31
In the five days that Luis did not go to work there had piled up on his desk letters, telegrams, and other messages, most of which he would have enjoyed, for many of them were congratulatory. Seeing them now, he felt no sense of fulfillment, no affirmation of his righteousness. They were merely reminders of a turmoil that had uncoiled. He went over them perfunctorily, then dumped them all in a side drawer.
The phone rang and Eddie answered it. “It’s the Old Man,” he said. “He wants to see you.”
The publisher’s voice sounded relieved. “Ah, so you have finally come,” he said as soon as Luis was on.
“I wasn’t well, sir. I hope I didn’t inconvenience you.”
“I understand,” the publisher said. “If it was a blow to you, Luis, just remember, it was much, much more to us. Have you written to your wife, or called her up and told her? They were such good friends, you know.”
“No, sir, I haven’t,” he said, feeling a pang of guilt. He should have told Trining, but then it was probably just as well that she did not know. Perhaps Marta and Simeon had mentioned the tragedy to her, but the fact that she had not called him up was indication that she still didn’t know.
“I hope you are all right now,” Dantes said. “Can you come to my office immediately? There are officers who will be here in an hour, and they want to clarify a few things about your special issue.”
When he hung up, Eddie was looking at him expectantly. “It’s the constabulary,” Luis said simply.
“Patience,” Eddie told him as he opened the door.
A few of the men at the desks turned to him. Perhaps they knew what was in store for him in the publisher’s office, perhaps they envied his courage, which they, in their conformity, in their middle age, no longer had, but he walked on, not wanting to talk even with those who knew him well. This was his problem, and he must handle it alone.
Miss Vale was waiting for him, and she smiled perfunctorily as he paused before her desk. She was efficient, not given to office gossip, and she was one of Dantes’s most trusted workers. It was rumored that she was an illegitimate sister of Dantes, but Miss Vale was dark and Ilokano, while Dantes was fair-skinned and Negrense. “Go right in,” she said, smiling at Luis. He was pleased to find that with that single smile she could still look like a young girl.
The publisher was opening his morning mail with a gold letter opener, and on his large circular desk were copies of the morning papers, including Luis’s magazine. “Sit down, Luis,” he said without turning to his editor. “If you want a drink, the bar is over there.” Dantes thrust his chin across the expanse of blue carpet, the conference table, to the cabinet at the far end of the big room.
“It’s too early, sir,” Luis said.
Dantes stood up, elegant in his cream linen suit, alligator shoes, and green silk tie. He cracked his knuckles—a sign that he was nervous—and started pacing the floor, his head bowed, as if in thought. “I have often wondered about you,” he finally said, the smoky eyes focused on Luis for a brief moment. “Why should you feel uncomfortable with your money, Luis? It is not a crime to be rich, you know.”
“No, sir,” Luis said. “I have never considered myself a criminal.” He found himself speaking with confidence. “I like my comforts. They are, after all, mine by inheritance, and I am sure that my father wants me to enjoy them.”
Dantes walked over to the narra conference table—a huge, glass-topped, rectangular single piece of wood surrounded by a dozen gilt-edged hand-carved chairs. His voice sounded far away. “Anyone reading you would conclude that you hate the rich and think that all of us are scoundrels who make money exploiting the working class. Even if we do, please do not forget that the poor will always be with us and it is not our fault. They will be there because they are stupid, and they are stupid because they are poor. They are there because they are lazy, they have no capital, no incentives, no imagination, and no will to work. In any society, however, there are those among these wretched poor who will rise. History is full of them. Your own Manila elite—and you know how I despise the new ones—many of them started with nothing but glib tongues and nimble fingers—”
“But do they need to be always with us?” Luis asked diffidently, as if he were addressing the question to himself. “If so, I would then admit that society is always exploitative. We go to the nature of man—his perpetual evil—”
Dantes glanced at Luis, and a small laugh preceded his reply. “Ah, Luis—just like Philosophy Twenty-four again. Ah, my undergraduate years.” He sighed. “Soon we will be going into theology, then escapism, then nirvana, and all that sort of thing. I continue to read, Luis, though not much”—he thrust his chin again at the books that lined the huge office. Indeed Dantes was very erudite, and every historian in the country knew of his extensive collection of rare books on the Philippines, including one of the first editions of the Doctrina, which was the first printed book in the country.
“I know, sir,” Luis said humbly, “and that is why I consider it a privilege that you should even seek my views or talk like this with me.”
“Enough of the flattery,” Dantes said, but he was obviously pleased. “I love the Buddhists—they seem to have all the answers. I am particularly amused by the Tantric Buddhists. You should see my collection on Tantric art one of these days—mostly from India and Nepal. Ah, but I am straying now. What I want to say is that the poor need not be with us always. That is why we have revolutions—all through history. Don’t you believe that the Communists, the Marxists, invented revolution. They had it in ancient Egypt—in Rome, Spartacus. All through history blood has been spilled, and it is not a pretty sight, Luis. I don’t really think you want revolution. You are just like me, living with illusions, too comfortable to go after most of them—but, mind you”—he paused and pointed a finger at the young man—“I am not accusing you of insincerity.”
“Thank you, sir,” Luis said, feeling relieved. The room had begun to get stuffy, and he could feel the blood rising to his temples.
“I think I understand your motivation,” Dantes said. “I think you are a bit muddled and unclear, even to yourself. The quest for justice is in every man, even in me. I have vision, too, I like to think. I would like to see this country grow, I would like to see it laced with prosperous towns, with people who have money to enjoy life, to buy the good things in the market, the products we make—”
“Just like America,” Luis said evenly, but the sarcasm made its mark.
“Don’t talk like that,” Dantes said. “You must see progress in economic terms, and its social aspects will follow, since this is a society where awareness of other people’s feelings has always been a part of tradition. Can you not see, Luis, what I am trying to do? I want my hands not only on industry but also on communications. Radio and television—we have them now—and power, electricity, and shipping and transport—the whole complex that would make this country surge forward.”
With the Danteses in the lead, Luis said to himself.
“I know you have been upset by how you joined my organization, but I cannot stand persons who do not see it my way, which, by God, I know is not wrong. Besides, in the end, you must judge me not according to what I say but by what I have done. And what have I done? Think of the thousands gainfully employed, enjoying some of the best privileges anywhere in the country. Of course this is not just what I want to do, and it is for this reason that I want nationalists on my staff. We must modernize, and this starts in the mind, not in the mouth. We must stop being hewers of wood, drawers of water—to use your awful cliché.”
Luis turned the thought in his mind. This was what the Meijis did, this was the siren call being trumpeted in all the new countries—how to stop being slaves not only to tradition but to the mother country.
“For whom are we going to modernize, sir?” he could not resist asking. “For whom shall we break our backs, miss our meals, and even kill our brothers in order to be modern?”
“You are cynical and you mistrust me,” Dantes said, a hint of sadness in his voice. “How I wish you did not ask that, for it implies that I am working only for myself. Yes, that is true, I love wealth and the power that goes with it, but I know that I will not live forever—like you, I once had youth, but look at me now. I am not as healthy as I’m supposed to be …”
Luis remembered how Dantes was said to have gone to those Swiss rejuvenation clinics, so that he could have more virility—monkey glands, all those things that the rich could afford—and as the rich man droned on, almost like a hypochondriac, about his impending death, Luis not only got a glimpse of Dantes’s weakness but also began to think of all those like Dantes who had everything but were aware that everything was ephemeral.
“Sic transit,” Dantes was saying. “In my case it could be cancer or heart attack—or just the usual complications one expects in old age.” He shook his head slowly and his gaze wandered to the city spread before his picture window—splotches of tin and cement, the sickly green trees, and a smoky sky mottled with clouds. His voice sounded remote and suddenly cold. “I have thought a lot about justice, but let me make this clear—it should be my kind. I make the rules, for I am what I am—the patron, the hacendero, the feudal lord—all those sociological clichés that you use. I like the role. It gives me a feeling of deep satisfaction, almost orgiastic—to use again one of your fashionable words—of superiority, of achievement, and of doing well. The justice I dispense with is mine, for I am the lord, and this justice will go to the workers, for whom you profess love and affection, not as a flood but as a trickle. If you will pardon my sarcasm, how much do you pay your driver and your maids? What are the terms of tenancy on your father’s hacienda?”
Luis bristled and raised his hand in protest, but Dantes waved his protest away imperiously and continued, his voice now raised almost in a rant: “The poor do not know what abundance means. They will not appreciate it, since they are not conditioned to it. We are Western men—our wants, our ambitions are unlimited. They are Asians—primitives with limited wants and equally limited vision. They will always be workers, do not forget that. It is the fate of men to be born unequal. Those with brains will rise in any society, democratic or totalitarian. Ideology is meaningless to those who do not know the difference between caviar and bagoong. Margarine, not Danish butter.”
Dantes paused and his eyes blazed—but only for an instant. Now they were warm again. “You must forgive my enthusiasm,” he said with a quiet laugh. “Sometimes I really sound like a soapboxer or a schoolteacher, and I forget that you are not only an editor but one of the most distinguished young writers in the country today.”
Luis carefully brushed aside the compliment. “Thank you, sir,” he said, “but I cannot help feeling that you seem to think the lower classes are aspiring to utopia. I can assure you—most of the time all they want is three meals a day, education for their children, medicine when they get sick.” He paused, for he suddenly realized that he was merely repeating what his brother had said. “These they do not have. Have you ever been to the Philippine General Hospital, sir?” He knew the question was impertinent, for every year it was to the Mayo Clinic that Dantes went for a checkup. “Have you seen the charity patients there, sleeping in the halls, dying because they have no medicine?”
“That’s the government’s responsibility, Luis, not mine. There is no employee in our companies who does not enjoy the best medical care and pension benefits—much more than what all those crooked union leaders are demanding. I gave all these benefits to the employees without their asking for them. No one can lecture to me about the rights or needs of the poor.”
The intercom buzzed. Miss Vale’s voice came clear. “The two officers are here, sir.”
Dantes’s voice changed quickly. “Serve them something and tell them we will be ready in a few moments.”
Dantes turned to Luis and his voice was grim. “You realize that I have been making a speech.” The grimness quickly disappeared and he smiled wanly. “I do get incoherent sometimes, but out there are two officers, and before they come in I want you to know that there is only one side—my side. I am not interested in what is right or wrong—or what is true or false. My main interest is that nothing happens to this organization. Let me make this clear—I will back you all the way but only if you subordinate whatever ideas you have to what I have mentioned.”
Luis nodded. There was not a single doubt in his mind now that the Old Man had really drawn the line. Yet he could not but appreciate Dantes and his frankness, his simple illustration of what he wanted and what he was. Luis should have had no illusions from the very beginning—as Ester had said, this should have sunk into the depths of his subconscious. If she were here now … Oh, Ester, if you were here now, you would be kind to me, you would comfort me, give me your hand and say that the world will always be like this and we can do nothing about it except be close to each other and share as best as we can the agony of our helplessness.
“In a way,” Dantes was saying softly, “we have been lucky—the Army is not so corrupt or power-hungry as it is in Latin America, and it is easy to work things out because the officers are just after promotions.”
“But someday it will be corrupted, sir,” Luis said. “It is already starting. As with all our institutions, it will decay, for the Army will no longer have a vision and its highest castes will be only after comforts. This will start at the top, not with the privates and the corporals. But it will spread down, and there will be no stopping it, for the leaders shall have been infected; the colonels will not believe their generals, the lieutenants will not believe their colonels, and the privates will not believe their lieutenants. Patriotism becomes a sham, a means toward getting rewards. A dictator will go masquerading as the man on a white horse. And he will do it easily—for as long as we have an Army that does not side with the poor—”
Dantes had listened, but his was the last word nonetheless: “And what army in the world, ever, has been an instrument of the poor? It has always been, will always be, the instrument of the state—and therefore of the powerful!”
The dialogue was over. Dantes strode to his desk and reached for the intercom.
Two officers, a fat balding colonel and an ascetic-faced major, came in. They did not extend their hands when Dantes introduced them to Luis. “Colonel Cruz, Major Gutierrez.” They looked at the Old Man’s beady eyes, which did not soften, even when everybody was seated.
“These gentlemen have gone to your town, Luis,” the publisher said, “and they want to disabuse your mind about the massacre.”
“There is nothing to talk about,” Luis said. “Everything was in the magazine, Mr. Dantes. There is no point in discussing it—unless they have something new to add to it. If they have a reply, we will, of course, as a matter of policy, print it.”
The colonel took the bluster from Luis. “Yes, there are still many things we can discuss,” he said, his voice perceptibly hostile. “Inaccuracies, omissions—all of which have put us in a very bad light. You should have checked all your facts first before you wrote that trash.”
Dantes acted swiftly. “Please,” he addressed the two officers, “let us go into this dispassionately.”
The old hate pulsed in Luis. “There was nothing to check,” he said. “I saw the grave where the victims were deposited without decent burial. I’ve talked with some of the villagers who escaped from your men and my father’s guards. I saw the place where the houses stood—a whole barrio, mind you—leveled. I need no further proof.”
The colonel was unimpressed. He lighted a cigarette, inhaled casually, and turned to Luis with contemptuous self-confidence. “Since you are so sure, I hope you will consent to hear our side. These you didn’t mention—that the villagers were active Huk supporters, that one of the leading Huk commanders in central Luzon is from the village—and I think you know him well. You did not mention that there was an encounter—that the villagers fired first—”
“And twenty villagers were killed and not one casualty among the civilian guards or the troops.”
“Only because they were trained well.” The major laughed, although his ascetic face remained expressionless. He opened his portfolio and handed Luis a sheaf of papers. “Read it,” he said.
Luis took the sheaf and skimmed through it. The report was obviously prepared by a staff member and was an arid bureaucratic piece.
“This is your side,” Luis said, “but you are big, and who will take the side of the people—the small people—whose interests, since the government should serve the people, should be your concern?”
The colonel grinned. “You talk as if you were their anointed spokesman. Why don’t you be yourself, Mr. Asperri?” Luis could sense the scorn in the appellation. “You know very well you are not small. You are very big, sir.” The colonel got a fat envelope from the portfolio. Turning to the publisher, he said, “Perhaps this will prove our point. Read it, sir. This is the handwriting of our editor’s father, who is the biggest landlord in the province. It seems hardly possible that he has sired someone like his son. If a father does not believe in his son, who will?”
Dantes read the first page carefully, then the second. He stopped reading. “Your father, Luis,” he said bleakly, “feels you were prejudiced when you wrote that article. There was no massacre—just an encounter. So many of them taking place in central Luzon, you know. Even in the Visayas, in Negros, they have started. Furthermore, your father says that these two gentlemen know why you are prejudiced. Would you care to tell me why? Here, read it yourself.”
The two officers turned to Luis. “I don’t personally want to talk about your past or your personal life,” the major said. The ribbon on his chest showed that he was a Bataan veteran. “I can very well understand why you are bitter, but we will have to break our silence …”
Everyone knows, everyone! It was a time when he should not have cared, when neither contempt nor praise should have affected him, when nothing should have eroded his belief, but in this moment of truth, he felt clammy and small.
“… and expose you,” the major continued. “Tell the world the reason for your bias, your prejudice. Maybe you do not think that this is fair, but what, then, is the reason for your inability to see it our way? We should ask you, as an editor, to be impersonal, but this you have not been. Well—everything is now in your hands. The future …”
The future—did it really mean anything now? His lies—his denials of Sipnget and his mother—had caught up with him.
“What do you say, Luis?” Dantes asked, pointing to the document that Don Vicente had written. “Your own father refutes you.”
“We had the whole barrio site examined.” The colonel laughed casually. “There was no grave at all. Yes, the village was burned. You know these things happen when houses roofed with thatch are close together. That the whole village was plowed—that is not our doing. It was his father’s. We do not deny that two villagers were killed—just two—and I think our editor knows who they are. They were taken away by the villagers themselves when they left. They were buried decently, according to them. I dare someone to go there and dig the land inch by inch and show me the mass grave!”
All is done. Luis gritted his teeth; my own father, he has gouged out my brains and squeezed the air out of my lungs. “Call it what you want,” Luis said. “How do we know how you may have exhumed the refugees when I am sure that by now you may have dispersed them? How can I gather testimony from the people who are afraid? The dead will bear me out if the living won’t.”
The major laughed again in his humorless manner. “I see that you are even superstitious. I do not think that is good for journalism.”
The officers stood up, ramrod-straight, and made ready to leave, their Pershing caps in their hands. “You have a very interesting story,” the colonel said. “I hope that someday we can have a really long talk.”
“In the stockade?” Luis asked contemptuously.
“You misunderstand us,” the colonel said, “but perhaps you will be able to explain to me why Filipinos would kill their own brethren. This, in principle, seems to be what you insinuate. We are not wealthy like you, Mr. Asperri. Without the government in which your father has a very strong say, we are really nothing—and who made this government, Mr. Asperri? It’s the people of Rosales and Sipnget—and your father and you yourself and Mr. Dantes.”
He was beyond the reach of anger, and his voice was clear as he echoed his father: “It is the strong who make the laws, and the laws are not for the weak.”
“Your political beliefs,” the colonel said, “seem straight out of medieval times. I am sorry, but we did not come here to talk politics. We merely came here to give you a chance to retract before we start any action. It is but proper that you should know where we stand. You are being given the choice, and in your own language, you have a deadline. Mr. Dantes knows …”
They tipped their Pershing caps in mock politeness, shook the publisher’s hand, then marched to the door. Luis sat back and stared at the papers on Dantes’s desk, the affidavit that his father had signed, which the officers had left for him to read. Even the phrasing was unmistakably his father’s; so was the uneven signature.
“I hope that you listened carefully to what was said,” Dantes said scowling. “We are in a mess. They were here yesterday and told me what they would do. Eddie said you haven’t been coming to the office, and I understand. Now this.”
“It is part of the job, sir. The risks go with it,” Luis said.
Dantes walked to his side and placed an arm on his shoulder. “Luis, let us not make it difficult. I don’t want my back against a wall. I don’t want to be forced to select the kind of ax my executioner will use.”
“Isn’t that what they have already done?”
The publisher’s brow knitted, and his thin lips compressed into a line across his tired, aging face. “What is it that really happened, Luis? What is it you hold against your father? After all, one reads in the papers every day about encounters like this, and one must learn to take them in stride. It is not the end of the world if one village is burned down and twenty people—like you said—are dead. You get more killed in traffic accidents in one day in the country.”
“We have learned to take murder as an everyday occurrence,” Luis said. “When we do this we may just as well stop worrying about whether or not we will ever have law and order. We die when we stop being angry.”
“But that’s not the point, Luis,” Dantes said, moving away and facing the young man. “There is a limit to our capacity. We cannot fight all battles as if they were of the same magnitude. That is the way things run. In some we use high stakes. Others we just ignore—or file away while we wait for a more propitious time. Now, this is what those officers want us to do—print a retraction and declare that there was no massacre, unless we are willing to conduct an investigation ourselves.” He walked slowly to the wide glass window through which the sun streamed in. “You have to make the decision,” he said softly.
“It is all up to you, sir,” Luis said after a while, “but there will be no retraction from me. It is not a question of me and my father involving your publication. That is between my father and me, and we will settle it our way. I will have to resign, and they can sue me as an individual if they want to.” He had not really given the idea much thought, but it came as natural as breathing.
“You have made a most difficult choice, Luis,” Dantes said, still looking out of the window, a touch of sadness in his voice. “I knew it would be this way, but I hoped that you would see it my way. We really don’t have much choice. We can do what they want us to do, or they can come at us in a big way. I will pull strings to save the magazine, but among my priorities—and I am speaking frankly to you—the magazine is not the first. You know very well that I have other interests. I had thought that it would be just some sort of hobby. Perhaps I am speaking much too candidly, making a hobby out of your life, your career—but there it is. Never underestimate the power of the government—nor the bureaucracy as such. I have enemies, too. Perhaps you don’t know, but more than fifty percent of your ads have already been withdrawn from your next issue. The advertising department will inform you this afternoon on this when they give you the listing. You know that the government controls newsprint through the release of foreign exchange. That is just the beginning.”
“All these simplify matters, then, Mr. Dantes,” Luis said calmly.
“But we can back up a bit, Luis.” Dantes turned to him. “The world is not really as cold-blooded as you picture it. Look at you—aren’t you yourself a paradox? In between is a broad meeting ground, so wide we can both rest on it and give no damn to anyone …” Dantes’s eyes were expectant.
“I am very sorry I have caused you a lot of trouble, sir, but you know, if Ester were alive”—he choked on the words—“if she were here now and I could discuss this with her, she … she would agree with me.” He stood up, but Dantes held him back.
“We cannot end this way,” he said. “I think we understand each other better now. You spoke of Ester—she was an only daughter, and I was very fond of her. I want you to stay, Luis.”
He walked to the door. “It has to be resolved, sir—and I see no other way.”
Dantes went to him and they shook hands. The publisher’s grip was tight and cold. “You can print the retraction, sir,” Luis said. “Eddie is a very good man, and if you decide to close the magazine, I hope you can keep him.”
“You want a final statement or something?”
“No, sir,” Luis said. The publisher’s grip relaxed, and Luis walked out.
Eddie was pacing the office when Luis went in and sat wearily on the sofa beside his desk. “Well,” Eddie asked, “what happened?”
“I put in a good word for you,” he said simply. “It’s the most I could do.” He stood up and started clearing his desk, sorting out the articles that he should have attended to. “I don’t know if the old man will keep the magazine. If he does, you will most certainly be running it. If he decides to let it go, you will be absorbed in his other ventures.”
“How did it come to this? I didn’t think it would come to this. Isn’t it too much for an exposé?”
Luis went to his desk. “That’s the Army for you,” he said. “As for Dantes, we are not tops in his system of priorities, that’s all.”
“Well,” Eddie said grimly, “I cannot see what is important and what is not. If he doesn’t think twenty dead people important, I cannot work for him. I’m used to the gutter, Luis.” He stretched himself on the sofa, flipped off his brown slip-ons, and wiggled his toes.
“I’m sorry, Eddie,” Luis said, emptying his drawers of letters, manuscripts. It was like combing into the past—only the past could not be dredged from his drawers and dumped like clips or knick-knacks on his glass top, where he could pick them out one by one and say: This fragment of my life is important.
Eddie watched him wordlessly. “But in a sense Dantes is right, Luis. You are bitter, you know.”
Luis threw a fistful of junk into the wastebasket and glared. “I knew the village, I could name everyone in it. They were not just casualty figures—they were people.”
Eddie sat up. “I do not deny that,” he said. “They must mean very much to you. Look at what you are doing to yourself. Let us not go into that cliché about obligations and righteousness and justice, but you have obligations to yourself, too, and your relatives—your father, most of all. Why should he disagree with you?”
The trash from Luis’s drawers was now reduced to a small pile of mementoes. It hardly mattered now. Eddie had given him loyalty, respect, and that kind of relationship that could arise only from mutual trust. “There are things you do not know about me,” he said quietly. “It is not that the massacre is not true. God knows it is, but I did not tell you why I have been shaken by it to the very core. My grandfather, he was one of those killed. And my mother, she was betrayed and lost. You may have heard from me that my mother died long ago—that was a convenient lie.”
“Luis, it cannot be,” Eddie said. “If it is true, then it is not enough that you write about the massacre.”
Luis smiled wryly. “How I wish that I could really do something—but what, Eddie? As my father said, it is not the truth that gives us strength. I’m not even half the man that I should be. I am a godforsaken bastard. Go to my hometown and ask anyone you meet in the street. He will tell you how my mother was a maid in my father’s house. I had to live that lie in this city, and I tried to belong. Everything is a sham and I wish I’d never been born.”
Eddie stood up and embraced him, but Luis pushed him brusquely away. “I don’t need your sympathy,” Luis said.
“It is not sympathy,” Eddie said. “It’s gratitude—for trusting me.”
“I don’t have to be a hypocrite anymore. I can now live the way I like. If I must, I will tell the story all over again. Let us say that I am a mourner and that nothing can comfort me except the truth and the damnation that goes with it.”
Dear Father,
Today I thank you not only for this life but also for helping me clear the cobwebs in my mind, so that I may yet know the answer to the riddle that I have for so long tried to unravel. I am, thanks to you, slowly escaping from delusions. Indeed it was most easy to delude myself, to mask a deep and private fear with public avowal of virtue or dedication to some noble folly. Do I really love humanity or truth or that abstraction called freedom? How deceptively simple it was for me to address myself to these ends, and how illusory they are finally becoming.
The reality is not quite like this. In truth I am afraid of losing my comforts, the certainty of the wealth you will give me, all the opulent dreams that are already real, for I know, no matter what I do, that you will not disown me. Your dream, too, is your own mishmash of virtue. You, too, have found it convenient, perhaps, to forget.
When you sent me off from Rosales to a Catholic college you knew it was absurd, for I had never touched a rosary before, and if I had, it was in the manner Grandfather prescribed. (You should have known the old man—you have too many things in common: bullheadedness, love of the good life, and a certain earthy approach to living.) He always looked with skepticism at the many who went to church on Sundays and holy days of obligations, for he felt that most of them desecrated the temple—the cheap, fornicating slobs whose minds, preceding their bodies, committed another mortal sin even as they knelt in the pews to ask that their sins be forgiven. He believed in prayer, of course, but only if it was addressed straight to God. He believed—just to make sure—in the spirits, too, which abounded in the fields, the trees, and the mounds.
Those were four tedious years during which I grew up without family and the pleasures of Sipnget. I was in high school—a junior—when the war came, and you had, at first, thought of going to Rosales but, on second thought, decided that Manila would be safe. You were right; the conquerors did not bother us, and we were adequately supplied not just with the amenities that you were used to but with the same dogged loyalty that your encargados and your tenants had always shown you.
I will now recall, dear Father, some aspects of those years that I know you did not particularly relish but that, if you understood better, would have explained to you why things were changing, why I, myself, knew that we must change not only because by doing so we would continue to occupy the positions that we always coveted but because by changing we would also be able to live.
You must remember that day when Santos and other men from Sipnget came and told you that they needed medicines, that the countryside was alive with guerrillas. I had listened and asked if I might go to Sipnget, if only to see my mother, whom I had not seen in years. And you told me to go with them so that I might see for myself and tell you how it was.
I was of course pleased to break away from the monotony of the house. We took the train to Rosales, then hiked for two days until we reached the range. We scaled a steep ridge, and in the glimmer of morning we saw the camp, a cluster of cogon huts at the bottom of a ravine. Trees covered the ridge and the narrow clearing from the air. The men were disappointed that we did not bring more medicines. They led me to the hut in the center, where they said their commander was. They called him, saying that Don Vicente’s son had come. The commander came out, a short, well-built man with a peasant’s simple, trusting face. His handshake was muscular and gnarled. Come in, Señorito, and make yourself at home in this humble dwelling, he said, grinning. His politeness irritated me. He was a leader of men whose reputation had spread well beyond Rosales. A hardened fighter, he had no reason to appear so meek. It was only afterward that I learned that he was not putting on a front, compared with the constabulary officers whom I had met. At one time (his men told me) he had a priest brought up to the hills because a spy whom he had ordered executed wanted the last sacraments. It was medicine that his men needed most. Malaria, typhoid, and dysentery had thinned their ranks, and they could not bring the sick down from the hills. I said that I didn’t see why they could not be brought down. At this his politeness vanished and he laughed aloud. He told a woman passing by with the day’s laundry to call someone in the nearby hut, and a one-armed man came. The man used to be a farmer, not a guerrilla, but a Japanese patrol had come upon him—and to the Japanese all those with malaria were guerrillas. They would have killed him had he not escaped. Wounded, he had fled to the hills to become a guerrilla.
I know, Father, that you did not want me to go to the hills again after that first trip, but I did go. I must tell you now that I went with my brother, Victor, and that when you thought I was in Rosales, in truth I was really with them for a few weeks. I saw them kill, but I was not appalled. In their company I was part of a wave. Without your knowing it I had forded rivers and stayed in mountain redoubts, where they made their own laws. It was a time for volcanic angers and it was a time for dreams, and Commander Victor dreamed that someday, when the killing was over, better times would come and he would go back to his farm.
Then peace came and I forgot Commander Victor. I returned to college, to cosmology and protoplasm, the reality and the activity of multiple beings and the place they occupied in the order of causality. I dozed through the devil’s rantings, metaphysics, and Father Aguirre’s Greek. My professors bored me. They had all shut themselves up in the drabness of their jobs, navigating in narrow circles. Each was placid and self-contained, mouthing dogmas and dieting on imagination. My classmates were of the same mongrel breed—rich, untouched by the war. If they were affected by war at all, they certainly bore no scars. I was the editor of the college paper, a job I relished in spite of the fact that I detested the restrictions imposed upon me by the invisible college censors, priests fastidiously occupied with word and symbol.
You returned to Rosales, too, to build the house that had been burned; you said you wanted to be closer to the land.
The war was over, and the last time I had seen Commander Victor was in Rosales. He was wearing an olive-gray GI fatigue, and he was with a group of nondescript men, drinking in one of the hole-in-the-wall bars that flourished after Liberation. He waved and cried—Señorito, I missed you!
I did not miss him. I had forgotten the men who killed—but not the killing. One morning I received a letter in pencil: “Dear Señorito, this shames me to the very core of my heart, but there is no one I can turn to but you. I need help, Señorito—money—and I hope you will not forsake me, as you never had in the past.” The mention of money sickened me, but I realized that he had quailed a lot to write to me. “I am not a recognized guerrilla. I received no back pay, nor have my men, but you recognized me and that is all that matters. My family is hungry. I cannot farm, because I have no carabao. My Garand and tommy gun were confiscated, but my automatic—if the worst comes and I won’t be able to pay—I’ll give it to you. It is the only valuable thing I have.”
I intended to send him a little sum, but somehow, with my schoolwork and other interests, I forgot about the letter. In the following week Santos came to inquire about my needs and to check the house to see if it needed repairs, and to pay some of your Manila taxes. We talked about Commander Victor—and of course Santos knew. Commander Victor is dead, he said. The constabulary had been investigating him for the things his men did during the war, and I would not be surprised if he was even investigated for killing the enemy. He was a poor man, and his wife, said Santos, had come to you to borrow money. You could not refuse, for it was for Commander Victor’s funeral. He had blown his brains out.
I can understand, Father, why you have been angered by the change that came upon Sipnget. Aren’t these the people you helped in their hour of need? But virtue—as the angels have always said—needs no reward, and if you are virtuous, your reward is not in this mundane world peopled by peasants.
I must now tell you what happened in college. You never asked me to explain, and I am grateful. In the press room that night, where I was closing the college paper, I junked my editorial and decided to tell the story of Commander Victor—his village, how he was delivered to his judges. If he was to survive, he had to use force, the same brute force with which he tilled the land. Wearied by his helplessness, by the weight of a future he could not carry, he surrendered his family to the brutality that he could not bear, and he ended his life with the same gun he had wielded to make secure the men who were his judges.
I justified, as I must now justify, the use of violence to secure justice—and self-destruction as the greatest virtue, for it is from death that we must rebuild.
I did not show the editorial to the college censors—not because I was afraid that they would blot it out but because there was just no time. I had done similar things in the past and received no adverse reaction from them. The following morning, however, the office clerk called me. The whole issue of the paper was being held in the office, and when I got there each news item, each article, poetry, and fiction was marked: Imprimatur, tribunal censorum. My editorial was crossed out in red pencil, and on it was: Donec Corrigatur, tribunal censorum. On my desk, too, were instructions to write another editorial or fill the editorial column with a news story.
It was more than I could bear. I did not go to school the whole day. The following morning, my associate editor came to the house and said that they were printing the paper on orders of the father rector and that I should go with him to the rector’s office, for they wanted to clear up the whole mess. I knew most of the priests quite well. I even learned my Spanish from them. I had no foreboding of what was to happen. They were waiting for me, seated before the large molave conference table in the rector’s office, looking solemn in their white cassocks. In the center of the table stood a black crucifix, and before the priests was a high-backed chair, which was apparently reserved for me. It was the Inquisition.
“Sit down, Mr. Asperri,” the rector said amiably. I took the chair and faced the priests—the rector with his double chin; the father dean, lean, ascetic; and the father moderator, his face burdened with a granite jaw.
“You understand, of course, why your editorial was censored,” the father moderator said. He was from the Basque, like you, although he was not Basque and his Spanish had that Catalan quality of resonance. “It was too strong, and besides, you were really stepping on territory quite alien to you. You know, Mr. Asperri, you have a lot of freedom because we knew you were responsible—but as said, this is now alien territory …”
“Truth is not alien to me, Father,” I said.
The father dean shook his head. He was a nice man, really, from Seville, and there were times during his lectures in aesthetics when he would close his eyes and be carried away by ideas, the transcendental beauty of faith. Now he was wide-eyed. “Let us not be academic,” he said, lisping, his yellowish and filmy eyes probing into me.
It was, of course, useless arguing with them, for they were masters of logic and they led me through a maze, pummeled me, battered me, and humbled me. I said, “I know that you would push me into a corner, as you now have done, but I repeat, I am speaking of one who fought for this country when others who would have fought better did nothing. I felt that I had to do something in this life, which you said would determine the next. I knew in my conscience that it was not wrong.”
“You will continue disobeying rules, then?” The father rector leaned forward, all his superior equanimity gone.
“It is not a question of disobeying rules,” I said. “It is a question of belief.” The father moderator held his thick hand to his lips in mock despair, and the father dean shook the yellow pamphlet, the Rules of Discipline, saying, “You know that there is only one thing left to be done.”
I picked up the threat and said, “You may want to kick me out of the college, but you cannot do this, for when I did not come to school yesterday I had already quit school. I have come here as a matter of formality, to tell you about my decision.”
I bolted up, unmindful of their confused and inane protestations, and headed for the door, the sunshine and the free air. I stopped by the office and told my colleagues what I had done, and somehow, the next morning my story was in the papers. Trining came to the house, and in tears she shook her fists at me. One week later Mr. Dantes gave me a job.
I was, of course, worried about how you would react, you being almost wholly Spanish and quite close to the priests in whose hands you had entrusted me. However, you accepted my youthful rebellion, which, as you now know, was also directed against you. I wish it would be easy to attribute this to the phenomenon of growing up, in which we all kill our fathers in order that we may become men, but it is more than this. I will never really be able to accept the fact that as my father you could condemn me and yet expect me to carry on the function of an heir. The line has been broken. It was rent asunder when you denied my mother. I am now free from you, Father. I know this, for I can now damn you to your face.
And yet I do not really hate you or wish you harm. It is what you stand for that rankles—the privilege, the apathy, and the alienation from the people, including me, who have made possible your safe pinnacle. No, Father, you are not ten feet tall. If you can look down on us, it is only because you stand on a pile of carrion.
A part of me shriveled when I left college and still another when I read your letter. Our Time will go on, but I must leave it in order to appease power. I have finally made use of it, although not in the fashion you wanted, for now I have become free.