17
On the morning that I left, Sepa came and thrust into my hand pieces of pan de sal with coconut syrup. The syrup had oozed, and the paper bag with which she had wrapped the bread was soiled.
“For the trip,” she said, attempting a smile.
I went down to the yard, where one of the boys had the jeep waiting. The air was heady, compounded with the clean tang of morning. The sun was mild, and one could drink it and never feel that the body was full. It touched the fading grass and gave it a tinge of jade. It glinted, too, in the leaves of the coconut palms and transformed them into a thousand blades gleaming and unsheathed. It was a beautiful day, but not for me.
Father was at the gate. When I kissed his hand, he held my chin up and said: “You’ll be all right in the city. But that’s not important. It’s the learning that counts, and the growing up.”
He dug out his gold watch from his waist pocket. “You have plenty of time,” he said. “Now listen. You are young and you don’t know many things, but do remember this: you are alone on this earth. Alone. You must act for yourself and no other. Kindness is not appreciated anymore, nor friendship. Think of yourself before you think of others. It’s a cruel world, and you have to be hard and cruel, too. They will strangle you if you don’t strangle them first. Trust no one but your judgment—and even then don’t trust too much.”
He laid a hand on my shoulder and smiled wanly. “Son,” he whispered. He had not spoken the word in a long, long time. “Be good.”
I wanted to fling my arms around his neck, tell him that I loved him, but my throat was dry. I only said, “I’ll remember, Father.”
I boarded the jeep, and we drove out into the street. I did not look back.
It was early evening when I reached Tutuban Station. The jostling crowd in the giant, gloomy building baffled me, but I had no difficulty because Cousin Andring was on the platform to greet me. When we emerged into the lobby, Old David came forward from the nameless phalanx of people. He had aged so much. I did not want him to carry my suitcase, but his grip was strong and determined.
We hurried to Cousin Andring’s jeep, which was parked outside the station, then we drove off to the suburbs. The long trip did not tire me, but in the jeep, watching the brilliant neon lights and the depressing huddle of tall buildings, I felt lost and tired.
My first days in the city were restless and uneventful. In the mornings, I’d wander around the shops or see a movie. I’d return to their house in Santa Mesa shortly before lunchtime. Tia Antonia seldom talked with me, and Old David did not have the time, either, for he was always busy in the garage or in the garden. I imagine that he purposely avoided me and busied himself whenever I went near.
Tia Antonia’s children—since most of them were already grown-up—were correct but not friendly, and, if they talked with me at all, they asked the most asinine questions.
I was very glad when, one morning, Cousin Pedring telephoned and said he would come in the afternoon to pick me up, so that I could stay in his house in Cubao until classes started. It had been ages since I saw him last, when he and Clarissa got married, and I was very glad he had not forgotten.
He had changed a lot. His girth was wider and so was his forehead.Clarissa, too, looked different from the young girl I used to know. Her cheeks were plump, and she moved about with a matriarchal dignity rather than the gay sprightliness that was her. She had three children now, the youngest a darling girl about two years old. Clarissa hummed incessantly as she prepared the supper table.
In the early evening Cousin Pedring and I got to talking about the old times, and we would have talked far into the night if he did not have a poker session with friends. He kissed Clarissa at the door, as if he were going on a long journey.
I was alone with her, and as she served me a second helping of ice cream we talked about Rosales and how it was. “That was the most beautiful wedding I have ever seen,” I said, recalling theirs.
“In a short time yours, too, will come,” she said. “And then you’ll be raising your own family. But you men never know the trouble women go through.”
I remembered the secret I had kept and decided that now was the time to get it off my chest.
“It was good you came to Rosales that vacation,” I said. “I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t come.”
“What do you think would have happened?” Her eyes lighted up.
I remember the letters postmarked Cebu, which I showed Father first, then burned. “Well,” I said, “you might have ended up marrying that fellow from Cebu and not Pedring.”
“Why do you say that?” she asked, the laughter drained from her.
“After all, he wrote to you so many times when you were in Rosales. He was very insistent, you know.”
“He did write to me?” She was incredulous.
“Yes,” I said. “But you never knew it, did you? Father told me never to tell you. As a matter of fact, I burned the letters myself.”
Her face became blank. “And I thought all along he had decided to forget. I was all wrong,” she mumbled, a faraway look in her eyes. And then her head drooped, and her body shook with silent sobs.
“Clarissa.” I went to her. “Is there anything wrong?”
She kept sobbing for some time, and I stood before her, not knowing what to do. She looked up at me and hurriedly wiped her tears.
“Tell me,” I said. “Does Pedring beat you?”
A smile bloomed again. “Foolish!” she said, rising from her chair. She tweaked my ear. “Of course, he treats me well. He doesn’t beat me at all. Whoever gave you that idea?”
“Why are you crying, then?”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “You are too young.”
“Tell me,” I urged her. “I won’t tell your secret.”
She turned away. A trace of sadness lined her voice. “I was thinking of all those letters … and it seems as if it was only yesterday …”
“You’ve not grown up,” I said, but she did not hear, for the baby had started crying and she rushed to the crib, baby talk gushing from her lips.
Then June, and I was in college at last, engrossed with botany, zoology, chemistry, and a host of other subjects for preparatory medicine. College was an exhilarating experience, and for a time the old nagging aches were soothed and I was immersed in new interests.
Until one October afternoon: I was in the college cafeteria drinking Coke, when one of my classmates rushed to me white-faced and asked if I had seen the evening paper.
I shook my head. He thrust the front page in front of me and asked if the photograph before me was that of Father.
I could not believe what I read, how he was brought out of our house the evening before by men who were armed. The soldiers had gone after his kidnappers, so the paper reported, but they had returned empty-handed.
I rushed to the dormitory, and at the lobby I met the father dean. He must have read the story, too, and had come to tell me about it. He held my shoulders, and his cool blue eyes gazed into mine.
“You have to be brave,” he said.
I went to my room and shut the door. No tears came; a tightness gripped my chest, and I could not breathe. I lay on my cot and could not think.
At dusk Cousin Marcelo and Tia Antonia came mouthing platitudes. “Maybe,” they said, “the men did not harm him.” Cousin Pedring came, too, with Clarissa. He said he would leave for Rosales the following morning.
I did not go down for supper. My roommate came in shortly before lights-out and brought me a glass of warm milk and crackers.
After Three Days, Cousin Pedring came, the grime of travel still on his face. There was no news at all about Father. Then, after a week, a tenant stumbled upon Father in the delta. He had died terribly, said Cousin Marcelo, who came with the news. The body bore more than a dozen bolo wounds. The day they found Father, they buried him beside Mother’s grave.
“You do not have to go home,” Cousin Marcelo said. “There’s nothing you can do now.”
“But I’m going home,” I told him, suddenly aware that it was now my duty to look after his ledgers, the farm. “I’d like to look at the papers.”
“Yes, of course,” Cousin Marcelo said. “Now you have to study a lot of things and make decisions.” He looked ruefully at me. “And you … so young and not even through with school.”
But it would not do for me to stay in Rosales anymore; everywhere I would turn, there would always be something familiar, yet alien.
“You’ll be free now,” Cousin Marcelo said. “You must not be like your father. He was a slave to what he owned. You must begin again—that is most important.”
Words meant not to be heard, a few drops of rain on parched ground.
We arrived at the station at dusk. No one met us but the baggage boys, who recognized me at once. They gathered around, and one got hold of my canvas bag, while another hurried down the platform to hail a calesa. They did not speak much.
Even the calesa driver did not speak until we were close to home. Cousin Marcelo placed a salapi in his palm, and as we got down, he turned to me and said he was sorry about what had happened. Sepa could not contain herself when she saw me coming up the stairs. She waddled down and exclaimed: “You are so tall!” Then she broke down and cried. Cousin Marcelo held her shoulder, then freed me from her. I did not cry; for a long time now I have not tasted the salt of tears. Darkness fell quickly, and since it was too late to go to the cemetery, I hastened to my old room and unpacked.
The supper that Sepa prepared was excellent—roasted eggplant, crab and meat stew—but I had no appetite. I went to the azotea. Sepa followed me; she had lighted her hand-rolled cigar.
“Tell me,” I asked after some silence. “What has become of the people in Carmay? Who did it? Surely you have an idea.”
“I do not know,” she said feebly. She leaned on the azotea ledge and turned away. “I’m just an old, worthless woman imprisoned in the kitchen. All I know is this: death hides now, not only in the delta but in Carmay as well.”
“Will they kill me, too?”
“Drive the thought away,” the old woman said. “You are young and good, and you have no enemies.”
“And Father was old and bad and he had a hundred?”
Sepa flung her cigar away. In the soft dark I could make out her face. Her voice was sharp, “Your father was good. He was not seen clearly, that’s all. Now don’t let such thoughts grow lush in your mind. Drive them away quickly.”
Silence again.
“Tell me, what has happened to the people in Carmay?”
“There are a hundred people there,” she said, “and all of them are still alive.” Then she must have guessed what I wanted to know. “You are asking about Teresita?”
“I wrote to her many times,” I said. “She never answered. Not even once.”
“She died last month,” Sepa said softly. She shifted her weight on the ledge. “The old sickness in her family …”
I could not speak for some time. The old woman prattled on: “It wasn’t much of a funeral. I wanted someone to write a letter to you, but I couldn’t find anyone I could trust.”
“Maybe,” I said after another uneasy silence, “it’s better this way. She won’t suffer anymore.”
Sepa grunted: “Yes, death is a blessing. People who grow old should remember that. How is David?”
“I didn’t see him when I left,” I said. “Tia Antonia must be taking good care of him. He’s well, I suppose. I visited Tia Antonia often. But Old David, he always seemed busy. He avoided me. At first, it was difficult; I couldn’t understand. I do now.”
“You have no news about Angel? Where is he now?”
“He’s lost,” Sepa said without emotion. “He is a soldier. But he is no problem, really, the way she is.”
“Who?” I asked, leaning over to hear her every word.
“Your father’s woman. It must be very sad, being cooped up in that house by the river, unable to show her face …”
“How did you know?” I asked. Sepa did not answer; she stood up shaking her head and left me to the night.
Morning came to Rosales in a flood of sunlight. I woke up, a stranger to my old room but not to the happy sounds of morning, the barking of dogs in the street and the cackling of hens in the yard. Cousin Marcelo was in the sala, waiting.
“I know my way to the cemetery,” I said.
He pressed my arm. “All right then, if you want to go alone. But be sure to be back as soon as you can. We have many things to talk about. You are an heir, remember.”
Breakfast was waiting. I took a small cup of chocolate, then went down to the street. Day was clear, and the sky was swept clean and blue with but wisps of clouds pressed flat against its rim. The banabas along the road seemed greener maybe because my eyes had so long been dulled by the dirty browns and grays of the city. Housewives were hanging their wash in their yards, and their half-naked children played in the street, their runny noses outlined in dirt. The day smelled good with the witchery of October, the tingling sun. Tomorrow, it would probably rain.
It was a long walk to the cemetery. The morning etched clearly all the white crosses and the gumamela shrubs that the grave watchers tended. I walked through narrow paths between the tombs, past the small chapel in the center of the cemetery, beyond which was Mother’s tomb, and now Father’s, too.
A woman was bent before the white slab of stone, and, as she turned I caught a view of her face. I was not mistaken—it was Father’s woman. When she saw me, she stood up and walked swiftly away. I followed her with my eyes, until she disappeared behind a sprout of cogon that hid the road.
I went to the tomb and picked up the bouquet she had left—a simple bundle of sampaguitas—then placed it back on the slab. It was not yet completely dry, and the gray cement that the masons had left unleavened still cluttered the base.
I remembered my first visit, Father’s quavering voice again: Nena, I’ve brought your son to you now that he is old enough.
I must see her, tell her it’s useless harboring ill will. I hurried from the warren of white crosses and headed for the river, down a gully, and along the riverbed until I came to another gully beyond where she lived.
The footpath was widened by carabaos that went down to the river to bathe, and beyond the bank was her house. It looked shabby from the outside, with its grass roof and buri walls already bleached and battered. A bamboo gate was at the end of the narrow path. I pushed it open.
Within the yard, I called: “Man. There’s a man. Good morning.”
No answer. I went up the bamboo stairs. From the half-open door I could see the narrow living room furnished with three rattan chairs, a coffee table with crocheted doilies, and some magazines. A Coleman lamp dangled from the beam above the room. In a corner was a table clock and a sewing machine. A vase with wilted gumamelas was on a mahogany dresser near the open window.
“Man. There’s a man,” I repeated. Still no answer.
In the room that adjoined the sala, someone stirred.
“Please,” I said, rapping on the bamboo post by the door, “I have to see you. I wanted to talk with you at the cemetery, but you left so quickly.”
A shuffle of feet, then she flung the door open and I saw her—not she who was gay and laughing but a tired and unhappy woman, her eyes swollen from crying. Her hair, which would have looked elegant if it were combed, cascaded down her shoulders. She was dressed in a dark shapeless blouse. From her neck dangled a red bead necklace whose medallion of polished gold rested in the valley of her bosom.
“What do you want?” she asked, glaring at me. Then recognition came, and the annoyance in her face vanished.
“You are his son,” she said simply.
“I want to talk with you,” I said.
She came to me. “Why did you come? You don’t have to. It is not necessary.”
“I have to,” I said. “Maybe, because we both lost someone. Maybe …”
“But you didn’t love him,” she said, looking straight at me.
I was too surprised to answer.
“I suspected it all along,” she said sadly. “Many did not like him, and I wouldn’t blame his only son for feeling the same way. Sometimes blood isn’t really enough.”
“You are wrong,” I said. Coherent speech was mine again. “I respected him.”
“Respected him! What a difference!”
I did not know how to argue with her; she did not give me a chance.
“Let me tell you,” she said hastily. “He was not good and he was not kind, and that is why they killed him. But he had virtues, and he was really good in his own way. Not many understood, but I did, and that’s why—” She brought the handkerchief to her eyes and started sobbing. She slumped on one of the chairs, her body shaking with her sobs.
“Please don’t cry,” I said.
She dropped the handkerchief on her lap and turned to me. “He loved you,” she said. “He used to talk so much about you.”
“That’s not true,” I said, unable to hold it back any longer. “That’s not true at all!”
“Ay!” She sighed. She rose and walked to the window. “If only we know the things that are hidden in the hearts of others, the world wouldn’t be such a sad place.” Outside, the sunshine was a silver flood. The birds on the grass roof twittered.
“He never cared for me,” I said plainly. “He tried to but—”
“But he did! And you call him Father! You didn’t even understand him!” she exclaimed. “You were very close to him, and you didn’t even know how he felt! And here I was, seeing him only once or twice a week, and I knew so many things. But maybe it’s because I’m a woman. I do know! You have to believe it now that he’s dead. We could have gotten married, lived together. He loved you, and he said he failed you because of me and many other things that he had to do, although he didn’t want to. The death of this Baldo, his helplessness before your Don Vicente. All these he told me and blamed himself. How will you ever understand? You have to be a man …”
There was nothing for me to say.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Seventeen.”
“So young,” she said, “so very young!”
I gazed out of the window, at the caved banks of the river. “I’ll be leaving, maybe tomorrow,” I said.
She came to me again and held my arm lightly. We walked to the door. A breeze stirred the tall cogon grass that surrounded the house.
“What will you do now?” I asked.
She bit her lower lip, and when she looked at me, resignation was on her face. “What can I do?”
“You’ll stay here?”
Her voice was dry: “Yes. Where will I go? To the city, like you? I’ve been there. You are thinking perhaps that if I leave I can start anew? I ask you: what for?”
She left me at the door and walked to her dresser. Before the oval mirror she examined her face, her swollen eyes. She was beautiful, even though grief had distorted her face.
“If there is anything you need, you can go to the house, to my Cousin Marcelo. I’ll tell him to give you everything you need.”
She turned quickly to me. “No,” she said sharply. “No, thank you. I don’t think I’ll ever go there. I’ve some pride, you know.”
“I want to help.”
“You can’t,” she said, trying to smile. “Thank you for the thought. I am ashamed, that’s all. But not with him. Only in the beginning. Then I wasn’t ashamed anymore, even when I felt a hundred eyes stab me in the market, in church; one gets used to it. The skin thickens with the years.” Fresh tears welled in her eyes. “But believe me, with him I was not ashamed. Never. Maybe I loved him deeply, although that didn’t seem possible.”
“Please, don’t cry,” I said.
She daubed her eyes. “Well, you see me crying now, but I will stop. I’ll powder my face and comb my hair, then go out. And should another man come up that path, do you expect me to shut the door?”
I did not answer. I turned and stepped down the stairs into the blinding sunlight.
So it must be; I left Rosales, relegating that town to a sweet oblivion in the mind. I left behind people who should not intrude into the peace that, I thought, I could build and reinforce with a wealth of means that is mine by inheritance.
I have lived in pleasant solitude, breathed God’s pure air, and wallowed in sybaritic comfort, although, occasionally, I do think about those who were around me, and do feel deeply about the travail of my youth. But I see their anguish as something caused by human cussedness itself, that this is man’s certitude and destiny—irrevocable, final—that one cannot make anything different from it any more than I can stir ashes back to life.
Yet, much as I am sure of these, I also know that the present, this now, is yesterday, and anything and everything that I find detestable are outgrowths of something equally detestable in this not-so-distant past.
I wish I could be honest and true, but truth as I see it is not something abstract, a pious generality—it is justice at work, righteous, demanding, disciplined, sincere, and unswerving; otherwise, it is not, it cannot be truth at all.
But the past was not permanent, nor is the present—who was it who said you cannot cross the river twice? Motion, change, birth, and death—these are the imperatives (what a horrible, heavy word!) of life.
I sometimes pass by Rosales and see that so little has changed. The people are the same, victims of their own circumstance as Old David, Angel, Ludovico, and even Father had all been. God, should I think and feel, or should I just plod on and forget? I know in the depths of me that I’ll always remember, and I am not as tough as they were. Nor do I have the humor and the zest to cope as Tio Marcelo did, looking at what I see not as an apocalypse but as revelation; as he said once, paraphrasing a Spanish poet, he was born on a day that God was roaring drunk.
I think that I was born on a day God was fast asleep. And whatever happened after my birth was nothing but dreamless ignorance. But there was a waking that traumatized, a waking that also trivialized, because in it, the insolence and the nastiness of human nature became commonplace and I grew up taking all these as inevitable. In the end, the satisfaction that all of us seek, it seems, can come only from our discovering that we really have molded our lives into whatever we want them to be. In my failure to do this, I could have taken the easy way out, but I have always been too much of a coward to covet my illusions rather than dispel them.
I continue, for instance, to hope that there is reward in virtue, that those who pursue it should do so because it pleases them. This then becomes a very personal form of ethics, or belief, premised on pleasure. It would require no high-sounding motivation, no philosophical explanation for the self, and its desires are animal, basic—the desire for food, for fornication. If this be the case, then we could very well do away with the church, with all those institutions that pretend to hammer into the human being attributes that would make him inherit God’s vestments, if not His kingdom.
But what kind of man is he who will suffer for truth, for justice, when all the world knows that it is the evil and the grasping who succeed, who flourish, whose tables are laden, whose houses are palaces? Surely he who sacrifices for what is just is not of the common breed or of an earthly shape. Surely there must be something in him that should make us beware, for since he is dogged and stubborn as compared with the submissive many, he will question not just the pronouncements of leaders but the leaders themselves. He may even opt for the more demanding decision, the more difficult courses of action. In the end, we may see him not just as selfless but as the epitome of that very man whom autocrats would like to have on their side, for this man has no fear of heights, of gross temptations, and of death itself.
Alas, I cannot be this man, although sometimes I aspire to be like him. I am too much a creature of comfort, a victim of my past. Around me the largesse of corruption rises as titles of vaunted power, and I am often in the ranks of princes, smelling the perfume of their office. I glide in the dank, nocturnal caverns that are their mansions and gorge on their sumptuous food, and I love it all, envy them even for the ease with which they live without remorse, without regret even though they know (I suspect they do) that to get to this lofty status, they had to butcher—perhaps not with their own hands—their own hapless countrymen.
Today I see young men packed off to a war that’s neither their making nor their choice, and I recall Angel, who is perhaps long dead, joining the Army not because he was a patriot but because there was no other way. So it has not changed really, how in another war in another time, young men have died believing that it was their duty to defend these blighted islands. It may well be, but the politicians and the generals—they live as weeds always will—accumulating wealth and enjoying the land the young have died to defend. This is how it was, and this is how it will be.
Who was Don Vicente, after all? I should not be angered then, when men in the highest places, sworn to serve this country as public servants, end up as millionaires in Pobres Park, while using the people’s money in the name of beauty, the public good, and all those shallow shibboleths about discipline and nationalism that we have come to hear incessantly. I should not shudder anymore in disgust or contempt when the most powerful people in the land use the public coffers for their foreign shopping trips or build ghastly fascist monuments in the name of culture or of the Filipino spirit. I see artists—even those who cannot draw a hand or a face—pass themselves off as modernists and demand thousands of pesos for their work, which, of course, equally phony art patrons willingly give. And I remember Tio Marcelo—how he did not hesitate to paint calesas and, in his later years, even jeepneys, so that his work would be seen and used, and not be a miser’s gain in some living room to be viewed by people who may not know what art is. I hear politicians belching the same old clichés, and I remember Tio Doro and how he spent his own money for his candidacy and how he had bowed to the demands of change. When I see justice sold to the highest bidder I remember Tio Baldo and how he lost. So honesty, then, and service are rewarded by banishment, and people sell themselves without so much ado because they have no beliefs—only a price.
I would like to see all this as a big joke that is being played upon us, but I have seen what was wrought in the past—the men who were destroyed without being lifted from the dung heap of poverty, without recourse to justice.
But like my father, I have not done anything. I could not, because I am me, because I died long ago.
Who, then, lives? Who, then, triumphs when all others have succumbed? The balete tree—it is there for always, tall and leafy and majestic. In the beginning, it sprang from the earth as vines coiled around a sapling. The vines strangled the young tree they had embraced. They multiplied, fattened, and grew, became the sturdy trunk, the branches spread out to catch the sun. And beneath this tree, nothing grows!
Baguio