“I wouldn’t miss this for all the world,” he said, “and not because it is your parents’ anniversary but because you are here; I really want to know you better.”
She squeezed his hand and said, “Flatterer! But I love it. Would you like to meet my friends, or would you rather join your crowd?” She pointed to a tent close to one of the buffet tables.
They were passing a floodlight that blazed upon a huge statue of ice — a swan in the middle of a big table of hors d’oeuvres — and drawing away from her, he saw how beautiful Ester was. He noted the difference between her uniform and this billowy fuchsia gown she was blooming in tonight. A dash of rouge, a bit of eye shadow — she had the fine features of the Danteses, the fair skin, the imperious chin. Gazing at her in the brightness, he said, “Ester, you are beautiful,” meaning every word of it.
She laughed: “If you keep this up the whole evening, I may yet become your girlfriend.”
He picked a cracker from the table and scooped caviar from a bowl.
“I’ll stay with you and serve you,” Ester said, “if you are hungry.”
“Starved,” Luis said. She guided him to a food-laden table beyond the court where a crowd was busy filling up their plates. She helped him choose his, then took him to a vacant table by the court. She was being the perfect hostess. “I’ve told my friends I may have a very eligible bachelor — I hope you will not disappoint them,” she said.
“I’ll stop the presses to see you,” he told her. She left him to bring her friends over. He was not really hungry. With a glass of Scotch he went up to the balcony, where he could have an unobstructed view of the garden, the guests rambling around in its great breadth. The orchestra played softly, and couples started moving toward the court. He was not aware that Ester had followed him and was hovering around him, a quizzical look on her face.
“I thought you would be down there,” she said solicitously. “I hope you are not angry with anyone.”
“Oh, no,” he said, laughing. “I was waiting for your gang, but where are they?”
“Dancing,” she said gaily, “but I will make up for it. I will be your partner the rest of the evening — if you want.”
She took the vacant chair beside him. “I wanted Trining to come — very much — but going to the province was more important. How is your father?”
“Not so well, but he will manage. Old people always do.” The orchestra started playing “Stardust.” “That’s one of my favorites,” Luis said. “Learned it during the war. The words are poetic.”
“I’ve read your poetry,” Ester said.
“My condolences.”
“I like it — but why is it always so sad and bitter? You must be terribly unhappy.”
“Are you a psychologist of sorts?”
“No, just trying to understand you.”
“I’m an open book. No deep dark secrets.”
She stood up. “Let’s not waste your favorite song,” she said, holding his hand.
They went down the stone steps. At the edge of the court he hesitated, suddenly awkward, knees watery, as if this were his first dance. She was already pressing close to him, however, so he held her narrow waist and her hand went up to rest on his shoulder, her cheek brushing against his chin. He felt the round, smooth, and silky nudging of her thighs, the warm softness of her breast, and all his senses became alive in response to her exalting nearness. He wanted to dance with her still, but the orchestra shifted to an abominable limbo and he said tersely, “There goes our poetry.” A young man whose face he did not bother to look at accosted them on their way back to their seats and asked Ester for a dance. Luis let her go.
He slid into the shadows, down the garden slope, where the bougainvillea thinned out toward the rocky promontory. He stood there and watched the city in the distance, aglow like embers, kindling a sky flecked with summer clouds. His back was turned to the music, and soon, so soon, he was hurtling away from this precinct to another time, in a far and forgotten place, and the music was the twang of guitars: I always go back, back to where it all started, to Sipnget, and the village fiesta, lighted by kerosene lamps, the hardened earth for a dance floor, the woven palm leaf for decor, divider, and shade, and the village girls …
“At last, I’ve found you.” It was Ester behind him. He turned around, stepped down the rock, and said, “The view from here is lovely. Manila looks like a spread of jewels.”
“Not in the daytime,” she said. “There’s a haze over it, and it looks quite ugly.” Then, seriously, “Why did you leave the party?”
“I’m still here, am I not?” he asked.
“I should have asked what you are doing here.”
“Not again,” he said. He held her arm as they went down the incline. “Don’t you know that you make me feel so eccentric?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Well, I just wandered around and I got to thinking about the town I left, the music I used to listen to. You know, just rambling around in my thoughts — I often do that. It’s quite exhilarating.”
“How far did you go?”
Luis did not know what to make of her, whether she was making fun of him or was sincerely inquisitive. He decided to be honest. “I was thinking of the very recent past — the war. I had to stop high school, and I commuted between Manila and the province, you know. Looking at Manila from here, with all those lights, and listening to the music, I am aware that time has really gone by.”
They went down a terrace and were now on the edge of the dance floor. Luis sat with her near the garden wall.
“We have to live in the present,” she said simply, “and thank God we are here, waiting for the morrow.”
“You are an optimist, I can see,” he said. “But the present is an extension of the past. The connection is not broken at all, and the war — what a big word it is! — it is an extension of peace.”
But what did he really know about the war? He was too young to have been in the Army and too old to be with the women. He spent the four war years in Ermita, where he grew up to be a young man, pampered, all his wishes granted. He was frightened, but he was never really in danger. It was Vic who knew war, who told him about its starkest details. It was Vic who was in Rosales and Sipnget, who helped to take care of Don Vicente in the earliest days of evacuation. Vic saw the Japanese enter the town, and he saw the pile of Filipino dead — their hands tied behind them with wire — loaded into pushcarts by civilians and taken to the plaza, before the whitewashed Rizal monument, and like so many diseased and butchered cattle, dumped into a common grave. Vic was in Sipnget, too, when the Japanese entered the village, herded the young men together, and picked out the prettiest girls. Now there was another war, and it was being fought in the mountains, in the plains, in Sipnget and Rosales, in dark, unknown warrens of the city, in newspaper offices, and most of all, in the convoluted recesses of minds such as his.
“You are young only once, but you want to grow old before your time,” Ester was saying.
“Our tragedy,” he said, trying to sound very light, “is that, as a famous writer once said, youth is wasted on the young.”
“But I don’t think you have really started to live.” Ester was prodding him. She had struck at the root of his ennui, and perhaps, he thought later, she was right. He had not begun to live — or love. He had not seen life as Vic had seen it; all that he had seen were the freaks, both of the imagination and of living reality. He had listened once to his grandfather’s tales, of aswangs making gold out of children’s blood, of winged men who could with a wave of a kerchief vault mountain and valley.