The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (68 page)

“What do you expect me to say?”

She bowed and was silent.

“It is your life, Betsy. I am nothing to you … nothing!”

She looked at me, her dark eyes imploring, and when she spoke,
it was almost inaudible. “Pepe, I cannot go. I—” she had difficulty saying it: “I want— I want to be with you.”

The words lifted me up to the clouds, the vast, friendly sky, and joy filled me.

But this cannot be, this can never be. “Betsy,” I said evenly, “I want to tell you that I have thought about you. Every day since I first saw you, and when I kissed you …”

She could not look at me and, again, she bowed.

“But I know who I am. What do they say? Water and oil? No, it is much, much more than that. You will have a boyfriend, someone in your own circle. You will get married, and you will forget me, your flirtation with politics, the Brotherhood.”

She straightened, her eyes blazing.

“And most of all,” I said, “much as I am grateful to you, for your kindness, your graciousness …” I remembered the letter I had written. “Please, I don’t need your help, your pity, I don’t want it.”

“Pity! Pity!” she cried. “Pepe, it is not pity at all. No, it is not pity at all!”

I shook my head. I was determined. “It cannot be otherwise.”

Our hamburgers came, but we did not touch them, nor our coffee. The waitress saw we were having a very serious talk and hastily left us.

“What do you want me to do? Prove to you that it is not pity?” Her breast was heaving, her words were a torrent. “Let us go,” she said, and to the waitress she gave a ten-peso bill. She did not wait for her change nor did she take the hamburgers, which we had not touched.

I followed her to her car and we drove off, the tires screaming as she shifted gears and stepped on the gas. We tore down M. H. del Pilar, and at the end of the road, without warning, she turned right, into the entrance of the Hawaiian Motel.

I was too surprised to speak.

A boy rushed toward us as she slowed down. He pointed to an open garage door, and she drove straight to it, slammed on the brakes. In a while, the garage door went down and we were alone in the musty semi-darkness. She turned to me, her face still grim. “If it is proof you want, you will get it now. It is not pity. No, it is not pity at all.”

I had never been to a motel, although I knew how they operated
on a short-time basis. She was now taken aback by what she had done for she hesitated, then asked, “Pepe, what will we do? How do we …?”

Our eyes locked. It was the first time for both of us, and we laughed nervously, self-consciously. A door at one side obviously led to the room upstairs. We went up the flight and opened the door to a small anteroom with a cheap, leatherette sofa, a table, and two empty glasses. Beyond was the bedroom, and, gingerly, we went in. A big double bed, music, the air conditioner turned on, and, on one side of the bed, parallel to it, a huge mirror.

Betsy and I laughed. The buzzer rang, and together we went out. The boy came up with a clean sheet, a white plastic jug of iced water, and what appeared to be a registration book. He seemed amused for Betsy and I began examining the book, the squiggles that passed for names.

“You sign your name here, sir,” the boy said, but his eyes were on Betsy.

I turned to her. “What will I put down?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Pepe Samson, of course,” she said emphatically.

I put it down like she said, in very legible script.

Address: Tondo, Manila. Residence Tax Number?

“I don’t have any,” I told the boy.

He smiled. “Any number will do, sir.”

I wrote down a lot of sevens.

“How much?” I asked.

“Short time, sir?”

I looked at Betsy. “How long is short time?” she asked.

“Four hours, miss.”

“Mrs.!” she corrected him.

“Mrs.” the boy said sheepishly. “It is twenty-two pesos.”

“I do not have that much money,” I whispered to her.

“All right,” she said, opening her handbag. The boy said we could pay later, but she paid at once.

Alone by ourselves, with the latch on, I watched her sit uneasily on the edge of the wide bed. When she looked at me, she blushed so beautifully I went to her, kissed her cheek, and said, “Mrs. Samson, I don’t need any proof.”

Her arms went around me tentatively, then tightly, and her mouth was warm and sweet. “Yes, you do,” she said.

In spite of her sophistication and her liberty with words like fuck and bullshit, the truth was that she was prim, even prudish. Alone at last, she could not even undress with me before her. She went to the bathroom, and when she finally emerged, a sheet was draped around her. She had all the blinds drawn. It took us so long to begin—more than two hours, I think, and I was surprised that I was the first. And it was all there—the tiny blotches on the sheet, stark red on white. She had grimaced, but did not complain and I had thought, having read once how ecstasy and pain contorted a woman’s face in the same manner, that she had been lifted to orgasmic heights, but in truth, she had suffered, and when it was over, we examined the mess. She embraced me and whispered, “We are now one.”

After a while, she nudged at me, but I, too, had been hurt and could no longer respond. Also, I could only think of that silly mirror that I had forgotten to look at, and that after all these years, I had finally lain on a bed with a mattress. I remembered the two hamburgers we did not have the foresight to bring along, for by then I had become really hungry.

We were quiet most of the way back to the university. The immensity of what had happened began to worry me; it should have been the fulfillment that it was, but I was only being dragged deeper into a bog of contradiction. I wanted to escape. Still, I was grateful for her gift of love—our oneness now of spirit and being. I was humbled by this girl who would never really be mine, who had proven not her virtue but her willingness to take me as I am.

No one can explain me better than myself. How many times have I stood before the mirror of the old cabinet in Antipolo, before the cracked mirror in the cramped and narrow room I had shared with Toto and pointed the accusing finger at this face and said to him, “You sonofabitch. You screwed up everything again.” And I have done this, loathing this bundle of nerves and arteries, knowing no one stands between myself and perdition. I should be grateful to Betsy, she could have everything and need not be encumbered by me. I can bring her nothing but bad luck and hardship. Who am I to
covet her? Why should she breathe the same foul air that is in my lungs? I should not repeat what my father had done.

I wanted to tell her all of this and of my days in the sun, the scent of new harvest, of early evenings and December chill when smoke from morning fires was around us in a haze and the world was silvery with promise; but she came from a planet beyond my vision, and I could only mumble senselessly about the damn traffic, my having to see Professor Hortenso; I even forgot to thank her when we finally reached Recto.

Professor Hortenso was in the faculty room. I told him that I had received an urgent phone call but could not tell him about it in the presence of the other professors. He stepped out with me into the corridor.

“You must be careful now,” he said. “Did you notice that there are new faces in the classrooms, students who are older than most? They are being admitted though the semester is about to draw to a close.”

I did not notice them, not in our classes of sixty. Professor Hortenso said they were intelligence agents, and they may have already infiltrated the Brotherhood.

“But what can they find out?” I asked. “Everything we do is public, our publications. Surely, they know everything.”

Professor Hortenso paused; the bell had rung and students had started to file out of the classrooms, transforming the sweaty corridors into rivulets of babbling, jostling humanity.

“You are wrong, Pepe,” he said. “You cannot have revolution without conspiracy. You and I, we are members of that conspiracy. The leaders of the Brotherhood—and you are one—are involved.”

“I am not aware,” I protested.

“You will be,” he assured me.

I told him about Juan Puneta, that he had gone to Tondo again, left his card at the
kumbento
and that he wanted me to ring him up.

He seemed thoughtful. “I don’t know what he wants. But just the same, give him a call and tell me what happens.”

He was going to his class, and he asked me to walk with him to the Education building, where he was handling a graduate seminar on Philippine culture.

“They have taken some of our boys in Diliman,” he said. “We have not heard from them. We don’t know what has happened to
them. We have tried tracing them but without success. They just disappeared. So, be careful, Pepe. We can all be easily disposed of.”

“They can arrest me any time they want,” I said. “They will find nothing on me.”

He shook his head. “Pepe, they will find many things. Just be careful.”

I remembered Ka Lucio’s warning. But what was there to betray? I knew no secrets, made no important decisions.

Professor Hortenso went on. “If I disappear, or if I leave Manila, do you know where to find me?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know where many of our Directorate members live.”

“I can always find you then,” he said, “in the church.”

“And you?”

“I am helping set up our committees in Central Luzon—Tarlac, Nueva Ecija. You were right, Pepe, the Huks, their children who are now grown up, they are important links not only to the past but to the masses—our base.”

“Ka Lucio—”

“Yes,” he said, “I am now sure his help is very important.”

After my eight-thirty class, I went to a small crummy bookshop on Recto where there was a pay phone and dialed the number Puneta left. No, he was not in—it was one of the maids who answered. But would I leave a message as to where I could be reached tomorrow? He would not be back till late that night.

I will be in school in the late afternoon, I said; and in the Barrio the whole morning.

Hortenso’s warning disturbed me. I was slowly being sucked into a whirlpool, and I did not like it. Ka Lucio’s warning, his lecture on betrayal, bothered me, too, but as I told Professor Hortenso, I knew no secrets and I was not about to join any armed group, much as I longed to avenge Toto’s death. It is not that I was afraid of violence—I saw it every day in the Barrio, the slow, deadly violence inflicted on us, the gang fights, the knifings that were common in Tondo, the malnutrition, the stifling dreariness that deformed the body and the spirit. But I had also begun to know a woman’s love, to eat not just enough but what I wanted; with a little more effort, I
would not be just an acolyte; the doors that had been shut to me were finally opening and, beyond them, heroin dreams were beckoning. I was not beguiling or deluding myself merely because I had become a member of the National Directorate or a full scholar in school; after studying Spanish, I realized that if I worked hard at things I really liked, I could excel at them. And being a revolutionary was not in my compass. I could appreciate what Ka Lucio had done, what the Brotherhood was doing, and I was doing a bit if only to merit my position and to salve my conscience; but from the very beginning, politics and politicians had been a bore to me, and I was not now ready to transform myself into that slimy creature I had always loathed.

There should be ways by which I could withdraw unobtrusively from the Brotherhood’s Directorate. After all, I earned nothing there. At the same time, I wanted to keep Professor Hortenso’s friendship, not because it was necessary for my continued employment on the school paper, but because I had grown to respect and like him and his wife. I would still participate in the demonstrations, help in the planning, write manifestoes, things expected of me, but I would be in the shadows, then ease myself away before I finish college.

My new relationship with Betsy bothered me, not with guilt feelings but with confusion. I loved her, but at the same time I desired Lily, too, and despaired for her, wondering about her customers, and the “sensation” she gave them. I often lay awake at night, waiting for her to come home, and could only go to sleep when I heard her walk up the alley, bidding her mother good evening. She would sleep till about ten in the morning at about the same time I would be through with my cleaning, and she would talk with me from her window—nonsense things about us and the Barrio. Then she would be off by eleven after a hurried lunch, for she was expected to be at the Colonial from noon to midnight. If she was late, she would be fined, and if she was late three times in a week, she would be suspended for a week. It was only on Tuesdays that she could really talk with me, but these days were spent more on shopping, sewing, and helping her mother.

Sometimes we reminisced about Toto. Now I was working very hard in the church, and Father Jess increased my allowance. I had asked if he was going to take another fellow, but he told me flatly it
was going to be my decision, because the new boy would have to share the room with me; wasn’t it like that with Toto? It was he who brought me to Tondo. Roger, who lived close by, was helping a bit in the church now. Furthermore, I began to like being alone, and would find it difficult to adjust to a new roommate the way I had grown accustomed to Toto.

Yes, I missed him, his subdued and steady pushing when I flagged and, most of all, our quiet talks. I often caught myself asking questions aloud and somehow expecting them to be answered. But Toto was not there, and Roger was not bright enough to take his place.

I decided to see Ka Lucio again. I would have seen him more if only to listen to his stories about the war with the Japanese. Professor Hortenso had frightened me with his knowledge that some of our members had disappeared without any trace and that there were more who would certainly vanish.

I will not ask those asinine questions that had rankled us in the past, those impertinent questions about the validity of government, the obligations of the governed and those who govern. I had learned the answers to these early in Cabugawan.