20
Don Vicente did not join them for breakfast. Trining and Luis had the long table to themselves. The chocolate was very hot, and the pan de sal, since it was baked at home, was much bigger than they got in Manila. Mangoes were in season, and the silver tray was full. How was it in Sipnget then? One fruit had to be divided among the four of them, and the seed was always for him. He would savor it by sucking and licking it till it was dry, then he would slip the seed into the eaves of the kitchen roof and it would stay there, dried and waiting. He never got to planting them.
He had expected Trining to be sullen, but the brief encounter last night seemed to have been forgotten, for her face was aglow. He had known her when she was a gangling girl of eight, and he had seen her in all forms of dress and undress. In the warm morning light she was indeed a woman now, clear-skinned and beautiful.
They were finishing their chocolate when across the hall there reverberated a crash, then his father’s startled cry. They rushed to the room. By the time they got there Don Vicente had already risen and was at the door, bellowing to the servants to call the captain of his civilian guards.
“What is it, Papa?” Luis asked, but the old man, blocking the door, merely shook his head. “Nothing, nothing, take your cousin away from here …” Through the half-open door Luis could see that the window was broken and shards littered the floor.
Shortly before lunch, after he had apparently thought it all out, Don Vicente asked for Luis to come to his room. By then what had happened was the talk among the servants and the civilian guards on the grounds. Luis wanted to question the commander, but his pride held him back. Why did his father not confide in him? That he did not rankled in him as he proceeded to the old man’s room.
Luis found his father immensely composed. He was before the window, gazing pensively outside. He even smiled as he turned. Although the old man had a passion for order and cleanliness, he had obviously left everything as it was for Luis to see. “It was intended that I not be hurt,” the old man said without emotion. He eased his corpulent frame into his rattan lounging chair, and with his double chin quivering as he shook his head, he continued: “No, they merely wanted me to get this message.”
From the marble-topped side table he reached over and picked up a stone as large as a duck’s egg and beside it a crumpled piece of paper—the kind that children use in grade school. He handed the paper to his son. The penmanship was masculine and at the same time very fine. Indeed it seemed familiar, although it was in Ilokano: “The land belongs to the people and the people will get what is rightfully theirs. The next message will be delivered with a bullet. Commander Victor.”
Luis turned the paper over to see if there was anything on the other side. His father spoke again: “But I do not see how anyone can throw it clear to the window of my room in the daytime. If he was in the street, he would have been seen. In the neighborhood he could not go anyplace. The guards have checked everything.”
Victor—Luis mulled over the name, not only because it was his brother’s but because once upon a time, during the war, Vic and he did know a Commander Victor. He, too, came from Sipnget, but unlike most of the young men in the village, he had been able to finish high school. He had ambushed the Japanese almost at will and had distributed food, not only in his village but also to others in need.
Commander Victor was dead. But was he really? There was a new Commander Victor whom he had yet to meet.
Luis walked to the window, which opened to the street and to the town plaza and beyond, to the huddled houses of cogon and bamboo, homes of inconsequential people—clerks, shopkeepers. His father was right—it would require great strength to hit his father’s bedroom window. Then quickly it came to him that it could be done with a sling—from across the plaza, beyond the houses, from the line of bamboo at the end of the town, and he remembered how he and his brother used to fling stones, making two or three circular swings with their slings before letting go. How well Victor did it then. While his stone often splashed on the opposite rim of the river, Vic’s always went beyond, to wherever he aimed.
“Why do they hate me?” his father’s voice prodded him. “I have tried my best to do what I can for them. After all, this land, which my great-grandfather cleared—all of it—bears more than just his pride and our name, and we are duty-bound to preserve it and help those who help us preserve it. Haven’t we lived with honor, giving them what is their due, helping them with their problems, no matter how personal? When they are born, when they get married, when they get sick, and when they die—to whom do they come for help? It’s I and no one else; I look after them, more than like a father. Can they not see what this means? My brother was the same—he helped them and they killed him and his poor helpless wife, his son. What kind of people are these? Can they not see that we are honorable?”
Luis knew all the words—the rights of the nobility, the responsibilities of serfs—but now they did not evoke anger from him, just indifference, and if he could, he would banish them from his own vocabulary, just as he would relegate all of Rosales to limbo.
“Why do they hate me?” the old man repeated sadly. “Soon it will be a grenade in the yard—or poison in our food. Yet I care for them, more than they will ever know. I have built irrigation ditches for them, sent them to the puericulture center, given rice and money to the priest so that he can go to their villages and minister to their needs. I contribute to their fiesta generously. I have stood as godfather to their children—they are all my children—and they hate me. I can see it in their faces when they come here, whining and begging for help. They cheat me of the harvest, but I continue to keep them because I love them, because they are part of the land, which is part of me. What do they want that I cannot give? They have food, security, and peace. They are happiest as they are, and they do not have a single worry—not a bit of what I have to endure—and only because they are under my wing. They repay me with this—this,” he said, pointing to the piece of paper on the table. “Luis, can you explain this to me?”
It would have been the simplest thing to do, to declare that Rosales was no longer the paradise his father had proclaimed, that paternalism was done for, that charity is its own stigma and that the best of intentions are often brutalized and demeaned, but he chose to speak as only a son would: “You must be patient, Father. We are living in difficult times, and this is not your creation. It was created by the war, by expectations that could not be fulfilled. They will learn in time what their place really is, but”—and now he weighed his words carefully, hoping not to displease his father—“we must also understand that if we are to stay here, to be on top as we have always been”—he checked himself and was surprised that he was verbally and emotionally taking his father’s side—“then we must also change and learn to understand what is happening below us.”
“Just what do you mean?”
“Change, Father, is sometimes imperceptible, because it is slow. You have changed, too, perhaps without knowing it.”
Don Vicente smiled. “Yes, yes,” he mumbled under his breath. Then, “When you were there last night, how was it?”
“Everything was fine, Father,” he said. Don Vicente turned away, waving his son off. “Everything was fine, Father,” he repeated as he went out of the room. He was again the boy who played on the banks of the Agno, who shared a roof in Sipnget with another boy and with this boy ate the same soft-boiled rice in the lean months of the planting season. Vic was with him again—the stone, the sling—and he would always be near. If he was darkness, Vic was light, was free, while Luis was encumbered with a past, the remembered experience that brought no certainty, although it was as real as flesh and as haughty as day.
Time that I have lived! It is all here now, compressed in this house, encompassed by this little town. Time that I have lived—there is a creek that passes the village, a creek spanned by an old wooden bridge that was often washed away by monsoon floods. When the rain comes in June the creek slowly fills, then overflows, and the waters could come right to our backyard and we would go to the bridge with long poles and ensnare the pieces of driftwood that have been carried away by the current and we would keep these for firewood. When the rains subside the creek dries up until there are just pools, moss-green and muddy, but we would still bathe in it, for the creek is closest to us and it was here where Vic first told me: Manong, you are white and I am brown. We are brothers, but how can that be? The creek brought us face-to-face. Again, one day, he said: I have been told that you should leave and that if you left, you would not return. I will leave, too, as all of us do leave the place where we were born—but I am sure we will come back.
Vic had returned. That could have been his message that Luis had seen, that could have been his sling. Then it occurred to him that he was ignorant of his brother’s movements. If Vic had changed somehow, Luis had helped in the transformation, for it was he, after all, who had sent Vic the books to read and had helped him find the answers. Vic did not have to search far if he had desired to find answers himself, for they were all here in Rosales amidst the implacable poverty and the dullness of the herd.
Luis was free at last from all these, thanks to his benevolent father. He could roam and reap the harvest—but not Vic, although at least Vic now had the freedom to create, to travel an expanse unlimited by geography or vision. Luis prayed to God that in spite of everything Vic would retain this thought at least: that they were brothers and that Luis had not forgotten the jungle’s torment. Vic was courage, and what did Luis have to show to redeem his manhood, to attest to his creativity? A few poems? He had the beneficence of a name he was born to bear. If he could only turn back, he could now be by Victor’s side as he should be, for his brother was also his fate.