Trining was resolute; she left several sandwiches for Santos and followed Luis toward the dike. The path that led to Sipnget was completely obliterated. The dying grass hid every trace of the old path. Even the clean straight lines that sled runners and bull-cart wheels had etched upon the dike had been wiped out. He held her hand as they went up. The sun was still soft and mild, and although they had both walked a considerable distance, they were still fresh, free from the ravages of heat and humidity. Once she stumbled as she stepped on a loose clod, but she quickly braced herself and, clinging to Luis, went up the dike. How thorough the destruction of Sipnget was! Not a single tree, acacia or palm, stood where the village used to be. The tractors of his father had done a tidy job—the furrows were immaculate and straight. They went down to the stubble field, and for Trining, the walk on the plowed earth was extremely difficult. There was no path to the river except through that brown serrated land. They reached the riverbank after great difficulty and looked down on the delta, silver and brown in gashes of sun. He turned around and saw how all the trunks of buri had been removed. There was no curtain of grass, no mound.
“I don’t know now where the grave was,” Luis said, admitting defeat. “God, it could have been anywhere here, even on this very spot where we are standing.”
She pressed his hand and did not speak. “Can we go back to Santos and ask him?” she asked after a while.
Luis smiled. “It was not he who wanted this land plowed,” he said. “No one but Father and his friends. Whoever worked here will not speak with us now.” He turned again to the river. “It is a fine day for a woman with child to go walking,” he said lightly. “Aguray lies beyond.”
They went down a gully choked with weeds and rotting banana trunks. In the soft sand of the riverbed they walked again hand in hand. The water was only ankle-deep in many places, but in a few weeks the rains would come in earnest and the water would rise, muddy-brown and swift, and it would no longer be possible to cross the river except by raft.
“Why should they stay there?” Trining asked. “Why don’t they come back to Sipnget or to any part of the hacienda, where you will let them farm?”
The sun was now warm, and Luis opened her umbrella and shielded her from it. “We stayed there once during the war,” Luis said. “It is quite inaccessible during the rainy season, when the river is flooded and portions of the delta become a swamp. Now that the delta is dry, so is Aguray. It is a kind of stopover, a temporary haven. I am sure that they are merely biding time, that when it becomes more propitious, they will come back.”
She paused, her brow glistening with sweat as the baby inside her stirred again and she grimaced with pain.
“Are you sure you want to go on?” he asked.
She smiled at him. “Yes,” she said. “We are here now. We must proceed.”
He led her to the shade of the tall grass and let her rest on a huge, smooth boulder. He took off her sneakers and rubbed her feet. She watched him, his devotion, and when he was through he took off his shoes, too, for now they would cross the river. He folded the cuffs of his pants and placed their shoes in the lunch basket.
The water was cool, a murmur over the pebbles. It rose no higher than their knees at the deepest, and they walked slowly, holding hands. He was afraid lest she stumble where the stones were mossy.
Her thoughts were far, far away. After a while she said, “Luis, I don’t know, but there’s just the two of us. We don’t need much, do we?”
“What are you thinking of?”
“If it is the land they want, don’t you think we can sell it to them cheap—or even give it to them in time? I know Tio would not do it if he were alive, but he is gone, Luis. We can leave Rosales, go to the city—anywhere you want to go, maybe America or Europe. You can write there, and I will look after you. Just us—I will love it that way.”
What he heard pleased him and he would readily have accepted her idea, but it suddenly occurred to him that he wanted to keep everything intact, that he wanted to play landlord, too, in a fashion different from his father’s. “It is not that easy,” he found himself saying. “Even charity is not that simple. It has to be administered with great responsibility. That means slow, hard work. It means surveys, seeing to it that the land is equitably divided and that it goes to the right people. It means the building of institutions that will replace us—perhaps some sort of bank for crop loans, or a lending agency to which the farmers can run when someone in the family gets sick or gets married. Also, someone has to teach them the basics of farm management—you know, all these things must be done professionally …”
She was looking at him intently, and when he paused she said, “It would be simple, Luis, if you really put your mind to it.”
“Yes,” he said. “It can be made simpler, but it means that we couldn’t get away. It means we will have to stay here—and work.”
“There are always problems coming up—like those clouds. It has been very warm. Do you think it will rain?”
He followed her gaze. The clouds were dark, and they stretched up the hollow curve of the sky. “If it does, it will do us good,” he said. He guided her to the shallows, and the water sloshed around their ankles and sang among the pebbles and the moss-covered boulders. As they went farther across, the water evened out and Trining did not bother lifting her skirt. Then they reached the other bank and walked barefoot on the sand, which had begun to warm. This was the first time he had come to Aguray since the war—and although the yearly monsoon blotted out the trails, new ones were always etched on the sandy loam at the beginning of the dry season and one whose sense of direction was as keen as the wind’s could not miss Aguray.
Now they came across the small clearings, watermelon and cucumber patches that seemed abandoned, for there were no signs that the thatched sheds at the fringes of the clearings were inhabited. Before noon they rested again in the shade of a lone acacia tree on the sandy plain. Trining opened the lunch basket. She had not forgotten her husband’s preference for salted eggs and tomatoes. They ate slowly. Trining held her belly once, pain beclouding her face, but only for a moment. She drank cold water from the thermos bottle, and soon she was fresh and ready for the walk that lay ahead.
At high noon Luis stopped and pointed to the far end of the wide delta, to the trees and the bamboo clumps that marked Aguray. “There, that’s where they should be,” Luis said.
They hurried on, past the thicker growths of grass that sprouted from the dunes, past many clearings planted to root crops and sweet potatoes, all of which were overgrown with weeds. It had become very warm, and Luis took off his shirt. Trining continually mopped her brow with her scarf, and although she tried courageously to keep in step with her husband, she started to lag behind and Luis had to walk slowly. “You cannot go farther,” he said, drawing her into the shade of another camachile tree before the riverbank. She was panting and pale, but she smiled wordlessly. He smothered the grass in the shade, and spreading his damp shirt on it, he bade her sit. She did not want to but he was firm, so she sat down slowly, holding her belly. All around them the grass was tall, ready to burst into white plumed flowers. A cloud of dragonflies hovered over them, the gauzy wings glinting like specks of silver against the sky. He let her rest until her breathing was easy again, then he helped her up and they walked down the sandy bar, up the gully that led to Aguray.
During the war Victor and he used to go to the village and feel secure—but only during the rainy season, when the river was full and Aguray itself was isolated. There were so many small islands of sandy loam there, each with its own moat, and one could not easily cross the waters and navigate unless one came from the place and knew each of the waterways, for every year these changed, depending on the way the current moved.
He ran up the riverbank, which was a low incline, and looked down at the Aguray that he knew. This was the haven that he and Vic and Commander Victor had known—but if Sipnget was now gone, so too, was Aguray. There was not a si
ngle house in the sandy wasteland. He raced down the path, which was still unclaimed by grass, and he came across yards where thatched houses once stood, where people used to gather in the early evenings. Nothing was there now. He turned to his wife, who had followed him, and tears scalded his eyes as he said, “You can see for yourself—they were hounded even here.”
“It is not true!” she cried. “There must be a way we can find where they are! They cannot vanish like smoke. Santos—he would really know. He keeps that ledger. The soldiers, the policemen in town … You are the hacendero now. They must respect you and give you what you want.” The words poured out of her in a torrent.
“Trining,” he told her softly, holding her by the shoulder, “no one can help us. This was their last refuge, and they had no cause for leaving it. I do not think even Santos knows where they have gone.”
He turned to the hills at his left, the rugged bluffs that loomed so near although they were kilometers away. “There’s only one place they could have gone to, and we cannot follow them there.”
“We can!” she cried. “If you want to—and I want to—we can follow them wherever they have gone to.” She freed herself and walked away, her steps rigid and straight, as if in a trance, then she broke into a run for the river and Sipnget. He called to her to stop, and when she did not he sprinted after her. Catching her, he held her quivering body close to his, sought her warm, pained face, and kissed her—her lips, her damp nose, her eyes, her hot, salty tears—and when she tried to break away again, he pinioned her arms until her struggling ceased and she started to moan and the sound that came from her was the anguished cry of a wounded animal. “She is my mother, too. Isn’t it so, Luis? And I have not even seen her and presented myself to her. I want to thank her, my dear husband, for bringing to this world the person I love …”
He slipped an arm around her formless waist and let her cry. When she quieted down he led her back to the river. He picked up the empty lunch basket, the scarf, and the umbrella that she had left at the bottom of the gully, and shielded her from the hot westering sun.
They were on the riverbed again. The sun was hidden now behind an ominous mass of clouds that spread out across the sky. “It’s going to rain—if the wind does not blow those clouds away,” he said. She looked up at a sky that had darkened. Soon it would be June, and if the rains came on time, there would be grasshoppers on the wing, mushrooms in the bamboo groves, and spiders in the bushes at dusk. If it rained on time, the seed would also sprout on time, and somewhere in this vast and blighted land, unmarked by a cross or hedge or man’s lament, lay his kin—and somewhere, too, his mother would be walking, searching …
“I don’t care anymore whether or not it will rain,” Trining said in a strained voice. “I just don’t care anymore.”
CHAPTER
34
Rain fell the following afternoon, preceded by incessant thunder. The four o’clock whistle at the rice mill had not yet blown, but the shower hid the sun completely and it seemed as if dusk had come. Luis had not closed the windows in their room, and the gusts had made a wide wet gash on the floor. He dragged the high-backed narra chair across the floor and set it by the window. With a towel he mopped up the water on the sill. He flung the towel to a corner, where the maids would pick it up, together with his soiled clothes. He took a bedsheet, and wrapping it around his shoulders, he sat by the window and gazed at the town raked by mist and wind. He hoped that he could write, and he had a bookcase carried in from the library. In it were most of the books he had brought home from his city shelves. He found out, however, much to his discomfiture, that running the farm, along with the host of other responsibilities that he had inherited from his father, was turning him into a drudge involved not just in looking at figures but also in dealing in a very personal way with tenants, overseers, and even some of the townspeople and officials themselves. The first few days after his father’s burial were spent in meeting people, in trying to remember faces and first names, the way his father did. Even the smallest decisions were left to him; making them was what his father did, and this was not entrusted to the lawyer, the accountant, or Santos. This fact impressed upon him how authoritarian his father had been and how, therefore, his father must have been responsible for what had befallen Sipnget.
No new desires moved Luis in his new position, and the mind that had prowled the past terrain of anger and of remorse and dwelt briefly on those few moments of happiness with Ester could not find a moment of inspiration. He was a fugitive in the silence of his house. The time he now had on his hands was not time at all, for the essence of life eluded him and what he wrote was no more than a jumble of phrases, a few typewritten pages, verbose, clumsy, clipped together, or crumpled into little balls in the mesh wastebasket near his desk.
The dry season was not really over. Beyond the wet sweep of the azotea, the wide garden with its azucena pots was starting to sink in a flood. Beyond the pall of rain the adobe walls and the wide asphalt ribbon had acquired a polish and the neighborhood children had rushed out, naked, and were running up and down, shouting, holding their faces to the sky taut with storm. Some of them climbed the short banaba trees that lined the street, all the way down to where the gray-green hulk of the municipio stood; they plucked twigs off the trees, which they shook at one another. It was wonderful to be young and splashing in the rain. In Luis’s mind he raced with the children, and he felt the slosh of the rain on his bare feet and the tingling drops on his skin. But this season of fresh green would not last—the rain would pock the plaza, and there would be muddy craters where the pigs would wallow. The weeds would grow everywhere, and the green would acquire a dirty hue.
He did not see his wife come in. He became aware of her only when she sat on the broad arm of his chair and rested a shaky elbow on his shoulder, her breath warm on his cheek. “You will never make a good housekeeper,” she chided him. “Look at the floor—it is all wet. And your things piled up there. And all that waste paper. You forgot to close the window again.”
“I was asleep,” he said, his eyes still on the children on the asphalt, who had started playing leapfrog. “Besides, I want it open.”
“Aren’t you cold?”
“You see I have a blanket about me.”
She brought her swollen body closer to him. “I thought you might want to be more comfortable.” She was soft and warm, her breast against his arm, a strand of hair across his cheek. “I am having some coffee brought in. You should go out. Do not confine yourself so much in this room. You will end up being a monk if you don’t watch out.”
He leaned on the sill. “Must you recite the things you do for me? Must you always be giving me advice?”
Her hand was cool on his nape. “Please do not be vexed with me,” she said. “I just cannot bear seeing you like this—an hour or two in the office below and the rest of the day here. Do you want to go to the sea? To the beach in Dagupan? Or to Baguio for the weekend? Or do you want to see the latest movie in Manila? Whatever you say, but please do not shut yourself up here. This was just what Tio did.”
“You don’t have to tell me that. I know.”
“You used to wake up early—in Manila—and stroll down the boulevard, and at dusk you would walk to the Luneta. This is not a time for walking, but tomorrow, if the sun comes out, we will go for a walk. I need it. We can follow the dike, and as you used to do, we may be able to get some saluyot for lunch.”
“No, Trining,” he said, “what I want is peace.” Rain lashed the ditches; the huge leaves of the lilies in the garden trembled, and gusts of wind swept the media agua.
“You will get wet here,” she said, tugging at his pajama sleeve.
“The worst that can happen is for me to catch pneumonia,” he said.
“You do not appreciate the fact that I care,” she said bitterly.
“But I do,” he assured her, trying to hide his irritation, “but I need time for myself.”
“It is not time for yourself
that you really want,” Trining said, bending so low that her cheek brushed his. “You are looking for something you will not find. After that trip to Aguray, Luis, I have come to accept it—that we cannot find them. There are things that we must accept because we have no choice.”
“You are beginning to sound like Father,” he said.
“I am only trying to help. Aren’t you glad?”
“God, I’m glad,” he said. “I am glad for the food you stuff me with, but do not pamper me. I can leave today if it will make things easier for you. I can return to Manila or go back to Sipnget and start building again. Perhaps that is the best way. You know, I married you so that our house and our landholdings wouldn’t fall into other hands. With me out of the way, you can have it all.”
She stepped away, staring at him, her lips quivering. “Luis, how horrible can you get! Is that the reason—the only reason?” She was frightened. “Please let us not quarrel. If you want me to stay away, I will—but don’t say these things. Do you really mean them? Then why didn’t you tell me before?”
The outburst had left him shaky but elated somehow. Now he was calm. “I’m sorry, Trining,” he said quietly. “I am not myself anymore. I cannot think straight anymore. Please leave me alone.”
She stood before him, speechless, then turned and walked out of the room. As the door closed after her, the cold, hostile silence came back, stronger than the rain. He went to the bed and lay down. If anybody could give him comfort, it was his wife, and yet he was shutting her off, hurting her. There must be something bestial and satanic in me to make me hurt like a sadist those closest to me. Ester, and now Trining. He rose quickly and called out, “Trining! Trining!” When she did not answer he went to his old room, to the kitchen, then to his father’s room. She was not in any of the rooms. One last place—the library. He flung the door open, and there she was, on the couch, her eyes wet with tears, her faced contorted with pain.
Don Vicente Page 42
