21
Luis changed his mind about not saying good-bye. He had expected his father to hold him back, but Don Vicente was more than understanding. He even tried to be blithe about it.
“I see, I see,” he said, nodding and grinning, so that the double chin quivered and the bags under his eyes broadened. “Rosales is very dull except for what happened this morning. What is more, you cannot miss the party of the year—yes, I have read about all those European dukes coming. In any case I have already told you what needs to be said. Do not forget—”
“I won’t,” Luis said, holding the pudgy hand to his brow. His suitcases were packed, Simeon was waiting downstairs, and outside his father’s room Trining was pacing the hall, waiting for him. “I won’t,” he repeated, then he wheeled out.
But what was there to remember? It was a story he had heard so many times, the call to duty and the land, that his future was in politics. It was of course difficult to understand his father’s attachment to the land. As a young man, Don Vicente had lived in Spain, visited the old village near Bilbao where his great-grandfather had come from. There was not much now in the Asperri lineage to suggest that it was Basque, nothing but the name, the fair skin, and the demeanor, and those did not matter. His exhortations were sown on barren soil, on the arid reality of Rosales itself. The life of the mind, which beckoned to Luis, was in Manila. It was better to revel in it, to seek the kindred vitality of the young who revolved around the editorial offices, and the nearness of Trining, Ester, and her friends. Although he did not want to indulge in it, he basked in their flattering attention—a result of not only his looks but also because as a poet he exuded some kind of exotic magnetism.
He wanted to spend some time with Trining, but she had waited in the hall only to find out if he would be permitted to leave, and when she found out, she had rushed to her room. He knocked at the door, pleading, but she would not open it. From within came a mumbling sound that could have been her weeping.
He reached the city at dusk. Depressed, he had dozed through most of the checkpoints, and Simeon, still displeased that Luis had cut his vacation short, had been sullenly quiet. The depression lasted for some time, and it was not banished even after Luis had finished the homework he had brought with him.
He developed in his mind a master dummy of the next issue of Our Time. There would be a couple of articles on the Bell Act, an exposition on the cultural resurgence in Southeast Asia, a couple of stories, and an essay on the crisis of the Filipino identity. The scenery no longer interested him as it did the previous day. The country was drab, dead brown. The dirty towns through which they passed were all the same, their asphalted main streets lined with wooden shops boarded with impieties of soft-drink signs.
“Do you want to pass by the office, señorito?” Simeon’s voice startled him. They were now entering the city, and the traffic in Balintawak was tangled again—jeepneys and buses filled with office workers hurrying home. Toward the west the sky was a riot of indigo. Dusk finally brought a sense of peace.
“Home,” Luis said. He needed a shower more than anything, to wash away the fatigue. The car could not avoid Rizal Avenue and the snarl of traffic in Plaza Goiti, but in a while they were on the boulevard and Luis felt at home once more in the wide Luneta, now covered with dying grass, and to the right the sea, the stubby trees, all covered with the deep and onrushing dark.
The house was one of those prewar structures spared by the holocaust of Liberation that leveled much of the Ermita and Malate districts, south of the river. It was built by his grandfather in the twenties for Vicente and his Spanish bride.
Sometimes his grandfather drifted into his thoughts, particularly when Luis and his writer friends talked about the revolution of 1896 and how in the end it was usurped by the ilustrados. His grandfather was one of them; though he had always considered himself—according to Don Vicente—a Filipino, Luis knew that his loyalties were with that far-off peninsula from which his forebears had come. The old man had been an astute politician, although he did not run for any public office; he knew where the centers of powers were, and when he saw, for instance, the inevitability of revolution, he made the proper noises, which seemed to indicate that he, at least, sympathized with the ill-disciplined, ill-equipped Army. As a Basque, he had always regarded the Spaniard as inferior in the first place. But to avoid total involvement, he had feigned illnesses and was conveniently sick in Manila. The coming of the Americans ended the masquerade for the wily old Vascongado. He saw the inevitability of American suzerainty, and one of the first things he did was join the Federalista party. He would have gotten a very high position in the new government—friendly as he was with those in Manila—but he had decided, like all good Basques, that the future lay in the land, which had, after all, supported him in splendor all through the years.
He was not wrong; it was a time when the haciendas were being forged and sugar plantations in the south were being set up with American and other foreign money. He went back to Pangasinan and the vast lands he had laid claim to and built that region’s biggest house, which became a rest stop for any tired and visiting Americano. In the process, through the American cadastral surveys that were being made all over the country, he brought out his old Spanish titles, and with Spanish sherry and other forms of concession, he included into the Hacienda Asperri hundreds of small clearings that the Ilokano settlers had made.
The old man liked to consider himself a diviner, a plutocrat ahead of his time. He saw, for instance, the movement of Manila out of the strictures of Intramuros, and he bought lots in Santa Mesa and of course in Ermita, on the boulevard close to the sea. It was in the Ermita house he built where his son Vicente lived, his daughters having married Americans and Spaniards and left for wherever their husbands willed.
The hacienda in Pangasinan prospered, and he died a very happy man knowing that his other son was prepared to take over while Vicente hobnobbed with the rich and the powerful in Manila. He did not know of the ill will that exploitation had spawned, how the house would be burned by the same peasants who he thought were loyal to him. Don Vicente continued living in Manila, depending on the overseers who worked for him, knowing that though he was in the city, he wielded great power. He played poker regularly with Quezon and was on the best of terms with the mestizos who revolved around Malacañang.
Having finished law and studied history as well, he had learned what his father had taught him, and to this wisdom he added his own instincts. He had information on what stocks to buy, where new roads were to be built, and when export crops were to be developed, and his intentional losses at the poker table, which were substantial, were easily recouped.
He contributed, too, to the campaign funds of senators and, of course, to the Independence mission, while in Pangasinan his tenants toiled and filled his bodegas with grain. Even when his brother was killed and he had taken his niece under his wing, he did not see the need for returning to Pangasinan; the order of things was secure, the constabulary would see to it that a similar uprising would never happen again.
After the war, his instincts served him once more; he could see the changes coming, and one of the first things he did was rebuild the old house that had been burned, bringing to it many of the artifacts in Manila that were not destroyed; his son was growing, he could leave Manila and go back to the land where he now should be.
Luis had the Ermita house, therefore, all to himself shortly after he finished high school, except on those occasions when Don Vicente visited him, which was quite often at first but soon became infrequent. Don Vicente gambled still, but most of his old poker cronies had died, some of them at the hands of the Japanese, some in exile in America, and the old man did not seem to be at ease with the new occupants of Malacañang. Luis also knew that his father had some special women in Manila. He had never seen the Spanish woman his father married, for she was one of those mysterious creatures who lived in the shadows. The servants talked of her, however, of her madness, of her having been shut up in a hospital in Manila and then in the tower room of the big house, where she would be very quiet except for her whimpering, which sounded more animal than human. There was no medicine, no doctor, however, that could clear her mind, render it lucid again, for what had cracked was not because of some genetic discrepancy or some frustration that had finally surfaced but the heavy accretion of past profligacies, lies, indiscretions, and that hedonist view that regarded woman as a plaything as, indeed, Don Vicente considered his wife when she was younger. But she was a sensitive woman who was not just uprooted from hearth and home; she had also loved her husband deeply and had great hopes about the new land that she thought would be her country as well. When the poor woman finally died, her funeral was just as secret, for she was buried not in Rosales but in a cemetery in Manila. To the best of his knowledge, his father never visited her grave, and not once did he tell Luis of the life they had lived together, even in those moments when Don Vicente was reminiscing about Europe.
The Ermita house was not particularly big by the standards of the district, which was Manila’s best housing area, but it was formidably built in Spanish style, with wrought-iron grills for windows and doorways. Red tiles were used unsparingly, and the walls were serrated, although this fact was no longer visible, for the walls had been covered with ivy, which Simeon trimmed. The grounds were wide, the grass was mowed regularly, and the pots of dahlias and ground orchids seemed perennially in bloom. Somehow the Ilokano nature of Luis’s housekeepers was evident in the grounds, for at the back, close to the garage where they lived, were plots of tomato, eggplant, and okra, and it was from this garden that Luis often got his fresh vegetables when he felt like having vegetable stew.
The house had four bedrooms, and furnishing and decorating them when he was through with high school had given him some amusement. Together with Trining he had toured the furniture shops and the few drapery stalls in Divisoria. He had had air-conditioning installed in his bedroom and in the room that he had converted into a study/guest room. In the hall his father had placed a grand piano, which no one played except Trining when she dropped by with her college friends. He had a radio/phono, too, in the study, and extra speakers in the living room, and although he leaned toward the classics, Trining insisted on buying and stocking the record bar with her own Latin and boogie-woogie favorites. His library had been growing, but he often lent books to friends, and some of them took advantage of his good nature and forgetfulness.
Marta was watering the gumamela hedges by the gate when the car drove in. She flung the gate open, then ran to open the door of the house.
“I wasn’t expecting you so soon, señorito,” she said. She switched on all the lights as Simeon carried his suitcases to his room.
He called Eddie at once, and as expected, although it was already almost seven, his associate was still in the office. Luis had left instructions on how the next two issues would be run, and he had hinted, too, that he might lengthen his vacation, so Eddie sounded surprised: “I thought I would be parking on your swivel chair for some time. What’s the matter—you broke a blood vessel?”
Luis laughed. “That’s a bad guess. It is the place, Eddie.” He felt that he was being honest. “Any mail?”
“Contributions,” Eddie said, “and some angry letters about the last article on labor you wrote. But they won’t sue because they are all crooks. I am glad you have returned, so you can be at the party tonight. You know, only editors were invited—from the entire outfit there are only eight of you going, and you know how the Old Man feels about invitations being rejected.”
Luis knew. There was the famous story he had told earlier about how Dantes had eased out one of the executives in his shipping company after the man and his wife were invited to a sit-down dinner and only his wife came because her husband was down with a cold. In spite of such feudal attitudes, however, Dantes regarded his editorial people with more than employer interest. In the mornings when he was in his publishing office he often called his editors in to do nothing but play chess or comment on a new painting or sculpture that he had acquired. All the while the bar at the end of his office would be open and a waiter in white would hover around, jumping to their every whim, dumb-faced to their discussions of politics and culture. It was also at these informal sessions that Dantes gave instructions to his columnists and his editors—he would identify the targets of his derision and his ire, and it mattered not if the sessions lasted until lunchtime, for he would have lunch brought to the room. The editors always knew when the talk was over, for Dantes, almost as a ritual, would open his gold cigarette case and pass around—even to those who did not smoke—Sobranie Black Russians, and then he would light each stick individually with his gold lighter, and after a few puffs he would smile benignly and say, “Well, boys, that is how the cookie crumbles”—an old expression that he never quite forgot from his Harvard undergraduate days. Then the editors would file out, their heads up in the air, for the oracle had spoken and now they knew what to do.
Luis had gone to see Dantes before he left, telegram in hand, saying that he would have to rush home to see his ailing father but that if everything was all right, he would be back. No, he must not miss Mr. Dantes’s silver wedding anniversary. The publisher had grudgingly consented to let him go home, “on humanitarian grounds,” but he had ended the interview saying, “Luis, you must know that this party is important to me.”
There were other parties, and the whole week was to be devoted to them—one for each company, one for close relatives alone, then this major bash, for which the royalty of Europe had been flown in by chartered Stratocruzer and billeted in two whole floors of the Manila Hotel, together with an orchestra from the United States, a couple of opera singers, one from La Scala and the other from the Met, plus the five hundred most important Filipinos, headed by the president and his social-climbing wife.
“Any message?” Luis asked.
“Yes, Miss Vale asked if you had arrived. She seemed very anxious. It was Dantes’s daughter who asked for you. Say, you are moving up very fast.”
He wondered if Ester had been instructed by her father to inquire or if she had done it on her own, but Miss Vale, Dantes’s old-maid secretary, never went into details. She gave out only the barest information, and it seemed that her head was full of secrets but that she stored them for no one but Dantes.
Even when he was in college, Luis did not swallow everything said in the classroom. The family, the teacher, the church—everything was authoritarian, but there was a far more impressive schooling that he had gone through, where one learned freely: the years in Sipnget, which taught him how important relationships were, how people were what they were. It took only a few weeks in the Dantes offices, therefore, for him to know and to latch on to knowledge that was not dispensed in his sociology or political science classes, to amass the information that was never printed in the papers—not even in his own, noted though it was for its liberalism and steadfastness to truth as Dantes—not his staffers—saw it.
As Don Vicente had said, Dantes was no patriot who would sacrifice for freedom and nation; he was a power merchant, selling dreams in his media complex and manipulating men with power at the same time. He could have had his main office in his shipping company and trading firm, which occupied one building in that new community called Pobres Park going up somewhere in Makati, or in his electric and communications building—but no, he chose to have his main offices here in this newspaper building, for it was with his newspapers that he wielded the most influence.
He was an astute politician, although he did not make speeches or run for any public office; in the highest echelons of both the Nacionalista and the Liberal parties, men vied for his favors and trembled at the slightest rumor of his displeasure. It was also believed that he was supporting the Huk movement and that his politics for the future was voiced by his leftist writers like Abelardo Cruz and Etang Papel, fire-breathing “liberals” who knew whichever way the wind blew.
Luis had amazed both of these writers with his insights on rural life, the mute aspirations of those who work the land. Cruz and Papel were city-room revolutionaries who had romanticized their ignorance with facility, and in a sense Luis saw himself in them, for he, too, for all his protestations, was just as comfortable and incapable of sacrifice as they. But there was one major difference, which he prided himself on—he had lived on a farm, knew of the sun’s rage, the cold of the waterlogged paddies, and he had exposed Abelardo Cruz’s rural knowledge as a book-learned sham. “Do you know how to catch freshwater crabs in the fields?” he had asked the pugnacious editor one evening when they were having coffee after the paper had been put to bed. Cruz claimed he did and even went into the motions of how he did it as a boy, until Luis asked the most important, the most crucial question: “And what if there is no water in the hole?” It was one of the first things any boy in Sipnget learned, for it spelled the difference between life and death. And Luis explained it to them, these champions of agrarian change, these lovers of the poor: “When there is water in the hole, stick your hand in. The crab could be there. But in heaven’s name—don’t stick it in if there is no water. A snake may be there.”
Etang Papel had insisted with her Manileña ignorance and colegiala impertinence that the lower classes were the makers of revolution; after all, she read and echoed the Manchester Guardian and those books that were difficult to come by but could easily be had if you had friends in New York or in London. But Luis knew that the indolence of the masses was real, that their volcanic angers were the accretion of repressed feelings, for he had seen dogged patience and docile servitude that had numbed their capacity for scrutiny. He had seen them troop to his father’s house to borrow money, to reaffirm their bondage—that they were secure in it, that his father could do no wrong. Where, then, was the massive force that could be harnessed? It certainly was not in this city room, it certainly was not in Sipnget; wherever it was, it had to be nurtured, lavished with care, so that it would sprout and grow. And only then …
In many ways, he was very glad that he had Eddie to work with; he had met him at one of the college-editors conferences in his junior year. They had gone to the south and stayed for a week as guests of Dantes at one of the publisher’s island retreats off the city of Iloilo. And one night the two of them had wandered down the empty beach, and Eduardo Sison, the editor of a small college paper, had talked with him, questioned him, rather, about many of his assumptions, uncaring of the fact that he was a rich man’s son. Like Ester, he had asked Luis about his motivations, his insincerity. Eddie, after all, was a self-supporting student who clerked in a Chinese store in the daytime, then went to an accounting class in the evenings. He had a natural talent for writing, but he also had the peasant’s natural talent for survival, and because he was a farmer’s son, his instincts for what was right were also sharp. When this opening with the Dantes group came and Luis was asked to get a right-hand man, he did not hesitate in naming Eddie. The magazine was about three years old, and there was gossip that the former editor and his associate had been eased out for trying to set up a union. It was a weekly and their deadline was more flexible, but Thursdays were a travail, for the magazine came out on Friday, early enough, according to Dantes, to beat the Sunday magazines and yet interesting enough for the reader to go back to it for his weekend fare.
It was patterned after the staid English weeklies—Dantes affected a liking for British papers—but its presentation was bright and breezy. The writing was in-depth without being ponderous, and the contributors, whose numbers Luis built up through personal meetings, covered a wide spectrum—conservatives and radicals, campus literati and aloof Ph.D.’s.
He did not know it, but it was Ester who had brought his name to her father’s attention. She had heard of him often from Trining, had read his poetry, which Trining would bring surreptitiously to school, and the articles he had written in his college paper and in the other newspapers, for by the time he was in his senior year Luis had already caught the attention of the national-magazine editors for his forceful but elegant prose, and when he met them they were surprised that he was still in college.
Dantes gave his two young editors a free hand, and he was not disappointed. Luis was a good team leader, although there was not much of a team to lead—just Eddie and one staff member, two proofreader/copyreaders, and a layout artist. Most of the articles were solicited, but in spite of a growing list of distinguished contributors the editors still had a lot of topical writing to do themselves—and fashioning those subheads and those pungent captions was always a dreary chore.
Trining was right—the magazine was his life. Ester took him for a snob when they met for the first time, but he remembered her face, and it was not because she was Dantes’s daughter. There was a quality of frailty about her, of tragedy in her eyes. He remembered her, although she wore that anonymous brown, stiff-collared convent-school uniform. She had gone to her father’s office that morning and had interrupted a discussion on Hemingway’s latest fiction, The Old Man and the Sea.
“My daughter,” Dantes had introduced her, and Luis had turned to her standing by the table, notebooks in her arm. He merely nodded—an almost mechanical reaction—then went on with the discussion, saying that Hemingway’s simplicity was terribly misleading, that this was no simple fisherman out for big game, that the work belonged to the same classic mold as Melville’s Moby Dick, that it was the story of man searching for meaning, and Ester stood there, listening until it was time for Dantes to hand out his black gold-tipped cigarettes to the two young men, who took them although they never really smoked. He did not speak to her, and he did not even bid her good-bye when he left the publisher’s office.
At eight-thirty Luis was ready. He could not make up his mind as to whether or not he should wear a tuxedo. The invitation had left the choice open between black tie and national costume, but it was so warm that he compromised by putting on a barong tagalog, with the collar buttoned, over his tuxedo pants.
The Dantes mansion—or compound—occupied a huge lot in San Juan, perhaps a full two hectares of choice land overlooking the city. It had been purchased by the Dantes clan before the war, when such mansions were comparatively cheap and there were still a few nipa houses in the area. The land was rocky, as were most of the environs of Manila, and people were not attracted to it, for nothing would grow on it except sturdy acacia and guava trees.
Five blocks away from the Dantes house, Luis was struck by the immensity of the party. The whole distance was lined with fat, glossy Cadillacs, Jaguars, and Rolls-Royces. Ubiquitous motorcycle policemen from San Juan and Manila directed traffic. It was the party of the year, perhaps of the decade or even the century, but nothing was said about it in any of the papers that belonged to Dantes. It was in the other papers that the event made a splash, for the three big publishers, in spite of their stiff competition for advertising, had formed an informal club where their social doings and good deeds were publicized but not in their own papers—an expression of urbanity that was somehow shallow and hypocritical. It was in the other papers, too, that Luis had read about Sydney oysters and Australian lamb being flown to Manila for this party, along with champagne by the gallon, truffles from France, Roquefort and Stilton cheeses, and other gourmet foods, about how the tables were decorated with tulips from Holland, and then, of course, about the guests—bank presidents from Wall Street, a couple of princesses and some dukes, and a dozen titled personages from Europe.
As he neared the Dantes mansion, a uniformed police colonel stopped his car at the gate and checked his invitation with the guest list, then a police captain gave his driver a card with a number and told him to park farther up the street. They drove into the compound, which smouldered with multicolored bulbs, and the door was opened by a doorman resplendent in the gala uniform of a police colonel. Like most of the big houses in the neighborhood, the Dantes residence was done in the ornate architecture of the twenties and thirties and surrounded by high adobe walls now covered with ivy. The acacia trees were strung with colored bulbs—green and blue and red—and in the carefully manicured gardens were huge candy-striped tents; in the tents were tables. There were four buffet tables at strategic places on the grounds, and beyond, on a stage before the tennis court that was not covered with Masonite, the American orchestra was playing “Autumn Leaves.” Luis listened briefly and concluded that the Bayside band was better.
The guests spilled all over, on the terraces, under the high bushy pergolas, and across the grassy lawn. Waiters in white barong tagalog, black pants, and white gloves flitted about balancing trays and carrying drinks, and all around was the happy sound of people at play.
The night was unusually cool, and the scent of sampaguitas hovered over everything. In the biggest tent, at the other end of the tennis court, Dantes was seated with his asthmatic wife, and beside them were the president and First Lady. Luis could see them clearly in spite of the distance.
He walked toward the tent, and midway he caught Ester’s eyes. She rushed to him, and together they went to her father and mother.
“Congratulations, sir, madame,” Luis said, shaking the couple’s hands, and Dantes, ever the impeccable host, asked, “I hope your father is well, Luis.”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“Well,” Dantes said, “Ester, he is all yours.”
Luis took another look at the celebrants. Dantes looked older than his fifty-five years, his hair prematurely white and with bags under his eyes, which were perennially misty. His chin always quivered when he talked, and it was quivering now as he chatted with a couple who had just arrived. Luis became aware of Ester’s hand gripping his and keeping him from tarrying. “Oh, I’m so glad you came,” she said, gushing. “I asked Papa if you were coming, and he said that you had gone home to visit your ailing father. So you left Trining there. She should have come, too. I was allowed four guests, and she is, well, my best friend—but you are here and that is all that matters.”
“I wouldn’t miss this for all the world,” he said, “and not because it is your parents’ anniversary but because you are here; I really want to know you better.”
She squeezed his hand and said, “Flatterer! But I love it. Would you like to meet my friends, or would you rather join your crowd?” She pointed to a tent close to one of the buffet tables.
They were passing a floodlight that blazed upon a huge statue of ice—a swan in the middle of a big table of hors d’oeuvres—and drawing away from her, he saw how beautiful Ester was. He noted the difference between her uniform and this billowy fuchsia gown she was blooming in tonight. A dash of rouge, a bit of eye shadow—she had the fine features of the Danteses, the fair skin, the imperious chin. Gazing at her in the brightness, he said, “Ester, you are beautiful,” meaning every word of it.
She laughed: “If you keep this up the whole evening, I may yet become your girlfriend.”
He picked a cracker from the table and scooped caviar from a bowl.
“I’ll stay with you and serve you,” Ester said, “if you are hungry.”
“Starved,” Luis said. She guided him to a food-laden table beyond the court where a crowd was busy filling up their plates. She helped him choose his, then took him to a vacant table by the court. She was being the perfect hostess. “I’ve told my friends I may have a very eligible bachelor—I hope you will not disappoint them,” she said.
“I’ll stop the presses to see you,” he told her. She left him to bring her friends over. He was not really hungry. With a glass of Scotch he went up to the balcony, where he could have an unobstructed view of the garden, the guests rambling around in its great breadth. The orchestra played softly, and couples started moving toward the court. He was not aware that Ester had followed him and was hovering around him, a quizzical look on her face.
“I thought you would be down there,” she said solicitously. “I hope you are not angry with anyone.”
“Oh, no,” he said, laughing. “I was waiting for your gang, but where are they?”
“Dancing,” she said gaily, “but I will make up for it. I will be your partner the rest of the evening—if you want.”
She took the vacant chair beside him. “I wanted Trining to come—very much—but going to the province was more important. How is your father?”
“Not so well, but he will manage. Old people always do.” The orchestra started playing “Stardust.” “That’s one of my favorites,” Luis said. “Learned it during the war. The words are poetic.”
“I’ve read your poetry,” Ester said.
“My condolences.”
“I like it—but why is it always so sad and bitter? You must be terribly unhappy.”
“Are you a psychologist of sorts?”
“No, just trying to understand you.”
“I’m an open book. No deep dark secrets.”
She stood up. “Let’s not waste your favorite song,” she said, holding his hand.
They went down the stone steps. At the edge of the court he hesitated, suddenly awkward, knees watery, as if this were his first dance. She was already pressing close to him, however, so he held her narrow waist and her hand went up to rest on his shoulder, her cheek brushing against his chin. He felt the round, smooth, and silky nudging of her thighs, the warm softness of her breast, and all his senses became alive in response to her exalting nearness. He wanted to dance with her still, but the orchestra shifted to an abominable limbo and he said tersely, “There goes our poetry.” A young man whose face he did not bother to look at accosted them on their way back to their seats and asked Ester for a dance. Luis let her go.
He slid into the shadows, down the garden slope, where the bougainvillea thinned out toward the rocky promontory. He stood there and watched the city in the distance, aglow like embers, kindling a sky flecked with summer clouds. His back was turned to the music, and soon, so soon, he was hurtling away from this precinct to another time, in a far and forgotten place, and the music was the twang of guitars: I always go back, back to where it all started, to Sipnget, and the village fiesta, lighted by kerosene lamps, the hardened earth for a dance floor, the woven palm leaf for decor, divider, and shade, and the village girls …
“At last, I’ve found you.” It was Ester behind him. He turned around, stepped down the rock, and said, “The view from here is lovely. Manila looks like a spread of jewels.”
“Not in the daytime,” she said. “There’s a haze over it, and it looks quite ugly.” Then, seriously, “Why did you leave the party?”
“I’m still here, am I not?” he asked.
“I should have asked what you are doing here.”
“Not again,” he said. He held her arm as they went down the incline. “Don’t you know that you make me feel so eccentric?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Well, I just wandered around and I got to thinking about the town I left, the music I used to listen to. You know, just rambling around in my thoughts—I often do that. It’s quite exhilarating.”
“How far did you go?”
Luis did not know what to make of her, whether she was making fun of him or was sincerely inquisitive. He decided to be honest. “I was thinking of the very recent past—the war. I had to stop high school, and I commuted between Manila and the province, you know. Looking at Manila from here, with all those lights, and listening to the music, I am aware that time has really gone by.”
They went down a terrace and were now on the edge of the dance floor. Luis sat with her near the garden wall.
“We have to live in the present,” she said simply, “and thank God we are here, waiting for the morrow.”
“You are an optimist, I can see,” he said. “But the present is an extension of the past. The connection is not broken at all, and the war—what a big word it is!—it is an extension of peace.”
But what did he really know about the war? He was too young to have been in the Army and too old to be with the women. He spent the four war years in Ermita, where he grew up to be a young man, pampered, all his wishes granted. He was frightened, but he was never really in danger. It was Vic who knew war, who told him about its starkest details. It was Vic who was in Rosales and Sipnget, who helped to take care of Don Vicente in the earliest days of evacuation. Vic saw the Japanese enter the town, and he saw the pile of Filipino dead—their hands tied behind them with wire—loaded into pushcarts by civilians and taken to the plaza, before the whitewashed Rizal monument, and like so many diseased and butchered cattle, dumped into a common grave. Vic was in Sipnget, too, when the Japanese entered the village, herded the young men together, and picked out the prettiest girls. Now there was another war, and it was being fought in the mountains, in the plains, in Sipnget and Rosales, in dark, unknown warrens of the city, in newspaper offices, and most of all, in the convoluted recesses of minds such as his.
“You are young only once, but you want to grow old before your time,” Ester was saying.
“Our tragedy,” he said, trying to sound very light, “is that, as a famous writer once said, youth is wasted on the young.”
“But I don’t think you have really started to live.” Ester was prodding him. She had struck at the root of his ennui, and perhaps, he thought later, she was right. He had not begun to live—or love. He had not seen life as Vic had seen it; all that he had seen were the freaks, both of the imagination and of living reality. He had listened once to his grandfather’s tales, of aswangs making gold out of children’s blood, of winged men who could with a wave of a kerchief vault mountain and valley.
“I guess you’re right,” he said. “Why don’t you help me live a little?” He glanced at his watch.
“It is still early,” Ester said, “and you asked me to help, didn’t you?”
It was a dare he must pick up sometime. Right now he could not stay for another moment. The night was lost, no matter how amusing the conversation and enchanting this girl. In that inner self there was no light; there was this scourge of the searching mind that could not be eluded.
“I have to be up very early,” he said. “Aren’t you happy that I’m such a thoughtful employee?”
“That’s not a nice thing to say,” she said. “You are trying to put me in my place, and I am not spoiled.”
“I’m sorry.”
Ester tried to be light. “And speaking of Father, he sleeps until lunchtime sometimes but still manages to work the whole night. Aren’t you really going to meet some of my friends?”
Luis smiled and stood up. “I’d rather be with you,” he said solemnly. He had intended to flatter her, but now that he had said it he meant every word. “I really would like very much to be with you again when I can have you all to myself.”
Her eyes shone, and he felt that they were looking right through his permeable skull, into the recondite corners of his brain, reading his thoughts as if they were in blazing neon.
“I’m not really a snob—even if you did call me one.”
“I did not,” she objected vehemently. “Whoever gave you—”
He pressed his forefinger to her lips to stop her from talking further. “I think I am beginning to love you,” he said.
Even as he drove away it seemed as if Ester was still beside him. He could still smell her fragrance, her hair, and most of all, he could envision those dark, sad eyes that would—he was now sure—always hound him.