33
They buried Don Vicente Asperri the following morning. It was a warm May day, and a fierce sun bathed Rosales with a searing brightness. All the town officials were gathered in the house, five congressmen from the province and three senators, all in dark suits or barong tagalogs, and the whole front of the house was lined with big black cars. Luis received their condolences with indifference and fretted at the toilsome length of the funeral service in the hall. When the coffin was brought down the marble stairs the senators and congressmen vied with one another to hold the carved silver handles as if the chore was a privilege for a chosen few. If only his father could see it all now, he would be pleased at such fawning gratitude from the big men whom he had helped. Now it was to ingratiate themselves with Luis, the next Asperri, the only Asperri, and around him they hovered—powerful men—knowing that the mantle had been transferred to him.
With Trining, Luis was the last to descend, and at the landing the solicitous crowd milled around them, recreant favor seekers all. In the driveway, which was cleared so that the couple could pass, the town police, in starched khaki uniforms and black armbands, formed a two-file honor guard, and beyond the gate, in the street—where the coffin was pushed into a shiny funeral coach drawn by four black horses—were the inconsequential people of Rosales, the tenants, the mob that had come to pay the great man their last respects. The shuffling of stolid feet and the low, hushed voices merged into one depressing hum. It was warm in the yard, too, and the sweaty smell of people was heavy in the air. The brass band started the Funeral March, and the policemen in the driveway moved to the gate and into the street, where they led the procession, their flag drooping in the immobile air.
Behind the funeral coach, Luis and Trining, in their Chrysler, led the mourners, followed by the politicians, the provincial and town officials. Behind them, inching their way along the main street, were three trucks from the rice mill, all bursting with funeral wreaths, with streaming black ribbons, purple lotus flowers, and greens. Behind the trucks the multitude, on foot, kept pace.
The Catholic priest, who lived on Don Vicente’s grace, timed his arrival perfectly. Accompanied by two acolytes, the young priest walked down the street with burning incense. He went to the rear of the funeral coach and intoned a prayer, then the funeral procession moved on.
Trining turned to Luis. Above the dragging cadence of funeral music and the shuffle of feet on the asphalt, she whispered, so that Simeon would not hear, “You must forgive him. He is dead and cannot hurt you anymore.”
But it is the dead who hurt us most, for we cannot ask them questions, bring them to heel, or confirm with them what it was that made them what they were. Even in death, something of the man lives on—the visitation of his sins. What he did is not confined to himself. The wars he sanctioned go on long after every bone in his virulent body has become one with the soil. Upon this soil we feed and we imbibe the same virus. Death is the ultimate truth, not for him who is gone but for us who still live. “Yes,” Luis said softly, “he can still hurt us, perhaps not so much by what we remember but by what others will expect of us—Asperris. We carry his name, you know, and that is a burden.”
The procession left the asphalted street and proceeded to the dirt road leading to the cemetery. The street was now lined with sorry-looking houses roofed with thatch and walled with buri-palm leaves. People came out of their houses to line the street and gaze at this most impressive display of big cars. Never again would Rosales have a funeral of such magnitude. Never had it had so many politicians and officials gathered together, all in the name of Vicente Asperri.
Had it not rained a few days back, dust would have risen to suffocate all of them. As it was, only a thin, powdery cloud rose, and it covered the coach ahead, the carved cherubs on its hardwood door, while the black wooden wheels creaked in their slow turning. In about half an hour the procession reached the cemetery at the southern end of the town, and the crowd made way for Luis and his wife and all the personages gathered around them as they headed for the small visita in the center of the cemetery—a dilapidated structure with a rusting tin roof and four posts gone awry. Near this the Asperri mausoleum stood on a lot wide enough for a house. It was walled with white Romblon marble. Here lay Don Vicente’s father, his brother, and his sister-in-law, their black marble tombs shaded by lowland pine. There was a tenant whose sole duty was to look after it, to trim the gumamela hedges and water the plots of African daisies and amarillo shrubs, so that, although the whole cemetery had not yet responded to the touch of May, this particular plot was green and abloom.
The politicians vied with one another in hoisting the coffin out of the coach. They carried it to the chapel and set it on a low platform. Santos walked over to Luis and asked if he wanted the cover removed. Luis shook his head. Out of the tightening circle that surrounded them the priest came forward and stuttered the last ritual. When it was over he went to Luis, his breath stinking of tobacco, and said that he hoped everything would be well, that Luis would continue to be the Catholic that his father was. Then the politicians and their wives crowded around Luis, asking him and his wife to visit them in Manila. We have known your father’s greatness, they all said; and we hope that you will not forget us … The band played “Nearer My God to Thee,” and the tomb was sealed. It was time to leave; he took Trining’s hand, turned listlessly to the assemblage, and attempted a smile, after which they walked to the car.
They were silent all the way, and when they went up to the house Trining said, “I know what you’re thinking of.” They washed their feet with warm water, which a servant had placed at the top of the stairs, and they shed their outer clothes of black. Marta had insisted that this be done, so that no abomination would visit them.
Luis remained silent, and in their room Trining repeated, “Luis, how much better it would be if you just talked.”
The warm water had banished the tiredness from his feet, and he sank into bed. The heat in the room descended on him like a solid mass, pressing down and seeking every minute pore of his skin. Trining went to him and sat on the edge of the bed. She was wearing a comfortable maternity dress, which she had ordered from her dressmaker in Manila. Although the dress was chic, it could not hide the contour of her belly.
“My grandfather … Father is there in that handsome mausoleum—and my mother, I don’t even know where she is. Can’t you see how terrible it is? So now I am the lord and master of this castle—hah!” He laughed without mirth. “Did you see how they came to me, the politicians? Have you ever seen such a funeral? Can you not imagine the power I now hold—to do with as I wish? Stop the waves, do not dirty the hem of my royal robes—”
“Luis, what are you talking about?” Trining was distraught.
He sat up beside her, pressed her hand, and said softly, “Even a king does not have all the power in the world, sweetheart. There are things I must do myself, with no help from anyone.”
“I’m your wife. Do let me help.”
He held her face and kissed her softly. “How do we go about living with this blot in our minds?”
“We can try,” she said hopefully. “There must be a way we can get to those who knew what really happened. Santos—he should be able to help.” Her eyes shone.
“They are all cowed,” he said. “Do you think you can find even one who would stand up to the constabulary? They have never been on the side of the people—all those officers are always on the side of the rich.”
“Which we are,” Trining said flatly. “So there must be a way that we can find out. We start here, in this house, and if we cannot get anything here, we can go to Sipnget, or that refugee village.”
“Aguray.”
“We can even go to the mountains, if the answers can be found there.” She was looking at him intently, searching his face, and he marveled at her tenacity—this frail creature, reared in comfort, who now, in his moment of need, was by his side.
After lunch they hastened to Don Vicente’s bedroom, which would be dismantled, and the maids hurried out, emptying it of its memories of sickness and death. When the room was finally bare and Don Vicente’s clothes were packed in mothballed lockers, Luis called Trining and pointed to the spiral staircase that went to the tower. Like him, she had never been up there. It had been locked all these years. He had once asked the servants about the tower, and they had told him that it was there where Don Vicente Asperri’s wife had lived and wasted her years in lunacy, cursing her husband who lived in the room below and slept away from her, on their wide matrimonial bed, cursing him for having failed to give her a child.
Luis slowly led Trining by the hand up the iron spiral stairs that were wiped clean, as were the wooden steps. They reached the top of the flight, and slowly Luis opened the door, which he thought would be locked. It was not. They stepped into the room in awe, expecting to see things they had never seen, perhaps old and rusting lockers brimming with unspeakable secrets. The room was airy, not cobwebbed and musty, and it looked lived-in. There was a writing desk and a sofa, and there was a shelf of folders, which, he soon found out, contained all the issues of Our Time published from the time he took over its editorship. There also were carefully bound issues of the college paper that he had edited. There were scrapbooks containing Luis’s letters when he was in high school, old pictures of himself on a picnic by the river and with his school debating team—and wonder of wonders, there were the poems he wrote in his teens, poems that seemed so effete and unreadable but that sent a pang of nostalgia coursing through his being. He had often wondered where he had placed all these, and now here they were, all neatly arranged and bound together, as if they were meant for posterity. So it was here where his father had cared for him in his own fashion. It must have been an effort, going up the stairs in his condition, but here he had peace—and communion with his son, which had not been possible in person.
“Oh, Luis,” Trining said, “he loved you. He wanted so much to know you. Can you see it now? Can you forgive him now?”
Luis strode to the window, a hundred thoughts crowding in his mind. Beyond the acacias and the coconut palms the whole town was spread around him. Through the clear glass panels he could see it all, even where Sipnget was and the river like a silver ribbon in the sun. And every day that his father spent here he could see the village, too. Luis shook his head. “I was something special, perhaps,” he said softly; “I can understand that, but I am not just an Asperri. I come from that place over there.” He pointed to the distance.
They went down to the library, which adjoined Don Vicente’s room. It was here where all the important papers were filed—the Torrens titles, the stocks in the mines and in the brewery.
Santos came up to explain things. “You know, señorito,” he said, “I owe everything I have to your father. I will serve you as well as I served him, and whatever little knowledge this ignorant brain holds is yours to use.”
Luis said, “I want the truth. I want to find out what really happened to Sipnget. More than this, I want to find my mother and to see where my grandfather was buried.”
“But what good would it do, Apo?” Santos asked. “The dead are dead—they cannot be brought back to life, and it really matters little where they have been buried or even how they died.”
“It does matter,” Luis said, “if they are your relatives!”
“I am very sorry, Apo, but sometimes, for someone like me, silence is the only answer. You understand, Apo, I will serve you in the best way I can, but there are things I cannot do, for I am not strong.”
“All right, then, where are the civilian guards? Who pulled the triggers?”
“They have been disbanded, Apo. The constabulary disbanded them after you left.”
“We cannot find even one?”
“Even if we did find one, would he speak? You are asking him to swing from the loftiest tree.”
“Would you be a Judas to me?”
“Even the weak have a right to life, Apo.”
Even with Santos’s rebuff, Trining was doggedly serious about going to Sipnget and beyond—to Aguray. She was hardly in any condition for the walk—and not even a jeep could go to Aguray, for it would mean not only fording the river where it was shallow but also walking the dunes on to where they became alluvial.
As she prepared in the evening for the trip—lunch basket, walking shoes, umbrella, and thermos bottle—Luis hoped that she would at least know how it was with his grandfather, although he had now become thoroughly skeptical that he would find even a trace of the exhumation and reburial.
Trining had her own defense against disappointment—the walk would do her good, and she needed it for the baby. They started out early in the morning with Santos at the wheel of the jeep. The sun was not yet up, and the town still slept in that brief coolness that always preceded the humid onslaught of May. Santos drove slowly over the road, which had begun to rut. Trining had dug out from the closet a green parasol and sneakers that she had used in her physical education class in college. The walk would be nice and cool if they got to Sipnget before daybreak.
Luis did not have a single worry about his physical safety, and he refused the pistol that Santos said he should carry. When they reached Sipnget, however, a little apprehension came to him. He was, after all, no longer Luis from the village. He was now one of the region’s wealthiest men. The sun broke through the thin morning haze. The air was rich, compounded of morning dew and the earth that had begun to stir. A new bridge made of unsplit coconut trunks lay across the irrigation ditch, which had been dredged. Santos assured him that the bridge was sturdy, and they drove over it. Then Santos carefully eased the vehicle down the uneven path, over deep ruts made by carabao hooves, which were beginning to disappear. They drove slowly, knowing that Trining in her condition would be uncomfortable at every little bump.
The dry season was over. The huge blotches of burned fields were now mottled with touches of green. The mud holes and even the irrigation ditch alongside the path had dried up, and water lilies, matted and dead, clung to the uneven floor of the ditch. Soon everything in the waterways would stir and the brown would disappear under a blanket of green.
“I came here once, long ago,” Trining said when they were near the dike. They had not spoken much on the camino provincial. “It was November, and harvest time.”
Luis knew well that season when the whole land seemed ablaze with golden fire and the air was brilliant and scented. It did not last more than a month, for the scythe subdued the fields in no time and the fire of torches blackened the fields, singeing the hay to the very skin of the earth.
The trail made a curve, and there, beyond the thin veil of grass, stood the dike. The old duhat tree and the buri palms were gone. Luis was not surprised. With the people of Sipnget no longer there, it was natural that the landmarks would also be erased. They stopped in the shade of a stunted camachile tree, and Luis helped Trining out of the jeep. She smoothed the creases from her skirt, and for a moment, as if in pain, she held her belly and did not move. “Don’t you think you should stay here with Santos and wait for me?” Luis said. “I can go alone, I know the place. It is quite a walk, but I should be back in three hours.”
Trining was resolute; she left several sandwiches for Santos and followed Luis toward the dike. The path that led to Sipnget was completely obliterated. The dying grass hid every trace of the old path. Even the clean straight lines that sled runners and bull-cart wheels had etched upon the dike had been wiped out. He held her hand as they went up. The sun was still soft and mild, and although they had both walked a considerable distance, they were still fresh, free from the ravages of heat and humidity. Once she stumbled as she stepped on a loose clod, but she quickly braced herself and, clinging to Luis, went up the dike. How thorough the destruction of Sipnget was! Not a single tree, acacia or palm, stood where the village used to be. The tractors of his father had done a tidy job—the furrows were immaculate and straight. They went down to the stubble field, and for Trining, the walk on the plowed earth was extremely difficult. There was no path to the river except through that brown serrated land. They reached the riverbank after great difficulty and looked down on the delta, silver and brown in gashes of sun. He turned around and saw how all the trunks of buri had been removed. There was no curtain of grass, no mound.
“I don’t know now where the grave was,” Luis said, admitting defeat. “God, it could have been anywhere here, even on this very spot where we are standing.”
She pressed his hand and did not speak. “Can we go back to Santos and ask him?” she asked after a while.
Luis smiled. “It was not he who wanted this land plowed,” he said. “No one but Father and his friends. Whoever worked here will not speak with us now.” He turned again to the river. “It is a fine day for a woman with child to go walking,” he said lightly. “Aguray lies beyond.”
They went down a gully choked with weeds and rotting banana trunks. In the soft sand of the riverbed they walked again hand in hand. The water was only ankle-deep in many places, but in a few weeks the rains would come in earnest and the water would rise, muddy-brown and swift, and it would no longer be possible to cross the river except by raft.
“Why should they stay there?” Trining asked. “Why don’t they come back to Sipnget or to any part of the hacienda, where you will let them farm?”
The sun was now warm, and Luis opened her umbrella and shielded her from it. “We stayed there once during the war,” Luis said. “It is quite inaccessible during the rainy season, when the river is flooded and portions of the delta become a swamp. Now that the delta is dry, so is Aguray. It is a kind of stopover, a temporary haven. I am sure that they are merely biding time, that when it becomes more propitious, they will come back.”
She paused, her brow glistening with sweat as the baby inside her stirred again and she grimaced with pain.
“Are you sure you want to go on?” he asked.
She smiled at him. “Yes,” she said. “We are here now. We must proceed.”
He led her to the shade of the tall grass and let her rest on a huge, smooth boulder. He took off her sneakers and rubbed her feet. She watched him, his devotion, and when he was through he took off his shoes, too, for now they would cross the river. He folded the cuffs of his pants and placed their shoes in the lunch basket.
The water was cool, a murmur over the pebbles. It rose no higher than their knees at the deepest, and they walked slowly, holding hands. He was afraid lest she stumble where the stones were mossy.
Her thoughts were far, far away. After a while she said, “Luis, I don’t know, but there’s just the two of us. We don’t need much, do we?”
“What are you thinking of?”
“If it is the land they want, don’t you think we can sell it to them cheap—or even give it to them in time? I know Tio would not do it if he were alive, but he is gone, Luis. We can leave Rosales, go to the city—anywhere you want to go, maybe America or Europe. You can write there, and I will look after you. Just us—I will love it that way.”
What he heard pleased him and he would readily have accepted her idea, but it suddenly occurred to him that he wanted to keep everything intact, that he wanted to play landlord, too, in a fashion different from his father’s. “It is not that easy,” he found himself saying. “Even charity is not that simple. It has to be administered with great responsibility. That means slow, hard work. It means surveys, seeing to it that the land is equitably divided and that it goes to the right people. It means the building of institutions that will replace us—perhaps some sort of bank for crop loans, or a lending agency to which the farmers can run when someone in the family gets sick or gets married. Also, someone has to teach them the basics of farm management—you know, all these things must be done professionally …”
She was looking at him intently, and when he paused she said, “It would be simple, Luis, if you really put your mind to it.”
“Yes,” he said. “It can be made simpler, but it means that we couldn’t get away. It means we will have to stay here—and work.”
“There are always problems coming up—like those clouds. It has been very warm. Do you think it will rain?”
He followed her gaze. The clouds were dark, and they stretched up the hollow curve of the sky. “If it does, it will do us good,” he said. He guided her to the shallows, and the water sloshed around their ankles and sang among the pebbles and the moss-covered boulders. As they went farther across, the water evened out and Trining did not bother lifting her skirt. Then they reached the other bank and walked barefoot on the sand, which had begun to warm. This was the first time he had come to Aguray since the war—and although the yearly monsoon blotted out the trails, new ones were always etched on the sandy loam at the beginning of the dry season and one whose sense of direction was as keen as the wind’s could not miss Aguray.
Now they came across the small clearings, watermelon and cucumber patches that seemed abandoned, for there were no signs that the thatched sheds at the fringes of the clearings were inhabited. Before noon they rested again in the shade of a lone acacia tree on the sandy plain. Trining opened the lunch basket. She had not forgotten her husband’s preference for salted eggs and tomatoes. They ate slowly. Trining held her belly once, pain beclouding her face, but only for a moment. She drank cold water from the thermos bottle, and soon she was fresh and ready for the walk that lay ahead.
At high noon Luis stopped and pointed to the far end of the wide delta, to the trees and the bamboo clumps that marked Aguray. “There, that’s where they should be,” Luis said.
They hurried on, past the thicker growths of grass that sprouted from the dunes, past many clearings planted to root crops and sweet potatoes, all of which were overgrown with weeds. It had become very warm, and Luis took off his shirt. Trining continually mopped her brow with her scarf, and although she tried courageously to keep in step with her husband, she started to lag behind and Luis had to walk slowly. “You cannot go farther,” he said, drawing her into the shade of another camachile tree before the riverbank. She was panting and pale, but she smiled wordlessly. He smothered the grass in the shade, and spreading his damp shirt on it, he bade her sit. She did not want to but he was firm, so she sat down slowly, holding her belly. All around them the grass was tall, ready to burst into white plumed flowers. A cloud of dragonflies hovered over them, the gauzy wings glinting like specks of silver against the sky. He let her rest until her breathing was easy again, then he helped her up and they walked down the sandy bar, up the gully that led to Aguray.
During the war Victor and he used to go to the village and feel secure—but only during the rainy season, when the river was full and Aguray itself was isolated. There were so many small islands of sandy loam there, each with its own moat, and one could not easily cross the waters and navigate unless one came from the place and knew each of the waterways, for every year these changed, depending on the way the current moved.
He ran up the riverbank, which was a low incline, and looked down at the Aguray that he knew. This was the haven that he and Vic and Commander Victor had known—but if Sipnget was now gone, so too, was Aguray. There was not a single house in the sandy wasteland. He raced down the path, which was still unclaimed by grass, and he came across yards where thatched houses once stood, where people used to gather in the early evenings. Nothing was there now. He turned to his wife, who had followed him, and tears scalded his eyes as he said, “You can see for yourself—they were hounded even here.”
“It is not true!” she cried. “There must be a way we can find where they are! They cannot vanish like smoke. Santos—he would really know. He keeps that ledger. The soldiers, the policemen in town … You are the hacendero now. They must respect you and give you what you want.” The words poured out of her in a torrent.
“Trining,” he told her softly, holding her by the shoulder, “no one can help us. This was their last refuge, and they had no cause for leaving it. I do not think even Santos knows where they have gone.”
He turned to the hills at his left, the rugged bluffs that loomed so near although they were kilometers away. “There’s only one place they could have gone to, and we cannot follow them there.”
“We can!” she cried. “If you want to—and I want to—we can follow them wherever they have gone to.” She freed herself and walked away, her steps rigid and straight, as if in a trance, then she broke into a run for the river and Sipnget. He called to her to stop, and when she did not he sprinted after her. Catching her, he held her quivering body close to his, sought her warm, pained face, and kissed her—her lips, her damp nose, her eyes, her hot, salty tears—and when she tried to break away again, he pinioned her arms until her struggling ceased and she started to moan and the sound that came from her was the anguished cry of a wounded animal. “She is my mother, too. Isn’t it so, Luis? And I have not even seen her and presented myself to her. I want to thank her, my dear husband, for bringing to this world the person I love …”
He slipped an arm around her formless waist and let her cry. When she quieted down he led her back to the river. He picked up the empty lunch basket, the scarf, and the umbrella that she had left at the bottom of the gully, and shielded her from the hot westering sun.
They were on the riverbed again. The sun was hidden now behind an ominous mass of clouds that spread out across the sky. “It’s going to rain—if the wind does not blow those clouds away,” he said. She looked up at a sky that had darkened. Soon it would be June, and if the rains came on time, there would be grasshoppers on the wing, mushrooms in the bamboo groves, and spiders in the bushes at dusk. If it rained on time, the seed would also sprout on time, and somewhere in this vast and blighted land, unmarked by a cross or hedge or man’s lament, lay his kin—and somewhere, too, his mother would be walking, searching …
“I don’t care anymore whether or not it will rain,” Trining said in a strained voice. “I just don’t care anymore.”