28
There had always lurked somewhere in the shadows of this house, compounded with its musty odors and clammy surfaces, a pall of inevitable decay so real that Luis could feel it hovering over him. What did his father say? What was it that had curdled all the warmth that once coursed through him? The Asperris were destined to be tormented, to be flailed and torn in spirit. Look at Don Vicente’s Spanish wife, whose body was wasted by abortions, whose days were lived in madness. In the end they would all die, and nothing, nothing would remain of them. This was not spoken but implied, understood by the people in Rosales and Sipnget who had watched what transpired in this big red house, who had seen how the Asperris were born, debauched, and how they then passed away—his father’s father, the uncles and aunts, until there was no one but Don Vicente.
Luis, however, was not an ordinary Asperri. From the very beginning, a deep, dull ache in his heart told him that he had not really forgotten, that he was still capable of more than kindness. He would be saved from damnation as long as he dispensed with tokens of virtue as he knew virtue when he was young, but as long as he was capable of kindness he would also be an easy victim of deceit. Kindness—as his father had said—was just another form of emotion that man must free himself from so that he would be strong. How much easier it would be if he merely followed what the old man wanted and dismissed the agonies of conscience with the thought that he was committed to something just as necessary—the well-being of no other than himself. This self, however, this bundle of nerves and flesh, this mirror of the inner consciousness that had long been cracked, was the prison from which he would now flee, for it was not just rotten tendon and bone—it was also blood that had been poisoned.
This blood nurtured in a distant corner of Spain was no longer what it was, and its perversion was in him, nagging him, reminding him that in this house was his destiny. He must now take leave of it.
He had already packed and was waiting for one of the boys to fill up the radiator and clean the seats of the car. Trining had made a cup of coffee for him, and he was ready to go. “What will you do now?” she asked.
“I will avenge them, that’s all,” he said simply.
“Oh, Luis, you will end up fighting your father.”
He walked to the azotea. The east was paling, and in the orange light the jagged rim of the distant hills stood out. Beyond the sprout of coconuts at the right a dog barked, then the silence of early morning descended upon the town again, punctuated by the crowing of cocks.
Her arms closed around him, and her voice trembled. “I am afraid, Luis, not just for myself but for you. Please take me along.”
He kissed her on the forehead. “We have already talked about this. For the moment your place is here. He is sick, and that is a concession I am giving him. It is foolish, you being here and I there, but this is not forever.”
She was silent. Then, after a while: “I will call you up as often as I can. Will you try to write down whatever is happening over there, whatever comes to your mind?”
“Every day,” he promised. They went down together and she kissed him passionately. “Tell me everything he does,” he whispered. When the car drove down to the gate and into the street it was already morning.
Luis arrived in the city before noon and proceeded to his office at once. As he had expected, everyone at the desk had heard about his wedding. He had no time for the bantering, and although there was this emptiness in his stomach, he tried to smile. All the way he had carefully planned how he would play up what had befallen Sipnget—the crisis in the rural areas, the immediate need for land reform, and the renovation of the armed forces. It would be one issue devoted to nothing but political reform, and the touchstone would be Sipnget.
Eddie was amazed to see him back. “You deserve a much longer honeymoon,” he joked. “Of course I know that what you can do in forty-eight hours would take us ordinary mortals forty-eight days.”
Luis grinned. He flung his leather portfolio atop the bookcase behind his desk and inserted a sheet of copy paper into his typewriter.
“Tell me what is so important that you cut short your honeymoon,” Eddie said, hovering by him.
Luis looked at his associate. He trusted him completely. Eddie worked harder than Luis himself, but in spite of his ambition he completely subordinated himself to his editor’s wishes.
“I’ve seen something in my part of the country that provides the clue to why the Huks are getting stronger every day,” Luis said. “A massacre has been committed. We didn’t even get to know about it. Worse, it was condoned and glossed over. Twenty were killed.” His voice started to tremble, and he stopped. Eddie sat on the edge of Luis’s desk and listened keenly. “In my hometown. The constabulary and my father’s civilian guards—they destroyed the village, too.”
Eddie rubbed his chin. “Of course you have the proofs, photographs, testimonies—all those things.”
Luis glared at his associate. “My eyes—what more proof is needed? I know the village, the people. It is gone. I saw the charred posts, the mass grave where the victims were buried.”
Silence.
“You are in for something big, Luis,” Eddie said. “Something we might go into with our very lives.”
“Yes, and we can’t let it pass. I’ll have to lay it open—the whole mess. You don’t know what this means to me. It is my own father whom I am fighting now. He knew about it, but he kept silent.”
Eddie winced. He stood up and went to his desk. “He may have his own reasons, Luis, and they may be good. In any case”—he looked briefly at the calendar—“our deadline is five days from now.”
Luis made a listing of the authors he wanted for the special issue. He also checked up on the file of articles that had already been accepted and those that had been set in type, ready to be used. In half an hour he had made half a dozen calls and worked out a dummy. Now the editorial, which he must write—and the article on Sipnget.
He should not have been surprised to find Ester in his home that evening. Eddie had informed him with a sly, knowing wink that she had called twice, asking when he would return. She had not bothered him in the office, but here she was now, watching him as he moved about, to the kitchen, where Marta was preparing the table. They had greeted each other at the door with a mere handshake, and making a bright effort to sound casual, she had congratulated him. He had in turn asked her to stay for dinner and told her that she did not have to worry about how long she could stay.
“Tell me how it was—the vacation, the wedding,” she said, watching him as he helped Marta prepare an extra plate at the table.
“I had not expected you here,” he said.
She laughed softly. “Poor Luis—always acting surprised. I was in your office yesterday, and today I called up Eddie about you.” Her laughter trailed off into another question: “How does it feel to be married?”
“I thought you wouldn’t want to see me again, least of all come here,” he said, not bothering to answer her questions. “What is it that’s bothering you, Ester?”
“You don’t have to ask me that,” she said flatly. “But you can ask me why I am not on my knees.”
They sat down to dinner, but Luis nibbled at his paella, his favorite, which Marta had prepared. Ester, too, did not seem hungry. “Well, I must want something to be here. Aren’t you curious enough to find out?”
“Tell me.”
“That’s game of you, Luis,” she said. “I just want to hear you talk, really, about your town, your big house, your father’s hacienda, and of course your wedding night. Know something? I have always known that Trining was very possessive about you, that she really wanted you. Were you nice to her—I mean, gentle to her?”
Her prattle had become quite unbearable. “What are you trying to prove?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
He stood up, and because she made a motion to rise, he went to her and eased her out of the room. They went together to the azotea, out of Marta’s presence.
“You know everything. You don’t have to ask questions,” he said. She sat close to him, so that he could smell the fragrance of her hair. When she spoke again, it seemed as if she had suddenly aged and her voice was feeble. “Yes, I used to think that I knew most of the answers, that I could even guess what you would do. Tell me how it happened. It was not what I expected of you. Not that I do not think Trining is a good girl for you, but you had some ideas, and marrying your cousin—that was not in the stars.”
“Yours,” he said, “not mine. Do you find anything immoral about it?” He was defending himself and Trining.
“That’s nice of you, thinking that I am still concerned with morality.” She had become curt. “Do you love her?”
“Does it really matter?”
She turned away.
“I have no explanations,” he said simply.
“I didn’t ask you to unravel your dark thoughts,” she said. “I can only guess. You know, Father did not approve of you—he thought we were going to be really serious. He wanted me to marry my cousin—you must have seen him. He is old enough to be my father. He is balding, has bad teeth and bad breath—but who cares? He is the only heir on his side—and the family wealth, you know, as the cliché in Negros goes, must not fall into the hands of others.”
“It’s not a bad idea,” Luis said.
“Yes,” Ester said. “So you are very rich now, Luis—richer than you thought you’d ever be. Was it your father who told you to marry your cousin, so that your hacienda won’t be split?”
“That’s not true!” he said, glaring at her.
“All right, then.” She drew back. “It may not be true, but it’s a fact, isn’t it?” She walked to the door and crossed the hall to the foyer. Luis followed her, and for a while, when she turned to him it seemed as if she had regained her spirit, for a smile played at the corners of her mouth. “But we must really see each other again, although the rules are now changed. After all, you are a married man now.” She broke into a nervous little laugh. “You must come and see me tomorrow—at six.”
He did not answer. She smiled again and did not wait for him to accompany her down the driveway, where her car was parked.
When she was gone he went to his room to think things out. He was not going to see her again. He was going to steel himself against the compulsion. To Trining, he was going to be the husband that his father had never been to his mother.
Yet it was only a little past five, and here he was, on his way to Ester’s house. The sun was still hot on the pavement, glittering in the shop windows and bouncing off windshields in blinding flashes of silver. It was an easy drive after he had extricated himself from the traffic in downtown Manila.
When he drove in she was reading in one of the wrought-iron chairs that lined the porch of the Dantes residence. Casting her book aside on the low glass-topped table, she raced down the driveway to meet him. She wore a green print dress, and her eyes were alive. Only the nervous flutter of her hands as she clutched at his and the tremor in her voice gave her away. “You are extremely early, Luis”—she smiled at him—“and look at me, I haven’t even made myself up.”
“You are prettier in the raw,” he said.
She pivoted him out of the porch and the shade of the bougainvillea trellis to the lawn, into the cool shadow of the house, and they sat in the garden chairs. “I’ll go get some drinks,” she said, and went back to the porch, where she vanished behind a ripple of violet-and-green curtains. She had not asked him what he wanted, but Ester was always full of surprises. He felt the old familiarity return. He remembered how he had sat in the same chair, how her mother had always asked him inside, how he had always said that he preferred it here—unless, of course, it was raining—among the palmettos and the well-kept hedges, sipping Coke and nibbling at cookies and exchanging inanities. Those were, of course, the days before they started arguing with each other, before this wall between them was set up by pride, by misunderstanding.
She returned, looking anxious, and placed the cold drinks on the low table. “Pineapple juice,” she explained. “I was tempted to fix you a bourbon, but I want to break your old habits.”
“You are incorrigible, Ester,” he said lightly, “just like me.”
“What do we do now?” she asked as she sat before him. “Shall we go see a movie or talk, or shall we go for a ride, like old times?”
“Anything you say.”
She started sipping her drink, and sometimes she would look furtively at him. Their talk drifted to Rosales, to his father, to Trining. “Why didn’t you bring your wife with you? That’s a bit unfair, isn’t it?”
His casual reply: “She has to take care of Father for the time being. Besides, she will be with me perhaps on weekends.” They rambled on—about the new book she was reading and how difficult it was to get certain titles because of the import controls, until she suddenly apprehended him: “Luis, you are not listening!”
His mind had wandered away to Sipnget, to what he had written and sent down to the press—the utterance of his anguish. He turned to her. The brightness in her eyes had dulled, and in them he saw the shadow of a hurt. She folded her hands serenely on her lap and admitted, “It is difficult to talk as if nothing has happened, when we have really been set apart. Luis, why did we have to quarrel?”
“I don’t know,” he said dully. “It couldn’t be helped, I guess.”
“Why did you come to see me?”
“You asked me to.”
“You did not have to come.”
“I owe you at least an explanation.” It was not really that which he owed her; he was drawn to her because she was truth, because she was the mirror in which he could see himself, and he had come to her for sustenance. Indeed he would need her now as man needed light.
“I don’t need your sympathy,” she told him. “I was wondering—just wondering—I wanted to tell you yesterday, but I couldn’t. There are many things you have not been aware of.” She turned away, as if she was sorry that she had again taunted him. “I didn’t mean to spite you,” she added hastily. “Shall we go now for that drive? I promise to keep quiet most of the way.”
He smiled at her and held her hand, and her breath was warm and fragrant on his face when she drew near. “I’ll get my bag,” she said, and went up to the porch again. She came back with a fresh coat of lipstick.
It was dusk when they reached the boulevard. The wind flowed into the car and whipped strands of Ester’s hair to his face. They had driven many times along this stretch of asphalt, and it no longer had any surprises for them. The restaurants, the tawdry nightclubs, and the neon lights had long been etched in his mind as props of the nightmare that he now shared with Ester.
“You know,” she attempted to say above the steady hum of the car, “we could coast along like this, pretending that we would reach some place—but there’s no such place. It’s limbo.”
“Don’t talk like that,” he said. “We must stop fighting.”
“All right,” she said. She sat erect and silent beside him. When they reached the other end of the boulevard, where the stone embankment sloped into an incongruous pile of rocks, beyond which was the sea, she tugged at his arm. “Take me to your house, Luis,” she said.
“You must be fooling,” he said.
“I’m not.”
“No.”
“Please, I like it there,” she insisted. “We are not going to make love—if that is what you are worried about. It’s just that somehow in your room I can tell you things that I cannot say in any other place.”
“It won’t do any good,” he said, trying to dissuade her and swinging the car around the curve, past the Baclaran church. “I am taking you home.”
Her voice was pleading. “Please, just this once.”
He glanced at her, at the dark eyes pleading. “All right, but it will not do any good.”
“I know.” She sounded contrite.
The house was unlighted save for the twin gate lights. Marta and Simeon had probably stepped out. As he groped for the switch at the top of the stairs she held him back. “Let’s keep the house dark,” she said. “I want it this way, so I can’t see your face and you can’t see mine either.”
She mumbled something about the darkness making people equal. She followed him to his room, and he opened the window to let in the air. In a while his eyes became accustomed to the darkness that was punctuated by the headlights of cars making a turn at the next curve, and he could see her quite distinctly in the soft dark. From the sandy stretch before the seawall the eager laughter of promenaders, mingled with the cries of peanut and balut vendors, floated up to them.
“Luis, will you be honest with me? In my own way I have been honest with you.”
“You are asking too much. You don’t only want me defenseless, you also want me emasculated.”
“Luis, that’s not what I want—you have misunderstood. I am committed to you. You must trust me as you would yourself. We are the same, Luis; it’s so very clear to me now.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Why do you work for my father?”
It was a question he had not expected, and it startled him. Yes, why did he work for Dantes? “Why do you hate your father?” Luis asked instead.
“I could ask you the same question, Luis. Please answer me now.”
“Well, it is a compromise with what I believe in and what I can really do,” Luis said. “I know that your father is no angel, but I need his paper so that I can air my views. That is one reason.”
“And the other?”
“I am human, Ester.”
“Thank you for admitting it, but I know my father as you have never known him—and I know, too, why you accepted his offer.”
“Tell me.”
“No, you tell me.”
“He said I could do whatever I wanted—and he meant it.”
“You missed the point, Luis. How could you have missed it! He was flattering you, and you fell for it.”
For a while he did not speak, and when he finally did he could not bring himself to be angry with her. He asked instead, “Why do you humiliate me? You are so good at it, you will reduce me to nothing.”
She held his hand tightly and brought it to her lips, kissed the lean fingers one by one and then pressed his palm to her cheek. “I love you,” she said. “I am just trying to help you see how things really are—how my father really is—my family, even me. Can’t you see how humble I am before you?”
“I can’t,” he said but without conviction. The barrier between them was beginning to crumble.
She let go his hand. “You must see it,” she said. “It is not easy for me to talk like this, to hurt myself and my family. We are very proud. My father, he would rather lose all his money than surrender, but I—I would have come back to you crawling if I had to do it. Now, let me tell you why Father got you. He said you were one of us, that you would understand and would not make any trouble, like forming a union and that sort of thing.”
“I find it extremely uncomplimentary, even insulting, that I was not taken for my own talent,” Luis said. “I am not humble and I know I have a little.”
She pressed his hand but did not look at him. “I am sorry, darling, I have to tell you this. Papa said the magazine was not making money and could use someone courageous and enterprising, but the first editor did something Father would never condone—form a union—and that was why he had to go.”
It all came back to him—his first day in the office, the dirty looks of some of the boys in Editorial at this young whelp of a mestizo, this hacendero’s son who was going to run a liberal, leftist magazine. He was a scab, and he knew it now.
“Please do not be angry with me,” she begged him. Tentatively he held her by the shoulder—this woman who loved him and understood him—and slowly drew her to him.
“I felt funny at first, reading you. Then I thought maybe you were blind or that you had your own reasons, but I look at myself and I am so unhappy. With you there is a way out, but not for me—I will always be a Dantes. I live the good life, I go to Europe every vacation, wherever my fancy takes me, but I also live in Negros where I grew up, knowing how my family—all my father’s friends—make their living. I know some of our workers’ children. I played with them.” She paused and seemed to choke on her words. “I know poverty, Luis—the most terrible and degrading form. It is right in our hacienda, behind our house, in the cuartels of the sacadas, in the villages of our plantation workers. And I am eating so well and enjoying it and loving the stage in London and the museums in Paris. I cannot live with myself like this.”
“You were born to it,” Luis said, “but you know, Ester—and wisdom is the beginning of sadness.”
“No,” she said. “Love is the beginning of sadness.” She turned and kissed him on the chin. “Did it ever occur to you,” she asked, “that you were not the first?” She looked at him, and in the soft dark he could feel her eyes probe into him deeply, passionately.
“It does not matter really,” he said, relieved and also sad that what he had suspected all along was finally confirmed. “But why tell me?”
“I don’t really know,” she said humbly. “It was very easy to say that I did it to get at my father, to hurt him, but I love you, Luis. When I am not with you something happens to me. I am uneasy. I cannot sleep. I’m tense. Maybe because we are so much alike. Do you want to know—”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said again and meant it.
She did not mind him. “He was the son of one of our workers,” she said, pressing close to him. “I was fourteen, perhaps—and he must have been eighteen. He came to the house every morning to water the rose garden, and I used to wake up to his soft singing—you know, melodious Visayan songs. I would open my window—the garden was below—and watch him work, and although he knew that I was up there, watching, he never turned to me. It was a girlish crush—he was dark, he had good teeth, and his face was warm. I wanted to be near him. One afternoon I went to the group of shacks where he lived. He was there, playing a guitar, when I walked by. There was a duhat tree with fruit—it was not very high—and I asked him to get me some of the fruit. He wanted to climb the tree, but I wanted to feel his arms around me. I told him just to lift me up, so I could reach the fruit. He was strong and gentle, and I will never forget how it felt to have his arms holding me.”
She paused, and in the darkness, when he looked at her, her face had become grim. “That was when Father came by on his horse, and he shouted at him to put me down, which he did immediately. There, in my presence, with his riding stick, Father lashed at him, at his head, his back, his chest, and he just stood there, taking everything, not whimpering, not warding off the blows. I screamed at Father, saying that I had asked him to lift me so that I could reach the fruit, and he told me, in Spanish, so he wouldn’t understand, ‘Go back to the house, you little harlot.’ ” She paused again, then said, “Perhaps I really am a harlot, Luis—but only to you now, only to you.”
“What happened to him?”
“It was a month later that I finally saw him for the last time. By then I had to leave Negros to come to Manila for school—the vacation was over. It was on my conscience—God, how it bothered me! I stole money from my mother, from my father—not much, maybe a thousand pesos, something they would not notice. Then I got my biggest diamond ring. Early one evening, when Father was in Bacolod with his mistress and I knew that he wouldn’t be back until dawn, I went to the cane field. He did not want to, he was afraid, but I—I am a little harlot. It hurt, but I didn’t mind. I gave him the money and the diamond ring and told him to run away, never to come back, and never to see me again.”
“So I must run away, too,” Luis said sadly, “and never see you again.”
“No!” she said emphatically. “You will do no such thing.”
“We are both wiser now,” Luis said. “You cannot be my—”
“Little harlot,” she finished the sentence with a nervous laugh. “No—not your fault, Louie. And don’t get ideas from all the novels you have read—that I am a nympho. I am not and will not be one. And more than this, remember that the Danteses are proud. Very proud.”
“What will you prove?”
She rose and brushed the wrinkles from her dress. “Nothing,” she said, her eyes shining. “I am not trying to prove anything. I just want to be able to live honestly—with myself.”
She did not want him to drive her home, so he walked with her to the boulevard, where she hailed a taxi. And when she had gone, Luis went back to the porch, the darkness above studded with stars. In the tall leafy acacias beyond the high, serrated wall, cicadas were lost in the city.
Words, nothing but words, but they were Ester’s, and remembering them, he was filled with gratitude and humility; she had given him a gift of love, which, however she might define it or gloss over it or diminish it, would always be more than what he could give.