The girl did not speak.
“We had so many things to talk about. After all — all these years …” He rose, looking into her eyes, soft and waiting. “This you won’t tell Father,” he said.
“What is it?”
“I’m leaving tomorrow. In the afternoon, when he will be napping.”
Her reaction was quick. She drew away. “No,” she cried. “You can’t. You said we would stay here two weeks — or even a month!”
He held her shoulders and said solemnly, “Mr. Dantes’s silver anniversary, Trining …”
She brushed him away. “You are lying,” she flung at him. “At least you can be frank with me. I’ve known you all my life, Luis. What secret is there between us?”
But how can I tell her, how can I say that I am now a stranger among my own people? “You won’t understand,” he said softly. “You just won’t understand.”
“But I do,” she flared again. She crossed the room and stepped out into the azotea. Above, in the cloudless sky, the stars were luminous. He followed her to the ledge. She turned to him. “I won’t tell him, of course, if that is what you want, but when he learns that you have gone without telling him he will be very hurt. And what will I tell him then? Will I lie for you again?”
He nodded.
“Will I tell him that you did not want to hurt him by leaving so soon? The Dantes party is important, and Ester invited me, too. But this is not the reason. What you really feel is nothing but loathing for this house, for where you came from. Luis, we must learn to live with all this — you and I. I am alone, too, and I have no one but Tio and you now. All the way home I was thinking of the wonderful vacation we would have — how we would go to the river and swim, perhaps. You don’t know how it is to be shut up here or in that convent school.”
“I will write to you,” he promised. He took her hand and guided her back to the room. “I will try to write to you every day …” But he doubted if she heard his last words, for she had wrenched away and ran, her slippers thumping across the silent hall.
CHAPTER 20
Don Vicente did not join them for breakfast. Trining and Luis had the long table to themselves. The chocolate was very hot, and the pan de sal, since it was baked at home, was much bigger than they got in Manila. Mangoes were in season, and the silver tray was full. How was it in Sipnget then? One fruit had to be divided among the four of them, and the seed was always for him. He would savor it by sucking and licking it till it was dry, then he would slip the seed into the eaves of the kitchen roof and it would stay there, dried and waiting. He never got to planting them.
He had expected Trining to be sullen, but the brief encounter last night seemed to have been forgotten, for her face was aglow. He had known her when she was a gangling girl of eight, and he had seen her in all forms of dress and undress. In the warm morning light she was indeed a woman now, clear-skinned and beautiful.
They were finishing their chocolate when across the hall there reverberated a crash, then his father’s startled cry. They rushed to the room. By the time they got there Don Vicente had already risen and was at the door, bellowing to the servants to call the captain of his civilian guards.
“What is it, Papa?” Luis asked, but the old man, blocking the door, merely shook his head. “Nothing, nothing, take your cousin away from here …” Through the half-open door Luis could see that the window was broken and shards littered the floor.
Shortly before lunch, after he had apparently thought it all out, Don Vicente asked for Luis to come to his room. By then what had happened was the talk among the servants and the civilian guards on the grounds. Luis wanted to question the commander, but his pride held him back. Why did his father not confide in him? That he did not rankled in him as he proceeded to the old man’s room.
Luis found his father immensely composed. He was before the window, gazing pensively outside. He even smiled as he turned. Although the old man had a passion for order and cleanliness, he had obviously left everything as it was for Luis to see. “It was intended that I not be hurt,” the old man said without emotion. He eased his corpulent frame into his rattan lounging chair, and with his double chin quivering as he shook his head, he continued: “No, they merely wanted me to get this message.”
From the marble-topped side table he reached over and picked up a stone as large as a duck’s egg and beside it a crumpled piece of paper — the kind that children use in grade school. He handed the paper to his son. The penmanship was masculine and at the same time very fine. Indeed it seemed familiar, although it was in Ilokano: “The land belongs to the people and the people will get what is rightfully theirs. The next message will be delivered with a bullet. Commander Victor.”
Luis turned the paper over to see if there was anything on the other side. His father spoke again: “But I do not see how anyone can throw it clear to the window of my room in the daytime. If he was in the street, he would have been seen. In the neighborhood he could not go anyplace. The guards have checked everything.”
Victor — Luis mulled over the name, not only because it was his brother’s but because once upon a time, during the war, Vic and he did know a Commander Victor. He, too, came from Sipnget, but unlike most of the young men in the village, he had been able to finish high school. He had ambushed the Japanese almost at will and had distributed food, not only in his village but also to others in need.
Commander Victor was dead. But was he really? There was a new Commander Victor whom he had yet to meet.
Luis walked to the window, which opened to the street and to the town plaza and beyond, to the huddled houses of cogon and bamboo, homes of inconsequential people — clerks, shopkeepers. His father was right — it would require great strength to hit his father’s bedroom window. Then quickly it came to him that it could be done with a sling — from across the plaza, beyond the houses, from the line of bamboo at the end of the town, and he remembered how he and his brother used to fling stones, making two or three circular swings with their slings before letting go. How well Victor did it then. While his stone often splashed on the opposite rim of the river, Vic’s always went beyond, to wherever he aimed.
“Why do they hate me?” his father’s voice prodded him. “I have tried my best to do what I can for them. After all, this land, which my great-grandfather cleared — all of it — bears more than just his pride and our name, and we are duty-bound to preserve it and help those who help us preserve it. Haven’t we lived with honor, giving them what is their due, helping them with their problems, no matter how personal? When they are born, when they get married, when they get sick, and when they die — to whom do they come for help? It’s I and no one else; I look after them, more than like a father. Can they not see what this means? My brother was the same — he helped them and they killed him and his poor helpless wife, his son. What kind of people are these? Can they not see that we are honorable?”
Luis knew all the words — the rights of the nobility, the responsibilities of serfs — but now they did not evoke anger from him, just indifference, and if he could, he would banish them from his own vocabulary, just as he would relegate all of Rosales to limbo.
“Why do they hate me?” the old man repeated sadly. “Soon it will be a grenade in the yard — or poison in our food. Yet I care for them, more than they will ever know. I have built irrigation ditches for them, sent them to the puericulture center, given rice and money to the priest so that he can go to their villages and minister to their needs. I contribute to their fiesta generously. I have stood as godfather to their children — they are all my children — and they hate me. I can see it in their faces when they come here, whining and begging for help. They cheat me of the harvest, but I continue to keep them because I love them, because they are part of the land, which is part of me. What do they want that I cannot give? They have food, security, and peace. They are happiest as they are, and they do not have a single worry — not a bit of what I have to endure — and only because they are under my wing. They repay me with this — this,” he said, pointing to the piece of paper on the table. “Luis, can you explain this to me?”