27
It was a dreary walk from the camino. All around him were the newly harvested fields. There were still a few golden patches waiting to yield to the scythe, and the fields smelled richly of grain and of cut grass. When Luis finally reached the dike his legs were numb. Once, this dike was no more than a rise of earth that followed every bend of the river, but in a few years the path astride it had become a dirt road and the saplings of camachile and acacia on both sides had grown into trees, which helped to hold the earth in place. The narrow road carried no more than bull carts, horse-drawn calesas, and an occasional jeepney. On both sides, down to the bank of the river, spread patches of ripening tobacco plots, gold and green, topped with white where the blossoms had not yet fallen. The sun was high, and in the still afternoon the earth seemed to simmer. Astride the dike, he could see the distance he had traversed, and he cursed himself for not having worn sneakers. His aching feet must be blistered by now. His shoes had been newly polished by Simeon, but after he had crossed the muddy harvested fields, they had, like the cuffs of his gray pants, become dusty, the mud having dried on them. He walked on. Weeds were beginning to obscure the path. There were no quarter-moon marks of carabao hooves or the fine polished lines made by sled runners, and the earth was crusty under his feet. The path had not been used for some time, he mused. He stopped and looked back to where he had come from—the wide, flat fields splotched with high mounds of hay, and in the distance the lash of white country road where not a single bull cart or calesa moved and the lomboy tree at the edge of the depression from where the earth that formed the dike had been excavated. That tree—he was not wrong—years ago he had climbed it, defying the bees that hived in its trunk to gather its black juicy berries. This was the path, and holding on to a thick stand of grass, he bounded up onto the flat broad back to the dike.
As he stood in the heat of day, he saw before him the barren land. How lonely and empty Sipnget had become—a few buri palms, the bamboo brakes that lined the riverbank, the green puffs of acacia, rows of broken buri-palm trunks left to rot near the riverbank, the water shining in the sun, the broad stony island, and the stubborn reeds, jutting above the water with their catch of moss and water lilies.
Sipnget as it used to be was gone—the store below the dike, the house where he was born, where he had heard the halting screech of his mother’s scolding and the soothing remonstrances of an old man. An infernal machine had thundered past Sipnget, leveled the trees and the palms, and furrowed the land into a flat and ugly wound. In a moment of doubt and faltering he retraced his steps—no, he was not wrong, he was in Sipnget, but gone were all the little things that had enmeshed themselves with his life. How could he bring back the village that he knew—blow life upon a desert of brown, so that it might bloom with the old and familiar scents? He ran down the dike, away from the vanishing traces of the path. A sprout of grass caught his foot, and he stumbled on the hard plowed earth. He picked himself up, cursing, shaking the clod that dug into his palms. He hurried to where he knew the first house used to stand. When he reached the place he stooped and examined the ground. Curled up with the dry, upturned soil were cinders and white-bleached roots of acacias and buri palms, like maggots feasting on his past.
All of them in the house in Rosales, including his dear ailing father—surely they must have known what had happened to the village. He had not asked any of them or even told them that he was coming, but they should have told him. On the day he arrived he had asked Santos how it was in Sipnget, and the short, work-ridden caretaker had turned away and—as if he never heard the question—left. Luis was not close to any of his father’s workers, not even to Simeon, who had taken him from Sipnget to this big red house, and to the servants, who greeted him politely. He had taken for granted that the countryside—for all its being stirred by the proselytizing of the Huks—would be unchanged, that the village would be where it always had been, the end of dreams. Surely, someone in Rosales must have known that Sipnget was gone. But why did nobody tell him?
He raised his eyes to the sun that singed the heavens, and he was about to turn and go back to the dike when, from the direction of the river, behind the large prostrate trunks of buri palms, he saw a man rise.
“Hoy!” He waved his hands.
The figure bobbed up, and he caught a glimpse of an old, anonymous face, but the man bent down again and was hidden behind the trunk. Only his back and the brim of his wide buri hat rose intermittently. He seemed to be busy, rising and stooping behind the trunk.
Luis ran toward the man and in a leap perched himself atop the trunk. Below him the man was tying together burned planks of wood with black, sooty wire. More planks of burned wood were scattered nearby.
“What’s happened? Did the whole village burn down?” he asked.
The man went on with his work, his face hidden by the wide brim of his hat, his blackened hands struggling clumsily with the wire.
“Are you deaf?”
“I heard,” the man said, still without looking at Luis.
“Tell me, where are the people? How did this happen?”
The man did not speak. Luis descended from atop the trunk and bent down a little. The face was gaunt, the eyes tired, the chin withered, and the forehead wrinkled. Recognition came: “Tio Joven!”
The man raised the bundle of wood and stood it on one end. Picking up a piece from the pile, he rammed it into the middle of the bundle and hammered it, so that the bundle would tighten.
“Luis, the grandson of Ipe.” Luis spoke in haste. “You know me, Tio Joven.”
The man paused and dropped the piece of wood that he used as a club. He squinted at Luis. Then he picked up his club again and pounded at the plank. “Why did you come here?” he asked without pausing in his work.
Yes, why did I come here—I who had wanted to escape from this land, to blot from my mind the faces of my people? “That’s a foolish question,” Luis said simply.
Tio Joven peered at him again, but there was no apparent recognition in his eyes. He shook the bundle and tested its tightness. “People change,” he said. “Many come here, asking all sorts of questions—and what can I say when I am just here to gather wood for my stove?”
The man stopped and, lifting the bundle to his shoulder, started to walk away. Luis held the man’s load and dragged it down. Holding him by the shoulders, Luis shook the man viciously. “My mother and my grandfather and my brother—where are they?” he cried.
The old man shook off his hold and backed away. For a moment Luis expected him to draw the bolo at his waist, but the man did not. In Tio Joven’s eyes Luis saw no hatred and no fear—only that resignation of old people who have grown tired of living.
“What do you want me to say?” the old man finally asked, barely raising his voice above a whisper, his eyes throwing glances around him, as if he were afraid that among the dead trunks of palms, in the hot harsh day, someone was listening to the horrendous secret that he was about to tell. “You shouldn’t have come here,” he said, taking off his wide-brimmed hat and fanning himself. His eyes had grown warm. “It’s all too late now.”
Luis felt panic pounding his chest. “My mother,” he said. “Where are they? Can’t you tell me?”
Tio Joven put on his hat and wiped his hands against his faded trousers. “Nena—your mother—she is alive, but your grandfather is dead—and so are many others.”
Luis could not believe what he heard. “No!” he cried, and although fear, anger, and sorrow claimed him, no tears welled in his eyes. There was instead this choking weight that pressed upon his chest. “Only a few months ago …” He wanted to say that he had been here, but he realized immediately that he had quite forgotten the old folks, that he had not written to his mother at all or attended to her needs, that he had shut her and his grandfather conveniently out of his mind.
“My mother, where can I find her?”
The old man shook his head. “After it happened we did not really know who was alive and who was not. After a week your mother came to where we had evacuated. She was hungry and we fed her. She was dirty and we gave her some clothes. She would go to every man and say, ‘Victor—or Luis—you must go home now.’ Every young man was Luis or Victor. She had nothing else. Her eyes were red from crying. She carried a small bundle, which she used as a pillow. It contained nothing but old newspapers and letters. She would not part with it. She left at night, so no one noticed her departure. That was the last time we saw her.”
“Where could she be now? Where can I find her?”
Tio Joven looked far away. “Ask the wind,” he said. “She goes where the wind wills. She was in Rosales, I have heard—in the market, searching. She does not bother anyone. People are kind—they will always give her food, clothing, and a roof over her head.”
After a while, Luis asked, “Tio Joven, how did it start, how did it happen?”
“I do not know,” the old man said, “but your grandfather, he was among the first to fall. He was feeding the hogs, I think. Two days later—the fires hadn’t completely died down and the posts of the houses were still smoking—the dead were still there, where the bullets had found them.”
Luis covered his face with his hands and leaned on the buri trunk, his knees watery and shaking. “Only a few months ago—” he said bitterly.
“Time is swift.” The old man sighed. “Sometimes we don’t notice it anymore.”
“Tell me what happened?”
“You never heard about it in the city, not even from your father?” Luis did not speak.
“Three months ago, or less,” Tio Joven said, sitting on the bundle and fanning himself again with his hat. “It is not very clear to me now. Ask those who are in town. They know better.”
Luis leaned forward. “Tell me.”
“But what use is the truth now?”
Luis turned away. “I have to know,” he said quietly.
Tio Joven bent over, rested his elbows on his knees, his chin on his palms. “It’s very hazy now,” he said, looking at the yellowish blades of grass struggling up from where he had picked up the bundled pieces of wood, “but that afternoon—how can one forget it? The harvest in November was good. Your tia was planning to butcher a pig.” He turned to Luis and smiled.
“It was sunset. I was coming up the river, where I had lifted the fish traps. It was a poor catch. I had gone up the gully when the shooting started. I could hear the bullets whistling. I stopped, then I saw the people, the women and the children, running toward the river. I went back and fled to the delta with them, and we hid in the high grass. From there we saw the village go up in fire—all through the night. Then, before dawn, we started looking around for the others in the delta. I called my wife’s name, but she was not among those who escaped.” The old man’s face was inscrutable. His eyes had long been dried of tears, and the story he told had long numbed his senses to grief.
“Why did it happen?” Luis asked.
Tio Joven bit his lower lip and spat. “I do not know—how will I know? They came searching for us in Aguray—in the delta to which we had fled. The constabulary soldiers and Don Vicente’s civilian guards—they said that our village was evil, that there were Huks among us, and that they would continue to follow us. We returned here—some of us. We saw for the first time what had happened, and we knew we couldn’t stay here anymore. A few days afterward the tractors came.”
Luis stood up. Around him the newly plowed earth was waiting for rain and seed. “Grandfather,” he asked, “where was he buried?”
The old man pointed to the turn of the river. “There are twenty of them there.” The old man rose, heaving his load on his shoulders. Luis walked behind him.
“I am now in Aguray, too. That’s farther up the river—if you remember. There’s not much to eat there, and we cannot tell when we will have to leave. When the rains come we won’t know how the floodwaters will turn. The delta may be flooded, and all the houses of reed and bamboo that we have built will be washed away. They haven’t come down to drive us away. Maybe we will go to Manila if we can raise the transport money. We can try our luck there.”
Luis took his wallet, pulled out some bills, and handed them to the old man. The old man shook his head, but Luis tucked the bills into the old man’s shirt pocket just the same. “Thank you, thank you,” the old man said. “You will be going back to Manila? I hear it is very peaceful there.”
Luis did not answer.
“We do talk about you sometimes,” the old man said finally, “that you will be getting married. You will live in Rosales, of course?”
Luis did not want to talk about himself. “Are all the others in Aguray, too?” he asked.
“About five families,” Tio Joven said, shaking his head. “Life there is difficult. There are no fish in the river. We have planted some peanuts and watermelons—seeds that we got from the farmers there, who wanted to help us. We need many things. See, I come this far for firewood.” They walked with difficulty, stumbling over dry chunks of earth and deep furrows. The old man stopped before a thicket of shrubs near the riverbank. “Behind this,” he said.
Before the mound of earth Tio Joven flung down his load and wiped his face with the sleeve of his shirt. “There are twenty here—we counted them, and we know all of them.”
Luis stood before the swell, his arms limp at his sides. Beyond, the river, the sparse growth of weeds motionless on its banks. Above, a smoky blue sky and the sun, which ravaged everything. I see them all before me now, all who have trusted me because I was one of them. This is my truth, and it would have been simpler if I were ignorant of it and could not trace myself to it. Here I am, the chief mourner, but I cannot cry. I see an ancient and craggy face and eyes that have also seen travail I will never witness. Grandfather—if you are here now, I will hold your hand to my brow and tell you that the world is evil and that not even love such as mine matters anymore. And Mother, you who cared for me simply, where are you? What do I have to offer you? You are here around me—alive as the air is alive and kind as the land that will continue to nurture the seed.
“Tell me, Tio,” he asked without looking at the old man, who now squatted beside him and was starting to pull the strands of grass that had sprouted at the base of the grave. “Who buried them here?”
The old man kept at the grass. “Who else but we? We could have buried them earlier, but we were all afraid to go to the village. When we finally went, they were lying in the ashes, their bodies black and bloated. They all looked the same, and you wouldn’t know them if you had not been with them all your life. They left them there—they were not even decent enough to bury them after they had killed them. We had to gather them, each one, carefully, so that they would not fall apart. We didn’t want them eaten by dogs—dogs, do you realize that?” His voice had become an ugly screech. “Dogs,” he was saying, again and again, in futile anger. “They will pay for this. Dogs. Dogs!”
A warm whiff of wind swept the grass that sprouted from the mound. The grass was yellowish green unlike the grass that covered the dike and the riverbank. Between the blades, shoots were breaking through the soil, straight and firm and sharp. Luis bent down and scooped a handful of earth, which he crushed and let trickle through his fingers.
“I’ll come here again,” he promised.
“What for?” the old man asked. “We buried them properly. There was no priest—we could not even afford that—but we prayed for all of them.”
“I’ll come again,” Luis said, although the bleak truth was that there was no sense in returning.
Tio Joven bent down and pitched the bundle on his shoulders. Luis watched him do this, and his eyes followed flakes of ash and charcoal as they fell to the ground. “Maybe I will return, too,” the old man said. “There is still some firewood I can get.” He struggled toward the river and disappeared down the gully.
Luis turned his back to the sun, and his shadow lay like a stub on the ground. A thousand curses stirred violently in his mind, like a pack of starved dogs straining at their leashes. Not many in Manila would believe him if he told them what had happened in Sipnget. His friends would say: Luis, this is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. However, he would tell them the truth.
The journey was longer now. The dream is over, vanished like the aimless drift of smoke, like the echo of a gun. It was here on this hallowed land, now violated, where I saw the dream in my grandfather’s eyes, in the anger that fed his soul and stirred his withered muscles. We came from the delta one afternoon, on our shoulders old jute sacks half filled with turnips that we had dug. I was tired, and so were he and Victor. We were all gasping as we went up the gully that the carabaos had widened as they trampled their way to the river. I gripped his hand and helped him up. We were to follow the dike home. On the dike’s broad back Grandfather paused to catch his breath. We laid our sacks down, and when he had regained his breath Grandfather turned to us and said: If I had my way—and a smile kindled in his face—you both would not be here today, looking for something to fill the supper pot.
I told him that I had no complaints. He stood his full height, his tattered trousers pressed close to his bones by a wind that sprang from across the fields, and Vic and I, we reached no higher than his chest. He pointed to the distance and said hoarsely: See that dalipawen tree there, I planted that like a monument. See how green its leaves—but the tree does not matter, for the markers that are important are those of stone, which the rich man has studded the land with.
With a slow sweep of his hand he traced the curve of the river, which gleamed in the sun, and said: All this—up to the river—was ours, because we cleared it.
My father’s men intruded upon Sipnget after that and told this defeated man—my grandfather—long before I was born, even before my mother’s time—that everything he had cleared, even the lot where his house stood, belonged not to him but to the man who lived in the big red house in Rosales. Like all the farmers in the village who had clawed their farms out of the wilderness, this man found himself shackled to this land. Times when the stars and the full moon’s halo augured a bountiful harvest, times when the river brimmed with fish—these were forgotten. The old people died or left, their homes were swept by typhoons or were torn apart by inheritors, but the big red house withstood all vicissitudes. If they got sick or a child was born, if they married and needed money, to the big red house they went. Debt piled upon debt, and one day Grandfather, no longer able to pay, sent his only daughter to serve in the house, and she, who they said was as beautiful as the morning star, was lost forever to Sipnget.
Father—he was young and handsome then—appreciated beauty and took it where he found it, and a year later the girl from Sipnget returned. The village was asleep. Only the insects in the grass and the owls in the buri palms were awake. She returned with her shame, which all the village came to know, and this shame became more than just the bones and the veins in me; in time it also became this passion that cannot be vented, these thoughts that cannot be spoken—all that I cannot be.
Grandfather dreamed. Looking at the hollow creeks and the mouth drawn like a line, I knew that the maculate dream would endure, but it had to confront another dream—my father’s.
They drove back to Rosales in great haste, and the road, white and shimmering in the afternoon heat, vanished behind them in billows of dust. The car rattled, but they did not slow down until they reached the main street and were past the open gate to the bodega of the rice mill behind the house where Santos, the perennial ledger under his arm and a pencil stuck behind his ear, was looking after the weighing of the sacks of palay before they were carted to the mill.
Luis bolted out of the car. “Mang Santos!” he shouted.
Santos laid his ledger on the small table beside the wooden platform of the weighing machine and met Don Vicente’s son. He avoided Luis’s angry eyes.
“Why did you not tell me? Why didn’t you?”
Santos turned furtively to the men heaving the jute sacks from the platform of the weighing machine into the queue of bull carts. They had paused and were watching with quiet interest.
“Please, Luis,” Santos tried to quiet him, “let’s not talk here.”
“Why did you not tell me?” Luis repeated.
Santos did not answer. He placed a placating arm around Luis’s waist and led him to the room beside the garage. Santos offered him a chair, but Luis refused it.
“You are all liars,” Luis said. “You came to me, all smiles, wishing me happiness and a long life on my wedding day, although you knew my mother was lost, my grandfather dead. Have you no heart at all?”
The torrent subsided and Santos asked, “What good would it have done if I told you?” The caretaker’s hands were shaking. “I am no one here, Luis—just an ordinary servant, like the rest.”
The caretaker’s face was frightened, and Luis pitied him. Like the others, he had grown old serving his father, and now another master was taking over. “You lied to me—with your silence. You did not say a thing, but you lied to me, just the same,” he said wearily.
“Always remember this,” Santos said meekly. “You are your father’s son. What happened to Sipnget, to your mother and your grandfather—there was a time I knew them all—was an injustice that cries out to God for vengeance, but who am I to say this? Who can right the wrongs that people do in their anger or in their blindness?”
After some silence, Luis said, “And Victor, do you know where he is? What has become of him? He wasn’t in Sipnget when it happened.”
Santos rose and went to the grilled window. “We don’t know where he is, but the civilian guards and the constabulary think he is the new Commander Victor. They thought he was in the village when they attacked it.”
So it was my brother who brought death and destruction to Sipnget, Luis thought grimly. My brother …
“A happy day has come, Luis,” Santos was saying. “On your wedding day, how could we have told you? Besides, I should not be the one to tell you. Your father knows what happened. Our guards were involved, perhaps less than the constabulary, but they were involved, just the same.”
He knows, the whole town knows—and how will I face him now who strapped these clothes on my back? Santos had more to say, but Luis wheeled around and rushed out.
In the shiny, heat-laden hall the calla lilies that had been brought from Baguio for his wedding had wilted in their crystal vases. A garland of bridal bouquet that a thoughtful maid had strung on the statue of the farmer with a plow had dried, and its small petals had fallen, dotting the base of the statue with white. Trining was asleep in their room. He wriggled out of his sweat-soaked clothes and sat on the rattan sofa by the window. The fatigue had reached his limbs, and in a while he rose and bent over his wife, kissed her gently on the cheek, then went out and crossed the hall to his father’s room.
Don Vicente was slouched on his bed. As usual, the blinds were down, but the depressing dimness of the room no longer dulled his vision. His father’s eyes were closed, mere slits below the black bushy patch of eyebrows. His arms were dumpy at his sides. On his head, as if it had been grafted to the round, fleshy lump, the ice bag was precariously propped, and running down the side of his mouth to his chin was a thin line of saliva. If he had as much as nodded, the ice bag would have fallen, but it did not fall even when he stirred. “Speak, son—what is it that you want?”
Now the baggy eyes were half open and were glued on him.
“I have just returned from Sipnget,” Luis said, sitting on the wrought-iron chair beside the bed, watching the rising and falling of his father’s broad chest. “I found out that my mother has disappeared and my grandfather is dead—killed by your guards.” He thought of sterner words to say, but now this was all he could utter, as if all fight had been drained from him and he had become puerile and timid.
“I knew you would go there,” Don Vicente said softly. “I was waiting for you to come and see me, to tell me you finally did go. It is a very tragic thing, Luis—this I must tell you.”
Luis bit his lower lip. “There were others killed.”
“I know,” Don Vicente said, shaking his head. “Tragic thing.”
“I have heard of things like this,” Luis said, “but in the city, where one is detached from the barrios, I always thought these were exaggerated.”
Don Vicente propped himself higher on his bed. “Now perhaps you will tell me what wrongs are to be righted?” The father peered at his son, his thick, pallid lips drawn across the flat expanse of his corpulent face. “Luis—” The old man’s voice was almost pleading. He tried to smile, so that the corners of his mouth no longer drooped. “Luis, I have never told you about my past. I did not want to talk about it, but now, now I must. You are my son, you have a right to know it. You know that I am dying and perhaps I deserve to die unloved and—and hated, even by you. However, I was once young, too, and the young have their own weaknesses.”
“I have never claimed that I have no weaknesses,” Luis said simply.
The old man did not heed him. He went on, his face bathed with the luminosity of remembrance: “I was young when I traveled all over Europe, and I was curious and virile then—not like now. It has been two years since I have had a woman, because I am no longer capable. Oh, what I would give to have one erection! But this diabetes, this drug that works on my heart … Yes, it was different then, hijo. I traveled all over Europe and had a good share of prim English girls and healthy Nordics, but there’s nothing like a Filipina in the way she holds a man, loves him, satisfies him. I should know. God forbid that you become a homosexual—that’s becoming so fashionable nowadays—with all that literary life you are living. Oscar Wilde was a homosexual, wasn’t he? There must have been others.”
“Must I prove my manhood all the time, Father?”
Don Vicente shook his head. “No, hijo—I am explaining myself more than anything else. You see, Rosales was not big enough, nor was Pangasinan, perhaps not even Luzon. Your grandfather knew that. He knew I was bright. So off I went to Manila, to high school, like you did, and then I came back to this town and its stupid peasant ways and its ugly peasant women.”
“Including my mother.”
Don Vicente shook his head sadly. “You misunderstand, hijo. Please do not misjudge me. In her youth she was very pretty, and as you would say, I fell for her. It was not like those popular stories you like to repeat in your articles, about landlords having their choice of the prettiest of their tenants’ daughters. She was working in the house, and I loved her—you do not know how much. My father knew, he heard about it—and that was why he sent me to Europe for college, and of course I could not but obey. It was difficult tearing myself away from her—you know, we couldn’t get married. There was not even a thought about it. For many months she was on my mind, always. You will understand the anguish. I did not write to her, nor did she write to me. I was in Europe. I was going around—”
“And you forgot all about her—and her son.”
His father shook his head sadly. “It was not like that, hijo.” His voice was soft, supplicating. “It was not like that at all. It was human frailty. I came back and wanted to see her, but I had gotten married in Spain, and I did not want to stay in Rosales. Would you want to live here after you have lived in Europe? How many times did I want to see her, to ask her about you, after I found out about you.”
“And yet you did nothing to help her when I was a baby—yes, she did tell me this.”
“I was away, Luis. I was away, and when I came back and her husband had died and I did see her again, she was no longer the pretty girl I remembered. Work and motherhood had destroyed her.”
“And suffering, too,” Luis said. “I look at myself in the mirror, and I see you.”
“And you do not like what you see,” Don Vicente said. “I do not blame you, Luis, but I want you, just the same.”
“And that is why I am here—because this is what you want.”
Don Vicente turned away, and sobs convulsed his body. “I am dying, and I don’t want you to hate me for what happened to Sipnget. I will do anything for you, because—because you are my son.”
Luis steeled himself. “Thirteen years, Father,” he said clearly. “Thirteen long years—you never had need for us. No, you didn’t love her or me at all.”
The old man turned to him, his baggy eyes red with tears. “What do you want me to do?”
“There is nothing you can do now,” Luis said. “My grandfather is dead. My mother, she is crazy and no one knows how she is. And my brother—only God knows where he is.”
“Your brother!” Don Vicente suddenly raised his voice. “He is my enemy. He is your enemy. All of them have become your enemy. Don’t you understand? She is a fine woman, but what could I do? I am no god, and I can’t dictate to the soldiers where they should go or to the civilian guards who are under their control—tactical, they call it—when they are in the field. They will not say it was a mistaken encounter, but that is what I suspect it was.”
“But why did they burn the village? Why did you send your tractors there to erase it?”
“Our tractors!”
“Why?” Luis stood up and moved to the window. He raised the blinds a little, and fine powdery dust drifted from the blinds and dissolved as a little sun filtered in. The soldiers who made their camp in the schoolhouse across the plaza were cooking their supper in blackened cans and iron cauldrons.
“The memory must be erased, that is why,” Don Vicente said. “Do you think I am not sorry that this happened? But if you must know the truth, blame it on frailty, everything that is natural with men. I don’t regret that you were born, that I cared for you and gave you things you needed. You will understand.”
Across the plaza a soldier, naked from the waist up, his sweaty chest shiny in the late-afternoon sun, stirred one of the cauldrons with a big wooden ladle. A squad was preparing to leave at the camp gate.
“I didn’t ask you to take me,” Luis said.
“But am I taking back what I gave you—or boasting about it?” Don Vicente asked. “I couldn’t let you suffer, that was all. I was never happier than on the day Santos brought you here, and the other day, when you and Trining were married—what more can a father want than grandchildren?”
“I should have stayed behind, in Sipnget.”
“Do not be sentimental,” his father said. “What would have been your future there? The things that I give you, they are yours by right.”
But these were mine by right, too: the days when we had nothing but salt and rice and camote tops, days when I walked in the sun, looking for crevices in the fields where the frogs hid, so that I could spear them and have something to eat. These were my birthright, too.
The soldiers with their tin plates and spoons were filing out of the schoolhouse and finding themselves benches and writing desks scattered under the acacia trees.
Don Vicente continued, “But I have no regrets except that your mother—”
“Don’t talk anymore about her. You can’t give her sanity back,” Luis said, suddenly turning to his father. The old man was not looking at him. His eyes were raised to the ceiling. Luis strode to the door, but his father held him back. “Sit down,” he said sharply, his eyes now wide open. “I am not finished yet.”
Luis returned to his seat and met his father’s steady gaze. This was the gesture of courage that he had long wanted to make. It is said, his grandfather had told him once, that the field rat that can look at the deadly rice snake in the eye before the snake strikes is saved. Am I saved now when I have become so pliable in his hands?
“Do not be rash,” Don Vicente continued. “Truth—that which you seek, which I cannot give you—is how we look at things, what we believe. Do not talk about injustice or wrongs. There is always an element of injustice in this world, and many wrongs are committed in the jungle. We all live in a kind of bondage until we die. This, too, is truth, and it is ugly, so we do not call it that.”
“How would you call it, Father?”
Don Vicente twiddled his thumbs. “How can I call it anything else? All I know is that we are alive, that you haven’t grown up. How about motives, why don’t you go into them, too? What is the motive of Dantes, for instance, in building up his image as the champion of liberalism and all that crap? You know that he is not, that he is a vicious plutocrat, but you work for him just the same. You asked me why I had the village plowed. It was not hate—it was remorse. I wanted to start anew, to wipe out the traces of a past that will bother us.”
“What about those who lived in the village?”
“Their lives—what about mine and yours? Whose is more important? Your mother and your grandfather are no longer there. Don’t be sentimental. As for the tenants, they can be accommodated anywhere. The farms they tended—these will still be going to them.”
“They are frightened, Father. They will not come back.”
“And is that my fault?”
Suddenly Luis felt very tired and his head ached. “We have to have a conscience, Father,” he said feebly. “That is what separates us from the animals. It is not the soul or belief in God that distinguishes us—”
“Conscience is for the weak,” Don Vicente rasped contemptuously.
So this is what we are up against, Luis cried inside him. The primeval law, the glacial age.
“It is enough,” Don Vicente said, “that I didn’t approve of it, that I feel remorse about it. It is tragic that they were killed, but there was some firing from the village—don’t you understand? They fired back. And there is another thing you must realize—their minds were diseased and their death was inevitable. It’s they—or us.”
How clear it had become. It was as if his father had been skinned and his insides turned out, so that Luis could look into each internal sore.
“You must understand,” Don Vicente continued. “Perhaps I can put it better this way. Look at you, at your friends—the five-centavo guerrillas. Where are they now? Who are those who made money during the war, who survived? The collaborators, the buy-and-sell men who did business with the Japanese.” A long pause. “I am not saying that you should be an opportunist, but at the same time you cannot go against the wave. You must ride it and reach some place. To shout against injustice, to oppose it, is sometimes good for the spirit; but be sure it does not destroy you. Just remember this: the laws are made by the strong, not by the weak.”
Luis nodded dumbly. There was nothing more that his father could say that he did not already know. He rose, and as he headed for the door again Don Vicente called, “The blinds, Luis. Put them down.” But although he clearly heard his father’s command, he did not turn back.
Trining had awakened when he got to her room. She was sitting by the azotea door, and in the soft light of the late afternoon she was reading Marquand’s Point of No Return, which he had brought with him from the city. She stood up and kissed him. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
When he did not reply she asked, “How are they? What did your mother say?”
Luis probed into her anxious face, into the soft brown eyes that were always expressive and alert. She did not know what had happened to Sipnget, and somehow he was glad, for if she did and had not told him so, he would have hated her, too. He sat beside her and told her how the whole village had been burned, that there was nothing in the barrio now but ashes and plowed earth. When he had finished she embraced him, her heart thumping against his chest. “The soldiers and Father’s guards,” Luis said, “it was a mistake and that’s that.”
“Did you fight with him?”
“I was afraid once,” he said softly. “I stayed away from him, because I might say something I need not say. Now I am not afraid anymore. I can even damn him now without caring about what he will say.”
Trining shook her head sadly. “You will end up hating everyone, even me.”
“How else do you expect me to react?” he asked. He closed his eyes and held her close. Hate—but isn’t this the strongest force man has ever fashioned? The father rector argued forcefully once that love was far stronger, that it was the basis of Christian action and forgiveness its bedrock of virtue. Love, however, does not commit people. It does not draw them together in the same way that hate does. You cannot be Christian and forgive or love the tyrants around you, for in doing so, you will yourself institutionalize their brutality. There is nothing un-Christian about hating those who are unjust. I am a vengeful God—read the Bible again; I come bringing not peace but the sword. So let there be hate, so that we can exorcise the evils that plague us. Only with the cleansing catastrophe of fire can we renew ourselves.
How readily he agreed now with his brother—but only because the agony was now his.
But what of this girl, this woman who was to bear his child, who had turned to him as her savior and master? He stroked her hair and said, “Don’t say that—how can I ever hate you? You are the most wonderful thing that has happened to me.”
“If you are filled with anger today,” Trining said, “I hope you will have it in your heart to forgive. There is hope, Luis, and time is on our side, because we are young. I have memories, too, or have you forgotten? When they killed my parents and my brother I should have grown up hating those who killed them, but I do not, for you have helped me grow and understand.”
Time is not on our side, the thought formed clearly; time is certitude, time ordains us all to die, as Father will die—but why has he lived so long to warp my life? Time was his friend, not ours.