30
Now I’ve done it, Luis reflected bitterly when the first copy of Our Time, with the story of the Sipnget massacre, was brought up by the copy boy. The article on agrarian reform was written by a rural sociologist, and the complementary piece on political stability and social change was a contribution from a scholar just returned from Harvard. His own article was extremely calm. He had been worried that it would be truculent and emotional, but it was simple, eloquent reportage, and even Eddie, who did not believe in I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine, had gushed over its polish and forcefulness. Writing it, however, had been more than a drudge. The fury that kindled his vision had made the first draft easy to do. It was the rewriting that had drained him; it had been difficult to speak ill of his father and of the civilian guards, but he had done it with objectivity, and now that the anger had been dissipated a nameless void took its place.
He did not go to the office the day the magazine came out. It was as if he had done the last useful thing for the month and work itself had become some fetter around his neck. Eddie called many times, telling him of his visitors, particularly the team of officers from the constabulary and the imminent trouble that he had raised. Never before had the house where his father once lived seemed so wide and forlorn. In a moment like this it was best that he was alone, so he had hurriedly told Simeon and Marta to go to Rosales on the flimsiest of reasons—that Trining needed them—and told them that he would just call them back. He would miss the couple, but they must have guessed his torment, for they left without complaint.
The nights were most difficult. Between the sombrous dark and moments of fitful sleep he damned himself. Now it was not three jiggers of bourbon but five, sometimes ten. On the fourth night that he had not gone to his office it was half a bottle before he could sleep—and he did not even sleep long.
When he woke up, the bedroom burst in a bright yellow slash and he shaded his eyes with his palms and turned on his side. It had rained—one of those brief, unusual showers in February—and a slow, sinuous breeze filled the room and toyed with the voile curtains. Outside, beyond the rain-polished window, the night was dark.
It was ten o’clock by the timepiece on top of his dresser. He had not slept for more than thirty minutes, but somehow he felt a bit refreshed. He sat up stiff and straight and passed his hand over his thick, uncombed hair. Slowly the hand, which he could not fully control, fingered, too, the stubble on his chin. His toes curled at the edge of the bed, he groped for his slippers and, finding them, stood up. He felt a little dizzy, and he clung for a moment to the bedpost to steady himself. He had brought the typewriter from the library to his bedroom some months ago when Ester had suggested that he work in the bedroom while she was there. Ester loved listening to the hypnotic clacking of the keys. Now his eyes were on the machine and on the crumpled sheets on the floor. He had written the letter, bits of his thoughts, and some stray lines that would go into a new poem, but he had not really worked out anything whole.
He went back to the mirror and peered into it. The face that confronted him looked wan. Around the eyes were bluish rings that he had never seen before, and as he peered at his face, he caught sight of Ester’s picture on top of the low aparador. He wheeled around, and holding the picture in the light, he examined the swept-up hair, the lips parted in a smile, and the pensive eyes—all her fragile beauty held in a simple aluminum frame. Her dedication was simple: For Luis … Sincerely, Ester. He cursed himself again for not having kept her letter, for giving it to her father when it was really his. He must write another letter, another poem, anything that would express this emptiness. He picked a sheet from the ream beside the typewriter and sat down. He was surprised to find that his fingers were unsteady. On an empty beach, he typed, sand and sky and sea—all beyond my reach. He paused. That was all he could write, for although they burned in his brain, words would not shape into lines and he sat helpless before the machine. He stood up after a while, went to the bathroom, and splashed water on his face. The refreshing coolness was brief. His stomach started to twinge, and he went to the kitchen and opened the cabinets and the refrigerator. There was plenty to eat—tomatoes, oranges, canned stuff, and leftovers in the freezer—but the sight of food now sickened him.
He went back to his room, combed his hair, put on a fresh shirt, then went down. He switched the lights on in the garage. His car was dirty, and although the Chrysler was only last year’s model, it looked drab with its thick coat of dust. He had driven through the bad, dusty streets the first night that he did not go to work, and with Simeon and Marta gone there was no one to clean the car. He pressed the starter twice, and the engine obligingly purred—but only for a while. Its hum died into a sputter. He pressed the starter again, then saw that the fuel tank was empty. He cursed and slammed the door.
He hailed the first cab that came along. He had nowhere in mind to go to, so he said to the driver, “Derecho.” Perhaps there was something to see in the office, although it was already past ten. There would be a few persons still at the desk of Dantes’s daily newspaper. When he reached the publishing office he did not bother to get his change. He raced past the parked delivery trucks near the entrance and into the lobby, where the elevator boy was drowsing. There was not much of a crowd in the editorial section, and beyond it, in his office, there was light still. Eddie was working late, reading a batch of galley proofs, when he went in. “Luis, I hope that you are feeling better,” Eddie said. “I know how you feel, so I didn’t want to bother you, but now that you are here—”
“I came for a few things,” Luis interrupted him.
“Take your time,” Eddie said. “Would you care to treat me to a cup of coffee? I’m sleepy and I need to go over this.” Then Eddie became businesslike. “Can you make it tomorrow? There are a lot of people who want to see you. I have all the names and messages there.” He thrust his chin at the pile on Luis’s desk. “Tomorrow, particularly, some constabulary officers will be coming. Dantes said you cannot hide from them anymore.”
“I have not been hiding,” Luis said angrily.
“I know,” Eddie said, “but that is the impression one gets, especially after the massacre story came out.”
They went down to the ground-floor coffee shop, which catered not only to the Dantes employees but also to the pedestrians and window shoppers. They went to their favorite corner, and Eddie ordered an egg sandwich and coffee.
“Make mine just coffee,” Luis said.
“You aren’t having anything to eat? You look famished,” Eddie said. Luis smiled grimly and shook his head.
The waiter brought Eddie’s order. As he started eating he became thoughtful. “This should not go on,” he said. “It won’t do you any good. Do try to come back to work as soon as you can. There is no therapy as effective as work. About Ester, you should not blame yourself. It was not your fault. The reasons are far more complex than both of us can understand.”
“It’s not just Ester,” Luis said, shaking his head.
“Who else, then?”
Luis sipped his coffee and glanced around at the few customers in the shop and at the waiters looking sleepy and bored—they would have about an hour more to work, for the shop closed at midnight. Luis looked at Eddie and said, “I’m worried about us.”
“No, no.” Eddie gestured with his hands. “Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself, thank you.”
“No, not you personally,” Luis said. “Not just you and me, but our generation itself. It is a generation that really is aimless. We say that we have been sobered or matured by war, the generation that could be the trailblazer, for it is the generation that has known the first years of independence. But for a few exceptions, we are headed nowhere. The generation that preceded us was interested in independence. What are we really interested in?”
“Milk and honey. The opium of Hollywood. The chariots of Detroit. Babylon, Rome—the depravity of dying empires.”
“We are dying, yes—but where is the empire? We cannot even develop the rural areas, for we really do not care—and those who care want to bring a holocaust first that will sweep away weed and seedling.”
“You can lose your equanimity, just thinking about the magnitude of our problems, Luis,” Eddie said. “I am sure that Lenin and all those fabled revolutionaries often laughed at themselves. I think they enjoyed a good screw when it was time for screwing—and a good fight, too, when the time for it came.”
“I envy them of course—the young people whom we know and who are now in the hills. Of course everything has been simplified for them. Perhaps it is easier that way. We who are left behind are cowards.”
“Now, now,” Eddie objected, “be careful with that word—coward. Don’t generalize. Suppose you have a heart condition or you can’t shoot. Suppose you are a man of words and you can do more just by opening your mouth. What is total war but total politics, too?”
“Justifications,” Luis said. “You are right, of course, but I am tired of justifications. Those who rationalize—and God knows how often I do that myself—are merely draining their blood, and bloodless, they get corrupted.”
“Call it justification,” Eddie said edgily. He had finished eating and was apparently getting bored. He stared out of the shop door into the street that lighted up with green when the neon sign of the newspaper office flashed. “But doing what we are doing is not exactly a cowardly thing, Luis. Maybe for you it is, for you have everything—but what about people like me? I will be branded the rest of my life, I am sure—and I really cannot afford it.”
“You will end up as executive vice-president of the Dantes Shipping Company when the time comes,” Luis said, humoring him. “Don’t worry. At least you will deserve it, but look around you and who do you see? It’s the scum who are getting the largest part of the cake—the thieves, the grafters—and we know it. The traitors, those who collaborated with the Japanese—and it’s only five years after the war—it is they who are now in power, and they even call themselves patriots.” Luis paused and a chill passed through him. He was merely parroting what his father had told him. The old man was not wrong, he was affirming the truth. He said sadly now, “Yes, it was always the opportunists who destroyed the revolution. It was they who sided with the Spaniards. It was they who shaped our relationship with the Americans and who sold the Filipinos to the Japanese. I am sure that even now, as the Huks grow in strength, a lot of them are pandering to the Huks.”
“But this is nothing exceptional,” Eddie said. “I am sure that the Romans found the same kind of panderers when they were building their empire. It is simply survival and preservation of interests.”
“The revolution lives, but the dream dies—and we cannot do anything, we who were nourished on that dream, for we are too puny or too involved in the system itself. So my dearly beloved and dying father keeps a company of civilian guards and deems it a necessity, even when his guards kill innocent villagers. We cannot even perish in leisure, for the pain of waiting will be worse than death itself. If we must die—pardon the heroics—death must come, swift and painless, in the manner in which we were reared, afraid of pain.”
“I am sure that those whose memories of the Occupation are bitter will disagree with you,” Eddie said. “They knew what pain was.”
“Not that kind, not that kind,” Luis said. “Physical pain is much too simple, although there is nothing quite like it.”
“Whatever it is,” Eddie said boorishly, “keep it away from me.” Then seriously: “Luis, I hope that you will get over it very soon. Just remember, the magazine is your baby now. You gave it life. Of course I can always put it out, but then it will no longer have the personality that you have given it.”
Luis stirred his coffee. “I wish you wouldn’t talk like some damned preacher, giving me motivation and all that jazz.”
“I mean it,” Eddie said. “Perhaps I’m also thinking of myself, but I am really trying to tell you that there is no sense in your acting like this. It was not your fault any more than it was Ester’s. No one in the office blames you.”
Luis leaned forward and glared. “But it was mine, more than Ester will ever know,” he said. “I did not give her strength, sympathy when she needed it. I was just too damned concerned with myself.” He stood up, went to the counter, and paid the check. Eddie followed him to the door, and in the lobby Luis said, “All right, I will try and make it tomorrow.”
When they parted, they shook hands, which they rarely did. The rain started again—a slight drizzle—and Luis ducked in the shade of the marquee. Holding the jacket closer to his chest, he sat on the base of one of the columns. Beyond the ebony pavement came the clop-clop of horses’ hooves on the asphalt. Every once in a while a car sloshed past, its lights flat and bright on his face. When the rain finally stopped he crossed the street and walked toward Plaza Goiti. He looked up; it was midnight and Eddie was still upstairs, working. It had become chilly, and at Plaza Goiti he hailed a cab and gave up the idea of walking until he was tired and could easily go to sleep. He did not stop before his house. He got off a long way from it and walked the deserted seawall. Beside him was the sea, black and formless but heaving and alive. The walk would be long, and it would end in the gumamela-lined driveway. He would go up to the porch, unlock the door, and walk past the silent living room, with its muted piano, which Ester used to play, and its record racks, and beyond, to the bedroom, where he would lie listening to his breathing, to the click of lizards on the wall and the scurrying of mice in the recesses of the ceiling. He would remember what Ester had told him, recall the warmth of her arms around him, the taste of her tears and the thrashing of her heart against his own. God—we were one, as close as no other two people have been, and she had to run away, not so much from life as from me.
He sank on the rain-drenched seawall, and bending over, he gave way and finally found release in a grief that wrenched from him a moaning loud and unmanly. He was still sobbing when a policeman emerged from the shadows, tapped him lightly on the shoulders with his truncheon, and asked him if he was drunk. He turned to the anonymous face, and in the first flush of turquoise dawn—for it was almost daybreak—he rose slowly and murmured a flat and level “No.” He went up the boulevard and straight and steadily to his house, as if drawn to it by the power that makes a criminal hie back to the scene of his crime.