“You are wrong,” I said. Coherent speech was mine again. “I respected him.”
“Respected him! What a difference!”
I did not know how to argue with her; she did not give me a chance.
“Let me tell you,” she said hastily. “He was not good and he was not kind, and that is why they killed him. But he had virtues, and he was really good in his own way. Not many understood, but I did, and that’s why—” She brought the handkerchief to her eyes and started sobbing. She slumped on one of the chairs, her body shaking with her sobs.
“Please don’t cry,” I said.
She dropped the handkerchief on her lap and turned to me. “He loved you,” she said. “He used to talk so much about you.”
“That’s not true,” I said, unable to hold it back any longer. “That’s not true at all!”
“Ay!” She sighed. She rose and walked to the window. “If only we know the things that are hidden in the hearts of others, the world wouldn’t be such a sad place.” Outside, the sunshine was a silver flood. The birds on the grass roof twittered.
“He never cared for me,” I said plainly. “He tried to but—”
“But he did! And you call him Father! You didn’t even understand him!” she exclaimed. “You were very close to him, and you didn’t even know how he felt! And here I was, seeing him only once or twice a week, and I knew so many things. But maybe it’s because I’m a woman. I do know! You have to believe it now that he’s dead. We could have gotten married, lived together. He loved you, and he said he failed you because of me and many other things that he had to do, although he didn’t want to. The death of this Baldo, his helplessness before your Don Vicente. All these he told me and blamed himself. How will you ever understand? You have to be a man …”
There was nothing for me to say.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Seventeen.”
“So young,” she said, “so very young!”
I gazed out of the window, at the caved banks of the river. “I’ll be leaving, maybe tomorrow,” I said.
She came to me again and held my arm lightly. We walked to the door. A breeze stirred the tall cogon grass that surrounded the house.
“What will you do now?” I asked.
She bit her lower lip, and when she looked at me, resignation was on her face. “What can I do?”
“You’ll stay here?”
Her voice was dry: “Yes. Where will I go? To the city, like you? I’ve been there. You are thinking perhaps that if I leave I can start anew? I ask you: what for?”
She left me at the door and walked to her dresser. Before the oval mirror she examined her face, her swollen eyes. She was beautiful, even though grief had distorted her face.
“If there is anything you need, you can go to the house, to my Cousin Marcelo. I’ll tell him to give you everything you need.”
She turned quickly to me. “No,” she said sharply. “No, thank you. I don’t think I’ll ever go there. I’ve some pride, you know.”
“I want to help.”
“You can’t,” she said, trying to smile. “Thank you for the thought. I am ashamed, that’s all. But not with him. Only in the beginning. Then I wasn’t ashamed anymore, even when I felt a hundred eyes stab me in the market, in church; one gets used to it. The skin thickens with the years.” Fresh tears welled in her eyes. “But believe me, with him I was not ashamed. Never. Maybe I loved him deeply, although that didn’t seem possible.”
“Please, don’t cry,” I said.
She daubed her eyes. “Well, you see me crying now, but I will stop. I’ll powder my face and comb my hair, then go out. And should another man come up that path, do you expect me to shut the door?”
I did not answer. I turned and stepped down the stairs into the blinding sunlight.
So it must be; I left Rosales, relegating that town to a sweet oblivion in the mind. I left behind people who should not intrude into the peace that, I thought, I could build and reinforce with a wealth of means that is mine by inheritance.
I have lived in pleasant solitude, breathed God’s pure air, and wallowed in sybaritic comfort, although, occasionally, I do think about those who were around me, and do feel deeply about the travail of my youth. But I see their anguish as something caused by human cussedness itself, that this is man’s certitude and destiny — irrevocable, final — that one cannot make anything different from it any more than I can stir ashes back to life.
Yet, much as I am sure of these, I also know that the present, this now, is yesterday, and anything and everything that I find detestable are outgrowths of something equally detestable in this not-so-distant past.
I wish I could be honest and true, but truth as I see it is not something abstract, a pious generality — it is justice at work, righteous, demanding, disciplined, sincere, and unswerving; otherwise, it is not, it cannot be truth at all.
But the past was not permanent, nor is the present — who was it who said you cannot cross the river twice? Motion, change, birth, and death — these are the imperatives (what a horrible, heavy word!) of life.
I sometimes pass by Rosales and see that so little has changed. The people are the same, victims of their own circumstance as Old David, Angel, Ludovico, and even Father had all been. God, should I think and feel, or should I just plod on and forget? I know in the depths of me that I’ll always remember, and I am not as tough as they were. Nor do I have the humor and the zest to cope as Tio Marcelo did, looking at what I see not as an apocalypse but as revelation; as he said once, paraphrasing a Spanish poet, he was born on a day that God was roaring drunk.
I think that I was born on a day God was fast asleep. And whatever happened after my birth was nothing but dreamless ignorance. But there was a waking that traumatized, a waking that also trivialized, because in it, the insolence and the nastiness of human nature became commonplace and I grew up taking all these as inevitable. In the end, the satisfaction that all of us seek, it seems, can come only from our discovering that we really have molded our lives into whatever we want them to be. In my failure to do this, I could have taken the easy way out, but I have always been too much of a coward to covet my illusions rather than dispel them.
I continue, for instance, to hope that there is reward in virtue, that those who pursue it should do so because it pleases them. This then becomes a very personal form of ethics, or belief, premised on pleasure. It would require no high-sounding motivation, no philosophical explanation for the self, and its desires are animal, basic — the desire for food, for fornication. If this be the case, then we could very well do away with the church, with all those institutions that pretend to hammer into the human being attributes that would make him inherit God’s vestments, if not His kingdom.
But what kind of man is he who will suffer for truth, for justice, when all the world knows that it is the evil and the grasping who succeed, who flourish, whose tables are laden, whose houses are palaces? Surely he who sacrifices for what is just is not of the common breed or of an earthly shape. Surely there must be something in him that should make us beware, for since he is dogged and stubborn as compared with the submissive many, he will question not just the pronouncements of leaders but the leaders themselves. He may even opt for the more demanding decision, the more difficult courses of action. In the end, we may see him not just as selfless but as the epitome of that very man whom autocrats would like to have on their side, for this man has no fear of heights, of gross temptations, and of death itself.
Alas, I cannot be this man, although sometimes I aspire to be like him. I am too much a creature of comfort, a victim of my past. Around me the largesse of corruption rises as titles of vaunted power, and I am often in the ranks of princes, smelling the perfume of their office. I glide in the dank, nocturnal caverns that are their mansions and gorge on their sumptuous food, and I love it all, envy them even for the ease with which they live without remorse, without regret even though they know (I suspect they do) that to get to this lofty status, they had to butcher — perhaps not with their own hands — their own hapless countrymen.