Don Vicente

by F. Sionil Jose

  “How facile you have become with words,” Luis said.

  “No, Manong,” Vic said. “It is you who are good with words. You are the poet, but sometimes I wonder if you really have a purpose, if your poetry is worth anything at all. You have a wonderful home and friends who appreciate your talent, but you grow fat, you grow old, and soon you will discover that you are nothing but skin and bones. What is the reason for your poetry?”

  Luis said sincerely, “I do not know. As a matter of fact, I don’t even know why God created us. We are very poor likenesses of Him, you know.”

  “I did not know that words—and you are a master of them—had sharpness and poison. With words you have also killed perhaps, although more slowly and more painfully. With us it is the body that dies, it is the body that will kill—faster and therefore more kindly,” Vic said.

  Words, words! Luis felt a cold rage rising in him. “You cannot take words and isolate them any more than you can say that you have killed a man and destroyed an instrument. This is reducing man to an object—and you are more than that.”

  “Yes,” Vic said. “I know I am more than an object, but in this process I am just an instrument, too. Therefore I must be useful—and I will be useful not only to myself but also to thousands like me, who may never get the opportunities you have.”

  “You are also my brother,” Luis said sadly, the anger ebbing out of him. “You are the boy I grew up with, who swam the Agno with me, the friend who gathered camachile along dusty streets, caught frogs in the cracks of the rice fields. You are not mindless, you are not heartless, you are not a machine.”

  “Manong, my brother, how beautifully you express yourself. But when you left Sipnget, when you left Mother, you left her forever. You were the son who was loved, because you needed love, and we loved you, but this love has not been returned. You know it and only you can explain to yourself why this has been so. I realized this when I saw you last time. I had come to ask that this love that you said you had be expressed in sacrifice. But you were incapable of sacrifice. If hate is strong, all the more should love be. My coming here shows this. It is in memory of our boyhood that I come here, wanting you and your wife to live. You cannot ask from me anything more. I have nothing else to give.” Vic was silent and transfixed before Luis—and tears were streaming down his dark, sunburned face.

  Luis embraced him. “My brother, my executioner,” he whispered.

  Vic pushed him away and without another word walked to the door. Luis did not follow him. He did not see where his brother disappeared.

  He did not know who guided him out of his fortress. When he sank into his bed a thought coursed through him like ice: all these years he had always felt himself superior to his brother, maybe because he had more education and had seen more of that broader landscape extending beyond Sipnget, and what he had seen and experienced had imbued him with more knowledge, more sensibility. He was, after all, a poet, and he could be really capable of love that was not love of self but love of life—and therefore of death—so that he should be able to give himself to death’s embrace and mock that which is also the end. He knew now, however, that this was not so, that this was self-deception instead, and that, as his brother had said, he was incapable of sacrifice. And the poetry that he had written—which could hardly be understood even by those with facility in English—of what use was it? Of what use was life? He had believed that he had simplicity, but now he knew that he was obscure instead, not because he did not know what he was saying but because his own feelings were inchoate and therefore devoid of real passion. What, then, was in his arteries?

  He breathed heavily. The house was quiet, but the silence was that of a sepulchre. The whole world was quiet. There was no one awake but him, and for the first time in many days his thinking was clear.

  CHAPTER

  36

  My Brother,

  When I saw you tonight, when in a moment of truth you came to me with a profession of love, my deepest regret was that I had none to give. You said that you had none, either, but you did give me something—you affirmed what I had always known to be the greatest manifestation of love or hate—and that is the willingness to lose the physical self. More than this loss, however, is the total commitment of the mind to an end that gives no glory, no reward, no immortality.

  My brother, you will be reborn, even before you meet Him who is our last arbiter. I know this, for you—not I—are the new whom we have all been seeking. I have often wondered about the shape and color of this new man, this archangel, this man whom we have sought to be the ultimate modernizer. Now I know what he looks like. He may think of himself as a machine or as a weapon, but I know that he is much, much more than this—he is a spigot of true blood and a coil of complex nerves, and although he may regard his life with some contempt, the truth is that he gives values, far more than I can adorn mine with the hypnosis of words. He is the poet, not I.

  Words—these are the jewels that I must polish. I must now try to answer as truthfully as I can, at least to myself, without having to justify myself, the question of what I have done with words—of what use is poetry, of what use is art.

  I will not now try to be as obscure as Ester—whom you will probably agree with—once said I was. In fact I would like to think that poetry or art is the most luminous, the most lucid, of all forms of communication, for it goes straight not to the mind but to the heart. I would be at a loss, however, to describe how the process comes about—and because the process sometimes defines the nature and uses of art, you must forgive me if I find no real explanation for the uses of art.

  What I can tell you is what it is against. It is opposed to the debasement of the human spirit. It is against anything that brutalizes, primarily because it is an affirmation of life—and anything that brutalizes denies life. How simple it would be for me to say now that art is life—not death—and that art, with all its inanities, its obscurity and its lack of purpose is, perhaps, like you, the ultimate conqueror of death.

  This, I think, is what I have tried to do—to create, for myself at least, something that could make me more than what I am, coward and weakling, a man who has forsaken his past and his loved ones, a man who has lived on hate as I know my kind of hate and yet must learn how to live, if only to assure himself that he is an artist.

  I think that I am, as usual, flattering myself again, thinking of myself as a creator, equipped with the finest sensibilities, and therefore special. How I would like to call myself a new man—but I know that I am not and that by your light I will never be really committed to life in such a way that I can vanquish death in the manner in which you have flung yourself completely toward its defeat. It is you then, my fearsome executioner, who is the artist, the rebel and creator, for it is you who will make beauty out of the ugliness that pervades our lives, out of the dung heap that surrounds us.

  As for me, there is no single shred of doubt in my mind as to the future that I face, a future that I will have no hand in shaping in the way that you have. My mundane task is to survive—and to survive I must stay away from the turmoil of conflict and the putrefaction of despair. My sight is limited. I look around me and see the vastness of a landscape that has been charred into ruins. I see nothing but the rubble of dreams, and I am puny and weak, and I cannot do anything but quiet this helpless rage and remember that I no longer belong.

  In spite of this I will try to live with my concept of honor, to accept the limits of what I can endure. If I am driven forward, inch by inch toward the grave, it is by compulsion and it is only with death that the tyrant within can be vanquished.

  God, I am afraid. I would like to think that I can be brave as in the harsh physical sense I was once brave. I have seen death and laughed at its ugly face, but I have not really conquered him, for in the end he will triumph and he knows it.

  But my death has happened and it has been swift and even sweet, for it has been administered with grace, with love—not hate. Good-bye, my brother.
r />   CHAPTER

  37

  The loud metallic clatter of vehicles and the shouts that rocketed up to the house from the school yard where the soldiers were camped woke Luis up from a dreamless sleep and made him aware that something important was happening. Somehow, Vic’s nocturnal visit seemed unreal, but the letter, which he had written in longhand, staring at him from his writing table, brought him back to the reality of Rosales, to Vic’s admonition that they must now leave. The air was ominous, and although the morning was bright and the day was alive, a sense of foreboding knotted his chest. He went to the room where his wife was. She was already awake, and the nurse was giving her breakfast—tomato juice, eggs, rice, and a thick slice of ham. Every night she was given sleeping pills, so that she never woke up until morning and had not had one listless night since her return from the hospital.

  “You slept well?” she asked, her eyes shining. He nodded absentmindedly and took a sip from her coffee. He sat beside her at the small table, and his hand went up slowly from her flanks to her breast. She nudged at him, implying discretion, for the nurse was in the room, although her back was turned to them.

  “You can sleep with me tonight, Luis, if you wish. It gets cold, and I need you to keep me warm. I am better now and won’t need any more injections.”

  “Except one,” he whispered in her ear; she quickly pinched him as she whispered back, “Not for another two weeks. Do you want me to go back to the hospital?”

  The nurse left them discreetly, and as soon as she was gone Luis said, “The soldiers are leaving. They are taking everything with them, even the tin tubs where they store the mush. I don’t think they’re coming back.”

  They walked to the window. In the rain-washed morning the soldiers were loading their bedding and tents into the six-by-sixes lined up in front of the schoolhouse. The trucks were already bursting with equipment, but the loading seemed but half finished. Two officers in sweat-drenched khaki were shouting orders at the men in battle greens, weighed down with bandoliers and ammunition cases, which they balanced on their heads. People were gathered around the trucks. Food vendors were cornering some of the soldiers poring over lists and arguing about debts.

  The first two trucks were filled with nondescript crates, and the families of the soldiers—mothers suckling babies, kids too young to understand what was going on—moved to the rear, and a jeep and an armored car with its mounted fifty-caliber machine gun advanced to take their place. Some of the shacks beyond the schoolhouse, which the soldiers’ families had occupied, were torn down and all salvageable materials—tin sheets and wooden sidings—had been loaded into the vehicles.

  They are leaving us, Luis mused darkly, and I will never know who among them destroyed Sipnget.

  He turned away from the window. “Why do you think they’re leaving?” Trining asked, tugging at his hand.

  “They’re in a hurry, so they must have been called to a place where they are needed more.”

  She was looking intently at him. “And with them no longer here, who will protect us?”

  He wanted to tell her of Vic’s visit, but he had never told her much about his brother except that he was intelligent and continually asking questions and that he wished Vic could have gone to college. It was now clear that Vic had really come to warn him, not just to continue the old harangue. Somehow, in the recesses of his mind, no matter what happened, he would be secure; for all the truculence of Vic’s rhetoric and the oppressive tension that pervaded the plain, he was convinced that he was no enemy.

  “Surely you don’t believe all those stories about the Huks. I would be more worried about the constabulary and the civilian guards. Look what they did to Sipnget.”

  “Don’t the papers tell the truth?” Trining asked. “Look at the stories about Santa Cruz, San Nicolas—the Huk massacres in the Army camps they attacked. And San Nicolas is only twenty kilometers away.”

  “Twenty-three,” he corrected her.

  She stood up and went to the window again. “We should get out of this place, Luis,” she said heavily. “I see no future here, nothing but days we cannot call our own. If we go back to the city, we can lose ourselves, and my baby will have better care, not like in the provincial hospital where we left him.” She turned to Luis. “Why can I not see him? Is he so shriveled and ugly—that is what premature babies are supposed to be—that I may lose all composure upon seeing him?”

  For a moment Luis was taken aback and did not know what to say. Then he surmised that the nurses must have been telling her things, hinting. “What did the nurses tell you?”

  “Nothing,” she said, “except that premature babies look ugly sometimes and they never really put on flesh and their skin never really stretches until they are nine or ten months—and that’s a pretty long wait, isn’t it? And look at the milk in my breasts that should go to him, poor thing.”

  “He is being taken care of properly—”

  “We should really get out of Rosales.” She was determined. “I’m afraid for you and what could happen here. We can rent a small house and sell the house on Dewey—even this house, if it has to be that way. Both are too big for us, anyway. We can live like ordinary people, with just one maid. I’ll do most of the housework and the cooking. But let us go while there is time. This afternoon.”

  He could not face her, for now it seemed that he must stay in Rosales, not because he wanted to defy his brother’s warning, not because he did not want to give Trining the peace of mind that she sought, but simply because he knew in his bones that he could not live elsewhere—not in the city, which would remind him of Ester and of the lies he had told. Living here would be living with the truth, no matter how damning it was. Living here required courage, too, which he must now possess. Most of all, being in Rosales would confirm, for him at least, that illusory contract he must have with his own people.

  “No, Trining,” he said evenly. “This is where we must stay. I’ll have the baby taken to Manila this week, so that he will have the proper care, but we—we must live here, for this is where we belong. I see now why Father was so concerned, why he returned here.”

  Her reply was a long time in coming. “I’ll stay with you. I’ll follow you …”

  “To the ends of the earth.” He laughed lightly and kissed her on the cheek.

  The nurse knocked on the door. The commanding officer of the detachment was downstairs—and would Don Luis please give him five minutes? He was sorry that he could not call earlier, but their order to leave was sudden. He told the nurse to ask the captain into the hall and to please wait.

  When Luis came into the hall the captain was staring at the mellowed frames of European Postimpressionist paintings that his father had brought home from his trips. The captain was a short, wiry man, probably in his early thirties, with prominent cheekbones and a narrow forehead. He appeared spare from a distance but on closer look was actually firmly built and muscular. He saluted Luis, then came forward and extended his hand. Luis saw him almost every morning getting into a jeep or armored car, then disappearing up the dirt road that led to the foothills and returning again in the late afternoon, his gait as brisk as ever. He had come for a visit one evening, but only Santos and Trining received him. He is a lonely man, Trining had told him later, and Luis had said brusquely, the guilty are always lonely.

  Luis shook his hand. The officer’s grip was clammy and tight. “I am very sorry, sir,” he said, “that I have to say good-bye the first time I see you.”

  Luis motioned him to sit down on one of the overstuffed leather sofas in the hall, then asked a maid to bring some coffee.

  “We are going up north,” the officer continued. “We did not receive our orders until early this morning on the radio. There seems to be more trouble there.”

  “Once it was confined to central Luzon,” Luis said, a wisp of sadness in his voice. “Now, it’s all over the country—in the Visayas, in Mindanao …”

  “Yes,” the captain said, “and fightin
g them is like ramming a steel fist in the air. They are everywhere and nowhere.”

  “They are wherever there is hunger and exploitation,” Luis said. “They feed on greed and injustice.”

  The officer looked down and seemed thoughtful, then he turned to Luis, his eyes burning. “I wish I could form opinions as easily as you,” he said, a hint of impatience in his voice. “It is of course very sad that my orders will always be to seek and destroy them. They are worthy opponents—some of them could really teach us tricks in guerrilla warfare and intelligence work. I am particularly impressed by Commander Victor—his daring, his brilliant tactics. The batallion has lost more than twenty men to him, and we haven’t captured a single man from his unit. Yes, I know he is your half-brother, and I am sure that you still hate us for what happened in Sipnget. I just want you to know that none of my men were involved, that it was after the incident that we—all of us—replaced the detachment here.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” Luis said.

  “I did not mean to digress,” the officer said. “I just brought it up so that you would know that I know.”

  “Don’t you feel a little bit uneasy, Captain, fighting your own kin? I imagine you must be a veteran of Bataan.”

  “Yes, yes,” the captain readily answered. “I was interned in Capas—the Death March, all of that. Yes, it was different fighting the Japanese. But it is our lives or theirs—it is really that simple when you are in the field.” He cracked his knuckles. Perspiration had moistened his face, and his shirtfront was wet. “But what can one do? We are not landowners like you. We are professional soldiers—at least the officers, like me. Of course those boys down there, with their families—they are not professionals. They joined the Army because it was just another job. God knows how difficult it is to get a job. Not one among them wants to go to the hills to fight—and yes, some of them have relatives, too, on the other side. No, sir, it has not been easy and it will never be. There is really no sense in going after your own kin, but we must keep our house in order. I am no student of politics the way you are, but if this country disintegrates, there are powers ready to grab us. One can say that under the Americans this may not be possible—but the Huks are anti-American, although I do not think the Russians are helping them. Why can’t they be just nationalists? It would be better that way. Even then, this I want to assure you—they are doomed.”