The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (22 page)

I have tried to understand self-delusion and I must be honest with myself in saying that I do not want to be poor. No one wants to be poor. The poor are not respectable simply because they are poor. When I have basic desires that cannot be satisfied, I am this earth’s most frustrated human being. I’d like to think I have brains and, therefore, I am superior to those who have more money than I. But
how can I call myself really smart? As D often tells off those bright boys in his advertising agency, If you are smart, why aren’t you rich?

I cannot but agree with G that I have already lost a bit of myself, I don’t know where—maybe in the United States, maybe right here in this city of dinosaurs. I would have wanted very much to speak out loud, to be heard, because I have something to say about the young who are being pawned away. But my voice is no longer strong and firm. I have aged, not with years but with the sullen wisdom of experience. I have seen how the innocents have been slaughtered and how the hapless victims were herded to their final ignominy with praises ringing in their ears. Thus we are destroyed, not with hate but with kindness. And the foul deed is never realized for what it is. We suffer most who are blind to it, who do not recognize it or who justify it as part of the social fabric, as part of living itself. We give legitimacy to a crime and are, in turn, the worst of criminals for this act. But prisons can be wonderful if they are air-conditioned, if they are mansions in the Park!

I
n November the first unit of the mill was ready to operate and the new pier was completed. The tracks from the pier for the diesel trolleys that would carry the ore and the scrap iron to the furnaces had also been laid, and in the scrap yard, mountains of junk were ready for cutting before they were fed to the furnaces.

A covey of newspapermen including Godo and Charlie had visited the mill and the visit itself had climaxed Tony’s work of a month, preparing background materials, photographs, and related data on the country’s steel needs.

The first cool winds of the Christmas season were already upon the city. The air was electric and the sun lay pure on the wooden panels and on the marble floor, glinted on the glass windows, and danced on the grass beyond.

Don Manuel had suggested a vacation for him, and the opportunity to visit the Ilocos had come. Carmen had some reservations about the trip; for her, there were only two places to go to for the weekend: Baguio and Hong Kong. The idea of slumming in some benighted village did not appeal to her, and she would not have gone if her father had not prodded her to go along.

And so, on this cool, wind-washed Saturday in November, Tony and Carmen were in the Ilocos, marveling at the well-preserved houses of brick and stone in the old capital of Vigan. They had gotten out of the car several times to take photographs of the old stone churches with their impressive baroque facades. The sturdy houses, the well-tended farms, the sunburned women, and the fruit trees in the yards—all these impressed upon him the kind of people his ancestors were.

They had started from Manila in the early morning and passed fields of ripening grain and small towns that were immobile in their lethargy and impersonal in their destitution. Now they were at the source of the pioneers who had settled in the towns they had passed. This was where they had started—the praetorian guard, the brave men who uprooted the old posts of their homes and transported them to the plains and the new towns of Central Luzon and Cagayan Valley and across the sea to Mindanao.

They reached Po-on in the late afternoon. The day still washed the squat, thatched houses, embossed them all faint gray against the massive deep blue of the nearby foothills. The dirt road, just wide enough to admit the Thunderbird, had broadened—disappeared, rather—into what seemed to be the village plaza, which was actually a wide yard in disarray, cluttered with half-naked children playing marbles and ill-clothed women nursing babies and chatting beneath the grass marquee of the barrio store at the far end.

Tony breathed deeply. The earth smelled rich, its aroma compounded with the sun’s rage upon the ripe November fields and the dung of work animals. The air was brilliant, and a cool wind that came from the direction of the sea creaked in the small grove of bamboo that formed a natural arbor, a gateway to the village.

Carmen had taken over the wheel since they passed the town of Cabugaw, because she did not trust his judgment on the quality of the road. She had driven so slowly that he was at first unaware that she had stopped. His eyes roamed about—to the huddle of houses, to the children who paused in their raucous game and were now looking at them with awe.

So this is Po-on, he mused. So this is where my grandfather, the illustrious Eustaquio, lived. What did he look like? If he was a learned man, as the old people said he was, could he have left here a few sprouts of his wisdom for me to glean?

“Well, aren’t you going to get out?” his wife asked. “Now, I hope you’ll find that you have not descended from an ape.”

Some of the women at the store approached them, as did two men who were spinning cotton spindles, which they held at arm’s length. The women were dark-skinned and the men, like most Ilocano men, were heavy-jowled. Their narrow foreheads and flat, broad noses conformed with the common anthropological concept of the Ilocano.

They stepped out of the car, and to the crowd Tony extended a greeting. They answered as one and without hesitation.

Carmen held on to his arm as if afraid she would melt away and become a part of the mass. She had told him at the start of the trip that there was no sense in it, in looking up members of his family two generations back, because they couldn’t matter anymore or alter the present.

“Why don’t you ask them if we are in the right place?” Carmen asked.

“This is Po-on?” he asked the nearest woman, who was smoking a black cigarette with the lighted end imprisoned in her mouth.

“Ay, it is so,
Apo
,”
^*
the woman answered. “What can we do for you?”

“We came from Manila,” he spoke to no one in particular in their own tongue, which was also his. He turned briefly to his wife, who was contemplating the crowd. “My wife and I …” he paused. “You see, it may surprise you, but I am here to seek my relatives. Our root, my grandfather—he was from here.”

In the many peasant faces he could immediately discern the bright, new kinship that he had established and he knew that they had accepted him.

“Samson—that was his family name, and mine.”

The crowd murmured and the woman with the cigarette spoke again: “But there’s no Samson here,
Apo.
I don’t remember a Samson here at all and I’m now thirty-five.”

“I was thinking,” he tried again, “if you could point to me the oldest man here. Maybe he knows.”

The crowd started a discussion.

“What are they talking about now?” Carmen nudged him.

“They are deciding who the oldest man is,” he explained, catching their every word.

The woman with the cigarette stepped forward. “My grandfather,
Apo
,” she said brightly, “he can help you find your root.”

The man they sought, it turned out, was not in the village but in a
sitio
across the fields. “It’s not a long walk,” the woman explained. “And, besides, the sun can’t hurt you now.”

He was glad that his wife had worn comfortable pumps instead of high heels. Once, in Washington, during a humid and burning summer, they took a long walk. They had met barely a week before, and he remembered it now with the objectivity that marriage makes a mockery of. He was in the Library of Congress and she had gone there that afternoon to have him show her the efficiency with which the library operated. It was five when they left and the sun hung over the gleaming city in a gray haze, glinting in the elms and on the ebony pavement, empty of buses and streetcars because the city’s whole transportation system was on strike. He had told her earlier that they would walk home to Dupont Circle across the city to where she lived, and she had acceded. They had not gone ten blocks when she decided to rest in one of the city’s main parks. And there, while she watched the squirrels nibble at the crumbs an old lady had tossed, he realized that he had been unaware of her suffering. She had worn high heels, and there lay before them a long stretch of pavement yet. He was making every penny count, knowing as he did the bitterness of a niggardly winter the year past. He desisted from calling a cab. It was she, when they started out again, who hailed one, and inside, while his cheeks burned, he confessed that he did not have enough money for the fare. “It’s all right, Tony,” she had said. “I can pay the fare and, if you care, may I treat you to dinner, too?” He refused, of course, but he had never been able to live the incident down, and afterward, even though they were married, his inner self cringed in embarrassment every time he thought of her so calm and poised, listening to his stammered apology.

But she was walking beside him now doggedly as a wife should. He wondered if she still recalled Washington and he took her hand. “Remember our first hike?” he asked.

There was no humor in her answer. “Of course,” she said. “I just hope all this is well worth the trouble.”

He did not reply, for he himself was not yet sure. Why was he here among the new hay and what force was it that propelled him beyond the precious confines of the Villa executive country, that made him break out of the full life into this past that was anonymous and dead?

He could not recall when it all started. Maybe, when he was working on his research papers on the Philippine Revolution, or when he was young and his father told him of barren hills and wicked fields and the churning sea, carried him on his shoulder and told him in a pious whisper of still another man, his grandfather, who led them away from the wasteland to the plains, a learned man who could read Latin and speak it like a monastic scholar, who wrote about death and life and the suffering in between. Istak—that was what he was called—and Eustaquio was his Christian name. “Mark him,” his father had said, “for you are descended from a big root.”

“Look,” She said edgily, holding his hand as they went down the margin of the village with their guide ahead of them. “Will we really get something from this? I doubt if this old man has the qualities of a chronicler.”

He smiled inwardly at her prediction. “It’s a quality of the rich,” he said evenly, “to be skeptical, but not of us, we who were made to choose between the sea and the bald hills.” With his hand he made a sweep of the hills at their left—barren and dying. “We always expect the worst and still we are able to laugh.”

“You are talking in poetry again,” she said sourly. “Can’t you stop being so pretty about your tribe?”

The path dipped down a newly harvested field with the bundled grain spread out in the sun. It curved through the field and disappeared into a cluster of
marunggay
^†
trees. Within the cluster stood a house.

The man they sought was perched on one of the rungs of the
bamboo ladder. He, too, like many of the men they had seen in the region, was spinning cotton. He was barefoot and his trousers of blue Ilocano cloth were frayed at the knees. His toes, unused to shoes, were spread out. He was probably seventy, but his short, white hair made him appear too venerable to have something as trivial as age. He stopped spinning and peered at the faces of his three visitors.

“It’s I, Simang, Grandfather,” the woman who accompanied them said. She took the patriarch’s wrinkled hand and pressed it to her lips. “We have visitors from Manila and they would like to talk to you because you are the oldest here and you know many things.”

Tony greeted the old man amiably, but the eyes that regarded him were cold.

“Yes, I know many things,” the old fellow coughed. “And everything is here, stored in my mind.” He brought his forefinger to his temple and gestured. “Everything there is to know I know.” His beady eyes closed, the old man turned and climbed up.

Tony stood dumbly before the crude ladder, waiting for him to reappear, and when the old man did not return, Carmen nudged Tony. “Perhaps we’d better go.”

Their guide, aware of their discomfiture, mumbled an apology, then went up into the house. In a while she returned and behind her hobbled the old man, looking at them dourly.

“I hope I’m not a bother,
Apo
,” he started suavely again.

“Of course you are,” the old man said.

“Don’t mind him, please,” their guide told them and, to the old man, raised her voice. “They were from this place once, Grandfather, and they want to know if some of their relatives are still in our midst.”

The angry countenance vanished. “Who were they, my children?” he bent forward, eager to know. The arrogant chin had dropped and the cracked voice had become warm.

“They left about a hundred years ago,” Tony Samson said simply.

The old man picked up the talk. “A hundred years! I’m not that old, but I know there were many who left in search of better land. I was one of the few who stayed and now I’m alone. I could have gone, too, but my place was destined to be here.”