have fought better did nothing. I felt that I had to do something in this life, which you said would determine the next. I knew in my conscience that it was not wrong.”
“You will continue disobeying rules, then?” The father rector leaned forward, all his superior equanimity gone.
“It is not a question of disobeying rules,” I said. “It is a question of belief.” The father moderator held his thick hand to his lips in mock despair, and the father dean shook the yellow pamphlet, the Rules of Discipline, saying, “You know that there is only one thing left to be done.”
I picked up the threat and said, “You may want to kick me out of the college, but you cannot do this, for when I did not come to school yesterday I had already quit school. I have come here as a matter of formality, to tell you about my decision.”
I bolted up, unmindful of their confused and inane protestations, and headed for the door, the sunshine and the free air. I stopped by the office and told my colleagues what I had done, and somehow, the next morning my story was in the papers. Trining came to the house, and in tears she shook her fists at me. One week later Mr. Dantes gave me a job.
I was, of course, worried about how you would react, you being almost wholly Spanish and quite close to the priests in whose hands you had entrusted me. However, you accepted my youthful rebellion, which, as you now know, was also directed against you. I wish it would be easy to attribute this to the phenomenon of growing up, in which we all kill our fathers in order that we may become men, but it is more than this. I will never really be able to accept the fact that as my father you could condemn me and yet expect me to carry on the function of an heir. The line has been broken. It was rent asunder when you denied my mother. I am now free from you, Father. I know this, for I can now damn you to your face.
And yet I do not really hate you or wish you harm. It is what you stand for that rankles—the privilege, the apathy, and the alienation from the people, including me, who have made possible your safe pinnacle. No, Father, you are not ten feet tall. If you can look down on us, it is only because you stand on a pile of carrion.
A part of me shriveled when I left college and still another when I read your letter. Our Time will go on, but I must leave it in order to appease power. I have finally made use of it, although not in the fashion you wanted, for now I have become free.
CHAPTER
32
When trining called up and told him of his father’s death he was saddened by it just the same. He expected himself to be indifferent to it, his final release from the encumbrances of the past. Before he received the news he had hoped that he could once more go home and face the old man and tell him what a dastardly act he had committed in condoning the fate of his mother and his grandfather. But now that the old man was dead, now that a heritage of land and power was his, he was touched by melancholy nonetheless.
“He asked for you, Luis,” Trining said between sobs. “He said that you should promise not to hate him—that if he had more to give to you, he would give it. He loved you, Luis, in his own way …”
Luis remembered how he had gazed at the flabby mass that was his father, his half-closed eyes that had lost their luster, the hands that no longer gestured or groped for the folds of the sheets. He remembered him prostrate on the high carved bed, his head never steady, as if he were in the midst of a nightmare. He had expected a note from him to return to Rosales, so that his father could explain everything, but no such letter arrived. He did receive letters from Trining, aside from the occasional phone calls, telling him that Don Vicente had bided his time, hoping, perhaps, waiting, perhaps, for his only son to yield to the compulsive call of blood, but not for the world could Luis have said: Father, in this moment when truth and forgiveness—and even love perhaps—are within easy power for us to release from the prisons of our dark, tormented minds, I come to you.
Luis did not go. The old man had lost.
Luis did not bother Eddie with the news. It was shock enough for Eddie that Dantes had announced Luis’s resignation. Shortly after the phone call from Rosales, Eddie visited him. It was early evening, and although he had nowhere else to go, Eddie did not want to linger. “I just dropped by to tell you that you need not worry about me anymore,” he said. “I have been given a new job by Dantes—just like you said. I said some things I should not have said.” He sounded very wretched. “I owe you many things, Luis. Do not think that I am disloyal—but I am poor, unlike you, and I need a job to eat—”
“You don’t have to apologize,” Luis said. He asked Eddie inside, for they had been talking on the porch, but Eddie drew back and, fidgeting, said, “I didn’t mean to stay long.”
“You can’t risk being seen with me anymore?”
“That’s not fair,” Eddie blurted out.
“It could be true, you know,” Luis said, “but don’t look so guilty and crestfallen because you are still working for Dantes.”
“I really must go—”
“Don’t,” Luis begged him. “I just got a phone call from my wife. I should regard it as good news.” He held Eddie and drew him up, and soon Eddie was his old self again. He immediately went to the bar and poured himself a Scotch.
“What is the good news?” he asked without interest.
“Father is dead,” Luis said simply.
“You should grieve.” Eddie was aghast.
“In a manner of speaking,” Luis said thoughtfully, “I am sad. I suppose I will miss him eventually.”
“Don’t speak lightly about death,” Eddie said. “They say that when a blight strikes it doesn’t come once. Remember what happened to Job? I am sorry, Luis—really very sorry.”
Luis said, “But this is what I wanted to tell you. Can’t you see? I’m now really on my own.”
Eddie shook his head. He had downed his drink, and he walked to the foyer. Luis wanted him to stay longer, but there was nothing more that they could talk about. “So, you see,” Luis told his friend as they went down the stairs, “I am an orphan now—and free.”
“No one is ever free from one’s self,” Eddie said dully. They had reached the landing, and the light shone on Eddie’s face.
“This is good-bye, then,” Luis said.
Eddie gripped his hand. “There is no good-bye between friends.”
Luis watched him walk down the driveway and disappear on the boulevard, where night had fallen. It was warm outside, but he did not yield to the temptation to walk over to the seawall. He bolted the gate and went up to the house.
In the morning he went to the gas station down the boulevard and bought a liter of gas for his empty tank. Then he washed the car; he had not worked with his hands in a long time, and he rediscovered the pleasure in it. He changed his wet clothes and tidied up the house, first sweeping the kitchen and ending up in the garden, where he piled up the dry acacia leaves and burned them. It was almost noon when he finished, and although his bones ached, he marveled at the satisfaction, the release from tension, that the work had given him.
From the library he picked out some books, Mayakovsky and Walt Whitman, Sartre and an anthology of Asian poetry. He arranged them in a trunk in the rear compartment of the car. He then disconnected the house main switch and locked all the windows and doors until it was stuffy and warm.
It was dusk when he reached Rosales. As he drove into the town the Angelus pealed, dirgelike, and some of the townspeople paused to pray. The massive gate opened, and he drove straight to the landing, where Simeon was waiting. He handed the keys to the driver and instructed him to leave in the morning for Manila. He hurried up to the hall filled with people, none of whom he recognized, and went straight to the bier at the other end, before the
statue of the farmer with a plow. He felt he had to see for himself. He stood between the tall brass candelabras before the elevated coffin, and his eyes wandered up the lacquered wood to the glass-encased viewplate. It seemed as if the man inside, obese and darkened by embalming fluid, was a stranger. Staring at the face of the corpse, Luis felt no sharp incision of grief. His father would have a mausoleum in the town cemetery—perhaps the biggest, the grandest. Santos must already have made arrangements. As for his grandfather, Luis was certain that the old man’s remains had been exhumed along with those of the rest and he would not even know where his grandfather was, in what unmarked and unremembered spot of land the old man had finally found the resting place he never had in life.
And his mother—where could she be now, that poor, deranged woman roaming the streets, sleeping on sidewalks, and seeking food in garbage cans? He imagined her on street corners in Manila, in rags, talking to herself, seeking Luis or Victor, carrying a bundle of old letters and clippings. How now would he look for her? If he did find her, would reason return, would she recognize him and say, My son, my son—or would she run away from him as one would from the reincarnation of evil, the spirits that abound in Sipnget and bring fevers to the young until they were appeased with offerings? This, too, was his father’s doing.
Forgive me, I cannot wail like the women. Everything that I have felt for you has become a festering wound whose pus, finding no escape, has gushed into my bloodstream and fouled my heart and transformed it into unfeeling rock. How can I cry, how can I rile the fact of death, the end of all tissues, diseased and sterile, when it is death alone that can erode the rock? I have not known the kind of love a father gives to his son. You have not held my hand, carried me on your shoulders, tousled my hair, or held me in your embrace, so I must not mourn you, Father, but the past, which I did not shape, since the present is decayed beyond redemption. If I mourn, it will not be for you but for a baby yet unborn, the days of darkness upon which it must crawl, the future that would wrinkle its face, so that long before the happy time, it would be ready for the grave. I mourn the dear ones who died at twilight, my kin in the wilderness firing at their kindred. I mourn for those who, like you, are great and indolent, seated in the safety and comfort of important offices. They are dead, Father, without knowing it—and for them there is no salvation. For these I grieve—but not for you. Forgive me, then, my father, forgive me.
Don Vicente Page 40
