The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (11 page)

She refused to sit down—no, they must leave right away. Her mother was home at the moment, and Don Manuel would be home before five—he was scheduled to play a round of golf before sunset. They sailed out, Carmen filled with banter, Tony uneasy and serious, into the sparkling sunlight.

Her Thunderbird, which had arrived with them on the ship, had been unloaded and serviced and was parked at the riverside lot. “The
traffic is awful,” she said as they got into the low-slung thing, flaming red and a beauty among the old cars parked alongside it. “It’s like learning how to drive again.”

In a while they were free from the knot of traffic and the car hummed evenly on the asphalt. She had always been a careful driver and she was more so now because her car was new. There was no disconcerting shift of gears, no jerky stops. As the coupe hummed up the Santa Mesa incline, she placed a hand on his thigh.

“
Oye
, remember now,” she said with a slight, knowing pressure, “Mama always goes by first impressions. It’s not that what she thinks matters. But, you see, she is my mother and yours, too, now. You may just as well get used to that fact. My family isn’t so bad, Tony, not half as bad as some people may have already made you think.”

He had not been attentive to her chatter, for he had been engrossed in what was ahead, in the scene that would probably be created, and he did not realize that, at last, a cool wind had swooped down upon them, clean and fresh, now that they had risen above the level of Manila and ascended the hilly suburb.

“Yes,” Carmen repeated with emphasis. “We aren’t the monsters some people think.”

“Who said that?” Tony asked, moving closer to her. The drift of her talk caught up with him.

She said seriously, “We are always supposed to have more malice and wickedness simply because we have money. That’s the proletarian way of thinking, isn’t it?”

“Don’t be too free with such words,” he chided. “This isn’t Washington anymore.”

Her hand went back to the wheel and she turned onto a road that branched from the wide street. Both sides of it were flanked by tall and leafy acacias that curtained the sun from the houses. They were all surrounded with high stone fences, with gates of wrought iron, and some even boasted guard houses. No jeepneys blundered into this street.

“Here we are,” Carmen sighed. They had stopped before a massive iron gate that stood at the end of a high adobe wall. Carmen blew the horn once and a servant ran up the driveway and opened the gate.

It was the first time he would see her home and his future in-laws—if they would accept him as a son. They would subject him to
scrutiny and ask, perhaps, who is this servant that Carmen brings home? Is he after the money of the Villas or is he simply a lonely student to whom Carmen took a fancy while in Washington?

It was neither; he was here because it was the honorable thing to do, and besides, there was no sense in arguing with Carmen, who always had her way. She got out of her car below the wide sweep of the creamy marquee. The stairway was black Italian marble. From there Carmen led him into the wide hall, with its parquet floor. The hugeness of the house was now evident. The lamps were all huge and the sunburst at one end of the hall was massive; the hall was amply stocked with heavy, cream-colored upholstered chairs, and it had none of the antique and
bejuco
^*
furniture that many of the elegant houses he remembered had. In almost every panel, on every table or gleaming lattice, there was some memento of a country the Villas had visited: a Swiss cuckoo clock, Scandinavian earthenware, Venetian glass, African carvings, and even an Ifugao god from the Mountain Province—Tony recognized it immediately—in one corner of the room.

A maid in white appeared at one of the doors that opened to the hall and Carmen asked where her mother was. Holding Tony’s hand, she led him to the terrace and, cutting through a break in the hedge, they went down to the garden, an invigorating flood of Bermuda grass.

Tony took one of the iron garden chairs and gazed at the scene—the tile roof, the grand sweep of the rear wing of the house—while Carmen called, “Julia, Julia!,” and when the maid appeared again ordered her to bring cold drinks and cookies.

“This damned heat,” Carmen said. “I can feel it again—the nausea. It’s back. The sooner I get over this, the better. For a full week now, ever since we arrived. Tony, I miss spring most. And here we are, in midsummer. We should have stayed in San Francisco until June.”

“Please,” Tony sounded a little peeved. “Let’s not go into that again. I’ve obligations, you know that. I have to be here before the school prospectus is made. My classes …”

“Esto, your classes,” Carmen said hotly. “And look at me. It’s been my death and God knows how long it will last.”

Tony was sympathetic. “It won’t be long, baby. My sister, when she had her first baby, she said the feeling lasted only until the third month.”

“My God,” Carmen said. “Just hope that I won’t feel this rotten at our wedding, Tony.”

He suppressed a desire to laugh at what was now a ridiculous situation. Here he was in her house to ask for her hand in marriage and he was already assured of fatherhood. Briefly, in his mind’s eye, he saw again her apartment in Washington, the tap that pelted like thunder in the dead of night, the wide handsome bed that squeaked.

With a sense of discovery, he also recalled the
ulog
of the Bontoc Igorots, which he had visited in one of his excursions to the north years before, remembered the smell of pine splinters burning in the chill dark, the young Igorot girls huddled around the flame and the frisky youths talking with them quietly. The
ulog
was not big; it was no more than a thatched granary sitting on a shelf overlooking a creek, and that evening it seemed even smaller. In the morning, when he revisited with his guide, he saw its dim interior—the cold ashes in the hearth at one end of the hut, the flat broad stones that were laid in some sort of mosaic as a floor, and the years of soot that clung to the walls and covered the floor, marking all those who visited it with a badge of black just as his khaki had already been marked. The
ulog
where the Bontoc youths met for trial marriage had one entrance and no window at all, but even in the dim light he could see it shorn of the exotic sensuality that had pervaded it the evening before.

And finally, sweetly, there was Washington again, and Carmen on that frozen Sunday morning preparing breakfast in the kitchenette, her lipstick all gone, her hair mussed, and her face oily and flat with the wash of sleep. She smelled more strongly than ever of woman and fulfillment, acutely so, and seeing her thus and smelling her thus, he dragged her back to the bedroom. What was the difference? This, this thing that had happened, was nothing but a sophisticated copy of the custom of those sturdy hill people in Bontoc, whose life he had tried to understand; the same, the same—they who practiced trial marriage and who made the union binding only when the woman was finally with child were no different from him and Carmen. Civilization simply had more refinements—the apartment
on Massachusetts Avenue, this girl, twenty-four years old, with her Spanish ancestry glowing in her clear skin, her exquisite nose and imperious chin, the rich endowments in her limbs.

“This heat,” Carmen interrupted his thoughts again. She took the seat beside him. “I hope the air-conditioning in my room, our room, is doubled soon. That cannot wait, can it? Lovemaking in this heat. It’s just like being pigs, no?”

He leaned over, pressed her hand, and laughed at her little obscenity.

The maid returned with a tray of drinks. “Tell Mama and Papa we are here.”

“Your papa is not yet in, señorita.” The girl returned to the grilled door of the terrace.

“Mama is a character,” Carmen said. “You’ll adore her.”

His drink, relaxing and complete, sank down his burning throat.

“Should I worry about her?”

“No,” she whispered. “You have nothing to worry about now.”

It was not different—his being here was like the Igorot ritual a thousand years old. A young man expressing suit went to the house of the girl and cast his spear at her stairway. If the girl’s father came down and brought the spear up, he was welcome; if, however, the father grabbed the lance and hurled it away or, as sometimes happened, flung it at the young man himself, that meant his rejection. He was here now with a primeval want, to see if the spear would be picked up and brought into the house, or if he would feel its blade upon his flesh.

In a while the sliding door of the terrace opened again and a woman in a short red playsuit, pudgy-looking and in her early fifties, padded out, an ice bag on her head. She was swinging a palm fan languidly across her face.

“Carmen, this damned heat. Did you see the invitation to the fashion show this Sunday?”

“No, Mama.”

“You never are a help,” the older woman pouted and kept swinging the fan as she waddled down. She flopped into the chair opposite Tony, who had risen and said, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Villa.” The chair creaked and sagged under her weight. She was not really enormous, but she was solid and she struck a ridiculous picture in her briefs, her thighs bulging out in folds like those of a chubby child.
Her eyes glanced off Tony and in that brief encounter he knew she had probed through him.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Villa,” he repeated.

She looked again at Tony indifferently.

“This is Tony, Mama,” Carmen said.

“Of course,” she said, swinging the fan. “Oh, it’s warm, really warm. Where do you stay?”

“In Antipolo, Mrs. Villa.”

“There?” incredulously. “Why, how can all those people ever live in that place. I remember passing that way last All Souls’ Day. It was warm then. It must be broiling there now.”

“One gets used to the heat.”

“Don’t tell me,” Carmen’s mother apparently did not brook dissent. “Our bedroom is air-conditioned and it’s still warm. Heaven knows how I can ever live without air-conditioning.”

“The old houses, Mrs. Villa,” Tony said, trying to make conversation, “were built to be cool. The old architects, they did something about the weather. The houses they made had wide windows and high ceilings …”

“Air-conditioning is unbeatable. I hope the air-conditioning in Mr. Villa’s car is repaired soon. Then he wouldn’t want the driver to drive fast. Come to think of it, don’t drive fast, young man. Simply because it’s hot is no reason for you to drive fast.”

Carmen threw an uneasy glance at Tony. Then, to her mother: “Tony doesn’t drive, Mama.”

“I don’t have a car,” Tony said flatly.

The older woman sat back. “What did you say your name was?”

Carmen answered for him. “Mama, I told you already. Tony Samson.”

“Ah, yes, I remember. You must be a relative of Dr. Alfonso Samson, no? That man! He certainly gets around. Remember, Carmen? Have I told you how we met him—your pa and I—in New York last summer? And then on the boat to France? There he was on the
America
—and I could have sworn he followed us. And did I delight in your father’s show of jealousy!” Turning to Tony, she went on with amazing lightness: “Do you know where he is now?”

Tony Samson looked at his shoes. “No, Mrs. Villa,” he said hopelessly. “He isn’t a relative. I just know him from what I read in the papers.”

“Aren’t you from Negros?”

Carmen’s voice was desperate. “No, Mama. From Pangasinan.”

“Oh well, names really mislead.”

Tony felt his mouth drying up again; one more question, he thought, and I’ll melt. Oh, this terrible heat.

Mrs. Villa rose. “What do you do, young man? I should know because, after all, Carmen is very keen about marrying you. I want to make sure you can support a wife.”

“Mama!”

“I’m through with college,” Tony said bravely.

“At Harvard, as you already know,” Carmen helped him.

“I am going to teach,” he said, turning to Carmen as if to say, I can take care of myself. “I’m also doing a little writing.”

“Writing? Now, that’s really good. I read in the papers about an American writer who sold a sexy book for a million dollars.”

“It’s different here, Mrs. Villa,” Tony said.

“You mean you don’t earn enough? Romulo is a writer, isn’t he?”

“Yes, Mama,” Carmen hurried to Tony’s defense again, “but—”

“I’ll make enough to live on, Mrs. Villa,” Tony said grimly.

“They all say that,” the older woman said with a hint of boredom.

“Carmen,” she faced her daughter, “if only Nena de Jesus didn’t grab Ben. He is back in your father’s office. You left on the same boat for Frisco, didn’t you?”

Carmen glared at her mother. “He is my best friend’s husband, Mama,” she said with striking stiffness. “He is dumb, no good,” she touched Tony’s hand. “I have made my choice.”

“You are insolent,” Mrs. Villa chided her. She dismissed her revolt with another languid swing of the fan. “I give up,” she said, rising, her flabby thighs and her chin quivering. Then she waddled back into the house.

They didn’t speak for a while. He looked at the white wall lined with bougainvillea. Beyond the garden wall, a piano tinkled. A car whined up the road and the afternoon steamed on.

Carmen spoke first: “I’m sorry, darling. But I told you Mama is a character.”

“She wasn’t a bother, really,” he lied.

“She was, too,” Carmen insisted. “But she’s always like that. Just
like a child.” She laughed mirthlessly and her eyes as they slid to him were supplicating.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’m not from Negros and I’m not related to this Samson doctor. Damn it, America was fine on a scholarship, but life would be better if I were a
hacendero
from Negros, wouldn’t it? Maybe we should elope and then we would have nothing but ourselves—”

“That’s being impractical, darling, but I’ll give it a thought. Besides, it’s just Mama and she can’t do anything. And Papa …”

“He won’t like me, either.”

“He’s different,” she said. “He’s more understanding, less of a scatterbrain than Mama.”

She had barely finished her sentence when a car was heard crunching up the driveway. Carmen’s Thunderbird hogged the way and the new arrival had to park near the gate.