“Paradise on earth, achieved with human understanding. Not a single egg broken.” Vic coughed mirthlessly.
“Do not try to be smart or funny.” Luis spoke hotly. “I have been writing poetry, as you very well know — not very good, perhaps, but this is not important. What I am trying to say is that I have hope that there is still truth to be gleaned, even from the garbage dump, if we search hard enough.”
“And you think that I have no hope? We fought the Japanese with slingshots because we had hope. We now fight for the same reason. You forget the source of our real strength. It is not people like you, although you can be one of us. We are very rich in numbers. The poor are many — they are the majority. This is all that I understand. As for the good life or reason or the world of the spirit, you can afford to be poetic about it because you are here. You forget one thing: we are there!”
“Is that what they are teaching you in the Stalin universities? I have heard about them.”
Victor laughed loudly. “Listen,” he said after a while, “we have lots of books, and lecturers, some of whom are Ph.D.’s. Does this surprise you? And we do have schools but not the kind you think. Every day is school day for us. We deal with facts, not with books. We know who is exploited and who are exploiters. If there is a god at all, He is in us — He is not up there. Paradise can be here if we fight well. There is goodwill in men if they are of the same class.”
“You sound so familiar,” Luis said softly, thinking of his own college days and those sophomoric discussions under the acacia trees. “I am tired of dreams. Why can you not be practical and learn to live with facts, as you say you do? With education — and I am only too glad to help you — you can be more than what you are, whether you are a farmer or a clerk. There is a lot of room. There’s freedom, too. Why are you doing this? There must be a reason.”
Vic had not stirred from where he sat. “I cannot give an easy answer,” he said with great feeling. “I wish I could tell you that I will endure all privation because I love our country, but what is our country? It is a land exploited by its own leaders, where the citizens are slaves of their own elite.”
“Be honest,” Luis pressed. “Do you think you will be different if you achieve power?”
“I do not know,” Vic said humbly. “One cannot foresee the future. I would like to say that I will be Spartan and honest. I am no hero. I would like the good life if I can get it. I would like to have lechon every day, to travel and see the world. I would like to be comfortable and not have one worry. But none of these is possible. It is not even possible for me to go to school the usual way, to know myself better …”
Luis was silent.
“And you want to know why I am away from all the comforts that I could appreciate, just like other human beings? I will tell you why. I am tired, Manong — very tired. I am tired of everything. I hate the present and I long for the future. It is a future that I hope will at least provide enough food for all of us. I am tired of soft-boiled rice and camote tops and coconut meat and green papayas, such as we have in the mountains most of the time. Once, long ago, I thought that all that mattered was food. There was so little of it — you know what we had in Sipnget.”
“You shame me,” Luis said.
“But it is true. Remember how it was in the big house? How I used to go there to work and you did not because Mother didn’t want you to go to town? How I used to collect the peelings of apples that your father ate and bring them home for us to eat?”
Luis did not speak. He did not want to remember. “All right then,” he said after a while, “what do you want me to give you?”
“Give! Give!” Vic flung at him. “I shouldn’t be ungrateful, but you always give. People like me — we never get anything that is ours because we worked for it, because we deserve it.”
“You are my brother.”
“Half-brother.”
“We came from the same womb. It is all that matters. We are equals.”
“How I wish I could believe that,” Vic said, “but it is not so. If we cannot be equal, at least both of us are Filipinos, with the same opportunities. I did not make the laws, nor did I set up the system for mestizos and brown people like me. I would like to think that under the skin it’s the same red blood. But blood is cheap, and I will use it to water the land so that people like me will live.”
“I will be on the other side,” Luis said, “not because I want to be there but because that is where you have pushed me.”
“But that is where you are,” Vic said, “not because I want you there. You are there of your own free will. You will inherit great wealth. Would you give it up? Why should you?”
“We can share it,” Luis said.
“But how far will you go, my brother? If I asked you to get rid of everything and come with me, would you do it? You have much to lose — and if you stay, I will understand. I even understand why you are reluctant to come out in your magazine that you are for us. Yes, we read you every week, and although you seem to sympathize with us, you really are not for us. Could it be that you have forgotten those years in Sipnget?”
“I have not forgotten,” Luis said hotly. “I am not turning away from that. You do not know of my turmoil.”
“And you think I don’t have doubts and moments of anguish, too?” Vic asked. “It has been dirty, dirtier than the war we went through. I thought that after Liberation all the fighting would cease, but it has not been that way. It’s uglier now — and so sad — and yet, what must be done must be done.”
Vic stood up. He did not even look grown-up. His hands twitched at his sides as he walked to the door.
“You didn’t tell me what you came here for — or what I can do,” Luis said.
“Some other time, Manong,” he said. “It has been refreshing, talking with you.”
“One last question,” Luis said. “Did you send that message to my father?”
Vic smiled. “You see, my brother, I have not lost my aim.”
Luis saw him to the gate and on the way kept saying, “What can I do for you? There must be something …” Through it all Vic was smiling, and after he disappeared into the shadows it seemed that a primeval darkness, thicker than the night, dropped like a final curtain between them.
Dear Mother,
It is long past Christmas Eve, and I can think of no better time to write you this letter than now. As you perhaps have already surmised, I am not very religious. There was a time, however, when I was — and I remember how you took me to the church in town during the Holy Week and how piously I followed you as you fingered your rosary and made your Stations of the Cross, how your care-lined face was turned to the prostrate image of a dead Christ at the altar. I still recall that time when I was flushed with fever and Tio Joven applied all those leaves on my chest and rubbed his saliva all over my forehead and I still didn’t get well. It was then that you decided that there should be a novena in the house to appease God, whom you believed had been angered. That early evening, after the novena, Grandfather went to the backyard where the dalipawen tree stood, and there, making an offering of the rice cake that you made, the hard-boiled eggs, and the hand-rolled cigar, Grandfather beseeched the spirits: You who have brought fever to my grandson, here is a humble offering. Come now and partake of it, and hurt my grandson no more. That evening I felt the fever ebb, as if it were no more than simple fatigue, although for a week I couldn’t stand. I remember how that early morning I went to the tree and saw the cake and the hard-boiled eggs still there and how, because the spirits had not helped themselves to them, I feasted on the offering, against all customary warnings. All this comes to me as lucid as day. It was this that made me realize that food for the spirits could also be food for the stomach.