At War's End 1 The Dinner Party

At War's End 2 The Investigation

ON July 14, 1950, in the evening, Virgilio killed himself in his bedroom by slitting his wrists with a straight razor and thrusting them into a pail of warm water.

His body was not found until the next morning.

He did not appear for breakfast at eight. At eight-thirty, Josefa, the housemaid, knocked on the door of Virgilio’s bedroom. Getting no response, she asked Arturo, the driver, to climb up the window to look inside.

The three maids panicked. Arturo drove off at once in the Packard to get me. After leaving a note for the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, we stopped at the police station near General Luna to report the suicide.

Two police officers were immediately assigned to investigate. They came with us in the car to the house in Ermita.

They started interrogating me in the car.

“Who are you?” Police Officer No. 1 asked.

“Why are you involved?”, Police Officer No. 2 demanded.

I was somewhat nervous but as calmly as I could be, I answered.

“My name is Nestor Gallego. I am a second-year student at University of the Philippines. Virgilio Serrano, the deceased, and I come from the same town, Jaen, in Nueva Ecija. I have known Virgilio since 1942 and I think he considers me his closest friend in university. That is the reason the driver came to me.”

The policemen brought together the household staff. “Did you touch, move or remove anything in the bedroom? Did any of you go out of the house after the driver left for the university?”

To both questions, the maids answered, No, whereupon they were told to stay within the premises for separate interviews later in the morning.

Police Officer No. 1 went out to the yard presumably to look for clues. Police Officer No. 2 made a sketch of the scene and then searched the bedroom systematically. He opened the drawers of the tallboy carefully, he felt around the linen and underwear. The wardrobe and the aparador were also examined. But it was on the contents of the rolltop desk that No. 1 concentrated. The notebooks, a diary, and address book were all neatly arranged around a Remington typewriter.

He was looking for a letter, a note even, to give him a clue or lead to the motive for the suicide.

On the first page of one of the notebooks were the “Down There” and then “To my friend and confidant, Nestor Gallego, with affection.” Although unsigned, it was in Virgilio’s spidery hand.

“You know anything about this?” No. 1 said in a low, threatening voice. He handed it to me.

I leafed through the pages. It looked like a long poem that had been broken down into thirteen cantos.

“No,” I said. “I have not seen this before.”

“But it is for you. What does it say?”

“I don’t know, I have to read it first,” cuttingly.

My sarcasm rolled off him like water on a duck. “Well then—read,” he ordered, motioning me to the wooden swivel chair.

A frisson ran up my spine. My hands trembled as I opened the notebook and scanned the poem. There were recognizable names, places and events. There were references to his professors in university and his tutors in Jaen. The names of some of his inquilinos appeared again and again. But the longest sections were about Honesto and Clara Garcia and Ricardo Valdefuerza.

From the tone and the words, it was a satire patterned closely after Dante’s Inferno. Virgilio, like Dante, had assigned or consigned people to different circles “down there.” It ended with a line from Valery, “A l’extrême de toute pensée est un soupir.”

“I cannot say truthfully that I understand it. I know some of the people and places referred to but not why they appear in this poem.”

“I will have to bring this back for analysis,” No. 1 said, giving it to No. 2 who put it carelessly in a plastic carryall.

“When you are done with it, can I have it back? I have a right to it since it was dedicated to me.” I wanted desperately to read it because I felt that it concealed the reason for Virgilio’s suicide.

They spent another hour talking to the household help and scribbling in grimy notebooks.

Before they left past one o’clock, No. 1 said: “It is clearly a suicide. There was no struggle. In fact, it was a very neat suicide.” He made it sound as if it was a remarkable piece of craftsmanship. I hated him.

I went with Arturo to the post office to send a telegram to Jaen. “Virgilio dead stop please come at once.”

The undertaker took charge thereafter, informing us that by six o’clock, the remains would be ready for viewing. He asked me to select the clothes for the dead. I chose the white de hilo pants and the white cotton shirt that Virgilio wore the other day.

“It is wrinkled,” the undertaker said. “Don’t you want to choose something else.”

“No,” I shouted at him. “Put him in these.”