I know, Father, that you did not want me to go to the hills again after that first trip, but I did go. I must tell you now that I went with my brother, Victor, and that when you thought I was in Rosales, in truth I was really with them for a few weeks. I saw them kill, but I was not appalled. In their company I was part of a wave. Without your knowing it I had forded rivers and stayed in mountain redoubts, where they made their own laws. It was a time for volcanic angers and it was a time for dreams, and Commander Victor dreamed that someday, when the killing was over, better times would come and he would go back to his farm.
Then peace came and I forgot Commander Victor. I returned to college, to cosmology and protoplasm, the reality and the activity of multiple beings and the place they occupied in the order of causality. I dozed through the devil’s rantings, metaphysics, and Father Aguirre’s Greek. My professors bored me. They had all shut themselves up in the drabness of their jobs, navigating in narrow circles. Each was placid and self-contained, mouthing dogmas and dieting on imagination. My classmates were of the same mongrel breed — rich, untouched by the war. If they were affected by war at all, they certainly bore no scars. I was the editor of the college paper, a job I relished in spite of the fact that I detested the restrictions imposed upon me by the invisible college censors, priests fastidiously occupied with word and symbol.
You returned to Rosales, too, to build the house that had been burned; you said you wanted to be closer to the land.
The war was over, and the last time I had seen Commander Victor was in Rosales. He was wearing an olive-gray GI fatigue, and he was with a group of nondescript men, drinking in one of the hole-in-the-wall bars that flourished after Liberation. He waved and cried—Señorito, I missed you!
I did not miss him. I had forgotten the men who killed — but not the killing. One morning I received a letter in penciclass="underline" “Dear Señorito, this shames me to the very core of my heart, but there is no one I can turn to but you. I need help, Señorito—money — and I hope you will not forsake me, as you never had in the past.” The mention of money sickened me, but I realized that he had quailed a lot to write to me. “I am not a recognized guerrilla. I received no back pay, nor have my men, but you recognized me and that is all that matters. My family is hungry. I cannot farm, because I have no carabao. My Garand and tommy gun were confiscated, but my automatic — if the worst comes and I won’t be able to pay — I’ll give it to you. It is the only valuable thing I have.”
I intended to send him a little sum, but somehow, with my schoolwork and other interests, I forgot about the letter. In the following week Santos came to inquire about my needs and to check the house to see if it needed repairs, and to pay some of your Manila taxes. We talked about Commander Victor — and of course Santos knew. Commander Victor is dead, he said. The constabulary had been investigating him for the things his men did during the war, and I would not be surprised if he was even investigated for killing the enemy. He was a poor man, and his wife, said Santos, had come to you to borrow money. You could not refuse, for it was for Commander Victor’s funeral. He had blown his brains out.
I can understand, Father, why you have been angered by the change that came upon Sipnget. Aren’t these the people you helped in their hour of need? But virtue — as the angels have always said — needs no reward, and if you are virtuous, your reward is not in this mundane world peopled by peasants.
I must now tell you what happened in college. You never asked me to explain, and I am grateful. In the press room that night, where I was closing the college paper, I junked my editorial and decided to tell the story of Commander Victor — his village, how he was delivered to his judges. If he was to survive, he had to use force, the same brute force with which he tilled the land. Wearied by his helplessness, by the weight of a future he could not carry, he surrendered his family to the brutality that he could not bear, and he ended his life with the same gun he had wielded to make secure the men who were his judges.
I justified, as I must now justify, the use of violence to secure justice — and self-destruction as the greatest virtue, for it is from death that we must rebuild.
I did not show the editorial to the college censors — not because I was afraid that they would blot it out but because there was just no time. I had done similar things in the past and received no adverse reaction from them. The following morning, however, the office clerk called me. The whole issue of the paper was being held in the office, and when I got there each news item, each article, poetry, and fiction was marked: Imprimatur, tribunal censorum. My editorial was crossed out in red pencil, and on it was: Donec Corrigatur, tribunal censorum. On my desk, too, were instructions to write another editorial or fill the editorial column with a news story.
It was more than I could bear. I did not go to school the whole day. The following morning, my associate editor came to the house and said that they were printing the paper on orders of the father rector and that I should go with him to the rector’s office, for they wanted to clear up the whole mess. I knew most of the priests quite well. I even learned my Spanish from them. I had no foreboding of what was to happen. They were waiting for me, seated before the large molave conference table in the rector’s office, looking solemn in their white cassocks. In the center of the table stood a black crucifix, and before the priests was a high-backed chair, which was apparently reserved for me. It was the Inquisition.
“Sit down, Mr. Asperri,” the rector said amiably. I took the chair and faced the priests — the rector with his double chin; the father dean, lean, ascetic; and the father moderator, his face burdened with a granite jaw.
“You understand, of course, why your editorial was censored,” the father moderator said. He was from the Basque, like you, although he was not Basque and his Spanish had that Catalan quality of resonance. “It was too strong, and besides, you were really stepping on territory quite alien to you. You know, Mr. Asperri, you have a lot of freedom because we knew you were responsible — but as said, this is now alien territory …”