The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (14 page)

“It is not true,” he said, feeling sorry for having been so direct. “You are dramatizing things again.”

“It’s true,” Carmen insisted. “So don’t think I’m being nasty this way. If I had told Papa that I’d already gotten married to you, he couldn’t have cared less.”

She sidled closer to him, her face beseeching. He touched her cheek and kissed her gently. “We shouldn’t be mad at each other on this day—of all days,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t tell you these things; they are what I should keep to myself.”

“And I … I have no pride when I am with you.”

“Listen, so you think you know what my father did when I was young? I told you, he bound me to a sled and horsewhipped me. Do you know what a horsewhip is? Well, my old man was careful not to strike my eyes. Just my back. You saw the scars.”

“It’s just a few marks—not really scars, just white marks,” Carmen said. “Mama, well, you know who she is, how her tongue works. She was poor until Father met her.”

He had wanted then to tell her how he had lied, that his father was in prison, not dead.

But his courage did not come. So tonight he decided that the problem would never surface again; he must live the lie now and talk of his father as belonging to the past, irrevocably there and pertinent only as a memory. He caressed her hair and told her how his mother had always been an angel, how she had slaved without a word of complaint.

“Perhaps you will be like her,” he said.

And she kissed him. “That’s the best compliment you’ve given me, darling.”

A balut
^†
vendor approached them. After refusing, Carmen started the car and they slid back to the boulevard.

She wanted to drive him to Antipolo, but it was late and they parted instead at her gate. He waited until she was safely within the high, white-washed walls, then he walked to the corner and got a cab.

Tony did not wake his sister, choosing, instead, to go to bed immediately. But sleep was a long time coming, maybe because of the coffee and the brandy. It was long past midnight and he wondered if Carmen was awake, too. She always had an agile mind; in Washington they would sit up talking, cozily snuggled together. But he could not recall anything searing that they had talked about, nothing that had bared her soul, although he had told her much about himself.
All that he could remember was the coffeepot bubbling somewhere in the kitchen, the late-night TV shows they watched together, her eagerness. Why had it been that way? Was it true after all that Carmen never knew how it was to be really loved, and that because she did not know, she had tried to find the meaning of surrender? There would be no secret meetings anymore; her most important problem was solved.

Below the house, in the slimy ditch half-covered with grass, the frogs started to croak, for the rains had finally come.

D
on Manuel went to the railroad station at noon to see them off. Just as Carmen had said, he did not seem ruffled at all. “Your mama is angry,” he told Tony as they stepped out of the car.

Tony had not expected him to come, and in Don Manuel’s presence his composure left him. “Thank you, sir,” he stammered. “I knew you wouldn’t approve of what we had done.” He tried to sound sincere. “But Carmen and I … we thought there was no other way.”

“You should have seen the rumpus at the breakfast table this morning when I broke the news,” Carmen said gaily. “You should have seen Mother cry. She was just putting on an act, of course. Mother was glad, too, that I’m already married. Now she won’t have to worry about me being seduced.”

“I had other plans, of course. I thought we would get to know more of each other,” Don Manuel said evenly.

Carmen sidled to her father. “Thanks, Papa,” she said. “But I’m sure you’ll like Tony just the same.”

“Now, Tony,” Don Manuel turned to him. “When you get back you proceed directly to the house. No ‘buts’ about it. It’s so wide
and empty, what with all the children already married and living on their own.….”

Tony looked at Carmen. He had hoped that when they returned, Carmen would stay with her folks until he found a small place to rent. But now that Don Manuel had spoken, his predicament seemed solved. He could not think of bringing Carmen to Antipolo—no, that was farthest from his mind. He turned to Carmen, and by the look in her eyes he knew that this, too, was what she desired.

“I thank you for your offer, sir,” he said humbly, “but—”

Don Manuel leaned back on the couch: “I know what you are thinking—of Mama and her displeasure. You don’t know her well enough. I’ll take care of her, you’ll see.”

Don Manuel stood up, and because they were the only people in the waiting room, he spoke freely: “I believe that you should live independently, but that should be when you really have settled a few important details—after you have found a place. Give us a chance. We won’t keep you forever.”

Don Manuel’s driver entered the room with their tickets.

“I wired the Pines Hotel this morning and have already arranged the bridal suite for you,” Don Manuel said at the door. “It’s a wedding present to my favorite daughter and to you.”

But for the scenery the trip was uneventful. The city’s fringes marched by—the same ugly houses huddled along the tracks, the muddied water and filth was a moat between him and the houses and their squalid yards. Then the train broke out into the open country, into sodden fields that were now starting to be tinged with green. The houses were no different in their smallness from those on the edges of the city. Why had the country not changed at all? Why were people like Don Manuel hoarding their money in Manila and cutting themselves off from the land that was the beginning and the repository of all wealth?

The sun poured down in a steady stream, saturating the landscape and burnishing the fields and the mountains with dusty blue and streaks of gold. The thatched houses bobbed out of the brown earth and the singing grass. But in this air-conditioned coach Tony could not drink in the air, could not listen to the wind, could only be
aware of the nearness of his wife and her domestic talk, her reminiscences of New England and Washington, of the changing colors of autumn, and the reds and golds of the maples and the sycamores.

“Have you ever tried swimming naked in a muddy brook?” he asked as the train sang over a creek, rich brown with mud. “In that dirt?” she exclaimed, a little aghast, and he explained to her that there was a world of difference between the mud in the fields and the mud in the
esteros
^*
in Manila. There is, he told her impatiently and with conviction, such a thing as clean mud. “Yes, yes, darling,” she said, “there is clean mud.” And she nudged him in that insinuating manner with which he had become familiar. She was referring to him as clean, wholesome mud, and for a moment anger crossed his mind—but only for a moment, for he had looked out the window then, into the flood of late afternoon, and rising on the horizon was this hump of a mountain streaked with veins of gold, and beyond this familiar blue was Rosales and home. He could not imagine himself being born in another place or growing up in another town, and nostalgia lashed at him, whipped away the anger that had started and stirred that old and nameless longing to see the town again, its crooked and dusty streets, and the neighborhood—the cogon shanties, the bamboo trees creaking in the wind, the carabao dung on the narrow trail that led to the river, and the papayas blooming in the morning. But he was not going home now, just passing through, just winging and dreaming through—and there would be no way by which he could find how it was with Rosales, if it had changed, and Emy, too, if she was all right and healthy and not completely blighted by a past that had made her fair game to the devil. He himself could feel his voice sandpapery and hoarse: “Beyond that mountain is home.…”

She glanced out of the window and smiled that quick, meaningless smile which meant that she understood but was not particularly interested, then went back to the picture magazine she had bought at Tutuban. He sat back beside her, wondering at the way his life had changed, wondering how he ever got here, in this air-conditioned coach beside this fair-skinned and lovely woman. The great distances he had traveled, the bitter winters of New England, the summer in
Spain, and the searching among the archives in Barcelona and Seville—all these now seemed shriveled into this hollow moment, this certitude of Carmen and the honeymoon. He sought her hand silently and held it, pressed it, his mind lazily meandering back to remembered images—not to those great distances he had crossed but to those places where he had seen the seed become a plant, to the house he had left, the home with its leaking roof, with plows and harrows rusting below the bamboo stairs, and the chicken roosting under the kitchen, the fence that had fallen apart. The house no longer stood, of course, for it had been dismantled long ago when his father went to jail and the family left Rosales for the uncertain beneficence of Manila. There was no Samson left in Rosales; there was nothing left for him to go back to or to claim but Emy, who lived on the other side of the broken-down fence. And if he did see her again, how would she take him? Would she loathe him for having left her or would she look up to him in wonder and say, Tony, you’ve gone so far, you’ve changed. And deep within his heart, he could feel that overwhelming sense of helplessness, that awful incapacity to hold back what had already happened. If he had stayed behind, if he had not gone to America, perhaps things would have been different for Emy, and that ignominy that had overcome her might not have touched her at all. The coolness of this coach, the softness of the girl beside him, and the racing of this train toward its destination were the realities he could not now ignore. They were the solid shackles around his ankles and his wrists, reminding him of what could no longer be changed.

It was when they had already arrived in Baguio that he recalled that they had not acted like newly weds at all, that they had gone through the trip as if they were an old married couple.

They arrived at the hotel at dusk and were immediately taken to their room. Now that they were alone an awkwardness commingled with relief came over Tony. It was a strange feeling, both pleasant and unreal, for it was something new. Not that he had never been alone with Carmen before this union was sanctified, but now the pleasure of being together was no longer the delirious thrill that he had expected it to be, for all that he expected of it was the possession and not the discovery of that possession. For a while he lingered by the door, holding her hand, and he would have asked her what
she was thinking had not the bellhop come at that moment with their luggage and switched on the fluorescent lamp in the ceiling.

Tony surveyed the suite, the well-ordered sofa and chairs done in rich, red upholstery, the fresh calla lilies and the dahlias as big as saucers in the slim, metallic vases. The paneling of red dao shone in the cold, blue light. No trace of pine scent lingered in the room, which, in fact, smelled faintly of floor wax. Then they were alone again. Night was falling swiftly outside, a phone jangled somewhere in the quiet corridors, and the cold of Baguio finally touched them, told them that the time to make love had come.

Carmen sat on the wide, cream-colored bed and watched him open the lock of the suitcase.

“I think we should do it as we have planned,” Tony said. “About entering this room, I mean.” She shrugged. “You can keep the illusion at least, baby,” he said, grinning. “You shouldn’t wear a Good Friday look—my God, not on your wedding day!”

He went to her, lifted her, and kissed her. The lips on which his mouth fell were warm but unresponsive, and Tony quickly attributed this to Baguio, to the slivers of cold that stole into this rich, intimate room. Or could it be more than the cold? Remembering her condition and the life that was developing within her, he felt an abiding warmth for this girl who had accepted him.

“
Esto
, we should not have bothered coming here,” she said with an air of boredom. “I didn’t like the look of that bellhop when we came in—and the clerk at the desk. They were practically undressing me. Me, of all people! Now, if we had gone to the summer house, as Papa had suggested earlier, we would be alone just the same.”

“Honeymoons are meant to be spent in hotels, baby,” he said, trying to humor her.

She sighed and placed her clothes on the bed. “It seems foolish, doesn’t it?” she asked but expected no answer. “A two-day honeymoon. A weekend actually, then you rush back to that miserable university for the good of this country’s future, for the benefit of the downtrodden Ilocano race.”

It was her way of showing displeasure and he brushed aside her sarcasm. “You married a teacher,” he said.

“An associate professor,” she corrected him. Her blitheness had returned with a quickness that pleased him.