Dantes had calmed down. He blew his nose and walked to the window again. “The funeral will be tomorrow afternoon,” he announced. “Don’t send anything.”
Luis looked at the thin, broken man and pitied him. “I am sorry, sir,” he said. “Perhaps I can say this: I’ll miss her more than you ever will.”
As Luis opened the door Dantes called him back. “Don’t tell anyone about this — for Ester’s sake.”
He nodded, then shuffled out.
Dear Ester,
I have never written a love letter and it seems rather late and funny for me to write one, but this is a love letter and my regret is that you will not read it. We are so much alike and so, although you will not read it, I will keep it and go over it every once in a while.
I will not forgive you, for you have caused me unspeakable grief, and more than this, you have planted in my mind the suspicion that I am responsible, not for your life but for your death. Maybe your father is right — I have killed you, and in the process I will also kill myself, not because I love you, which I do, but because we are one.
I will try to write this letter minus the obscurity and ambiguity that you said are my faults. I do agree with you that sometimes obscurity simply is a camouflage for illogical thinking or, worse, bad writing. So, you see, you influenced me, perhaps in a manner that you never realized.
When you were around I had some sense of security in feeling that I could just pick up the telephone and talk with you. I know now that I miss you as one who has lost his sight will always miss the light. So I now feel this overwhelming sense of loss. It is as if I could have been able to save you if I had not procrastinated, but I could not have done anything really except — as did that stupid king — stand before the surf (remember how it was in Cavite?) and bid it stop. I have one royal vice — a self-assurance that is engendered by ignorance.
If I cannot forgive you, it must be you who must forgive me, for I was ignorant and I did not understand the great wrong I had done. There is no way now, however, by which it can be undone, and not even God’s mercy can put back in place what I have diminished within myself — and so I must now move about, the incomplete man.
Yet I must atone for myself I must do this as a cripple and compound my misery by begging. This is not manly. It is degrading, but with you I now have no pride.
I love you, Ester, I love you and it is only in words, for this love is beyond deed. I can only relive the hours we were together, the needless conflict, the intimacy of love’s supreme act, and I must now ask why you are gone when you could still be alive, not my little harlot but this earth’s most precious gift.
I must now give death — not yours but mine — the contemplation that I have not given it, for your death will also be mine. It is the riddle of the unlived experience, the great emptiness of time that is not yet imprinted in the senses or etched on paper and stone. It is the riddle that we cannot unravel, not because it is a compulsive challenge but because the mind seems somehow incomplete, a vacuum that cannot be filled.
I have always felt that the emptiness of my life stems not from the absence of memories or events but from the lack of courage to go after life itself, the way a hunter would go after the most dangerous game, which is death, the way a seeker would challenge the loftiest peaks. We do not conquer life, no one can conquer what one cannot define, but at least it is there and it is ours to shape and to possess fully, with all the senses working, with all the powers of the heart surging, as we search for the answer to the greatest riddle of them all — death, the ultimate end, the enemy of all men, the final quietus to the noblest of emotions, the tenacity and ethereal creativity of faith. You have found the answer and I have found love.
I have asked my brother, whom you have never met, not to hate but to love. I did not mean it. I had meant to ask you, too, not to hate, but I could not do it. You trusted me and in so doing asked me, too, to have faith. Must this, then, be all? Should we drag our feet, believing that our bones will hold our puny frames against everything — the tyranny of fathers and the perfidy of those who practice treachery? You said that we must love because only by love can mankind be saved and the savages amongst us elevated to the realm of the gods — but how can we love when we are nourished on hate? The old virtues no longer suffice. The world moves farther away from the orbit that was plotted out for us by the great religions. We will not be machines, but we will be something worse — we will be pigs.
It’s not five years since the end of the war, and as you know, the theology of self-immolation has fascinated me, more so now that I can see it impinge upon my life. I will not know — never — what really made you do it, for it was not in the name of honor, nor was it failure to serve that compelled you to kill yourself, as it did the samurai. I would flatter myself if I surmised that it was love. I do not think that you were a weakling, either in body or in spirit, to have expressed by this act your rejection and abhorrence of our reality — the sadhu who encases himself with ashes and sends away the spirit from the body also dies. Nor do I think that it was loss of comprehension, for if there was anything that has really impressed me about you, it was your intelligence, which was more than intellect and intuition. It was, I think, an intelligence of the highest order, for it was conditioned by compassion.
I do not know and I cannot know, but this I do know — I will enshrine you here in my mind and in my heart, and I will hate you for tormenting me, but I will cherish you nonetheless, for enkindling, even just for an instant, the faith that had long died in me, so that I can and will escape the fate of pigs.
Thank you, my dear Ester, for humbling me, for making me less the man I thought I was but more the human being I aspire to be.
CHAPTER 30
Now I’ve done it, Luis reflected bitterly when the first copy of Our Time, with the story of the Sipnget massacre, was brought up by the copy boy. The article on agrarian reform was written by a rural sociologist, and the complementary piece on political stability and social change was a contribution from a scholar just returned from Harvard. His own article was extremely calm. He had been worried that it would be truculent and emotional, but it was simple, eloquent reportage, and even Eddie, who did not believe in I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine, had gushed over its polish and forcefulness. Writing it, however, had been more than a drudge. The fury that kindled his vision had made the first draft easy to do. It was the rewriting that had drained him; it had been difficult to speak ill of his father and of the civilian guards, but he had done it with objectivity, and now that the anger had been dissipated a nameless void took its place.
He did not go to the office the day the magazine came out. It was as if he had done the last useful thing for the month and work itself had become some fetter around his neck. Eddie called many times, telling him of his visitors, particularly the team of officers from the constabulary and the imminent trouble that he had raised. Never before had the house where his father once lived seemed so wide and forlorn. In a moment like this it was best that he was alone, so he had hurriedly told Simeon and Marta to go to Rosales on the flimsiest of reasons — that Trining needed them — and told them that he would just call them back. He would miss the couple, but they must have guessed his torment, for they left without complaint.