“I am very sorry I have caused you a lot of trouble, sir, but you know, if Ester were alive”—he choked on the words—“if she were here now and I could discuss this with her, she … she would agree with me.” He stood up, but Dantes held him back.
“We cannot end this way,” he said. “I think we understand each other better now. You spoke of Ester — she was an only daughter, and I was very fond of her. I want you to stay, Luis.”
He walked to the door. “It has to be resolved, sir — and I see no other way.”
Dantes went to him and they shook hands. The publisher’s grip was tight and cold. “You can print the retraction, sir,” Luis said. “Eddie is a very good man, and if you decide to close the magazine, I hope you can keep him.”
“You want a final statement or something?”
“No, sir,” Luis said. The publisher’s grip relaxed, and Luis walked out.
Eddie was pacing the office when Luis went in and sat wearily on the sofa beside his desk. “Well,” Eddie asked, “what happened?”
“I put in a good word for you,” he said simply. “It’s the most I could do.” He stood up and started clearing his desk, sorting out the articles that he should have attended to. “I don’t know if the old man will keep the magazine. If he does, you will most certainly be running it. If he decides to let it go, you will be absorbed in his other ventures.”
“How did it come to this? I didn’t think it would come to this. Isn’t it too much for an exposé?”
Luis went to his desk. “That’s the Army for you,” he said. “As for Dantes, we are not tops in his system of priorities, that’s all.”
“Well,” Eddie said grimly, “I cannot see what is important and what is not. If he doesn’t think twenty dead people important, I cannot work for him. I’m used to the gutter, Luis.” He stretched himself on the sofa, flipped off his brown slip-ons, and wiggled his toes.
“I’m sorry, Eddie,” Luis said, emptying his drawers of letters, manuscripts. It was like combing into the past — only the past could not be dredged from his drawers and dumped like clips or knick-knacks on his glass top, where he could pick them out one by one and say: This fragment of my life is important.
Eddie watched him wordlessly. “But in a sense Dantes is right, Luis. You are bitter, you know.”
Luis threw a fistful of junk into the wastebasket and glared. “I knew the village, I could name everyone in it. They were not just casualty figures — they were people.”
Eddie sat up. “I do not deny that,” he said. “They must mean very much to you. Look at what you are doing to yourself. Let us not go into that cliché about obligations and righteousness and justice, but you have obligations to yourself, too, and your relatives — your father, most of all. Why should he disagree with you?”
The trash from Luis’s drawers was now reduced to a small pile of mementoes. It hardly mattered now. Eddie had given him loyalty, respect, and that kind of relationship that could arise only from mutual trust. “There are things you do not know about me,” he said quietly. “It is not that the massacre is not true. God knows it is, but I did not tell you why I have been shaken by it to the very core. My grandfather, he was one of those killed. And my mother, she was betrayed and lost. You may have heard from me that my mother died long ago — that was a convenient lie.”
“Luis, it cannot be,” Eddie said. “If it is true, then it is not enough that you write about the massacre.”
Luis smiled wryly. “How I wish that I could really do something — but what, Eddie? As my father said, it is not the truth that gives us strength. I’m not even half the man that I should be. I am a godforsaken bastard. Go to my hometown and ask anyone you meet in the street. He will tell you how my mother was a maid in my father’s house. I had to live that lie in this city, and I tried to belong. Everything is a sham and I wish I’d never been born.”
Eddie stood up and embraced him, but Luis pushed him brusquely away. “I don’t need your sympathy,” Luis said.
“It is not sympathy,” Eddie said. “It’s gratitude — for trusting me.”
“I don’t have to be a hypocrite anymore. I can now live the way I like. If I must, I will tell the story all over again. Let us say that I am a mourner and that nothing can comfort me except the truth and the damnation that goes with it.”
Dear Father,
Today I thank you not only for this life but also for helping me clear the cobwebs in my mind, so that I may yet know the answer to the riddle that I have for so long tried to unravel. I am, thanks to you, slowly escaping from delusions. Indeed it was most easy to delude myself, to mask a deep and private fear with public avowal of virtue or dedication to some noble folly. Do I really love humanity or truth or that abstraction called freedom? How deceptively simple it was for me to address myself to these ends, and how illusory they are finally becoming.
The reality is not quite like this. In truth I am afraid of losing my comforts, the certainty of the wealth you will give me, all the opulent dreams that are already real, for I know, no matter what I do, that you will not disown me. Your dream, too, is your own mishmash of virtue. You, too, have found it convenient, perhaps, to forget.
When you sent me off from Rosales to a Catholic college you knew it was absurd, for I had never touched a rosary before, and if I had, it was in the manner Grandfather prescribed. (You should have known the old man — you have too many things in common: bullheadedness, love of the good life, and a certain earthy approach to living.) He always looked with skepticism at the many who went to church on Sundays and holy days of obligations, for he felt that most of them desecrated the temple — the cheap, fornicating slobs whose minds, preceding their bodies, committed another mortal sin even as they knelt in the pews to ask that their sins be forgiven. He believed in prayer, of course, but only if it was addressed straight to God. He believed — just to make sure — in the spirits, too, which abounded in the fields, the trees, and the mounds.
Those were four tedious years during which I grew up without family and the pleasures of Sipnget. I was in high school — a junior — when the war came, and you had, at first, thought of going to Rosales but, on second thought, decided that Manila would be safe. You were right; the conquerors did not bother us, and we were adequately supplied not just with the amenities that you were used to but with the same dogged loyalty that your encargados and your tenants had always shown you.
I will now recall, dear Father, some aspects of those years that I know you did not particularly relish but that, if you understood better, would have explained to you why things were changing, why I, myself, knew that we must change not only because by doing so we would continue to occupy the positions that we always coveted but because by changing we would also be able to live.
You must remember that day when Santos and other men from Sipnget came and told you that they needed medicines, that the countryside was alive with guerrillas. I had listened and asked if I might go to Sipnget, if only to see my mother, whom I had not seen in years. And you told me to go with them so that I might see for myself and tell you how it was.
I was of course pleased to break away from the monotony of the house. We took the train to Rosales, then hiked for two days until we reached the range. We scaled a steep ridge, and in the glimmer of morning we saw the camp, a cluster of cogon huts at the bottom of a ravine. Trees covered the ridge and the narrow clearing from the air. The men were disappointed that we did not bring more medicines. They led me to the hut in the center, where they said their commander was. They called him, saying that Don Vicente’s son had come. The commander came out, a short, well-built man with a peasant’s simple, trusting face. His handshake was muscular and gnarled. Come in, Señorito, and make yourself at home in this humble dwelling, he said, grinning. His politeness irritated me. He was a leader of men whose reputation had spread well beyond Rosales. A hardened fighter, he had no reason to appear so meek. It was only afterward that I learned that he was not putting on a front, compared with the constabulary officers whom I had met. At one time (his men told me) he had a priest brought up to the hills because a spy whom he had ordered executed wanted the last sacraments. It was medicine that his men needed most. Malaria, typhoid, and dysentery had thinned their ranks, and they could not bring the sick down from the hills. I said that I didn’t see why they could not be brought down. At this his politeness vanished and he laughed aloud. He told a woman passing by with the day’s laundry to call someone in the nearby hut, and a one-armed man came. The man used to be a farmer, not a guerrilla, but a Japanese patrol had come upon him — and to the Japanese all those with malaria were guerrillas. They would have killed him had he not escaped. Wounded, he had fled to the hills to become a guerrilla.