The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (41 page)

“No, not now. Not now. It is done now,” my uncle said.

“She is a very brave woman, your mother. You don’t know how courageous she was,” Auntie went on.

“Tell me about my father, Auntie,” I said. I could not eat anymore, though the hike from Quiapo had made me hungry. “Why did Mother hide it from me? It was so … so unnecessary.”

“Maybe she felt it was not time for you to know. That you were too young to understand.”

“I am twenty-two,” I said. “I am going to college.” Tears were starting to scald my eyes, and my chest was heavy.

“I don’t know everything,” my aunt said, turning away. “Your father got married to a very rich woman. I heard she died afterward, insane—that is what I learned. Before your father died … on that very same early morning he told me about you. Just before he died.” She stopped, looked at her plate, and toyed with her food.

“Your auntie visited Rosales afterward—after the funeral,” Uncle said. “And your mother,” he tried to smile, “where did she get the idea? Your father committing suicide? It was not an accident? But it was an accident! Betty?” he turned to her for confirmation, but Tia Betty did not speak.

“He was troubled, he was always thinking, forgetting things, forgetting where he was!” Uncle Bert insisted. “But the important thing … the important thing is that your father became successful. And we know you are talented—just like he was.”

“No, Tio,” I said. “My report card says I am not. I always failed.”

“But what is a report card?” Tio could not be dissuaded.

“I am not interested in school,” I said lamely. “I don’t know what I want. But I know I do not want to stay in Cabugawan.”

My auntie looked at me with pity. “You have to find a job and
you cannot find a good one unless you are prepared, trained. This is so simple, I should not have to tell you.”

“I will work,” I said. “But I will not sweat trying to be somebody.”

“Surely,” Tio said, “you will want to eat well, dress well, live well. Surely, you would like to live in a place better than what you left.”

Food, clothes—they are important, but not that important. Still, I must not antagonize my relatives, not on my first day in their house. “Yes, Tio,” I said meekly. “I know that. I just don’t know what I want to be.”

Tio clapped his hands in delight. “So there. You see, Betty, Pepe will be a success. It is just that he still does not know what he wants. Give him a year, he will.”

In a year. I turned the words over in my mind, but even then I was already thinking how I would be able to free myself from the clutches of the world’s end, this street called Antipolo.

Monday, and I was left in the apartment to mark time. After a breakfast of fried rice,
tuyo
, and coffee with Tia Betty and her voluble husband, I went back to my room upstairs and lay on the old iron cot. How would I fit in this old house, in this dilapidated neighborhood, which, even in the hush-hush hours, was already noisy with the snort of jeepneys and the babble of housewives?

Downstairs, Lucy, the Bisayan
atsay
from Dumaguete, was singing softly the latest Nora Aunor song—
I once had a dear old mother who loved me tenderly—for when I was a baby, she took good care of me
.… My thoughts meandered to Cabugawan again. How would Mother be on this bleak June morning? At least her bastard son would not be around to annoy her, remind her of an ancient grief. I could see her now, the traces of sorrow in the somber eyes, and again, I was nagged by guilt, for here I was, with the money she had saved, to be what she wanted me to be. Tio Bert and Tia Betty, they, too, would be hounding me with fancy ideas about the lofty virtues of a college degree; only with it could I flee the deadening embrace of Cabugawan.

Just look at me, my uncle seemed to say; just look at me! He clerked for this Chinese merchant in Binondo and his morning ceremony
was to polish the small brass sign beside our door:
ALBERTO S. BULAN
, and underneath, also in brass but in smaller letters,
ATTORNEY-AT-LAW AND NOTARY PUBLIC.
Having done that, sometimes with his handkerchief, sometimes with a paper napkin, he would zipper his cheap, plastic portfolio and then, puffing his chest, he would be on his way, waddling down the alley to Dimasalang for his jeepney. Moments later, Auntie Betty would leave by the same route for the elementary school in Sampaloc where she had been teaching for more than three decades—thirty years! Do people really work at the same dreary job for that long? The very thought was stupefying.

I was jolted from sleep when a train roared by, its horn blowing harshly, and the house shook like an empty crate. It was like an earthquake. I was so shaken I could not sleep anymore. But only that morning. I soon became accustomed to their roaring, clanging, shrieking—the diesel trolleys, the commuter trains, the Bicol Express, the Limited to Lucena, the baggage cars. Through their clangor I would sleep soundly on.

I walked around the neighborhood, taking in the narrow streets—Isagani, Sisa, Blumentritt—characters in Rizal’s novels. The wooden houses were old and weather-lashed and their tin roofs were rusty. Along our street was the same crowdedness, the shacks of squatters farther down the railroad line, and everywhere big-bellied, hungry children and jobless men in rubber slippers idling in doorways.

Our immediate neighbors, my aunt said, were nice; most of them had lived in the area as long as they. An Ilocano clerk was to our right and the new tenant, though she had been there for almost two years, occupied the apartment to our left; I saw her once coming out of the house with her maid; she was pretty and about my age, with shapely legs and breasts that begged to be fondled. She was the mistress of a businessman, or police agent, and he often parked beyond the alley in his green Mercedes 220, the only evidence of affluence in our neighborhood. She was very quiet, very polite, and as Auntie said, she could have been anyone’s ideal wife.

All through the haze of day and through the night, thoughts of Tio Tony, Antonio Samson, my father, badgered me, and though I tried to imagine how it would be to love him the way I loved Mother, I just could not. I remembered his visit long ago to Cabugawan, the way Mother would change the subject abruptly if his name came up
in conversations. Mother had kept a scrapbook of his writings as if it were the most precious of documents. When she was not around Auntie Bettina sometimes talked about him in tones of the highest esteem. I resented how he never came to claim me, or tell me, and I resented, too, Auntie and Mother, not for what had happened but for their not telling me.

At supper I asked about him again and Auntie Betty said he wrote a book—it was there on the shelf—that I should read so that I would know what his thoughts were. She was proud of how he had gotten his Ph.D. through perseverance, which, damn it, they said I should also have, and yes, they would help all they could. But most of all, how well he had married into the Villas and how rich he would have been, how comfortable we would have all been, if he had only lived!

How did he die? I finally asked the question that had bothered me all through the tedious day.

“An accident, a most horrible accident,” my aunt said.

Uncle Bert stood up, walked to the kitchen and pointed through the iron grills of the rear window that opened to the tracks. “There … there … that was where we picked him up. I mean, that was where we picked up the mangled pieces. It was early dawn—about five, or maybe four,” he said quietly. “He perhaps did not know that the train was on this track …”

I joined him at the window. The rails, almost choked with weeds, were shiny with the last vestiges of day, the rock bed dirty with the garbage and dust of the dry season. I could imagine him walking there, and the train rushing at him. I could see him beyond human shape, his blood on the iron, the rocks and weeds. He must have felt trapped or rendered deaf; the trains always slowed down when they approached this bend of the tracks, for a scant two hundred meters away was not only a crossing but the station of Antipolo. Besides, the train’s headlight could light up the house, my room, with the brightness of day. It was a senseless way to die.

I took his book from the shelf—
The Ilustrados
—but did not read it. I preferred literature. I felt strange handling my father’s book, leafing through it as if it were a part of him inanimate in my hands. These were his thoughts, but I did not want to know them, to know him, for there was one thing I was sure of: he did not care; he forsook me and Mother. The damn train. I would look out onto the
tracks every morning and imagine him there, how it was when he died, what troubled his mind, for he must have been in deep thought as Tio Bert had said, so deep he did not hear the train coming! There are no more steam engines, but I remember them from when I was a boy, spewing steam, chugging, big black monsters with bronze bells clanging. They are all diesel now, but it was not a diesel train that had killed him. Could he really have committed suicide? He had written a book; he had married well. It should be me—living off my relatives, on my mother’s meager earnings. I could contemplate taking my own life, but that dastardly, foolish act, I couldn’t even think about it.

I went to Diliman, convinced that I could not enroll because my grades were low. If I had to take the entrance exams, I would have to review. I did not relish that or the idea of studying there, for it became clear that I would come across people who knew my father, and meeting them, being subjected to their inquisition, would be too traumatic for me to bear. I had to make the motions, however, if only for my uncle and aunt, who would then tell Mother how it was that I was not admitted to the University of the Philippines. The real reason, however, was that I had spent my tuition money, and all that was left after two weeks of cavorting was one hundred fifty pesos, not enough for the entrance fee. It did not happen in a way that would have left me chastised and sad; I saw two movies a day, gorged myself with fried chicken,
siopao
,
mami
, and
pancit canton
—all the goodies I never had in Cabugawan.

We had enough to eat in Antipolo, the infernal vegetable stew with almost no meat in it, and I got easily tired of that. A TV set adorned the living room, but it was there for display and rarely did my uncle and aunt look at it; they were saving on electricity, for they always went around the house turning lights off.

With the little money I had left, and worried that Mother would know I was not enrolled, I went to Recto with just enough for a quarterly payment. What was one wrong initial? If it was not UP, it was a diploma mill. No degree in the world could improve me anyway.

“
Recto!
”—the jeepney drivers shout it, the name circumscribes and describes youth, the urban malady, and pollution;
bakya
supermarket at one end, which is Divisoria, and vision and corruption, or whatever you want to call it, at the other … Malacañang. It is this
other end, the vision-corruption part, that would be familiar ground to me for four years.

Recto! Rectum of Manila! Here are the odors of the posterior, particularly when the sun is warm and a busted sewer is gushing yellowish froth, with flies as big as bottle caps on the garbage piles. But we are young and if we see them, we look away. It will all be swept clean when the revolution comes and this Recto … this will be the boulevard of great erudition; it will be the avenue of hope. It already is to thousands upon thousands like me, for it is here where I go to school. Recto has these diploma mills, about half a dozen of them, and at dusk the students pour out of the airless schoolrooms, clogging the street and the narrow, smelly sidewalks, their young voices mingling with the noxious bedlam of a thousand jeepneys. Coming out of one of the Kung Fu movies on any afternoon, the faces I see have a certain pallid gloss to them—a trick of sunlight maybe, or it may just be the kind of funereal patina that covers everyone, for in this mass of young people are the great unwashed hoping to be scrubbed clean, hoping to be someone other than their anonymous selves.

I met Augusto Salcedo on my first day at school. Toto was as tall as I, with thick glasses that made him look like an underfed owl. He approached me in the corridor that morning and asked if the room beside me was for World Lit and it was, so he stayed and sat beside me when class started.

Our teacher, Professor Balitoc, had an M.A. in English literature from the University of California at Berkeley, and he never stopped reminding us of it. I liked him because he truly loved literature and could regale us with his own interpretations of the great novels he assigned to us.

Toto was taking liberal arts, too, but his course was heavy on science and math; World Literature was the only humanities subject he had that semester and it worried him, for he never liked works of the imagination. “Novels, they … they,” he stammered a bit, “are so difficult to follow and I get lost in the long-winded dialogues.”

“Read the comics,” I said.

He smiled. “That is what I do.”

I no longer had money to splurge on food, so I had to go home
at noon to the vegetable stew my aunt had taught Lucy how to cook. The maid was alone most of the time, for my uncle and aunt worked the whole day. She had already finished cooking. She was dark and a little chubby, but her face was warm, friendly. She had finished high school and had wanted to study in Manila, but she did not have enough money. She had worked instead as a maid for one of Aunt Betty’s fellow teachers, but the teacher no longer needed her so she passed Lucy off to my aunt who took her grudgingly although Aunt Betty often complained how difficult the housework was.

“You can eat now if you want to,” Lucy said at the door. I was warm and perspiring, for though the rains had started and the brown weeds along the tracks had started greening, it was still humid.

The shower adjoined the kitchen and I started soaping myself with the laundry bar. I was a virgin. Though I knew all that should be done, the most that had happened was a brief interlude with Marie; she was in section B in my senior year and I often danced with her at our high school parties, holding her so tight her breasts were pressed close against my chest, and I could feel the smooth curve of her thighs. But there were few chances for us to be alone, and though we had some sort of understanding that we would continue the relationship when she got to college in Manila, her family could not raise the money for her tuition and board.