The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (32 page)

“So what if you are cousins,” Godo pursued the subject. “You should have gone right ahead and gotten a dispensation from the pope. Those Negros
hacenderos
would marry their sisters just to keep their haciendas from breaking apart. Now I’m not saying it’s incest. If it were love …”

“It’s not incest,” Tony said, breathing deeply, hoping that Godo would stop. Then he could not dam the words anymore, and, looking away, he spoke barely above a whisper, “I saw Emy only last week. Emy has a child. And the child …”

“Oh, well,” Godo said expansively, and bluntly, “I was just saying how much better it would have been if Emy were already married, then there’d be no more problem. But Carmen, hell, Tony, you are worlds apart. Art, truth, beauty—these are never in the world of the Villas, and you … you had so much promise. You still could fulfill that promise if—”

Tony glared at his inquisitor and said aloud, almost for everyone in the bar to hear, “Emy’s son is six years old—the time I was in America, all the time I was there.… Can’t you see? The child is mine! And that’s not all.” The words flowed freely now and he could not stop. “My father— I never told you about him. I never told anyone about him, not even you whom I call my closest friends. He had rotted in jail and I let him die there. I didn’t even claim his body. And do you know who he was and what he did? Listen, he was a brave man, braver than all of us. He burned down our town hall; he killed a
hacendero
and three soldiers. He was as brave as no one among us will ever be. And I … I’m a coward because I’ll never be able to whisper my father’s name without recoiling at my own shame. Now do you know what I really am?”

Silence, the hum of an air-conditioning unit, the clinking of glasses at the counter, and the squeaky laughter of a girl somewhere in the shadowed cubicles.

Then Charlie spoke. “Life is always sad. That’s what makes suicide so tempting, because life is all that we really have and haven’t. Death makes us equals, too, because the foul and the good all die. The past, the present, and the future—what escape is there from these? None. And yet sometimes we are life’s happy victims.”

“What are you trying to say?” Godo asked with a smirk. “That we should all commit suicide?”

“No,” Charlie said resolutely, “that we should accept life and live it. Life is to be lived. It’s that simple.”

Godo turned to Tony. “Does Carmen know?”

Tony nodded without looking up. “She had a right to know. I told her the moment I returned from Rosales.”

“How did she take it?” Charlie asked.

“Civilized,” Tony said. “Carmen is always like that. It’s her passion to have people act civilized.”

Silence again, then Charlie tried to salvage what little exuberant mood was left. He called a waitress who was seated on one of the stools near the bar and asked her to join them.

She was pert and young and talkative, a Cebuana, according to her, who had finished home economics in one of the exclusive convent schools in the city and would have gone places had she not become too trusting with men. Now, look where she was, talking with slobs who did not care about her feelings, who considered her no more than someone who could be pawed all over in one evening and forgotten the next.

Tony ignored her prattle. The night was suddenly a senseless void. What he had hidden in his private consciousness had finally been exposed. The long skein had been unraveled and in the end was this: people knew, and no amount of protestation could prove how sincerely he had loved Carmen, that he would have willingly hied back to the university, to the hopeless drudgery of it all if only to show that he did not care for her money but only for her.

He did not care for Carmen’s money?

He lingered on the thought and found that it was not as absolute as he had wanted it. All his life he had known that dead end called Antipolo, he had known hunger—and not just the spiritual kind but also that merciless and embarrassing physical hunger, not just for food but also for all the things he could not possess.

After trying to caress the obstinate waitress, Godo suggested that they go find someplace where the women were more reasonable if not cooperative. But the brief encounter could not be forgotten, and shortly before midnight, after more senseless palaver in an Ermita bar called Surrender, Tony stood up. Holding his wallet, he said, “I feel guilty. You know how it is. It’s my in-laws’ big day. Carmen’s father—you understand, don’t you, Charlie?”

Charlie nodded. Tony motioned to the waiter, but Godo stopped him. “You don’t have to pick up the tab every time you are with us just because you are an ersatz Villa now,” he said with a boisterous laugh. “We still have some money and self-respect.”

He could not hold his contempt for Godo any longer. He had always been nice to him, particularly after his marriage, because Godo could be useful to the Villas and to himself, but tonight the insult must not pass.

“Don’t talk to me about self-respect,” he said with quiet fury. “You haven’t got any. You accept bribes just like the people you condemn—and don’t say that you didn’t get two thousand from Don Manuel for that lousy story you wrote about him. I have the canceled check and I can hang it on your neck anytime I want.”

He had said what he wanted most to say for the last few days, and a great and solemn peace filled him.

Godo jabbed a finger at him. Charlie’s glass of beer in the middle of the table toppled, but no one moved to escape the spreading blot.

“Is that your view of corruption?” Godo asked with a sneer. “You really have come a long way, Tony. You identify yourself with the Villas now. I’m sorry for you, I’m sorry for your children, and I’m sorry for this goddam country that permits people like you to go to college and then go about speaking as you do. Hell, you haven’t been educated at all. Nor have you grown up. I pity you.”

“The truth hurts,” Tony said quietly.

“The truth! Listen to my part of the truth. I am poor. There are thousands of poor jerks like me. Big men like Don Manuel, Dangmount, Lee, your nationalist Senator Reyes—this pack has robbed me of my rightful share in life. These sons of bitches band together. They have one thing in common: greed. And that’s what you have now. And the thousands like me? We scrounge around, we don’t live. Our children starve, our wives get sick and die. My wife is dying—and that’s where the two thousand went, you damn fool!” There were tears in Godo’s eyes and his voice trembled. “And you call me immoral? What right have you to make such a judgment? I was only getting back a little of what I could from the thieves and scum who call themselves nationalists and philanthropists. Two thousand lousy pesos. That is not even a fraction of what your father-in-law has stolen from the settlers in Mindanao. Want me to tell you how he got that steel mill set up? The dollars salted away in Switzerland?
No, you don’t want to hear what I have to say because the truth hurts—just as you said. Me and my kind, I don’t owe you any favor. It’s you who owe us your comforts, your very lives.”

“I—We don’t owe you anything. You have been paid, Godo. You are now answerable only to your conscience and to God.”

“Look, I believed in God once.” Godo paused and his voice, which had been rimmed with venom, was now calm and soft. “I once thought that there was goodness and virtue, and nice wonderful presents awaited those who were virtuous. But not anymore. I see around me nothing but the work of an unjust and merciless God. There is too much suffering in my world not because men have caused it but because God has created men like the vultures of Pobres Park. And so I don’t believe in God anymore.” Godo’s voice became a whisper. “Someday, Tony … you know how it was when we were in college. You know how some of our friends disappeared and how they went to the hills to join the Huks. Wasn’t it wonderful then?” A smile played briefly on his face as he reminisced. “Oh, how we talked in those grubby restaurants about the meaning of life, about being committed to duty, creating a new order for the future, for our children … not for us—I’m moving on to forty, Tony, and I’m not as healthy as I was then. I get rheumatic pains. I have poor vision. But if I get called again, I will join them. I shall not hesitate as I did before. I do not care anymore who they will be. Colorums, Huks, anarchists—Satan himself—whoever they are who believe that only with violence and blood can we wipe out the terrible injustice around us. Yes,” Godo raised his voice, “I will go with them and may God have mercy on you, for one of the first things I will do when I have the power to do so will be to tear down your high walls and set afire that garbage dump you call Pobres Park! And I will not be sorry for you, I will not have one single regret. You have deserted us, Tony. You are a traitor now to your class and to your past. You have become one of them!”

For an instant Tony felt like picking up the table and smashing it on Godo’s corpulent face, but he smiled tolerantly instead, then rose and walked out into the night.

On the way back to Santa Mesa, Tony vowed never again to have anything to do with Godo and Charlie. He loathed himself for having
let them trample on him—Godo, in particular, who had taken him for granted.

The big house came into view. Cars were parked all over the road and the traffic barely moved. As his cab neared the entrance, Carmen’s red Thunderbird was slipping out. She was at the wheel and beside her sat Ben, composed and grinning. Tony saw nothing wrong. Carmen and Ben were good friends. In a moment, however, the old suspicion, never completely banished, returned. There was something in Carmen’s face as the headlight of his cab struck it.

To the cabdriver he said, “Back out and follow that car with the girl driving. Don’t lose them.”

He trailed them down Santa Mesa Boulevard, then to Highway 54, Carmen drove leisurely. Once, as they neared the intersection in Cubao, he saw them kiss and his first impulse was to tell the driver to go alongside them. But his anger quickly subsided and gave way to a perverted curiosity. He brimmed with anxiety to find out what they would do, although in his mind there had already formed an inexorable image. The driver slowed beyond Cubao and asked in a rather apologetic tone who were the two they were following.

Tony had no immediate answer, for he had presumed all along that the driver knew. In spite of the tightening in his chest, he replied, “The man is a very good friend of mine. I just want to know how successful he is this time.”

The driver seemed satisfied with the explanation and all the way, past Makati and the approaches to Pasay, he did not speak.

At the junction in Pasay, Carmen turned right and headed toward Taft Avenue. She turned at a corner into an open gate. Tony felt faint. He glanced up at the sign spelled in neon—the shining name of the motel—and in that one glance all the sordid things that the name implied mocked him. It happened so quickly, as if everything had been planned. Now a hundred visions flashed in the tortured cavities of his mind. Nothing else mattered but this discovery, and above the growing din of his anger, the driver’s voice came clear. “Do you want to follow them in?”

“Drive on,” Tony said in a voice that was not his. “Drive on,” and his voice trembled. The cab picked up speed, and in Vito Cruz, Tony said he would like to go to Surrender, the bar where he had left Godo and Charlie.

He stumbled out of the cab and did not wait for his change. He
peeked inside each cubicle, even went to the men’s room, but Godo and Charlie had gone and the bartender did not know where. The anger was no longer just the anger of a man betrayed. It was compounded with an engulfing, nameless loathing for his wife.

Betrayal—but had he really lost anything except his pride? That was it, his pride. It had been afflicted before and he had outgrown the pain, because he was mature and sensible, because he was “civilized”—Carmen’s hateful word.

Why should he complain? He had known the good life and its beneficence could continue. He could go on making believe that Carmen still esteemed him and that this abominable thing that he had witnessed could be scraped off the mind as one would wipe the mess off a festive table.

He could still make-believe—another obnoxious word, an evil word—and he hastily repudiated the thought. Had he become so callous, so drained of self-respect that he would now think of disillusionment and the withering away of a once impregnable trust as nothing more than an inconsequential variation of living? Had he been so naive or so blind as not to see that around him worms had worked fast, eating away at the strong buttress which the past and all that was true and good had built? Or did he not see early enough that below him, underneath his very feet and pushing him up, was a dark force that no one could reckon—the greed and folly all men want to cast aside but cannot, because all this greed and folly are woven into the finest threads of their minds and their flesh, inseparable and eternal as original sin?

He prayed for an inner voice to redeem him, to tell him that he had done no wrong, but what he heard did not relieve him. It was the swish of a knife that sliced his heart, struck the finest tissues, and exposed their tender nerves to the faintest breeze. He had sinned, not against any single, identifiable man but against someone much more important—himself.