Sins Read online

  Copyright © 1996 by F. Sionil José

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83029-6

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  A Note to the Reader

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Dedication

  Glossary

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  This novel contains a few words—some Spanish, some specific to the Philippines—that may be unfamiliar to the reader. A glossary has been included at the end of the book.

  My name is Carlos Cobello. My very close friends and associates call me C.C. If I were to describe myself, I would say I am what the ancient Greeks called Anar Spoudogeloios—a calm, collected individual, not aloof, not hot-tempered, serious of visage and cheerful. I have served in my country’s foreign service; those who know this address me as Mr. Ambassador. As a leading member of the sugar bloc, I have, of course, been called a sugar baron. I have also been called a nationalist entrepreneur—a sobriquet I carefully nurtured and like very much. But my enemies—businessmen as well as ideologues—regard me as a predatory menace to Philippine society.

  How do I begin this litany? Is this the time to do it? In my present mood of isolation and decay, crippled as I am, should I even try to put things down? A form of expiation, perhaps, or atonement, the recitation of a thousand mea culpas? And if I do it, which I know I must, should I be a slave to the rigid chronology of time or to some human conceit that will blot out everything self-deprecating? I know I have lived an interesting life, but will it be possible for me to relate this life interestingly?

  Maybe I should begin by saying that I am dying—that is the most melodramatic way of starting it. They say that truth always sits on the lips of dying men. Crap! Hard-core liars lie to their last gasp, molding with apparent sincerity those fictions that they hope they can leave behind to gild, to veneer their lives of shame. I will not do this because, in truth, I have rarely lied in my life. Those who know me well, my dear Corito, my Angela, they can vouch not just for my honesty but also for my congenital decency.

  I read Hamlet during the war and I have always believed:

  This, above all, to thine own self be true;

  And it must follow, as the night the day,

  Thou canst not then be false to any man.

  I agree completely. Never a lender be. Just borrow and borrow and borrow …

  I have always known that I will not be able to take with me anything of the vestiges of power, the artifacts and the perks of affluence that I have amassed. History tells me Alexander the Great was buried with his hands outstretched and empty to show the world, half of which was then his dominion, that he could take not even a lump of soil with him. And so it is with me. What then can I truly keep? Not my hundred antique cars now rusting away in a field in Bulacan, not the millions in jewelry I have given Angela, Corito and my women. I always replied when asked what I amassed: what else but those ineffable memories that light up the dark recesses of the past. Memories, indeed, shining now like diamonds as I pick them up one by one to polish and to caress.

  But Delfin—my son, my only son in whom reposes all my hopes, who bears in his tissues my primal genes—does not love me. Maybe, he hates me in a manner never explicit, engendered in his innermost core by his mother. Oh, Severina, forgive me. I was so young then, just as you were young, too. I loved and sinned. Forgive me.

  Now, the intractable chronology of time.

  I always knew we were rich. We had this big house in Sta. Mesa, built by my grandfather when that place was wilderness, an expanse of cogon waste as my father remembered it. My grandfather, who was one of the leaders of the revolution against Spain, had the title to this land, some twenty hectares or more, which was lorded over by a low hill overlooking Manila as it was then, just a huddle of wooden houses except for the Walled City, where, for some centuries, the Spaniards had continually built houses of stone and the walls that surrounded the city. My grandfather planted the acacia trees along the street that led to the house and around the house itself, the trees that were already tall when I was a child, now great green giants that shade the street and the grounds.

  My grandfather is regarded in school textbooks as a hero, and a long street that leads from Grace Park to the heart of Manila—Quiapo, that is—is named after him. By the turn of the century, he already foresaw the frenetic bustle that would bloat the city. In a sense, the old house became his formidable retreat. With its thick brick walls, its tile roof and the finest hardwood for beams and floors, it could easily last another hundred years, perhaps longer than the stone houses in Intramuros, had they not been destroyed during the war.

  We had a lot of servants including Ah Chee, the amah from Canton who took care of me and my sister, Corito, four years older than I. Most of the servants came from our Hacienda Esperanza in San Quentin, Nueva Ecija. Esperanza was my grandmother’s name.

  I took this surfeit of ease for granted, this life of privilege to which I was born, and could hardly imagine an existence such as that of our house help and of the tenants in the hacienda with their small thatched houses. I could not see myself toiling in the fields in all that heat or slashing rain. But early on, I knew the value of money—this my mother constantly dinned into us. The price of a ganta of rice, of a kilo of pork; she was not poor but her family made its fortune through labor—they made furniture—not from inheritance as was my father’s case. Once, Father, who early on had begun collecting Chinese porcelain, dropped a Sung vase as he was taking it from its shelf.

  “It would take Jacobo,” Mother said, referring to one of the drivers, “ten years of continuous work to pay for that vase.” When we were eating, she would point to some particular fish—she did the marketing in Quiapo—saying that such and such fish cost so much.

  I went to the San Juan de Letran College in Intramuros all through grade school. My parents spoke Spanish at home and so did my sister and I, and our amah, too. Letran was run by Spanish Dominicans and my father had friends among them. He was not going to let me grow Americanized like the boys the American Jesuits were raising at the Ateneo; to him, all the good things about this country were brought by Spain. But, like my grandfather, he was pragmatic enough to learn English, to be at home with it, for he knew it was the language of government, of business and of culture. It must be obvious from this recitation that we are mestizos, and can easily trace our pristine origins to Castille.

  On this subject of our Spanish heritage, Father and I had passionate discussions. My reading of our history had broadened and, in some instances, citing chapter and verse, I would recall the clichés about friar abuses. Always, he would fall back on his last retort, that my ancestry included some friars indeed. Some of our relatives were still very much alive in Spain; I could always return and claim kinship with them. Why, then, did Grandfather join the revolution? He would smile slyly and say that if his father had not, we wouldn’t be where we are today.
r />   Like my grandfather, Father endowed his ancestry with superior intelligence, an attitude I came to share soon enough. “Oye,” he used to remind me when he was running everything himself after Grandfather had died. “Look at all these native attempts at business, these Indio corporations—no sooner do they start then they fall apart. It’s the corruption, the lassitude and laziness in Malay genes that enfeeble the Indios. But not those with Spanish or Chinese blood. They are the hope of this country.”

  Whatever one might say about him, like me, Father was concerned and regarded himself a citizen of this country.

  When he talked in this manner I would be silenced; I look around me, even now, and see the shameful rubble of enterprises that the Indios, in their ningas cogon, so enthusiastically set up, and then destroyed.

  “And it will always be this way,” Father would conclude, his eyes raised to the ceiling, to a chandelier, to the fine narra beams, whatever there was for the eyes to latch onto, “because these natives are like children, just as the Spanish friars found them to be—simpleminded, incapable of intellectual or creative enterprise. The Malay in them is easily seduced by pleasure, by fiestas, by lazy habits and comfort.… Just watch even the poorest of them, how they while away time doing nothing. Nothing!”

  Years afterward, remembering these conversations, I would analyze them; Father’s arguments were awry. He always spoke as if he knew how it is to work, but he had never really worked. He did not even finish college at San Juan de Letran. To him, work was simply supervising the hacienda in Nueva Ecija, twenty thousand hectares of it, encompassing all of San Quentin and two adjacent towns. Fifteen thousand hectares were planted to sugar cane, the rest to rice. A sugar mill in the next town served our hacienda and the adjacent haciendas that were also planted to sugar. He had very good encargados. Father stayed in the city most of the time, attending dinners at the Club Filipino. In Manila, about a dozen clerks collected the rents from the accesorias and other buildings that he owned in Quiapo, Sta. Cruz and Sampaloc.

  I remember him now in his prime, in his white alpaca suit and blue polka dot bow tie always, his bald head a shiny pink when exposed to the sun, an unlighted cigar in his mouth, his bushy eyebrows twitching when he spoke, his oily, bulbous nose and a receding chin much like my grandfather’s. Father was short and fat—all that two hundred pounds of hulk—but he moved with litheness and grace. In his later years he always carried a silver-handled ebony cane—to ward off the dogs in the neighborhood, he always said, but he used it more on his peons who were slow to move.

  I have not really described the house in all its opulence. It stands in the middle of a wide lot, on two hectares, atop this low hill. The rest of the property was subdivided into residential lots that were sold and developed in later years. In the thirties, the place seemed so far away from Manila, positioned as if it were some medieval fort. At the time, the rich mestizo families that used to live in Intramuros had already moved to the less crowded suburbs of Ermita and Malate and even farther, to Pasay and Sta. Mesa.

  My grandfather, attuned to the future, bought many parcels of land adjacent to the hacienda and outside the city, toward the hills of Marikina, Makati, fields planted then to kangkong, and fallow land covered with worthless cogon. But the Sta. Mesa lot was his pride. It was walled with adobe, ten feet high, quarried from the vicinity. All of it was soon covered with ivy, which grew lush like bushes above the walls. The main gate, as high as the walls, was made of solid molave and braced with iron filigree, with a small entrance for people. The gatekeeper, who also helped in maintaining the garden, lived in a shed by the gate, his children part of the household staff. The garage, which could hold ten cars, was at the west end, its second floor the quarters of the five drivers, two of them bachelors. The maids and the cook slept in the wide room adjoining the kitchen. The amah, whom Mother trusted most, had a room of her own on the ground floor beside the stairs, where she could be summoned at once if needed.

  The ground floor, consisting of a receiving hall paneled with narra, opened to a wide marble patio adjoining a dining hall. Beyond the patio was the swimming pool. Six bedrooms were upstairs, high-ceilinged, with ceiling fans. Their height was maintained when the entire house was provided with central air-conditioning in the fifties. Mother did not like it—she preferred fans—but Father wanted it that way for his guests.

  My room faced the east, the Sierra Madre. As a boy I used to look down on terraced rice fields that were soon to become housing developments. Corito’s room next to mine had the same view. My parents’ bedroom across the hall overlooked Manila, as did the wide balcony where smaller parties were often held, primarily because, from there, especially at night, Manila spread out like a huge carpet studded with jewels.

  Mother was four inches taller than my father, but she made no effort to look short. She wore high heels, and when walking with Father she was regal, erect but always sedate, demure, for, in truth, she never towered over him except in the management of the house, her indisputable domain, the huge garden particularly, and the kitchen.

  She was a fastidious cook and a meticulous host. She did the marketing herself, assuring us of the freshest meats and vegetables. She never hired a caterer, and even when a hundred guests were expected, although she had cooks and waiters from the Manila Hotel to help, she never let go of the personal supervision, the wine list, the flowers and the table settings. She could have easily managed a five-star establishment.

  I remember best the smaller dinners on the patio. She would be in the kitchen the whole afternoon, and through all that bustle, her frequent “puñetas,” hissing like a rocket, then the explosion of a hard slap, and the murmured, “Yes, Señora.”

  They came in tuxedos, the women in Valera gowns, unable to deny Mother’s imperial RSVP, knowing that if they did not come without an acceptable excuse, they would forever be cut off from her list. They could ill afford this, for Mother was Manila’s social arbiter, her parties attended by the country’s leaders, and every visiting fireman of distinction.

  So there they were, the chosen, seated at tables on the patio, candles glimmering softly, the cloying smell of dama de noche and kamuning hovering over the cool night air, and close to the ledge, before the swimming pool glazed with light, a string ensemble playing Mozart, native kundimans or whatever tune a guest requested. The talk was always subdued, punctuated every so often by the crack of Father’s laughter. The comfort of the guests was Mother’s first concern and to each table were assigned two maids in starched whites, barefoot, their hands encased in white gloves, ready to pour water, wine, into each emptied goblet. As for those pesky mosquitoes waiting to feast on exposed legs, underneath each table, hidden by lengths of embroidered linen tablecloths, were two maids squatting on the marble floor and swinging fans.

  I was then in grade school. I had watched some of those parties, the garrulous poker sessions with men like President Quezon. They would play sometimes till morning, when they would be served breakfast. In the meantime, they were sustained by Carlos Primero brandy and deep-fried squid, shrimp, chitcharon, English biscuits with a spread of caviar or camembert. It was the chitcharon that I liked best, dipped in vinegar with salt, crushed garlic and powdered pepper. I would wander around the tables listening to bits of conversation, which often concerned the state; the prices of sugar, copra and gold; the horse-trading in Congress and the coming war with Japan. Like my father, they were ordinary men, bragging about their women, burping, cursing, getting drunker and drunker as dawn started to limn the east. They threw their vomit on the marble floor and dirtied the bathroom with their urine. I knew someday I would be like them.

  It was only afterward, after the war, that I realized those were not simple poker sessions but meetings—or were they conspiracies?—of like minds, the division of spoils like the partitioning of Quezon City among mestizo friends. As for Quezon, he always won at those sessions, whether through collusion, skill or a mutual understanding among those who played that this was
one way the leader could be thanked. I leave this for you to decide.

  My father kept a kennel, six huge Dobermans that consumed more meat than we did. They were in the kennel in the daytime, but at night they were let loose in the yard to discourage any interloper. We were awakened one night; all the dogs were yammering and when the yard lights were switched on, the dogs were reaching up one of the guava trees where a frightened man was clinging, his leg bleeding. He turned out to be no thief but a very silly and daring suitor who was courting one of the maids.

  Father was amused; the dogs had proven their worth, but what about this man who climbed the wall and braved injury, perhaps even death, for a woman? The intrepid act touched my father, and as soon as the man’s leg had healed, Father saw to it that marriage was his reward. He was the godfather.

  My boyhood brimmed with excitement. We motored then quite often to San Quentin, sometimes in the Packard with its canvas roof down. I would go horseback riding with Corito, accompanied by the encargado. We would gallop through the humdrum villages, sending the children scampering to safety behind the fences. Father said I had physical courage; he had seen me ride at full gallop even though early on I had fallen twice.

  In truth, I was not all that brave. Sometimes, the sepulchral stillness in the house frightened me as I imagined ghosts lurking in those empty rooms. The thunderstorms at the start of the rainy season always seemed to be malignant forebodings of dark disasters. I also never liked the explosion of firecrackers in the New Year, when all the help gathered in the yard, beating cans and adding to the din. Once, Father took me heron-hunting in the green fields of San Quentin. I was perhaps twelve at the time, and big for my age. He let me aim the escopeta—a double-barreled, twelve-gauge Spanish shotgun. The explosion almost hurled me to the dew-washed ground, and the ringing in my ears continued the whole day. But Father was very pleased—I had aimed at a flight and had knocked down five.