“I don’t want to feel sorry,” she said, her face close to his, so that the fine contours of her nose, her cheeks, and her forehead were blurred.
“But I’m not,” Luis assured her. For a while they did not speak. In the silence he could feel himself flowing out to her, his whole body lost in the welcome of her being.
“Do you think your mother and your grandfather will approve of me?” she asked afterward. She had asked him to bring them from Sipnget, so that they would be present at his wedding, but Luis knew that they would never set foot in the big red house.
“I’d like to go with you this time — to meet them. She is also my mother now, remember that.”
“You will do nothing of the kind. Besides, you cannot walk very far.”
She did not bother him again about meeting his mother and his grandfather. He turned on his side and reached for the switch near the bedpost, and as darkness claimed them Luis thought: This is not wrong, for if it were, then I would feel wretched. Even if it was Father who planned it this way, this is also what I want. For a while Luis forgot the cancerous hatreds that had embittered him. With Trining beside him, a sense of peace finally came over him, and with it, sleep.
CHAPTER 27
It was a dreary walk from the camino. All around him were the newly harvested fields. There were still a few golden patches waiting to yield to the scythe, and the fields smelled richly of grain and of cut grass. When Luis finally reached the dike his legs were numb. Once, this dike was no more than a rise of earth that followed every bend of the river, but in a few years the path astride it had become a dirt road and the saplings of camachile and acacia on both sides had grown into trees, which helped to hold the earth in place. The narrow road carried no more than bull carts, horse-drawn calesas, and an occasional jeepney. On both sides, down to the bank of the river, spread patches of ripening tobacco plots, gold and green, topped with white where the blossoms had not yet fallen. The sun was high, and in the still afternoon the earth seemed to simmer. Astride the dike, he could see the distance he had traversed, and he cursed himself for not having worn sneakers. His aching feet must be blistered by now. His shoes had been newly polished by Simeon, but after he had crossed the muddy harvested fields, they had, like the cuffs of his gray pants, become dusty, the mud having dried on them. He walked on. Weeds were beginning to obscure the path. There were no quarter-moon marks of carabao hooves or the fine polished lines made by sled runners, and the earth was crusty under his feet. The path had not been used for some time, he mused. He stopped and looked back to where he had come from — the wide, flat fields splotched with high mounds of hay, and in the distance the lash of white country road where not a single bull cart or calesa moved and the lomboy tree at the edge of the depression from where the earth that formed the dike had been excavated. That tree — he was not wrong — years ago he had climbed it, defying the bees that hived in its trunk to gather its black juicy berries. This was the path, and holding on to a thick stand of grass, he bounded up onto the flat broad back to the dike.
As he stood in the heat of day, he saw before him the barren land. How lonely and empty Sipnget had become — a few buri palms, the bamboo brakes that lined the riverbank, the green puffs of acacia, rows of broken buri-palm trunks left to rot near the riverbank, the water shining in the sun, the broad stony island, and the stubborn reeds, jutting above the water with their catch of moss and water lilies.
Sipnget as it used to be was gone — the store below the dike, the house where he was born, where he had heard the halting screech of his mother’s scolding and the soothing remonstrances of an old man. An infernal machine had thundered past Sipnget, leveled the trees and the palms, and furrowed the land into a flat and ugly wound. In a moment of doubt and faltering he retraced his steps — no, he was not wrong, he was in Sipnget, but gone were all the little things that had enmeshed themselves with his life. How could he bring back the village that he knew — blow life upon a desert of brown, so that it might bloom with the old and familiar scents? He ran down the dike, away from the vanishing traces of the path. A sprout of grass caught his foot, and he stumbled on the hard plowed earth. He picked himself up, cursing, shaking the clod that dug into his palms. He hurried to where he knew the first house used to stand. When he reached the place he stooped and examined the ground. Curled up with the dry, upturned soil were cinders and white-bleached roots of acacias and buri palms, like maggots feasting on his past.
All of them in the house in Rosales, including his dear ailing father — surely they must have known what had happened to the village. He had not asked any of them or even told them that he was coming, but they should have told him. On the day he arrived he had asked Santos how it was in Sipnget, and the short, work-ridden caretaker had turned away and — as if he never heard the question — left. Luis was not close to any of his father’s workers, not even to Simeon, who had taken him from Sipnget to this big red house, and to the servants, who greeted him politely. He had taken for granted that the countryside — for all its being stirred by the proselytizing of the Huks — would be unchanged, that the village would be where it always had been, the end of dreams. Surely, someone in Rosales must have known that Sipnget was gone. But why did nobody tell him?
He raised his eyes to the sun that singed the heavens, and he was about to turn and go back to the dike when, from the direction of the river, behind the large prostrate trunks of buri palms, he saw a man rise.
“Hoy!” He waved his hands.
The figure bobbed up, and he caught a glimpse of an old, anonymous face, but the man bent down again and was hidden behind the trunk. Only his back and the brim of his wide buri hat rose intermittently. He seemed to be busy, rising and stooping behind the trunk.
Luis ran toward the man and in a leap perched himself atop the trunk. Below him the man was tying together burned planks of wood with black, sooty wire. More planks of burned wood were scattered nearby.
“What’s happened? Did the whole village burn down?” he asked.
The man went on with his work, his face hidden by the wide brim of his hat, his blackened hands struggling clumsily with the wire.
“Are you deaf?”
“I heard,” the man said, still without looking at Luis.
“Tell me, where are the people? How did this happen?”
The man did not speak. Luis descended from atop the trunk and bent down a little. The face was gaunt, the eyes tired, the chin withered, and the forehead wrinkled. Recognition came: “Tio Joven!”
The man raised the bundle of wood and stood it on one end. Picking up a piece from the pile, he rammed it into the middle of the bundle and hammered it, so that the bundle would tighten.
“Luis, the grandson of Ipe.” Luis spoke in haste. “You know me, Tio Joven.”
The man paused and dropped the piece of wood that he used as a club. He squinted at Luis. Then he picked up his club again and pounded at the plank. “Why did you come here?” he asked without pausing in his work.
Yes, why did I come here — I who had wanted to escape from this land, to blot from my mind the faces of my people? “That’s a foolish question,” Luis said simply.
Tio Joven peered at him again, but there was no apparent recognition in his eyes. He shook the bundle and tested its tightness. “People change,” he said. “Many come here, asking all sorts of questions — and what can I say when I am just here to gather wood for my stove?”