It would have been the simplest thing to do, to declare that Rosales was no longer the paradise his father had proclaimed, that paternalism was done for, that charity is its own stigma and that the best of intentions are often brutalized and demeaned, but he chose to speak as only a son would: “You must be patient, Father. We are living in difficult times, and this is not your creation. It was created by the war, by expectations that could not be fulfilled. They will learn in time what their place really is, but”—and now he weighed his words carefully, hoping not to displease his father—“we must also understand that if we are to stay here, to be on top as we have always been”—he checked himself and was surprised that he was verbally and emotionally taking his father’s side—“then we must also change and learn to understand what is happening below us.”
“Just what do you mean?”
“Change, Father, is sometimes imperceptible, because it is slow. You have changed, too, perhaps without knowing it.”
Don Vicente smiled. “Yes, yes,” he mumbled under his breath. Then, “When you were there last night, how was it?”
“Everything was fine, Father,” he said. Don Vicente turned away, waving his son off. “Everything was fine, Father,” he repeated as he went out of the room. He was again the boy who played on the banks of the Agno, who shared a roof in Sipnget with another boy and with this boy ate the same soft-boiled rice in the lean months of the planting season. Vic was with him again — the stone, the sling — and he would always be near. If he was darkness, Vic was light, was free, while Luis was encumbered with a past, the remembered experience that brought no certainty, although it was as real as flesh and as haughty as day.
Time that I have lived! It is all here now, compressed in this house, encompassed by this little town. Time that I have lived — there is a creek that passes the village, a creek spanned by an old wooden bridge that was often washed away by monsoon floods. When the rain comes in June the creek slowly fills, then overflows, and the waters could come right to our backyard and we would go to the bridge with long poles and ensnare the pieces of driftwood that have been carried away by the current and we would keep these for firewood. When the rains subside the creek dries up until there are just pools, moss-green and muddy, but we would still bathe in it, for the creek is closest to us and it was here where Vic first told me: Manong, you are white and I am brown. We are brothers, but how can that be? The creek brought us face-to-face. Again, one day, he said: I have been told that you should leave and that if you left, you would not return. I will leave, too, as all of us do leave the place where we were born — but I am sure we will come back.
Vic had returned. That could have been his message that Luis had seen, that could have been his sling. Then it occurred to him that he was ignorant of his brother’s movements. If Vic had changed somehow, Luis had helped in the transformation, for it was he, after all, who had sent Vic the books to read and had helped him find the answers. Vic did not have to search far if he had desired to find answers himself, for they were all here in Rosales amidst the implacable poverty and the dullness of the herd.
Luis was free at last from all these, thanks to his benevolent father. He could roam and reap the harvest — but not Vic, although at least Vic now had the freedom to create, to travel an expanse unlimited by geography or vision. Luis prayed to God that in spite of everything Vic would retain this thought at least: that they were brothers and that Luis had not forgotten the jungle’s torment. Vic was courage, and what did Luis have to show to redeem his manhood, to attest to his creativity? A few poems? He had the beneficence of a name he was born to bear. If he could only turn back, he could now be by Victor’s side as he should be, for his brother was also his fate.
CHAPTER 21
Luis changed his mind about not saying good-bye. He had expected his father to hold him back, but Don Vicente was more than understanding. He even tried to be blithe about it.
“I see, I see,” he said, nodding and grinning, so that the double chin quivered and the bags under his eyes broadened. “Rosales is very dull except for what happened this morning. What is more, you cannot miss the party of the year — yes, I have read about all those European dukes coming. In any case I have already told you what needs to be said. Do not forget—”
“I won’t,” Luis said, holding the pudgy hand to his brow. His suitcases were packed, Simeon was waiting downstairs, and outside his father’s room Trining was pacing the hall, waiting for him. “I won’t,” he repeated, then he wheeled out.
But what was there to remember? It was a story he had heard so many times, the call to duty and the land, that his future was in politics. It was of course difficult to understand his father’s attachment to the land. As a young man, Don Vicente had lived in Spain, visited the old village near Bilbao where his great-grandfather had come from. There was not much now in the Asperri lineage to suggest that it was Basque, nothing but the name, the fair skin, and the demeanor, and those did not matter. His exhortations were sown on barren soil, on the arid reality of Rosales itself. The life of the mind, which beckoned to Luis, was in Manila. It was better to revel in it, to seek the kindred vitality of the young who revolved around the editorial offices, and the nearness of Trining, Ester, and her friends. Although he did not want to indulge in it, he basked in their flattering attention — a result of not only his looks but also because as a poet he exuded some kind of exotic magnetism.
He wanted to spend some time with Trining, but she had waited in the hall only to find out if he would be permitted to leave, and when she found out, she had rushed to her room. He knocked at the door, pleading, but she would not open it. From within came a mumbling sound that could have been her weeping.
He reached the city at dusk. Depressed, he had dozed through most of the checkpoints, and Simeon, still displeased that Luis had cut his vacation short, had been sullenly quiet. The depression lasted for some time, and it was not banished even after Luis had finished the homework he had brought with him.
He developed in his mind a master dummy of the next issue of Our Time. There would be a couple of articles on the Bell Act, an exposition on the cultural resurgence in Southeast Asia, a couple of stories, and an essay on the crisis of the Filipino identity. The scenery no longer interested him as it did the previous day. The country was drab, dead brown. The dirty towns through which they passed were all the same, their asphalted main streets lined with wooden shops boarded with impieties of soft-drink signs.
“Do you want to pass by the office, señorito?” Simeon’s voice startled him. They were now entering the city, and the traffic in Balintawak was tangled again — jeepneys and buses filled with office workers hurrying home. Toward the west the sky was a riot of indigo. Dusk finally brought a sense of peace.
“Home,” Luis said. He needed a shower more than anything, to wash away the fatigue. The car could not avoid Rizal Avenue and the snarl of traffic in Plaza Goiti, but in a while they were on the boulevard and Luis felt at home once more in the wide Luneta, now covered with dying grass, and to the right the sea, the stubby trees, all covered with the deep and onrushing dark.