“But why did they burn the village? Why did you send your tractors there to erase it?”
“Our tractors!”
“Why?” Luis stood up and moved to the window. He raised the blinds a little, and fine powdery dust drifted from the blinds and dissolved as a little sun filtered in. The soldiers who made their camp in the schoolhouse across the plaza were cooking their supper in blackened cans and iron cauldrons.
“The memory must be erased, that is why,” Don Vicente said. “Do you think I am not sorry that this happened? But if you must know the truth, blame it on frailty, everything that is natural with men. I don’t regret that you were born, that I cared for you and gave you things you needed. You will understand.”
Across the plaza a soldier, naked from the waist up, his sweaty chest shiny in the late-afternoon sun, stirred one of the cauldrons with a big wooden ladle. A squad was preparing to leave at the camp gate.
“I didn’t ask you to take me,” Luis said.
“But am I taking back what I gave you — or boasting about it?” Don Vicente asked. “I couldn’t let you suffer, that was all. I was never happier than on the day Santos brought you here, and the other day, when you and Trining were married — what more can a father want than grandchildren?”
“I should have stayed behind, in Sipnget.”
“Do not be sentimental,” his father said. “What would have been your future there? The things that I give you, they are yours by right.”
But these were mine by right, too: the days when we had nothing but salt and rice and camote tops, days when I walked in the sun, looking for crevices in the fields where the frogs hid, so that I could spear them and have something to eat. These were my birthright, too.
The soldiers with their tin plates and spoons were filing out of the schoolhouse and finding themselves benches and writing desks scattered under the acacia trees.
Don Vicente continued, “But I have no regrets except that your mother—”
“Don’t talk anymore about her. You can’t give her sanity back,” Luis said, suddenly turning to his father. The old man was not looking at him. His eyes were raised to the ceiling. Luis strode to the door, but his father held him back. “Sit down,” he said sharply, his eyes now wide open. “I am not finished yet.”
Luis returned to his seat and met his father’s steady gaze. This was the gesture of courage that he had long wanted to make. It is said, his grandfather had told him once, that the field rat that can look at the deadly rice snake in the eye before the snake strikes is saved. Am I saved now when I have become so pliable in his hands?
“Do not be rash,” Don Vicente continued. “Truth — that which you seek, which I cannot give you — is how we look at things, what we believe. Do not talk about injustice or wrongs. There is always an element of injustice in this world, and many wrongs are committed in the jungle. We all live in a kind of bondage until we die. This, too, is truth, and it is ugly, so we do not call it that.”
“How would you call it, Father?”
Don Vicente twiddled his thumbs. “How can I call it anything else? All I know is that we are alive, that you haven’t grown up. How about motives, why don’t you go into them, too? What is the motive of Dantes, for instance, in building up his image as the champion of liberalism and all that crap? You know that he is not, that he is a vicious plutocrat, but you work for him just the same. You asked me why I had the village plowed. It was not hate — it was remorse. I wanted to start anew, to wipe out the traces of a past that will bother us.”
“What about those who lived in the village?”
“Their lives — what about mine and yours? Whose is more important? Your mother and your grandfather are no longer there. Don’t be sentimental. As for the tenants, they can be accommodated anywhere. The farms they tended — these will still be going to them.”
“They are frightened, Father. They will not come back.”
“And is that my fault?”
Suddenly Luis felt very tired and his head ached. “We have to have a conscience, Father,” he said feebly. “That is what separates us from the animals. It is not the soul or belief in God that distinguishes us—”
“Conscience is for the weak,” Don Vicente rasped contemptuously.
So this is what we are up against, Luis cried inside him. The primeval law, the glacial age.
“It is enough,” Don Vicente said, “that I didn’t approve of it, that I feel remorse about it. It is tragic that they were killed, but there was some firing from the village — don’t you understand? They fired back. And there is another thing you must realize — their minds were diseased and their death was inevitable. It’s they — or us.”
How clear it had become. It was as if his father had been skinned and his insides turned out, so that Luis could look into each internal sore.
“You must understand,” Don Vicente continued. “Perhaps I can put it better this way. Look at you, at your friends — the five-centavo guerrillas. Where are they now? Who are those who made money during the war, who survived? The collaborators, the buy-and-sell men who did business with the Japanese.” A long pause. “I am not saying that you should be an opportunist, but at the same time you cannot go against the wave. You must ride it and reach some place. To shout against injustice, to oppose it, is sometimes good for the spirit; but be sure it does not destroy you. Just remember this: the laws are made by the strong, not by the weak.”
Luis nodded dumbly. There was nothing more that his father could say that he did not already know. He rose, and as he headed for the door again Don Vicente called, “The blinds, Luis. Put them down.” But although he clearly heard his father’s command, he did not turn back.
Trining had awakened when he got to her room. She was sitting by the azotea door, and in the soft light of the late afternoon she was reading Marquand’s Point of No Return, which he had brought with him from the city. She stood up and kissed him. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
When he did not reply she asked, “How are they? What did your mother say?”
Luis probed into her anxious face, into the soft brown eyes that were always expressive and alert. She did not know what had happened to Sipnget, and somehow he was glad, for if she did and had not told him so, he would have hated her, too. He sat beside her and told her how the whole village had been burned, that there was nothing in the barrio now but ashes and plowed earth. When he had finished she embraced him, her heart thumping against his chest. “The soldiers and Father’s guards,” Luis said, “it was a mistake and that’s that.”
“Did you fight with him?”
“I was afraid once,” he said softly. “I stayed away from him, because I might say something I need not say. Now I am not afraid anymore. I can even damn him now without caring about what he will say.”
Trining shook her head sadly. “You will end up hating everyone, even me.”
“How else do you expect me to react?” he asked. He closed his eyes and held her close. Hate — but isn’t this the strongest force man has ever fashioned? The father rector argued forcefully once that love was far stronger, that it was the basis of Christian action and forgiveness its bedrock of virtue. Love, however, does not commit people. It does not draw them together in the same way that hate does. You cannot be Christian and forgive or love the tyrants around you, for in doing so, you will yourself institutionalize their brutality. There is nothing un-Christian about hating those who are unjust. I am a vengeful God — read the Bible again; I come bringing not peace but the sword. So let there be hate, so that we can exorcise the evils that plague us. Only with the cleansing catastrophe of fire can we renew ourselves.