Don Vicente is the corporate title of the second and third of the five novels in F. Sionil Jose's Rosales series. (Individually, the two are called Tree, and My Brother My Executioner; a little while ago I wrote about the first in the series, Dusk.)

Tree

The unnamed narrator of Tree is the grandson of Don Jacinto, the mestizo administrator who was so helpful to the fugitive family in Dusk.

The novel announces the sombre qualities of its retrospective focus from the beginning: "This is a journey to the past... My doctor says it is good that I should remember, for in memory is my salvation. I should say, my curse... I am a commuter between what I am now and what I was and would like to be... I find it so difficult and enervating to rationalize a middle-aged life that has been built on a rubble of compromise and procrastination."

The narrator's father, Espiridion, worked for Don Vicente, the wealthiest of the local landowners. In the first novel, Dusk, Don Jacinto remarks: "The most powerful people in this part of the country are the Asperris; they are Spanish, they own whole villages, all the way to Balungaw to the east and Santa Maria to the north... They came here much earlier than my grandfather and only God knows if they have title to the mountain, too."





Don Vicente is the latest representative of this clan. He makes just one appearance in Tree, and doesn't even get out of his car, but he is a constantly looming presence. A picture in Espiridion's living room shows the great man, "massive and impregnable, wearing a Panama hat, his corpulent chest almost breaking out from his tight-fitting, collarless suit. The picture hung on the wall by the big clock as a symbol, I think, of the vast authority the rich man wielded over us, particularly Father."

At one point a plan emerges to erect a statue of Don Vicente. Cousin Marcelo objects: "Would you be able to get someone bright enough to chisel out all the secret recesses of his personality? Show all the different layers and folds of his fat and his character? And where will you get the mountain of marble, not just for the shape of his corpulent body but for the immensity of his greed? You will insult the memory of Rizal by building this man a monument. Images of stone can only be for beings like Mabini, Bonifacio, Rizal. For someone like Don Vicente, you need something different, something that is is equal to his rapacity."

So Marcelo offers to paint a portrait instead. The first time the narrator sees the portrait, he wondered about the rendition -- "the blobs of black, the smouldering face". In answer to his question, Marcelo replies: "Just picture Don Vicente in your mind, what you feel about him, what you think he is, and there you have it."



This book is very different in tone from Dusk, and at first I wasn't sure I liked it. Rather than a driving narrative of flight, struggle, and new beginnings, the story here is episodic, made up of discrete recollections about family members and formative experiences, which are presented, and then left behind. But as the major unifying theme began to inexorably emerge, the novel started to grow on me.

This theme is the contrasting lot of the rich and the poor. The narrator lives a very comfortable life with his widower father. They, too, are overshadowed by Don Vicente, but they are well up in the hierarchy.

Conversely, all those around them -- principally tenants and servants, but almost everyone in the novel is in some shape or form subordinate to Espiridion -- suffer from chronic deprivation and/or lack of autonomy.

From the beginning it is clear that riches don't necessarily create happiness. The young narrator, with a dead mother and a cold father, is not rich from an emotional point of view. He is in many ways lonelier than the poor, downtrodden folks around him, and often looks to them for companionship and warmth -- not to mention some sense of reality (since many of the unfortunate characters who cross his path, rather than adopting an attitude of obsequiousness, are brave enough to speak their truth to his power). Martina, a household maid, tells him plainly, for example, that the "thieves" in Rosales were not people like her.

But the narrator cannot bring himself to follow through on the hints of his underlings. When he briefly sees Martina's dead father, he speaks of "this feeling of dread that I had intruded into a misshapen world that I had somehow helped to shape, and that, if I did not flee it, it would entrap and destroy me... I ran and ran -- away from the macabre shadows that trailed me, away from Martina and her dead father, into the comforting brightness of our home. I remember, too ... that last look of hurt and abandonment, as I ran out of a beautiful friendship into the certitude of ease that awaited me."

This pattern -- running back to comfort -- is repeated.

A pivotal episode with Tio Baldo is a microcosm of the novel's entire problematique.

Though poor, Baldo is bright. He helps Espiridion with the books, and acts as an informal teacher/companion to the narrator. Espiridion makes it possible for him to study surveying in the city, and when he comes back, two years later, he starts work as a surveyor, both for Espiridion and for the tenants. In the course of this work, Espiridion accuses him of "starting trouble against Don Vicente". He replies: "I only want to get their lands back. Don Vicente can still live in luxury even without those lands... It's common knowledge he grabbed these lands because the farmers didn't know anything about cadastral surveys and Torrens titles... You knew my father... You said he was not impoverished until Don Vicente took his land. I'm locating the old Spanish markers."

Espiridion dutifully reports all this to Don Vicente, who undertakes a succession of counter-measures -- including arriving in his car to deliver a box of bribe money that Espiridion is supposed to use to stop Baldo in his tracks.

Baldo rejects the money.

"Father spoke calmly. 'So you think you can win. You are at the end of your road, Baldo.'

"'I'm not afraid,' he said, with conviction. 'There are people on our side.'...

"Father's hands dropped from Tio Baldo's shoulders...

"'Baldo... we have to live. All of us. All right, I have a few hectares to my name, a rice mill, some houses. But still, I'm nothing. And you know that. Don Vicente -- he has everything. He can ruin not only you or me but all of us -- not because he wants to, but he may be forced to.'

"'We have nothing to lose,' Tio Baldo said. Tears began to well in his eyes."

Of course, Tio Baldo does not win his case, and he loses the money the farmers have entrusted to him. Defeated, he tells them: "I've tried, but we cannot fight money with money, nor force with force because we haven't enough of them."

The narrator, who witnesses the meeting, recalls: "Numbly I looked at the ancient, careworn faces... And as I looked at them..., as I listened to their grief, I felt a vise tighten in my throat; I knew I did not belong here, that I had to join Father in our comfortable house."

Tio Baldo, on the other hand, agonized by the disappointment of the farmers, commits suicide.

Tragedy is befalling the land, too. On a hunting expedition to the delta, Old David, a servant, reminisces: "People didn't crowd the delta then, nor was it planted with crops... The river was very clear then, like a spring, and the land wasn't dead. But more people came, sapped it dry of its milk. The animals fled to the deeper hills... Everything was cleared. The hills. The mountains."

The end of the Second World War is a turning-point for the Philippines and for the narrative.





"The war was over -- we thought there would be no more killing. But we were wrong, for now, all around us in the plain, the men who had fought the Japanese so well as Huk guerrillas now fought their landlords and the Army, which they perceived as instruments of the landlords to perpetuate their ancient, miserable lot...

"'It is so clear,' Cousin Marcelo said. 'The war showed the farmers, the poor, how they could survive and how the rich and the powerful could not. Look around you -- the tenants are no longer the cowed starvelings they used to be. They know that if they are united and if they have guns, they can do almost anything. Anything! We have to be aware of these changes and adjust to them. We cannot live in the past forever.'"

But the warning signs were not heeded:

"Indeed, the war altered many things but again not us, not us. We knew no hunger as did our neighbors, who lived on buri-palm flour...

"'We are fortunate,' Cousin Marcelo continued, 'But look at the thousands of young people with no future. They either become soldiers or bandits in the hills whom the soldiers seek without any pity.'"

Angel, the son of tenants, who is serving Espiridion without pay to pay off his father's debt, is a case in point. His parents sell their house and carabao to buy a fare to Mindanao, where his father ends up dead. His mother writes: "We thought we would never know hunger again, but hunger will always be with us... We can build strong houses here, but we shall always be cowering before the big men around us, doomed to die, paying..." Letters from the mother stop coming, and Angel joins the army. The narrator warns him that he is going to die. "Yes," he answers, "but I'll die decently." Angel will be fighting people just like himself, with the same griefs and burdens, but this is the only way out he knows.

Meanwhile, discontent grows.

"The farmers, the tenants -- we did not realize then how they saw and understood that the power of the rich, of Don Vicente and Father himself, had been eroded, that in those four abject years it was really each man for himself. The old loyalties held insofar as we were concerned, but they were rendered fragile, as only time would soon show."

Espiridion manages to face down one minor insurrection, but eventually he is kidnapped and brutally killed.

After a brief visit to organize affairs, the narrator bids goodbye to Rosales, and now passes by only spasmodically. There seems to be an emptiness inside him, an inability to come to terms with the disparities he was already experiencing as a child:

"What kind of man is he who will suffer for truth, for justice, when all the world knows that it is the evil and the grasping who succeed, who flourish, whose tables are laden, whose houses are palaces?...

"Alas, I cannot be this man, although sometimes I aspire to be like him. I am too much a creature of comfort, a victim of my past... I am often in the ranks of princes, smelling the perfume of their office. I glide in the dank, nocturnal caverns that are their mansions and gorge on their sumptuous food, and I love it all, envy them for the ease with which they live without remorse, without regret even though they know (I suspect they do) that to get to this lofty status, they had to butcher -- perhaps not with their own hands -- their own hapless countrymen..."

In the face of rampant injustice and venality, he openly admits: "Like my father, I have not done anything. I could not, because I am me, because I died long ago."

What triumphs when all else succumbs is the system: "The balete tree -- it is there for always, tall and leafy and majestic. In the beginning, it sprang from the earth as vines coiled around a sapling. The vines strangled the young tree they had embraced. They multiplied, fattened, and grew, became the sturdy trunk, the branches spread out to catch the sun. And beneath this tree, nothing grows!"

This is a sobering novel.

On the one hand it sheds relentless light on themes that are still dogging the Philippines. Sheila Coronel comments: "To this day, Filipinos agree that their country's failings -- crime, corruption, armed rebellion -- are rooted in a broken justice system. Cops and courts are seen as corrupt. And there is a widespread belief that the scales of justice are rigged... Over the many years I have reported on the Philippines, I have seen how the rich and powerful bend the justice system to their will." Despite some rays of hope, that system "remains deeply dysfunctional", and while that is the case, paths out of inequality remain steep and narrow.

On the other hand, the narrator's final, bitter assessment of himself -- "I have not done anything. I could not, because I am me, because I died long ago" -- is an assessment that many of us who are sitting comfortably in the First World might well make of ourselves. Like him, we seem powerless, unable to change ourselves or the world around us. May we at least have the grace, as he does, to feel uncomfortable about it...

As Cecil Rajendra puts it:

And money
makes
cowards
of us all...

As our
bank balance
increases
so too
in inverse
proportion
the voice
of conscience

d
e
c
r
e
a
s
e
s



My Brother My Executioner

The third novel in the series continues the theme of different destinies, this time exploring the divergent lives of two brothers during the time of the Hukbalahap (Huk) rebellion (1948-54). Luis Asperri is the illegitimate son of Don Vicente, the rich, well-connected man who loomed over the previous novel.

Luis grows up in a very basic village with his mother, grandfather, and half-brother Victor, before being plucked from his home to go and live as the rich kid of his powerful, well-connected parent.



I have to say straight up that this is my least favourite of the Rosales novels so far.

There are a number of irritations (the two utterly subordinated main women characters constitute a major one: Luis struggles to choose between them, and they both end up shafted, largely on his account).

But largely my dislike stems from the character of Luis, who just never commits to anything...

Part of the point, of course, is that he feels that he belongs nowhere. He doesn't feel comfortable in the luxurious environment to which he has been transferred, and uses his talents as a journalist to campaign for justice, but he always seems to keep some of himself in reserve; neither does he feel comfortable in the rural environment he left (he returns to Rosales as rarely as possible, and seldom communicates with his family in the village -- he has even told his city friends that his mother is dead).

This early passage (recounted on the journey to Rosales with his cousin Trining, who has finally persuaded him to visit Don Vicente, who is sick) sums up his dis-ease. It's always problematic if you despise those whose interests you claim to defend...

"He could see the blight sweeping over this land like a thunderstorm creeping over the near horizon... It was not rain that was coming; it was another season, and he could see it as darkness, could feel its electric tension as he had felt the touch of life itself. But this was not life, not even the promise of it, and the fact that he was no longer part of this land, this changeless miasma from which he sprang, filled him with sadness and guilt... Though he had fled Rosales, there was no escaping this blight, and he saw it clearly as the Chrysler sped through the monotonous drabness of the plain. This is the changeless land, scorched by sun and lashed by typhoon, and on it the peasant -- as much a part of the land as the barren trees and the meager grain that grow on it -- is changeless, too. Barefoot, ill-clothed, a fighting cock under his arm, here is the peasant, working with scythe and plow, plodding along, as slow and as patient as his water buffalo... The two other men in the car ... were incidental, servants to be ordered around... Both these men, however, could have been his relatives, for they came from the village where he was born."

The "blight" is organized Huk resistance, in which Luis's half-brother, Victor, plays an increasingly important tole. He is now "Commander Victor", having taken on the persona of a resistance fighter who had harried the Japanese.

It is not that Luis is unaware of the problems. At one point he muses: "What use is power when it is coveted just by one man, or one group, without the consent of those who are ruled? How long can it last?" But there are plenty around him who resist this line of thinking, and it is Jose's exploration of the various arguments and counter-arguments that makes this series of novels so vibrantly contemporary.



Dantes, for example, who owns the publication Luis writes for, is also a rich and influential man, with a knack for supporting the causes of the poor while continuing to look after his own interests. When the authorities are giving him a hard time because of a hard-hitting article Luis has written, he upbraids the younger man: "Anyone reading you would conclude that you hate the rich and think that all of us are scoundrels who make money exploiting the working class. Even if we do, please do not forget that the poor will always be with us, and it is not our fault... I have thought a lot about justice, but let me make this clear -- it should be my kind. I make the rules, for I am what I am -- the patron, the hacendero, the feudal lord... The poor do not know what abundance means. They will not appreciate it, since they not conditioned to it."

Don Vicente similarly challenges Luis: "Will you be the savior of the oppressed and the weak? My son, there are no oppressors, there are no oppressed. There are only people who seize opportunities to make their lives better. The poor are virtuous? The worst enemies of the poor are their own kind -- because they are too lazy, because they refuse to change."

Luis is aware enough to retort: "It is we who refuse to change... We have grown used to our comforts, to habits of the past."

But the rot goes back a long way, to unjust patterns of land ownership that have persisted down the years. Luis's grandfather, back in the village, is very clear about the origins of their misfortune, just as Tio Baldo had been in the previous novel: "They stretched the roads across the fields and dammed the creeks, so that the water could flow only to their farms. They built the railroad, too, right across the dikes we built, and finally they brought their lawyers and these learned men said: This land is ours, and this spot, which is just wide enough for your grave, is yours. And we said nothing and did nothing, because they were learned."

After the first warning from the insurgents -- the stone thrown through the window of Don Vicente's house, wrapped in a message from "Commander Victor" -- the rich man asks Luis: "Why do they hate me?... I look after them, more than like a father... What kind of people are these? Can they not see that we are honorable?... They are happiest as they are, and they do not have a single worry -- not a bit of what I have to endure -- and only because they are under my wing."

Luis wants to explain to him that "paternalism was done for, that charity is its own stigma and that the best of intentions are often brutalized and demeaned". But he doesn't. He appeals for patience, explains that these "difficult times ... [were] created by the war, by expectations that could not be fulfilled", and weakly urges that "we must also understand that if we are to stay here, to be on top as we have always been ... then we must also change and learn to understand what is happening below us".

Yeah, that's the sort of thing I would say... Gradual change. Compromise. Consensus-building...

Victor sees things very differently: "We know who is exploited and who are exploiters... Paradise can be here if we fight well. There is goodwill in men if they are of the same class... I wish I could tell you that I will endure all privation because I love our country, but what is our country? It is a land exploited by its own leaders, where the citizens are slaves of their own elite."



When Luis returns to his village the next time, it is gone. Razed. Bulldozed. His grandfather is dead, along with many others; he is buried in a mass grave; his mother is unhinged and wandering. Tio Joven recounts: "I could hear the bullets whistling. I ... saw the people, the women and children, running toward the river. I went back and fled to the delta with them... From there we saw the village go up in fire... The constabulary soldiers and Don Vicente's civilian guards -- they said our village was evil, that there were Huks among us, and that they would continue to follow us... A few days afterward the tractors came."

If Don Vicente has any regrets, he is not willing to give them much room: "It is enough ... 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."

Luis resolves to tell the world about the massacre. He publishes his article, but is ordered to retract it, on the basis of Don Vicente's testimony that "there was no massacre -- just an encounter".

Resigning his job, he writes to his father: "It is what you stand for that rankles -- the privilege, the apathy, and the alienation from the people, including me, who have made possible your safe pinnacle. No, Father, you are not ten feet tall. If you can look down on us, it is only because you stand on a pile of carrion."

Bold words. But Luis does not have the moral fibre to wholeheartedly throw himself behind his quest for justice.

When Don Vicente dies, and Luis inherits his estate, it is Trining -- Luis's unphilosophical, unpolitical cousin-wife -- who suggests that they could sell the land cheaply to the tenants, or even give it to them. But Luis baulks: "It suddenly occurred to him that he wanted to keep everything intact, that he wanted to play landlord, too, in a fashion different from his father's." He raises all manner of practical difficulties, in the way unwilling people do. Trining sticks with her point: "It would be simple... if you really put your mind to it."

Victor reappears, with another warning, and another exhortation to return the land to the people. But Luis is still full of excuses, and has made his father's heavy mantle of paternalism his own. He tells his brother: "If you only had one hour to spend in my place, you will realize that what you want is not that simple. I agree with you that the land must go to the people who farm it -- but how will they progress without someone like me to give them money when they need it? Why must they spend so much on fiestas when it is unnecessary? Who will sell their products? Who will teach them about farm management, fertilizers, and crop rotation? These problems cannot be solved with guns."

Yet his desire to stay in Rosales, despite the lack of security, seems to betray a death wish born of despair. It is as though he knows what a hollow human being he has become. After the death of Ester, Dantes's daughter, he confesses that "the theology of self-immolation has fascinated me, more so now that I can see it impinge upon my life".

And indeed, we leave him a new widower, and probably about to die himself: "If I die tonight," he muses, in echoes of the narrator of Tree, "it will be just a physical death, for I have long since died and only memory has framed me, here where I have trod, and searched and searched but found nothing."

But whereas we feel deeply the imminent fall of the brave hero of Dusk, here I struggled to feel anything. Luis just ends up being a big frustration...