“Tell me, Tio,” he asked without looking at the old man, who now squatted beside him and was starting to pull the strands of grass that had sprouted at the base of the grave. “Who buried them here?”
The old man kept at the grass. “Who else but we? We could have buried them earlier, but we were all afraid to go to the village. When we finally went, they were lying in the ashes, their bodies black and bloated. They all looked the same, and you wouldn’t know them if you had not been with them all your life. They left them there — they were not even decent enough to bury them after they had killed them. We had to gather them, each one, carefully, so that they would not fall apart. We didn’t want them eaten by dogs — dogs, do you realize that?” His voice had become an ugly screech. “Dogs,” he was saying, again and again, in futile anger. “They will pay for this. Dogs. Dogs!”
A warm whiff of wind swept the grass that sprouted from the mound. The grass was yellowish green unlike the grass that covered the dike and the riverbank. Between the blades, shoots were breaking through the soil, straight and firm and sharp. Luis bent down and scooped a handful of earth, which he crushed and let trickle through his fingers.
“I’ll come here again,” he promised.
“What for?” the old man asked. “We buried them properly. There was no priest — we could not even afford that — but we prayed for all of them.”
“I’ll come again,” Luis said, although the bleak truth was that there was no sense in returning.
Tio Joven bent down and pitched the bundle on his shoulders. Luis watched him do this, and his eyes followed flakes of ash and charcoal as they fell to the ground. “Maybe I will return, too,” the old man said. “There is still some firewood I can get.” He struggled toward the river and disappeared down the gully.
Luis turned his back to the sun, and his shadow lay like a stub on the ground. A thousand curses stirred violently in his mind, like a pack of starved dogs straining at their leashes. Not many in Manila would believe him if he told them what had happened in Sipnget. His friends would say: Luis, this is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. However, he would tell them the truth.
The journey was longer now. The dream is over, vanished like the aimless drift of smoke, like the echo of a gun. It was here on this hallowed land, now violated, where I saw the dream in my grandfather’s eyes, in the anger that fed his soul and stirred his withered muscles. We came from the delta one afternoon, on our shoulders old jute sacks half filled with turnips that we had dug. I was tired, and so were he and Victor. We were all gasping as we went up the gully that the carabaos had widened as they trampled their way to the river. I gripped his hand and helped him up. We were to follow the dike home. On the dike’s broad back Grandfather paused to catch his breath. We laid our sacks down, and when he had regained his breath Grandfather turned to us and said: If I had my way — and a smile kindled in his face — you both would not be here today, looking for something to fill the supper pot.
I told him that I had no complaints. He stood his full height, his tattered trousers pressed close to his bones by a wind that sprang from across the fields, and Vic and I, we reached no higher than his chest. He pointed to the distance and said hoarsely: See that dalipawen tree there, I planted that like a monument. See how green its leaves — but the tree does not matter, for the markers that are important are those of stone, which the rich man has studded the land with.
With a slow sweep of his hand he traced the curve of the river, which gleamed in the sun, and said: All this — up to the river — was ours, because we cleared it.
My father’s men intruded upon Sipnget after that and told this defeated man — my grandfather — long before I was born, even before my mother’s time — that everything he had cleared, even the lot where his house stood, belonged not to him but to the man who lived in the big red house in Rosales. Like all the farmers in the village who had clawed their farms out of the wilderness, this man found himself shackled to this land. Times when the stars and the full moon’s halo augured a bountiful harvest, times when the river brimmed with fish — these were forgotten. The old people died or left, their homes were swept by typhoons or were torn apart by inheritors, but the big red house withstood all vicissitudes. If they got sick or a child was born, if they married and needed money, to the big red house they went. Debt piled upon debt, and one day Grandfather, no longer able to pay, sent his only daughter to serve in the house, and she, who they said was as beautiful as the morning star, was lost forever to Sipnget.
Father — he was young and handsome then — appreciated beauty and took it where he found it, and a year later the girl from Sipnget returned. The village was asleep. Only the insects in the grass and the owls in the buri palms were awake. She returned with her shame, which all the village came to know, and this shame became more than just the bones and the veins in me; in time it also became this passion that cannot be vented, these thoughts that cannot be spoken — all that I cannot be.
Grandfather dreamed. Looking at the hollow creeks and the mouth drawn like a line, I knew that the maculate dream would endure, but it had to confront another dream — my father’s.
They drove back to Rosales in great haste, and the road, white and shimmering in the afternoon heat, vanished behind them in billows of dust. The car rattled, but they did not slow down until they reached the main street and were past the open gate to the bodega of the rice mill behind the house where Santos, the perennial ledger under his arm and a pencil stuck behind his ear, was looking after the weighing of the sacks of palay before they were carted to the mill.
Luis bolted out of the car. “Mang Santos!” he shouted.
Santos laid his ledger on the small table beside the wooden platform of the weighing machine and met Don Vicente’s son. He avoided Luis’s angry eyes.
“Why did you not tell me? Why didn’t you?”
Santos turned furtively to the men heaving the jute sacks from the platform of the weighing machine into the queue of bull carts. They had paused and were watching with quiet interest.
“Please, Luis,” Santos tried to quiet him, “let’s not talk here.”
“Why did you not tell me?” Luis repeated.
Santos did not answer. He placed a placating arm around Luis’s waist and led him to the room beside the garage. Santos offered him a chair, but Luis refused it.
“You are all liars,” Luis said. “You came to me, all smiles, wishing me happiness and a long life on my wedding day, although you knew my mother was lost, my grandfather dead. Have you no heart at all?”
The torrent subsided and Santos asked, “What good would it have done if I told you?” The caretaker’s hands were shaking. “I am no one here, Luis — just an ordinary servant, like the rest.”
The caretaker’s face was frightened, and Luis pitied him. Like the others, he had grown old serving his father, and now another master was taking over. “You lied to me — with your silence. You did not say a thing, but you lied to me, just the same,” he said wearily.
“Always remember this,” Santos said meekly. “You are your father’s son. What happened to Sipnget, to your mother and your grandfather — there was a time I knew them all — was an injustice that cries out to God for vengeance, but who am I to say this? Who can right the wrongs that people do in their anger or in their blindness?”