The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (50 page)

He passed the glasses with a flourish, his eyes crinkling in pleasure: “We have to celebrate. Pepe, you are the new literary editor. One of the judges wanted you immediately to be the managing editor, but you are a freshman.”

Toto was looking at me, wonder in his eyes.

“Thank you, sir,” I said, “I know you said good things about me. I cannot thank you enough.”

He took off his glasses; he looked younger without them. “But that is it! I was the last to go over the papers. You were one of the ten newcomers. I did not say a single word about you. The three other judges did all the talking—they were all for you, the way you wrote your essay, ‘The Role of Youth.’ They simply loved it, the probity, the freshness.”

“I wrote as simply as I could, like you said.”

“Simplicity,” the professor was expansive. “Not simple. You know the difference.”

I nodded.

“It was unanimous. You will be the literary editor, which means you are third in line. And next year, you can be managing, like I said, or even the editor. You have no one to be grateful to but yourself. You don’t owe me anything.”

“You told me, sir, to take the exam. Toto gave me hints. No, I am grateful just the same.”

The brandy burned my throat. Toto must have been drinking in the sacristy for he emptied his glass without wincing.

Mrs. Hortenso joined us for the same weak coffee in the living
room, her handsome face streaked with perspiration, which she wiped with her apron. The living room was shabby and cluttered with magazines and pamphlets, the old rattan furniture covered with crocheted doilies. But if the house was threadbare, it was certainly rich with books. One wall was lined with shelves and the books were even laid atop one another so that no space was wasted.

Mrs. Hortenso saw me looking at the titles. “That’s where his salary goes,” she said. “Why, if he could, he would also pay for the publication of the articles of Juan Puneta.”

Professor Hortenso scowled at her, but she did not mind him. I had heard of Puneta—a man of great wealth, a champion of nationalist causes, a graduate of one of the English universities; he also had the reputation of being unabashedly on the side of virtue.

Mrs. Hortenso must have noted my questioning look. “If you’ll be with the organization long enough, you will surely meet him. And you will be able to know what he has between his ears. He thinks he is a writer, too.”

Professor Hortenso looked at her again, and I could see he was not pleased with the revelations his wife was making. Mrs. Hortenso continued blithely: “I wonder who reads all the things my husband writes. I do, of course, because I have to proofread them.”

The professor’s countenance changed and he smiled at her.

“I hope you will not be a writer,” Mrs. Hortenso said, appraising me, “even if you are urged to be one. I hope in the end you will do something else. Otherwise, I will have nothing but pity for whoever your wife will be.”

“I will not get married, ma’am,” I said.

“He will be a priest,” Toto added.

She laughed then left us to do the dishes, for they had no maid. By ourselves, Professor Hortenso became serious. “Tell me, Pepe,” he asked, “what are your plans?”

“I don’t know, sir,” I said. “I told you I need money.”

“I understand that,” he said. “But what will you write? What will you do after school? What can you do for the Brotherhood? You are a member, you know—an important member. And most of all, you can write. How will you use your time?”

I was tempted to brag about my karate lessons, how good I had become with the flying kick, but Toto would probably not understand.
“I don’t really like writing, sir,” I said, “unless I have to. It is easy for me, stringing words together, but my thoughts sometimes come faster than I can write them.”

“What do you like to do then?”

“Eat,” I said quickly. I would have added “fuck,” but that would have shocked Toto.

They laughed and I joined them. “He is always making jokes,” Toto said, thinking perhaps I was being funny and did not realize how honestly, how truly I liked to eat. I always look back, for instance, to my first week in Manila—the
comida China
, the steak, the whole fried chicken, the pig innard
halo-halo
, and that exotic lunch at the Japanese restaurant. To have the stomach full, to savor all new and wonderful tastes—how I longed for these. I wanted to tell them that the Brotherhood bored me, that I joined only because I did not want to say no to Toto, that if I had to be a writer so that I could make a little money, I would do that—it would certainly be safer, perhaps more mentally exacting, but I would not have to deal with psychos and those poor addicts. I would write for money, be a politician, be a member of the Student Council only because these positions meant money, scholarship, the things that would make life comfortable and worth all the sweat and the saliva.

Professor Hortenso was saying, “Your essay was easily the best and it should be in the first issue of the paper. We will offprint about a thousand, distribute them within the organization, to other schools, paste them on bulletin boards. Then the Student Council, and afterward, maybe secretary, and, finally, president. With this essay, you will be very popular on the campus. Your election is almost assured.”

We would have stayed longer talking about politics and the Brotherhood, but he had a class at three and I was eager to rush home to Lucy.

As we walked toward the boulevard for the ride to Dimasalang, Toto was all questions: “What did you put in that essay? You made such an impression on Professor Hortenso, he even told me you could easily be the best editorial writer the paper ever had. I always knew you could write, ever since that paper you wrote on
Don Quixote.
”

“I read Cervantes three times. And not in comic books.”

“What did you say in the essay?” he was insistent.

“What they wanted to hear,” I said with some disgust. “What else would I say? I can dance to any tune they play, I anticipate their moods, their desires. I was not being honest, the way I am honest with you. Those blasted judges—sorry, Toto, but I suppose this includes Professor Hortenso—they are full of shit. They expect us to be full of shit, too. I just wrote what they wanted. It was so damn easy to fool them.”

“Pepe!” he sounded aghast. “You are joking again.”

“I am not,” I said. “What do you think the role of the youth is?”

We paused and he turned to me, his eyes afire with purpose, with vision and all the blather that the Brotherhood had pounded into him. “To look toward the future,” he said in a tone almost exalting. “To see to it that the mistakes of the past will not be committed again. To create a society that is egalitarian, that is dedicated to the upliftment of the masses. To serve the people, that is what!”

“Bullshit!” I shouted at him. “Now listen, my friend. The youth have no role. They have no jobs. They have no money. They are not in power and they do not make decisions. If there is going to be a war, they will all be dumped into the army. And they will be killed like young men everywhere have been killed—whether or not they believe in the war. Having no role is their role.”

He stared at me, unbelieving. “You really think that?”

I nodded.

“And still wrote differently?”

I nodded again.

He took a deep breath, then it came, “Son of a whore! Cheat, liar!”

“Son of a whore yourself,” I flung back. “I did it for something. Can you not see that? How can I pay back the five pesos you loaned me? The
siopao
you stuffed into my stomach? Get it into your simple head that I need the money, the scholarship. I am honest with myself, Toto, and with you. So, damn you, don’t you ever call me a liar. You are my friend so I am telling you this. Now—” I poked a finger at his face. I had become really angry with him, and we had stopped on the sidewalk. “Now, shall we go on being friends, or is this the last time I will talk with you?”

Toto bowed and shook his head; when he turned to me again and we started walking, his eyes, even with his eyeglasses on, were misty. “I understand, Pepe,” his voice quavered. “Yes, we will always
be friends. But can you not see?” His face was taut and pale. “It is so clear. You had to do this, to lie, to cheat—things you really don’t like to do—and only because you—” his voice was now hoarse, “you … we, Pepe … we are poor. The
Wretched of the Earth
—read it some time. We—the poor—have no choice.”

His voice faltered and he turned away; he was crying, so I placed an arm around his shoulder. We had reached the boulevard.

A jeepney to Dimasalang had come. “But we are not alone now, Toto,” I said, then broke hastily away from him. What he had said skewered me, lanced me, hurt me so grievously it was almost physical.

Lucy did not help ease my depression. By now she was used to my erratic schedule and took my late arrivals with grace. Without my telling her, she lighted the kerosene stove and heated a lunch of snail and mudfish, but the food at Professor Hortenso’s had sufficed. Perhaps she was surprised that I gave her but a perfunctory kiss when I arrived, and when I called from upstairs that I was not hungry, she came up to my room and lay beside me.

For some time now, I had been thinking about our relationship—extremely convenient and pleasurable—but there were aspects of it that were hazy. Too many questions had begun to form in my mind that needed to be answered. What, for instance, if she got pregnant.

“You don’t have to worry about that,” she assured me, pressing her belly to my side. “I am taking pills.”

“Where did you get them?”

“Do you need to know?”

“I would like to.”

“Come with me to the Family Planning Center in Dimasalang—that is where I sometimes go when I say I am going to my sister’s.”

“You had to fill out forms?”

She laughed. “Do I have to tell the truth?”

“Did he start you on pills?”

She was silent.

“We cannot get married, you know that.”

“Because I am just a servant?”

That never entered my mind as the reason. “No,” I protested. “I cannot feed you.”

“I can feed myself,” she said with a laugh.

But her relationship with the other man irritated me. “Do you still see him?” I asked, hoping she would not avoid the question.

She stood up. “I thought this is something we will not talk about,” she said pointedly. “If I see him now and then, it’s not important to you.”

“It is,” I said, rising and confronting her. “I don’t want to share you with anyone.”

“I am not your wife.”

“You prostitute!” I lashed at her.

She looked at me aghast, then turned and ran down the stairs.

I did not follow her; I had uttered
the
word and quickly realized my mistake. Remorse filled me. I had no money to give Lucy. How about him, whoever he was? And why was she not faithful to him if she loved him?

She was in the living room when I went down, lying on the sofa; her eyes were red from crying, but there were no more tears. I sat beside her, and she turned on her back. “Lucy,” I said, “forgive me. I love you.”

I surprised myself, telling her I loved her, holding her hand, kissing her hair. “I cannot bear the thought that another man …”

She remained immobile; she did not push my hand or turn away as I kissed her cheek. Words were not enough, but still … “Be honest with me. I love you, can you not see that? Who is he? What has he that I don’t have, that you still have to go to him making all those pretenses that it is your sister you are seeing? Why can’t you leave him? Does he give you a lot of money—and I cannot even give you a centavo …”

She turned on her side and hugged me. “Pepe,” she said in a voice husky with sorrow, “we cannot change things now. Yes, your uncle gives me money.”

I
t was just a matter of time before I would lose Lucy—this I knew not as instinct but as implacable fate, and the knowledge seared. She was the first; she was, like myself, a victim of this vicious condition, this living. Could we have avoided not just this entanglement but this very station into which we were flung? Always, there is something conspiratorial about circumstances that merge and fit, about feelings that ravage, showing how human and fickle we all are.

I always remember what Mother told me when I was about nine or ten: all those we love we will eventually lose, all those we hate we will eventually face. This is the inevitable sequence, the deafening roll that follows the lightning flash, the drab brown of the fields after the living green of the rainy season.

My first loss that Mother had described came the year the harvest had been niggardly. I thought I would never be able to continue schooling, which would not have mattered, except that, for Mother, this would have meant the end of the world.

I was fond of animals as if they were friends with whom I talked—stray dogs, cats, carabaos, hens and the roosters that chased and mounted them. I understand now the refusal of Buddhists to kill
animals although they may not hesitate to dispose of their fellow men who cross them. They would eat meat as long as they did not do the actual butchering. I read somewhere that the cows roaming the streets of India are holy not because they are anointed but because, in rural India, they provide milk for the people and fire for their stoves. They may just be a pack of old, rickety bones held together by tough, dried-up skin, but an Indian writer said he could not endure to see them killed for meat because he had grown up with them, slept with them on the same earthen floor.

I understand this feeling.

The space below our house was walled with split bamboo, and there we stored battered furniture that could no longer be salvaged but were still precious enough not to be dispatched as firewood. Under the house, too, were four solid hardwood posts uprooted from the Ilocos. A huge bamboo basket sat in the center, circular and tall as a man and wide enough to contain a calf. During the harvest season it was half filled with the grain some of Mother’s customers used to pay her. But in June, July, and August, the basket was empty, for we had either eaten all the grain or Mother had sold it for my school expenses.