The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (80 page)

I could look now beyond his shoulder, to his father, my grandfather, whom I had never seen though I knew what he had done, what he and the rest whom they called Colorums had wrought in one evening of anger. Now they crowded my thoughts, not wraiths that are formless but living men who are strong, whose voices urge me on. And I believe them because I know where they came from.

And beyond them that great-grandfather, about whom Mother had spoken, who had led his clan from the Ilocos to Rosales. Who else had their blood in me? What had they dreamt of? Pepe Samson then is just a name; I had come from afar and was simply born in a corner of the world called Cabugawan. I was someone, yet no one, for I was no longer living for myself, for this bundle of nerves and flesh; I was part of those who had perished and those who were yet to come. I belonged no longer to this casement of skin, I was part of the earth, the water, the air.

The door opened and in the light Tia Nena, her eyes blinking. “So you are leaving,” she said quietly.

“I will miss you, Tia,” I said.

She came in and sat on the stool before my small reading table. There was something sprightly about her tonight.

“And you were going to leave without saying good-bye.”

“I think it is better that way,” I said.

After some silence, “Pepe, do not ask how I found out, but I know what is in your mind. I will soon be leaving, too, to go back to Rosales now that I can look at everything there without fear.”

I turned to her, startled at what she had said.

She smiled. “Yes, I know how you feel and you may even tell yourself I am, indeed, a crazy old woman. I had nothing, too, and nothing to look forward to. Padre Jesus does not really need me to cook and do his laundry. But my home is there—the village, the hills.”

“No, Tia, do not waste your life. Stay here where at least you can have food when you are hungry. And when you get sick, there will be at least some neighbors who can take you to the hospital.”

“Where I will die nonetheless because I am poor.”

I did not speak.

“Come to me if you need help,” she said. “If you get sick, I will try and nurse you back to health. And if you get hungry, I will beg to feed you.”

“And when I die?”

“Then,” Tia Nena said with determination, “I will bury you and pray by your grave and put flowers there.”

“I am not a patriot, Tia Nena. Please don’t make it look as if I am trying to be one.”

“You will never get rich,” she said.

I was ready. “First, I am going back to Cabugawan, Tia Nena,” I said. “That is where I will start.”

“The village, that is where Victor started,” she said. Her eyes were shining. “My sons, that is where they started, too. Oh, you don’t know them. You never knew them. But Rosales is any town, and your village any village. We start where we know best.”

I went upstairs to Father Jess. Tia Nena followed me.

“I have a letter for Betsy, Father,” I said. “And if Professor Hortenso comes and looks for me, please ask him to leave his address with you. I will be going back to Cabugawan. And Betsy, if she returns, tell her …” I could not shape the words. “When it is over, and if I live through it, I will look for her.”

Father Jess said, “I will pray for you.”

He looked at Tia Nena. “There is no one now in Rosales whom you know. Your place is here.”

Tia Nena merely smiled at him.

Father Jess tried again: “You must consider what will happen. You cannot run anymore.”

“But I am not running, Padre,” she said quickly.

Father Jess was impatient; he dismissed her remark with a wave of his hand. “I know what you are going to say, that you never ran away and you are not running away now. But where you go …”

Tia Nena shook her head. “They will not harm me. They cannot harm me. All the hurt was done to me long ago. I am beyond hurting now.”

“I do not understand,” Father Jess said.

Tia Nena turned to me. “You build a church here,” she brought her closed fist to her breast.

“You are using my own words,” Father Jess said.

“But they are not yours alone,” Tia Nena flattered him. “The truth belongs to all who know it.”

“Speeches!” I said. Time to go, and the Tondo I will leave will be brightly lit with Christmas-star lanterns, colored lights strung before windows, boisterous drinking of
cuatro cantos
and San Miguel in the
tiendas
, children with harmonicas and plaintive voices caroling. But the distance that beckoned was dark. I was afraid.

So I leave behind those who see the sword but refuse to raise it. “Bless me, Father,” I said nonetheless. “I cannot leave without your blessing.”

“I am mortal, Pepe,” he said. As he raised his right hand, I dropped to my knees.

He helped me to my feet, and we went down. At the door, he wrapped an arm around my shoulder and hugged me briefly. Tia Nena kissed me on the cheek.

“
Hoy
, you have to cut your hair now,” he said as I left them at the
kumbento
door.

I was afraid but I felt very light. I knew I could go very far without tiring.

June 30, 1976
         
Rue d’Echaude, Paris

I
  was with the journalists Johnny Gatbonton and Arnold Moss and my wife the other day at the Emerald on Dewey (now Roxas) Boulevard, when we got to reminiscing, marking out our past. We have known each other from way back in our student days at the University of Santo Tomas. They sometimes come to Padre Faura and we talk shop. I told them of a significant decision in my life, made after I had looked carefully into my own being.

It came in 1960, when I was putting my novel
The Pretenders
into final shape in a village called Marquina, close to the port of Bilbao in the Basque region of Spain.

Rafael Zabala, a young businessman, helped me find cheap lodging in the village which was about half an hour away by car from Bilbao. I met Rafael, or Paeng, as I called him at the Kissinger Seminar at Harvard in 1955 and asked him to help me find a hide-away where I could write. He located a small inn for which I was charged two dollars a day, including meals. I remember my breakfasts—the large pitcher of fresh milk, bread and cheese, and for lunch or dinner, merluza—fish from the Bay of Biscay.

As a journalist, I had closely kept track of our agrarian tensions,
the Huk uprising from 1949 to 1953, and much earlier, had researched the Colorum peasant uprising in eastern Pangasinan in 1931. But first, I remembered my own relatives and neighbors in that small barrio where I was born, especially my grandfather, who was a tenant farmer, and how he had participated in the Revolution of 1896. My most memorable moment with that old man was when he took me to the fields beyond our village. It was harvest time, and the fields spread before us, golden with ripening grain. He had carried me on his shoulders, then he had put me down, and with one arm outstretched, he pointed to the near distance, to the land he had claimed from the forest together with his brothers, and spoke of how the land was stolen by the rich
ilustrados
with their new-fangled torrens titles. I remember most of all his crumpled face, the tears streaming down his cheeks, and his admonition: I should study, be literate so that I would not be oppressed.

Working in journalism in the fifties, I sought out Pedro Calosa, who led the Colorum uprising in eastern Pangasinan. Earlier, in 1948, I was drawn to the Huks and met their leader, Luis Taruc, when he came down from the mountains and stayed briefly at the old Quirino house in Dewey Boulevard. I was then on the staff of the Catholic weekly
The Commonweal
. Both had impressed upon me the immensity of the struggle for agrarian justice.

Now, here I was in the Basque, putting together my first novel,
The Pretenders
. I had included in it an old rebel, the father of protagonist Antonio Samson, who was in prison for being a member of the Colorum movement, and had burned the municipio of the fictional town of Rosales (Tayug).

There, far from the Philippines, I thought about the continuing poverty of our peasantry, which I knew firsthand.

In that month in Marquina, I often walked beyond the village to the hillside farms. My afternoons were punctuated by what seemed like the crack of pistol shots. The boys were playing
pelota
, the traditional Basque game that we in Manila call jai-alai. One day, a
pelotari
who had played at the fronton in Manila came in his big Ford—the only Ford in the entire region—and he drove me around the beautiful Basque country, and reminisced about the Philippines, and he made me homesick. I went to the posh resort town of San Sebastian. It was June and pleasant, and for a couple of nights I slept on the beach, the Playa dela Concha, the surf murmuring softly
through the night, the laughter of vacationers lolling on the sand reaching out to me, dismembered voices from another world. I also ventured into Guernica, remembering Picasso’s famous painting about the doomed town that was leveled by Hitler’s planes during the Spanish Civil War.

In these meanderings I brought to mind our own revolution, its betrayal, and the continuing oppression of the Filipino masses, not so much more recently by the colonialists, but by our own mestizo elites. How did we get to be so miserable, so downtrodden? I recalled my grandfather, his careworn face, and slowly—ever so slowly—I came to realize how necessary it was for us to rebel, to overthrow the status quo, the exploiters who claimed they were Filipinos.

I had been taught to believe in the sanctity of democracy, in the use of reason, and the evil that is violence. I had read voraciously
Das Kapital
in college, and was very much impressed by it although I found it difficult reading. But it was not Marxism that made me abandon the idea of peaceful change. It was my knowledge of the poverty in that barrio where I came from and how it was almost impossible for people like us to rise from the dungheap of
internal
colonialism.

It was in that Basque village where I finally and irrevocably accepted revolution. The moment I did, I immediately felt a gladsome lifting of the spirit, as if freed from a damning burden that had weighted me down all my life.

So the main character in
The Pretenders
, Antonio Samson, kills himself. Betrayed, corrupted, his death is for him a measure of redemption.

Where do you get your ideas? What inspires you? These are common enough questions often asked by readers. The imagination, of course, always helps, but the truth is that I write from my own inconsequential life. Like most egoists, I had thought of doing my autobiography but had desisted, for I know that in every story I wrote, I was in it not so much as a peacockish character, but as the fount of most of those thoughts, feelings, and the minutiae of detail and incident, I hope, that gives my fiction some semblance of throbbing reality.

For example, there is my past—our past. In conceptualizing the five-novel Rosales saga in the early fifties, I had planned on writing only four. I had not intended it to cover a hundred years of our history—perhaps, at the most, just three generations.

During the Liberation in 1945, when I was briefly in the American Army as a civilian technician, I read those free paperback editions that GIs casually threw away, among them the novels of William Faulkner. The literary geography that Faulkner created fascinated me, and I decided to try doing the same, that is, using those vivid memories of my boyhood and of my village. Too poor to buy a typewriter in those days, when my colleagues in the
Manila Times
left the office, I used to stay there and work till past midnight, writing the chapters first as short stories so that I could sell them to the weekly magazines to augment my income. As a friend, Austin Coates, said when we talked about my working habits, even if I was good at carpentry, the joints would show. And also: I should not write like this but try to get away from it all so that I could concentrate on my fiction.

Very sound advice, which I valued. Since then, I have tried writing away from my own country. The Rosales novels were mostly written abroad, with the exception of
Tree
, which I wrote in Baguio, in a modest hotel, Vallejo Inn, below the old Pines Hotel which had burned down. Vallejo, built before World War II, was for clerks, and the Pines was for the brass. I wrote
The Pretenders
in a small village in the Basque country,
Mass
in Paris, and the last to be finished,
Poon
, in Bellagio, Italy. My favorite writing escape is Tokyo. As everyone knows, Tokyo is one of the most expensive cities in the world, but I am very fortunate to know Gaston Petit, a French-Canadian Dominican and a superb artist. His atelier is in Shibuya, just behind the Dominican church. He allows me to stay in the monastery and in his atelier. Half of the year, during the summer months, Father Petit hastens to Champlain in Canada, but when the harsh Canadian winter sets in, he returns to Japan. If his atelier, which I call the Petit Hilton, is not available, Professor Yasushi Kikuchi of Waseda, another old friend, tries to locate inexpensive lodging in his university for me.