“Why did you tell my brother to wait in the garage, Marta?” he asked. “You should have told him to go to my room and wait there or sleep until the party was over.”
“But Apo,” Marta explained, “I didn’t even know he had gone there. I thought you had already seen him, for right after he arrived we didn’t notice him anymore.”
Luis drank his coffee in silence.
“What is Victor doing now, Apo?” Marta could not resist asking. “We never got the chance to talk with him. He didn’t seem to want to talk. Why …” the woman hesitated, “why is he so secretive?”
Luis waved her away. “It’s his manner,” he said, “and you cannot change it.”
He was ready when Ester came. Simeon and Marta were not yet prepared to leave, so, just as he had promised, he gave them an envelope with money in it. After giving the couple last-minute instructions, he and Ester went down, carrying Marta’s lunch basket. Ester was radiant in a red-printed skirt and blue blouse. “I have heard so much about hangovers,” she teased him. “I wanted to see someone with one.”
He grinned amiably. “I am made of sterner stuff,” he said. “I am sorry to disappoint you.” In the car Ester told him that she had brought a bathing suit. Luis reminded Simeon to look after the house very well, then the car was on its way.
“I’m giving them a one-week vacation,” he explained to Ester. “I will be alone and liking it.”
“With no one looking after your chastity?”
“God is extra kind to bachelors.”
The sea breeze flowed into the car, and the fragrance of Ester’s nearness was intoxicating. The morning was brilliant, although ribbons of mist hung over the bay, over the hulls of half-sunken ships. “I was wondering,” she mused, her hand resting on his knee, “maybe I can come once in a while and clean your house — and cook, too, if you’d let me, just as Trining sometimes does. It shouldn’t matter that I’m handy only with a can opener.”
“I’m not finicky,” he said.
As Ester had expected, the Redemptorist Church in Baclaran was not crowded. Luis was even able to park on the mango-shaded grounds — an impossibility on Wednesdays, when the novena for the Mother of Perpetual Help clogged the church with devotees. The offertory had just started, and Luis was glad that he did not have to sit through the sermon. He had yet to listen to one that would impress him. The priests — Filipinos or foreign missionaries — always had nothing to say except the same clichés about salvation, and they always talked down to their parishioners and sounded as if they were the holiest and the purest of men when God knew that many of them kept mistresses or absconded with church funds. Luis and Ester walked out before the benediction.
The houses along the highway were all festive. Multicolored paper lanterns of various shapes — stars, fish, and octagons — were all over the place, their frills quivering in the December breeze. Roasted suckling pigs, impaled on bamboo poles, were being carried to some of the houses.
They reached the beach resort in about an hour. It was desolate, for people stayed at home on Christmas Day to receive members of the family or godchildren. Only a handful of bathers were swimming in the calm blue water or sunning themselves on the distant curve of sand. The wind was mild and the surf quiet. Luis parked under a clump of short, thorny aroma trees, which would give them shade when the sun got high.
Close by, the laughter of a girl reached them as a boy chased her to the water. They would have privacy in the world — under the trees, in the car — but this was not what he came for. “I am glad you came,” he said. She smiled at him. He moved to her and, tilting her face up, kissed her softly. When he drew away, she remained motionless. He opened the door. Simeon had been thoughtful enough to place in the rear of the car a wide piece of canvas, which Luis now spread in the shade.
Ester joined him. “We can sit here the whole day, doing nothing but talk,” she said. She removed her slip-ons and dug her toes into the cool, soft sand.
“We have to eat, too,” he said, “and other things, besides.”
“After lunch, we go home,” she said. “I must be home early. Papa does not even know I’m here.”
He took off his shoes, too, and stretched his legs. “Is your father afraid that something might happen to you if you are with me?” he asked pointedly.
“Luis,” she chided him, “he does not even know I’m with you — and on Christmas Day.”
He lay on his side. Beyond the slope of sand, the sea was clear and lustrous. Two boats, their sails tipping and bloated with wind, were riding in the far distance. Beyond them lay the small green hump of Corregidor, and still farther the soft blue line of Bataan and the aquamarine rise of Mount Mariveles.
“You can leave now if you want to. Breathe the word and I’ll take you home.”
She bent over him and cupped her hand over his mouth. “Don’t talk like that,” she said. She shook her head. “Please, why do you always want to fight with me? You are so belligerent, and you want me to be your enemy. All right, I’ll stay with you all day if that will make you happy.”
He sat upright, his manner grown mild, and pressed her hand. “Thank you,” he said contritely.
Ester did not mean to drop the subject. “Even to me you are bitter. Do you hate women, or mankind in general? I cannot believe it, but I wish you’d at least be honest with me. Tell me that you over-dramatize — like all poets perhaps — that you wouldn’t have been expelled from the university had you not fought over such a trifling matter.”
“Trifling!” he shouted at her, his humor vanished again. “It is a question of belief, and furthermore, I was not expelled. I quit!”
“Call it what you want,” she said coolly. “You would have graduated with honors and not have been a false martyr if you just saw it the other way. The priests are human, too. They had their reasons and they felt cheated. I hear that they considered you one of their best products.”
He closed his eyes and strangled the anger that was growing in him. False martyr, human beings — he clenched his fist and struck his palm viciously.
“That would have been me,” Ester said sadly.
He turned to her. She was gazing at him with the kind of look no man can fail to recognize, that countenance that can render granite into sand. What has come over me? What devil anger possesses me so that I lash out at everyone who comes close? I was unhappy because I did not know what to do. I hesitated and wondered. I was afraid that I was not right, that I would end up hurting people, then I looked around me and found that it was not I who was doing wrong to other people — it was they who had hurt and betrayed me, not so much because they had not accepted me but because they had in a sense rejected me. I cannot be close to anyone, not even to those who have reared me — and here is the girl who would give me herself and all the sacrifice this act implies.
He sat up, stroked her arm, and traced a blue vein with his finger. “I am not angry with you — you must know that. It is with myself that I am continually at war. Maybe that’s overdramatizing it again, but like you said, I am egotistical and self-centered.” He smiled. “You must forgive me. You are a wonderful creature.”
Her humor had returned. “Cut it out,” she said. “You know I am no ravishing beauty. It is the blind man who will appreciate me.”
“Because he will see something that others will not see — your soul, which is beautiful, too. Do you know what you really have?”
She shook her head. “Flattery will get you somewhere.”
He knew it then and he was sure of it. “You have a glowing personality. You are real,” he said, and holding her shoulders, he drew her to him and kissed her softly, ever so softly.