“I wasn’t expecting you so soon, señorito,” she said. She switched on all the lights as Simeon carried his suitcases to his room.
He called Eddie at once, and as expected, although it was already almost seven, his associate was still in the office. Luis had left instructions on how the next two issues would be run, and he had hinted, too, that he might lengthen his vacation, so Eddie sounded surprised: “I thought I would be parking on your swivel chair for some time. What’s the matter — you broke a blood vessel?”
Luis laughed. “That’s a bad guess. It is the place, Eddie.” He felt that he was being honest. “Any mail?”
“Contributions,” Eddie said, “and some angry letters about the last article on labor you wrote. But they won’t sue because they are all crooks. I am glad you have returned, so you can be at the party tonight. You know, only editors were invited — from the entire outfit there are only eight of you going, and you know how the Old Man feels about invitations being rejected.”
Luis knew. There was the famous story he had told earlier about how Dantes had eased out one of the executives in his shipping company after the man and his wife were invited to a sit-down dinner and only his wife came because her husband was down with a cold. In spite of such feudal attitudes, however, Dantes regarded his editorial people with more than employer interest. In the mornings when he was in his publishing office he often called his editors in to do nothing but play chess or comment on a new painting or sculpture that he had acquired. All the while the bar at the end of his office would be open and a waiter in white would hover around, jumping to their every whim, dumb-faced to their discussions of politics and culture. It was also at these informal sessions that Dantes gave instructions to his columnists and his editors — he would identify the targets of his derision and his ire, and it mattered not if the sessions lasted until lunchtime, for he would have lunch brought to the room. The editors always knew when the talk was over, for Dantes, almost as a ritual, would open his gold cigarette case and pass around — even to those who did not smoke — Sobranie Black Russians, and then he would light each stick individually with his gold lighter, and after a few puffs he would smile benignly and say, “Well, boys, that is how the cookie crumbles”—an old expression that he never quite forgot from his Harvard undergraduate days. Then the editors would file out, their heads up in the air, for the oracle had spoken and now they knew what to do.
Luis had gone to see Dantes before he left, telegram in hand, saying that he would have to rush home to see his ailing father but that if everything was all right, he would be back. No, he must not miss Mr. Dantes’s silver wedding anniversary. The publisher had grudgingly consented to let him go home, “on humanitarian grounds,” but he had ended the interview saying, “Luis, you must know that this party is important to me.”
There were other parties, and the whole week was to be devoted to them — one for each company, one for close relatives alone, then this major bash, for which the royalty of Europe had been flown in by chartered Stratocruzer and billeted in two whole floors of the Manila Hotel, together with an orchestra from the United States, a couple of opera singers, one from La Scala and the other from the Met, plus the five hundred most important Filipinos, headed by the president and his social-climbing wife.
“Any message?” Luis asked.
“Yes, Miss Vale asked if you had arrived. She seemed very anxious. It was Dantes’s daughter who asked for you. Say, you are moving up very fast.”
He wondered if Ester had been instructed by her father to inquire or if she had done it on her own, but Miss Vale, Dantes’s old-maid secretary, never went into details. She gave out only the barest information, and it seemed that her head was full of secrets but that she stored them for no one but Dantes.
Even when he was in college, Luis did not swallow everything said in the classroom. The family, the teacher, the church — everything was authoritarian, but there was a far more impressive schooling that he had gone through, where one learned freely: the years in Sipnget, which taught him how important relationships were, how people were what they were. It took only a few weeks in the Dantes offices, therefore, for him to know and to latch on to knowledge that was not dispensed in his sociology or political science classes, to amass the information that was never printed in the papers — not even in his own, noted though it was for its liberalism and steadfastness to truth as Dantes — not his staffers — saw it.
As Don Vicente had said, Dantes was no patriot who would sacrifice for freedom and nation; he was a power merchant, selling dreams in his media complex and manipulating men with power at the same time. He could have had his main office in his shipping company and trading firm, which occupied one building in that new community called Pobres Park going up somewhere in Makati, or in his electric and communications building — but no, he chose to have his main offices here in this newspaper building, for it was with his newspapers that he wielded the most influence.
He was an astute politician, although he did not make speeches or run for any public office; in the highest echelons of both the Nacionalista and the Liberal parties, men vied for his favors and trembled at the slightest rumor of his displeasure. It was also believed that he was supporting the Huk movement and that his politics for the future was voiced by his leftist writers like Abelardo Cruz and Etang Papel, fire-breathing “liberals” who knew whichever way the wind blew.
Luis had amazed both of these writers with his insights on rural life, the mute aspirations of those who work the land. Cruz and Papel were city-room revolutionaries who had romanticized their ignorance with facility, and in a sense Luis saw himself in them, for he, too, for all his protestations, was just as comfortable and incapable of sacrifice as they. But there was one major difference, which he prided himself on — he had lived on a farm, knew of the sun’s rage, the cold of the waterlogged paddies, and he had exposed Abelardo Cruz’s rural knowledge as a book-learned sham. “Do you know how to catch freshwater crabs in the fields?” he had asked the pugnacious editor one evening when they were having coffee after the paper had been put to bed. Cruz claimed he did and even went into the motions of how he did it as a boy, until Luis asked the most important, the most crucial question: “And what if there is no water in the hole?” It was one of the first things any boy in Sipnget learned, for it spelled the difference between life and death. And Luis explained it to them, these champions of agrarian change, these lovers of the poor: “When there is water in the hole, stick your hand in. The crab could be there. But in heaven’s name — don’t stick it in if there is no water. A snake may be there.”
Etang Papel had insisted with her Manileña ignorance and colegiala impertinence that the lower classes were the makers of revolution; after all, she read and echoed the Manchester Guardian and those books that were difficult to come by but could easily be had if you had friends in New York or in London. But Luis knew that the indolence of the masses was real, that their volcanic angers were the accretion of repressed feelings, for he had seen dogged patience and docile servitude that had numbed their capacity for scrutiny. He had seen them troop to his father’s house to borrow money, to reaffirm their bondage — that they were secure in it, that his father could do no wrong. Where, then, was the massive force that could be harnessed? It certainly was not in this city room, it certainly was not in Sipnget; wherever it was, it had to be nurtured, lavished with care, so that it would sprout and grow. And only then …
In many ways, he was very glad that he had Eddie to work with; he had met him at one of the college-editors conferences in his junior year. They had gone to the south and stayed for a week as guests of Dantes at one of the publisher’s island retreats off the city of Iloilo. And one night the two of them had wandered down the empty beach, and Eduardo Sison, the editor of a small college paper, had talked with him, questioned him, rather, about many of his assumptions, uncaring of the fact that he was a rich man’s son. Like Ester, he had asked Luis about his motivations, his insincerity. Eddie, after all, was a self-supporting student who clerked in a Chinese store in the daytime, then went to an accounting class in the evenings. He had a natural talent for writing, but he also had the peasant’s natural talent for survival, and because he was a farmer’s son, his instincts for what was right were also sharp. When this opening with the Dantes group came and Luis was asked to get a right-hand man, he did not hesitate in naming Eddie. The magazine was about three years old, and there was gossip that the former editor and his associate had been eased out for trying to set up a union. It was a weekly and their deadline was more flexible, but Thursdays were a travail, for the magazine came out on Friday, early enough, according to Dantes, to beat the Sunday magazines and yet interesting enough for the reader to go back to it for his weekend fare.