THAT long-legged Americano—walking our sun-baked streets and coughing in front of our straggly tiendas, spending warm nights and cold early dawns in our plaza—you know him? You have seen him?
Our town of San Vicente calls him Mister Gibbons. Just like that: Mister Gibbons. When he found it necessary in the old days to use his signature, it was F. S. Gibbons. His first name we do not remember; many things have happened to keep it away from us. But it does not matter—not now.
The kids of our little town are afraid of Mister Gibbons. Even with his red face almost covered with a brown beard, his eyes hidden underneath thick brown eyebrows, he looks kind. But our kids are afraid of him. Mothers started it, whispering: Ssh, Mister Gibbons is coming. He’ll hear you! And the little children in the streets would leave their playthings—wooden boats, paper caps, blunt-edged bamboo swords and all – and scamper off to seek the protection of their mothers’ skirts. Their eyes would grow big with fear; they would stop wailing. For disciplinary purposes, the mothers of San Vicente find no better thing than the name Mister Gibbons.
He is a “Thomasite,” a member of that first group of American teachers who came to the Philippines in 1903 on board the President Thomas to teach the young natives to speak English and eat imported canned goods, to participate in world Olympic games and, above all, to dig gold for the Americans. And now—having walked our dusty streets all these years, drunk our clear water, breathed in the warm air from the brown rice fields—Mister Gibbons has become part of us.
When he first came to town, he was principal of the public high school. Half his salary he spent advancing the cause of dramatics and athletics in his school. The other half, strangely enough, was spent, wasted, on liquor. Women, yes. Those were his two passions. Wine and women.
He could dwell for hours on equations and double equations, on angles, x and y, corollaries. He could prove that parallel line will eventually meet. Of Byzantium and Medina he could tell many interesting things. We admired him then, worshipped him as if he were the wisest man on earth. Should we have despised him for other things?
No native could equal his capacity for liquor. No other Americano in town could get as dead-drunk as he. He never talked much, not even when he was heavy with potent whiskey. No inhabitant of our little town had the never to tell him he was going beyond the bounds of sobriety. He could have been capable of saying, “Mind your own business!”
We were sorry when he left, although it was best so for him. For a time we missed him: where is that all Americano who drank liquor as if it were coconut water? It would be good if he were detailed to a distant little island where the steamer could not place the bottled demon within his reach. But after three years he came back—back to our hospitality, to the tolerance of San Vicente. He was no longer a school principal. He was a free man, jobless, glad that the government had ceased imposing dignity upon him. Freedom. Freedom at last to drink as much as he could. To hell with dignity…
“We’re glad to have you with us again, Mister Gibbons,” one of his former students said.
That was what he could not resist, could not forget. That open-arms welcome. He said nothing, merely smiled. With a tremendous gulp he emptied his glass and ordered the Chinese waiter to fill it again. Later he could not pay for the liquor.
The stocky policeman would not put him in jail, drunk and defiant as he was. The policeman had once been a student under this Americano and now he was still loyal, ashamed. The town cop did the right thing, the net best thing: he paid for the liquor.
“Thank you,” Mister Gibbons murmured, and moved away.
One afternoon I was standing in a Chinese tienda waiting for a bus. I had but one peseta—just enough to take me to my home to the barrio. Mister Gibbons came slowly toward me, red in the face, thin. A month’s growth of beard could not conceal the broken spirit in him. He held a rattan cane, but he did not use it steady his legs—simply held it so that one end barely touched the ground. In the night when he passed by the nipa houses several dogs invariably barked or howled after him, or made for his wobbly knees. He used that cane then, spitting and muttering low words.
He paused before me, and in a scarcely audible voice he drawled out, “Will you give me a peseta? I’m broke.”
That was his strength, the last threads of good breeding holding him together, his gentlemanly approach. Many persons had been touched by that technique.
“Sorry, Mister Gibbons,” I said, “not today. I’m broke too.”
He moved on without a word. His back was bent. In the middle of the street he paused and coughed long and hard. His khaki pants, falling short on Japanese rubber shoes, were worn white on the knees. He was hatless in the hot sun and his brown hair was dry, unkempt. Shapeless little maps of dried perspiration showed on his dirty white cotton shirt. Then the bus came thundering down the street. He moved on, spat, and coughed again.
The governor of our province ran a private school in a nearby town, and to help his former teacher he offered Mister Gibbons a teaching position. To give the down-and-out foreigner another start in life, to see him become a new man, was one of the governor’s finest dreams. When Mister Gibbons got the job he even forgot to say thank you, but the governor, big-hearted, broad minded, did not notice such a trifle. We bade Mister Gibbons good-bye, wished him good luck.
“Hope you won’t come back any more!”
We meant, of course, that he should hold on to his job, keep it like a man with backbone and strength of will, self-discipline, and all that sort of thing he once preached to us.
In less than a year he came back to us in our little town of San Vicente.
Easily, without qualms, Mister Gibbons could make himself at home anywhere among his old friends. It was good for him to remember a few names; he clung to them as though they were his very life. From Paterno there was a peseta for him every morning. Eladio, squint-eyed owner of a bakery store, welcomed him with expressionless eyes but with a tolerant smile. Mister Gibbons did not ask for a bed—the wooden bench outside the store would do. No one could tell what time in the night he would come unsteadily in, tired, smelly, a lost soul.
We were kind to him in a blind way, we of San Vicente. The lawyers, doctors, teachers—at one time eager-eyed students under a good looking, soft voiced Americano that was Mr. F. S. Gibbons—helped him with the attitude one takes when helping becomes matter-of-fact. His drunken presence became a common sight on our dusty roads, at humble nipa tiendas. If we saw him idling away hours and hours on public benches, red, coughing hoarse and deep, talking to himself though tight-lipped to everyone else, the sun beating upon him, we said, “He’s thinking of his folks, he’s thinking of his home—far, far away across the seas.”
“I’ll give a peso to the fund if he decides to go,” a cloth merchant said.
“We can easily raise the necessary amount,” a councilor broke in, “but he won’t go. You know how he’ll squander it away. No he doesn’t have the nerve to go back now.”
“There!” a young man was shouting down the street, “He’s dying! Mister Gibbons is drunk again. He’s red as the sunset!”
He lay on the sidewalk half-dead, his mouth foaming, mumbling vague words, mere droning sounds. The concrete walk was hard under him. His eyes were closed, but not in sleep, and the natives looked at him with silent, retreating awe. A policeman sought the help of two other brawny men and placed him on a bench in the park, the home of the homeless. Never in jail. Far into the night and the cold dawn his labored, throaty coughing disturbed the village stillness.
“He’s going to die,” mothers said, “and the children of San Vicente will become naughty again.”
“Wine will kill him sure,” fathers agreed.
One day in August when the rains had come, Mister Gibbons disappeared. We heard later that he was in the city, in a sanatorium for tubercular patients. As if his going were a much awaited relief, San Vicente, as one, said, “Good for him. Now perhaps the city authorities will make him go home to America where he belongs.”
The following December, like a prodigal guest, he came back to us, drunk, red-faced as ever, still coughing, still drinking, begging…
The only other American in San Vicente was Mr. Parks, a wealthy landowner who started out as a real estate agent. Though we did not know from where and when he came, we knew that on Saturday nights, to save ten centavos, he walked two kilometers from his home to the movie house or to the boxing stadium. It was from him, the people said, that Mister Gibbons should learn a lesson.
When Mister Gibbons came back, Mr. Parks showed a sudden interest in his welfare. The town, taking notice, said it was racial pride which, though slow in coming, was not too late.
The next day I saw Mister Gibbons at the local hotel. To be sure he was drinking again, but this time his glass contained milk. His face was clean shaven. He met any onlooker’s stare unflinchingly, calmly. He was a new man, he was white again.
In the afternoon, we townspeople that joined the funeral cortege of a friend who had laughed when we remarked that Mister Gibbons would outlive half of San Vicente’s young men, passed by Mr. Parks’ house, which had a balcony running around all four sides. Its posts were painted black. We saw a man sleeping on a cot covered with a mosquito net hanging from the floor of the house. “He should be sleeping upstairs,” I said to myself, “not among those black posts. Why, Death is all around him.” The winds from the fields blew upon the balcony above; Mister Gibbons would have been more comfortable up there.
Perhaps he asked to be left alone, needing all the sleep he could get. It was good enough to be sleeping, not drinking and begging and coughing in the cold dawn. It was good to think he was back on the right path. And Mister Gibbons might have won, might have become strong again. But the good old man, Mr. Parks, met death in an accident, and as was not unexpected, his sole heir was Mister Gibbons.
A week after the funeral Mister Gibbons was at the hotel shouting hoarsely for drinks and more drinks. We could not tell exactly why: Perhaps in this fling he was trying to forget whatever sorrow he felt over the death of his friend, or perhaps it was only his old self asserting its inclination.
“He’s lost,” the people said, shaking their heads, “He’s hopeless, that Americano. No one can save him now, only Death.”
The summer night was warm, and it was the municipal presidente’s house that was being eaten by the flames. In the confusion a lawyer darkly mentioned that a few days before the presidente had bought all the property inherited by Mister Gibbons, who, subsequently, had made several short mad dashes to the hotel.
Everybody was at the scene of the fire—policemen, volunteer fire-fighters, women—all shouting for help. But everyone was afraid. Why couldn’t someone do something to save the presidente’s little girl? In a few more minutes she would be part of the burning mass. The town head himself could not be located. The girl’s shrill little voice was heard above the flames. It would be too late, it would be too—
And then he came, that Americano, red as the fire, unsteady as the flames. He went into the burning house without hesitation, without fear, right into the inferno…
The people said he would die. But what a glorious death it would be for him: a last magnificent gesture to remember him by, to obliterate his wretched past.
But he did not die. It was as if he would not die because there was something else he wanted to accomplish, something far greater than the past and yet still far off. The doctor that saved him was once a student under him. When at last Mister Gibbons could speak again he said it without a moment’s hesitation, just he had dashed into the flames. “Please give me something to drink, something hot,” he said.
Could you disappoint a hero?
The presidente glowed with gratitude. He offered to pay for Mister Gibbons transportation fare to America. “Anything you ask for besides,” he said. “Perhaps your home is in Tennessee or Texas or New York? You would like to see your folks, wouldn’t you, Mister Gibbons?”
A new light, something which had been lost all these years, brightened up Mister Gibbons’ face. But it was gone soon; only for a moment was it beautiful in his eyes. An old weariness, dull, deep, swept over his face. He did not even shake his head to stress his feelings. “Please give me something hot. I’m thirsty,” he said.
Only the other day he saw me again waiting for my bus. He came slowly toward me, pale and thin and bent. The cane was in his hand but now he used it to steady his steps. In a scarcely audible voice he murmured, “Will you give me a peseta? I’m broke.”
Now why should he come to me that way just when I was broke too?
Then, yesterday, as if to make up for lost opportunities, I brought my wife and small boy to town a little shopping. In my heart I hoped to see Mister Gibbons, and we saw him indeed. Sitting on the curb in front of the hotel he looked tired and dreary, lonesome among friends who now seemed to be strangers to him somehow. Many people walked by. They gave him only hurried glances.
My wife put a peso bill in my son’s hand and whispered something in his ear. My boy walked ahead and bravely, innocently, he offered the money to Mister Gibbons.
The Americano looked at my boy and smiled. It was the first smile in years of a very tired man who had made a very, very long journey. Smiling still, he patted my son on the head with a thin, hairy hand. With that same almost fleshless hand he closed the youngter’s palm, the peso bill still there. Mister Gibbons hasn’t lost everything yet.
