The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (2 page)

But tonight, alone in the big room that had been their sanctum all their married life, she was nagged for the first time by a pang of
regret and remorse so sharp and intense it actually hurt. All her life she had been pampered, had everything she desired. The things she valued were never those that could be bought, but those small tokens of truth and dogged fidelity that she, herself, could not give to anyone. It was not the first time that she would sleep alone; there were the times her husband had gone on business trips, and she had gotten used to such absences knowing that they were not permanent, that he would be back. Tonight, however, she was not sure. She had tried reading the books from the shelf by their bed—some anthologies, journals, and pocketbooks that her husband always had close by, but her mind could not latch on to anything she could retain. She stood up and, noticing the torn bits of paper with which her husband had littered the floor, started picking them up out of curiosity more than anything, and read the old, yellowed pages of the book that they had brought back from the Ilocos. It was in Latin and, of course, she did not understand. Then, as if she remembered that these bits of paper were important, she scooped them up and placed them in the shoe boxes that lined one of the closets in the room. The work tired her a little but still sleep would not come. For the first time, she was afraid that Tony Samson would never return, that when he said good-bye the parting was permanent, as final as death itself.

When she did fall asleep it was almost light and the east was already gray. She slept briefly but well, and when she woke up she immediately missed the arm that was usually flung across her breast, the warm nearness of a body she had known. She was angry at herself without quite knowing why, and when she drew the curtains, the sunlight that flooded the room hurt her eyes; she looked at herself in the mirror and, without her makeup and lipstick, she told herself that she was becoming a hag; the dark lines around her eyes, the beginning of a double chin, the start of wrinkles around her neck—these brought to her the presence of time, the enemy. She had once told her husband: I won’t mind growing old, I won’t mind really, as long as I have you always beside me and doing what would make me happy.

But he was not by her side, and shortly afterward her father knocked on the door and told her in a flat, toneless voice that her husband was dead—a horrible accident at the tracks in Antipolo
Street—and remembering this later on, she marveled at her presence of mind, how she took the news calmly as if it was the most natural thing to have happened. Her first reaction was of disbelief; it was not true, he had just gone off somewhere, to sulk, to let his jealousy pass; he was not dead, he was coming back, and not only because with her he had finally been freed of that dreary place where he had come from. This would be just one reason for his return, of course; the real reason would be because he loved her and would take her for all that she was—good and bad, sinner and saint.

But the past is irreversible; the funeral she attended together with her parents was nothing but a blur; she did not want to believe that the man she had loved, who had possessed her and lived with her for more than a year, was in that beautiful, sealed mahogany casket, never again to talk with her, to share her gossip. And somehow, aware of this at last, of the finality of it all, she felt that she could not bear the loneliness, not so much of being alone but of knowing that she had perhaps driven him to his death.

When the funeral was over she decided for the first time to visit the place where he had lived; she had extracted the address from Tony’s sister, who was clear-eyed and stony-faced throughout the funeral service, and she had driven the sister and her husband back to Antipolo Street. They showed her that portion of the tracks where they had picked up the mangled pieces of his body, and she stopped and touched the earth and the rockbed of the tracks, which were still stained with blood, and as she did something within her snapped. The last time she saw his blood was in the winter past; they had gone out for a walk in the fresh snow in Central Park and he had sneezed violently; he had a nosebleed, not a cold, and the blood speckled the snow, brilliant crimson against angel white, and even in that awful moment he had paused before the pattern and exclaimed, “How beautiful!”

They took her up the narrow alley, lined with people and children who stared at her, to their clapboard house and up the narrow flight to the small room where Tony had lived. His two suitcases were placed on one side and she asked if she could bring them back to their home, but they did not want her to; they wanted to keep something that belonged to him, to remember him by; she offered them money but they would not take it. There must be something he
left behind, they said; and she said, yes, there were many things, but mostly memories. She looked around her; she had never been cooped up in a place as small as this, and yet, somehow, it did not depress her as she was sometimes depressed at home. She looked down the window, at the tracks again, and along the tracks more shacks fronted by patches of camote and greens, and suddenly she could not stand another moment in this place, in this Antipolo where Tony had lived. She went down, trembling and sweating in the morning heat, and to each of the youngsters in the living room she thrust paper bills. They took her to the car she had parked at the other end of the alley, and to their mumbled apologies about their inability to entertain her in the best way possible, she whispered a listless thank-you and then drove off, a thousand accusations tormenting her. The whole wretched city now seemed one vast prison closing in on her and she would no longer be someone apart, with an identity all her own, but a member of the nameless mass, an insignificant fragment of the crowd. It was different when Tony was alive, for he had given her not just love and devotion but, in a real sense, a personality that she had not known was there: he had been very honest with her, sometimes too damning in his criticism, but always, in the end, ever lavish in his praise. Her virtues stood out—her capacity to see her role as a woman, her indifference to the vulgar tastes of her crowd, her own rebelliousness not so much against her family but against what her family had stood for: the vaunted privilege, the snobbery, when these were never real in a society as wide open as Manila’s.

In her own room she pondered these, for she now understood them. But there was something that never quite got itself spelled out clearly, and this was how she had given herself to him. She had always valued chastity not so much as a prize to be won but as a gift of love to be given in complete abandon to him whom she could trust, to a man with whom she would not mind a life of captivity.

This was the sole mystery that she could not solve. Maybe it was his fluent conversation—she always admired men who could express themselves clearly, who could argue themselves out of nooses, and Tony seemed capable of that without being boorish or pedantic. Maybe, as he had told her once too often, it was the tedium of being alone in a foreign land, unable to draw the cloying attention that she had always been used to.

Or maybe she was drawn to him as evil is drawn to virtue and all that is good—as Tony was. What he had told her was true, after all—that she was hopeless, and her family, too, and all of them, her father’s friends, her friends who vacationed in Spain to polish their accents and, perhaps, to bring home some peasant they could afterward pass off as an impoverished member of the aristocracy.

Was it also true that they were all beyond redemption? She had laughed when he first told her this; it had seemed so funny then, for she had understood corruption to mean committing malfeasances in public office, in pocketing government money, accepting bribes, and that sort of thing. Even if she did commit an indiscretion, it was not really that bad; she had not, after all, left him the way Conchita Reyes, the daughter of Senator Reyes, had left her husband and gone to Italy chasing a bogus count. She had returned to Pobres Park and to her husband, who took her back as if nothing had happened, and they had rejoined the same cocktail-cum-dinner circuit as impeccably gracious as ever. In her own way, Mrs. Antonio Samson considered herself faithful. While most of the women in the Park, particularly those in her circle, changed husbands more often than their monthly visitations, she had done no such thing. She had played around only with Ben de Jesus, who, after all, had proposed marriage to her earlier. She had acceded, yes, but with a feeling of guilt not only toward her husband but toward Ben’s wife, who was her best friend.

She could, of course, justify what she had done with her modern, “liberated” background. Besides, her husband was the sporting kind; in bed, when they were going through the habits of conjugal love, he would often think aloud about how it would be if he went to bed with any of her friends, and she would egg him on and tell him what her friends thought of their own husbands, how they told her of their extramarital experiences, and he had been delighted, of course, listening to her stories. It took some time, but she did realize later that he was really no more than a
provinciano
, charming in his own barrio way, who must be protected from his own simplicity.

She visited her husband’s office the day after the funeral; she had become curious about what he might have left there, the mementos that were to be recovered and permanently treasured. Tony had a way of putting down on paper his ideas and all the minutiae that he
came across; this was part of his training as a scholar, and the habit had been deeply ingrained. If she had not bothered herself before with knowing about what he wrote or the thoughts that often went unsaid between them, now she wanted to know all that she could about him, the wellsprings of his strengths and weaknesses, the visions he had of himself and the future. Perhaps, in the process of learning and even discovery, she would stumble upon the primordial reasons for life and death.

Her husband’s secretary had been most efficient; she had filed all his papers with skill and precision and told her where everything was, even the bills that had to be paid. She was stunned by the tragedy, and she told the widow that she had never worked for a man as dedicated to his job and as understanding of people as Tony. She was handsome in an antiseptic sort of way, and Carmen wondered momentarily if her husband had ever flirted with her or had appreciated the fact that she had broad hips.

“I want to be alone,” the widow said. “I would like to go over all his things, so please do not let anyone disturb me.”

The secretary delivered to her all the keys to the drawers and the filing cabinets and Carmen riffled through them. She examined the expense vouchers and the receipts that Tony had assiduously kept and smiled, remembering again how Tony had lived as honestly and as frugally as always, within the limitations her father had mentioned, although such limitations had never been defined.

Then, at the bottom drawer of his desk, she found them—the ledgers in which he had written in his clear, precise longhand a sort of diary. Five of them, and four were filled up; the fifth was half full, and the last entry was three months ago. He had not written anything for a long time, although in the others he had something—a paragraph, or even just a line—every day. The entries in the last ledger were about things she knew very well—her family, her husband’s work, his impressions of people he met. Here was Antonio Samson at last—raw, honest, and without pretensions. And yet, he could have told her everything he had written down, if she had just shown an interest, even the slightest. He had even brought his journal home—she remembered this clearly now—and had started to write one evening, but she told him to attend to her rather than to his memoirs. And now that he was gone, these ideas, these thoughts
were suddenly alive; she could hear his voice as she read what he had written about himself; his most secret thoughts. The last entry, however, was what interested Carmen most, for it pertained to her, and in a way, it was prophetic.

Antonio Samson wrote: