Don Vicente

by F. Sionil Jose

  “I’m sorry, my darling,” he said, bending low. “Have I hurt you?” She nodded but smiled, then kissed him. “I am in pain, Luis. I think I’m going to have the baby soon. This is a different kind of pain I’m feeling now.”

  He rushed out of the room, called for Santos, and told him to get Trining’s doctor. When he got back she had wiped her face. Although her eyes were red, she was smiling. “It doesn’t happen that fast,” she said. “The pain comes in several intervals. Maybe I should go to the provincial hospital or leave for Manila, whichever you think is best.”

  When a woman gives birth, he remembered the saying clearly, one foot is in the grave. Why did he not even have the decency to be more attentive to her in this time of need? “You are all I have now,” he said, “and I have not been a good husband to you during the last few days. Forgive me.”

  “There is nothing to forgive,” she said.

  He held her hand. “I have committed many crimes—I mustn’t commit one more. I cannot go around sending to perdition those whom I love.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” she said, trying to rise from the couch, but he restrained her.

  “It is true,” he said sadly. “Ester, I have a feeling I was the cause of it all. Before she did it—the last night she was alive—she was with me. I feel responsible, for I could have stopped her. I don’t know why she did it—I can only suspect. She did not expect us to get married, Trining, and she loved me. Please do not be angry now, but I think she killed herself because there was no future for us, or because she—she was pregnant, because she was carrying my baby. I cannot be sure. I can never be sure …”

  Trining closed her eyes and shook her head vehemently. “Stop telling me. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear it!”

  “I am sorry,” he said, “but it’s better this way. You will get to understand me better, know what I am. I feel that I hurried Father, too, to his grave, that I did not help Mother and Grandfather. Now I am also hurting you. God, I don’t want to hurt you!”

  “Then stop talking. Stop talking about Ester!”

  “It was not love, Trining,” he said. “I didn’t promise her anything. I could have promised her something from the beginning. You were the first girl whom I asked to marry me. With Ester it wasn’t love, it was something else.”

  She half sat and covered his mouth with her hand. “Don’t talk anymore,” she begged him.

  “All right,” he said, shaking his head. “I am like rust. I destroy everything I cling to. The dog in the street that bites its master’s hand might be forgiven, but not me.”

  She swung down from the couch and stood before him. “You won’t leave me?” she asked. “No matter what, you will not leave me?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I just want to know how long you will be needing me. It will not be forever. If you say so, you are lying. You don’t have to put up appearances, not with me. I will just assume that someday you will leave me. Luis—that I won’t be able to stand!”

  The light from the open window grew dimmer; the steady thrum of rain presaged high waters. He rose and embraced her awkwardly, for her belly stood in the way.

  “Don’t promise me anything,” she said.

  “I love you. You will be the mother of my child.”

  “You don’t have to kill me if you don’t want me anymore. I will leave you in my own way—and it will be forever, too.”

  He bit his lower lip, kissed her, and drew away. All my life I have made no sacrifice. I have never given up even one fingernail. All my life people have shown me the truest measure of their devotion. Love—if to love is to be willing to be used, then I do not know love. Nothing throbs here within, not a heart, only a cold and mechanical pump.

  “No, I will never leave you,” he said, but he knew he was not telling the truth.

  Dr. Reyes, who owned the small hospital in the town, was shivering when he arrived. He was the town’s best doctor, and although he was short and lean, there was energy and skill in his meager frame. “It is not yet your time, Trining,” he said as he entered their room and brought out his instruments. He was very casual about it all. “The blood pressure is normal, respiration is normal—but the pain, how long are the intervals? More than thirty minutes? But this is so soon—you are not due until about six weeks from now or thereabouts. Did you exert yourself? Did anything excite you? This could be a premature birth, you know, but thank God, we now have good hospitals.”

  “No,” she lied, not looking at her husband. “Nothing exciting has happened, but I did go for a long walk last week.”

  It was not necessary, said Dr. Reyes, that they go to the hospital immediately, but Luis was insistent.

  “Well,” the doctor said, “I wish I could say that my clinic is good, which it is, but really, if we are going to any hospital at all, we might just as well go to Dagupan. It has one of the best in the north. There is a very good obstetrical staff there, and it has the latest instruments. I don’t want to take any risks.”

  Santos drove them in the Chrysler. The rain was coming faster; it covered the land completely, and at times Santos had to switch his headlights on. There were ruts in many portions of the provincial road, and each bump was mirrored in Trining’s twitching face.

  By the time they got to Dagupan, it was already night, the streetlights were on, and the rain had diminished to a drizzle. One foot in the grave—and he had settled for the provincial hospital when it should have been that specialists’ hospital in Manila, with its array of the country’s best doctors, anesthesiologists, and pathologists. It was a consolation that Dr. Reyes had assured him that although it would be a premature birth, he expected the delivery to be quite normal. Trining was as healthy as a cow, he had whispered to him.

  He got a suite and a couple of private nurses to take care of Trining as her pain progressed. She did not deliver on that day or the next but on the third day, after Dr. Reyes and his team had finally decided that she needed a cesarian section. Luis followed her to the operating room. He would have watched it all had he not felt sickened. He had to go back to the suite, a wad of cotton drenched with ammonia clasped to his nose as he felt nausea coming.

  He did not faint. He sat through the two hours, and when it was over and Trining was wheeled unconscious to the recovery room he rushed to Dr. Reyes.

  “I am no surgeon”—the doctor’s face was grim—“so I merely assisted, but the surgeon we had, as you very well know, is one of the best. We did all that could be done. Trining is safe—she will be recovering in a few days, and then she can go home.”

  “Why did she have to go through surgery?” Luis asked. It was a foolish question. It had been explained to him earlier when he signed the paper stating that he was permitting a surgery. If it had not been done, her pains would not have ceased, the baby would not have been born, and the mother would have died.

  “She is all right,” Dr. Reyes repeated, “but we had to remove her uterus. You know, this means she cannot have another baby. Her ovaries are intact, so there will not be much hormonal change, but babies—that’s out of the question now.”

  “And the baby—is it a boy or a girl?”

  Dr. Reyes could not speak. The grimness of his face deepened. He beckoned to the new father to sit with him on one of the long sofas near the lobby. There, quietly, the doctor told him what had to be said.

  When the doctor had finished, what stuck in Luis’s mind were his words: “It will require courage to look at the baby—and more courage to accept him.” Courage! If only his father were here now, he would perhaps curse heaven. It was not possible that he who had everything, who had worked so hard to leave his name upon the land, must now himself be blighted. Perhaps it all started with him, his genes diluted with sin. It is not I, it is not my fault or Trining’s, Luis assured himself; it is not I, it is not I.

  But it was he who had planted the seed that had brought forth this thing that Trining would have to see, too, and have the courage
to accept.

  CHAPTER

  35

  When she regained consciousness her first words were, “How is my baby?” Her breath still smelled faintly of anesthesia. She had lost blood, and although she had been given a transfusion, she had the pallor of the sickroom.

  “It’s a boy,” he whispered, kissing her, “and he is well, but you cannot see him—he is in the incubator. He is such a tiny creature. The doctors say he may have to be brought to Manila within the week for special care. They don’t have the facilities here for him.” He was carefully preparing the ground for the fact that he did not want her to see the child. She smiled at him and pressed his hand. “You will be all right,” he continued. “They had to cut you up. They had to remove your uterus, and you won’t be able to have any more babies, but that was the only way you could be saved.”

  “Oh, Luis,” she broke into a sob, “and I wanted to give you a dozen children!”

  He stroked her brow until she quieted down. He had carefully instructed the people who were taking care of her never to mention the baby to her or let her see it.

  After two weeks, when she was finally able to move, he brought her back to Rosales together with two nurses. They placed a bed for Luis in the library so that Trining could occupy their room alone until she was well. It was only Santos and the two nurses who knew about the baby, and Luis had instructed them to keep their mouths shut, not only before Trining but also before everyone else.

  Returning to his chores fatigued him. There were decisions to make—the introduction of fertilizers in certain areas around the hacienda, the purchase of four new tractors, and the setting up of the first cooperative, which he had planned. Above all, the anxiety of watching over Trining, of seeing to it that she would not know. After supper, which he took alone in the dining room, he went to her. She was propped up on a stack of pillows and was reading the Manila papers that had piled up. Her complexion had improved. Color was returning to her cheeks, and her eyes were warm again. He kissed her passionately and whispered, “I can hardly wait—but it will have to take a month, I think.”

  She pinched him and called him a dirty old man. He kissed her again on the brow, this time tenderly, and said that he was sleepy and must rest. He closed the door of their room and crossed the hall to the library, where his bed was made. The moment he lay down, without even putting on his pajamas, he fell asleep.

  He woke up at about midnight—that was what the clock on the wall above the writing desk said—and the first thing he was conscious of was that he was not alone in the room. The lamps were on and the light etched everything clearly—the writing table, with his typewriter on it, the bowl of chicos and bananas, and the thermos jug with coffee. Seated before him, at his right, was Vic—lean and dark and serious of mien, looking intently at him.

  Startled, he spoke hoarsely: “Vic, how did you get here?”

  His brother simply smiled. “I have been waiting for over an hour, and I have finished reading most of your magazines,” he said, “but I did not wake you up, although I switched on the light so that I could read.”

  “But how did you get here?” Luis was incredulous. He sat up and groped for his slipper. “You must not stay here another moment—and you know why. You are a wanted man, and just across the street are soldiers.”

  Vic shrugged. He stood up and peeled a banana. “I am safe here,” he said. “Isn’t this your house, Manong?”

  Luis went to the door and bolted it.

  “I assure you I am safe,” Vic said. Then, thoughtfully: “But I must ask you and your wife to leave as soon as you can, tomorrow morning if it can be done. Go back to Manila and stay there. I don’t know how you will do it, but give the land back to the people. Of what use is it really to you?”

  “So this is what you came for—to make a pauper of me,” Luis said.

  Vic shook his head. He had grown thinner and older since Luis last saw him. His clothes were the same decrepit gray trousers and colorless shirt. “Make a pauper out of you? Do you know how I live? Many times we have nothing to eat but green papayas, guavas, sometimes no salt, and our stomachs are full of sourness. We are bitten by leeches and mosquitoes, and some have malaria. But we are not bitter. How can you be a pauper? You will never be one.”

  “Why do you want us to leave?”

  “Because you are my brother,” Vic said, “and I don’t want you to be like Grandfather—or Mother.”

  “Do you know where she is?” he asked shrilly. “I went to Aguray—my wife and I, searching.”

  “I searched for her, too,” Vic said, “in the villages and in the hills. She had been there and people saw her, but I was always too late. She must have gone to Manila. How can we find her there? You can move more freely than I. I can easily find her in the places I know—if she is there—but in the city …”

  Luis sat silent and helpless. “I did what I could, Vic. I am a writer—and I wrote. I was eased out of my job, you probably know that, but do you know how it happened? Who did it?”

  Vic said simply, “Don’t worry. Justice will be done, I swear. God,” he muttered, “if You are here, then You are my witness. I have sworn it!”

  “Why do you come like a ghost?” Luis said after a while. “Why should you still care whether I am alive or not?”

  “There is one thing we have in common,” Vic said. “We have the same mother.”

  “Yet,” Luis said evenly, “you really do not care; you would rather see me dead, so that it would be easier for you. If you only had one hour to spend in my place, you will realize that what you want is not that simple. I agree with you that the land must go to the people who farm it—but how will they progress without someone like me to give them money when they need it? Why must they spend so much on fiestas when it is unnecessary? Who will sell their products? Who will teach them about farm management, fertilizers, and crop rotation? These problems cannot be solved with guns.”

  “Excuses,” Vic said coldly. “I could kill you now if I had the hatred to do it, but what would that do for us? My enemy is larger than you and all your grandiose plans, which made it possible for your father and you to be what you are and for us—our mother and myself and all the people of Sipnget—to be what we are.”

  “It is history you want to destroy, then,” Luis said. “You cannot destroy what you have not created—and the past is bigger than any of us.”

  “We make our fate,” Vic said with a laugh. “Did you not make yours? And all the time you ran away. In the war you were safe in the city and no one could touch you.”

  “I had difficult times, too,” Luis said, “and I was with you, too, though briefly.”

  “Excursions,” Vic said contemptuously. “That was what they were—you were having fun. It was life or death for us. We were hounded like dogs then. It is the same now, only the hunters are no longer Japanese but our own brothers. I am alive, maybe because I ran, but we will not run anymore. Now we have to kill.”

  “How easily you say it,” Luis said. “Is it all that necessary? The world is changing, and what really is a few decades in history? The wealthy that you rail against—they will disappear in time. Look at me, Vic. I work—I am not really all that interested in the land Father has passed on to me. You are welcome to as much of it as you want. The wealthy who do not work will be replaced by young ones who have brains, whether they come from the lower class or from the middle class. It is really a cycle—that’s a very good Buddhist symbol.”

  “I only know that this is my time,” Vic said with conviction, “and I know that it is wretched.”

  “There will always be the poor among us,” Luis said, and remembered what Dantes had said: “The Communists have not abolished poverty. In fact you can say that the Scandinavians and the Americans have done a better job of that. And the poor sometimes get to love their chains.”

  “That is what we are here for,” Vic said. “To break the chains for them.”

  “The chains will be broken when the time com
es—not by you,” Luis said. “Look around you. The changes are coming. You cannot tell hundreds of talented young people that they cannot use their talents. They will.”

  “Talent is not enough,” Vic said. “They are not men of the future. It is the new men who will bring change, and their future is not in America but here. Did you ever think about the foul legends that our generation has fed on—that when God created the world and was fatigued by His labors He sat down to shit, and this shit is this group of islands? This is just one of the myths that we will destroy. I will forget the past; no, more than this, we will destroy this past, whatever the Spaniards and the Americans left, whatever they planted in your minds. We will do this—start anew, from a clean and empty sheet. We will write what the future should be. This is necessary, and urgent, for we cannot build until we have destroyed this past. Can you not see? It taunts us with its false promises, it corrupts us with its evils—”

  “And I will quote to you an old Ilokano saying,” Luis said. “He who does not know where he came from cannot know where he is going.”

  “But I know! I know!” Vic said, his voice rising with emotion. “If I did not know, how would I know what to destroy? How would I know my enemies?”

  “Enemies?” Luis asked. “Who are your enemies really, Vic? Across the street, in the schoolhouse, are soldiers. They are farm boys. Their parents could be like those in Sipnget, and they are just as poor. Do you want to kill your own kin?”

  “Do you think I like it?” Vic asked. “ ‘Any man’s death is also mine’—you have quoted that idea to me before. How can I forget that the soldiers we fight could have come from Sipnget? But they are not people—they are instruments of the rich.”