The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (24 page)

“Yes, yes,” the priest intoned dully, “but, you see, he apologizes for that. He was but twenty-one.”

“Please,” Tony repeated. “Do go on—one paragraph more.”

The priest opened the book to the pages he had left. “… 
quia veginti anno annis majorem aetatem finaliter attingit
 … for at the age of twenty-one he finally comes of age.” His drab fleshy face brightened up. “Listen to this now,” he enthused. “
Mundus viro no sperat. Eo tempus non habet
— The world does not wait for a man. It has no time for him.” He returned the book to Tony and his voice was tinged with emotion: “He had the sensibility of a poet—and humility, too. This is the virtue of all those who create and who are great, no matter how obscure they may have been. Why, I believe that God, even in His greatness, was humble. Your forefather had this quality and more. He was restless, too, and now I know why he left Cabugaw.”

Tony flipped the pages of the book and his whole being flamed and the vacuity within him seemed suddenly filled with something burbling and glowing that lifted him beyond the common touch. “Now I leave you to your discovery,” the priest sounded remote behind
him. “And, of course, you have to sleep here. I’ll have the cots prepared upstairs. Come up when you are sleepy.”

“Thank you, Padre,” he said happily without lifting his eyes from the engulfing maze, the fancy script, and the words he couldn’t read and understand. And, holding on to the ledger, he felt a kinship at last, tangible and alive, with this thing called the past. Maybe there is wisdom buried in this, or romance, or just a diurnal account of a young man’s fancy, his pride and his hurt. The transcription will not be important, he decided quickly. It was this solid memento that mattered, because it was the root on which he stood.

“You can ask him for it. It is but a scrap of paper that he has no use for anyway,” Carmen said.

He lifted the Coleman lamp, which had been left atop the wooden pedestal beside the cabinet. At the door the boy waited for them, his eyes heavy with sleep, and showed them to their room.

As they lay on two cots that had been brought together, they held hands—a soothing domestic habit—and were motionless but for their measured breathing. Beyond the heavy sill and sash shutters, which were flung to the remotest edge, the stars shone clear and tremulous in the cloudless sky. A silky breeze floated in, laden with the scent of the warm earth. A dog barked in the unknown recesses of the dark, and in the rotting eaves Tony heard the soft scurrying of mice and the snap of house lizards.

“It’s just like Washington,” she said after some time.

“Why Washington?” he asked, pressing her hand.

“The Library of Congress,” she said. “The first printed Bible. The American Constitution. They were all nicely framed and lighted in special containers, heated to keep out the frost and the humidity. It must have cost some money to install those devices …” He had taken her there because “when you are in Washington you just can’t miss the biggest library in the world,” and she had valiantly tried deciphering the scrawls.

“You are way off the track,” he said, divining her thoughts.

She turned on her cot and tweaked his nose. She smelled clean and, in the faint light of the other rooms, he could make out her face. “Oh, now, I’m not saying that we will have to go to so much expense trying to preserve your grandfather’s manuscripts.”

“What then?”

“But you can do it, maybe have an Augustinian friar in Manila transcribe it, and then, who knows, it may be an important document in literature—or ecclesiastical history.”

“That’s not funny,” he chided her.

“But I’m not trying to be funny,” Carmen said. “I’m merely carrying to a logical end what you have started. If you won’t have it translated, then at least we can bring it with us—not just the book, mind you, but all the other papers that were written in his hand:
Oye
, think what wonderful conversation pieces they will make!”

“Is that all you think of? Conversation pieces to show off to your illiterate friends and relatives?”

“Now it’s you who are being silly,” she reproached him. “We drove over horrible roads, ate in that filthy restaurant in Vigan, and now we are sleeping in this convent—on smelly cots. Five hundred kilometers—and the gas, I spent good money for it …”

The situation had suddenly become ridiculous and he did not know whether to laugh or to curse. But the feeling subsided quickly and gave way to his old understanding of the unchangeable dung heap that surrounded him. He brought to mind once more the American lady in her sixties on the boat crossing the Atlantic. He had met her on his way to Europe during his summer study tour. She was on an almost religious mission to a Sussex hamlet in England to seek the wellsprings of her ancestry, which were, she was told, still intact. A genealogical research agency had promised to do the job for a few dollars. “It’s dirt cheap,” she had said of the deal with the patent exuberance of an American who had accidentally stumbled upon a bargain. Tony recalled, too, the rapt crowds in the National Art Gallery in Washington, in the Louvre and the Prado, the hordes gaping at the old pictures, searching for beginnings in the cemeteries of art as if they were afraid to drift into the limbo of their own making, and these paintings, these revered pictures and stone images, were the anchors that would make them and the future secure. Their faces were all indistinct yet vaguely familiar, exuding as they did an enthusiasm and a longing. He had now struck an infallible identity with them, because he, too, had gone to great lengths to find but a book and a vanished name in a small town. And yet everything could have been simplified: a gilded museum, an efficient gravedigger with an encyclopedic memory—these were all that would have
been necessary to find the clues to that unalterable pattern that he did not shape but which shaped him. And his wife was all this because she had the money and he … he had only the dream.

“You, your money …” he said.

She turned and pressed close to him. He could not see her face clearly, but he could define the glaring dark eyes.

“You have too much of it,” he said with conviction.

“All right,” she said, lying on her back again. “But remember, it’s what makes the world go—not an old, rotting book that may not even sell as a collector’s item. You know that very well. You’ve seen all those first editions in the secondhand-book stores, the one near Dupont Circle. In Greenwich Village …”

“Let’s not start this again,” he said hotly.

“You started it,” she said, her voice betraying a hurt. “You wear those big chips and dare everyone—even me—to knock them off.”

“Is that what you found here?”

“You could have asked me a long time ago and I would have told you.”

“And yet you married me?” Tony pressed on.

She did not speak.

“At least,” he said, “you can be kind and say that you made a mistake.”

She turned to him again. “I was in love with you. What is it that you want? Have you forgotten that I can always ask Papa?”

To her it all seemed so simple: I can always ask Papa—omnipresent, omnipotent.

“I want only one thing: to be myself,” he told her.

“Aren’t you?” she flung at him. “Really, now you are asking for blood.
Esto
, even coming here is asking too much. The past is past and no one can alter it.”

But the past still demanded attention, and that was not all—there was need for continuity, too, and belonging to a huge and primeval wave. He knew all this now and the knowing evoked transcendental joy. He was, after all, not a drifter in the vast ocean of want. Now, if he could only return to his teaching and once in a while write, maybe about the urgencies he believed in.… If he could only forsake the drudgery of his commerce, maybe he could do more for some future searcher to covet and, maybe, the self-justification that had eluded him for so long might yet take shape under his very
hands. There flashed again, vivid and taunting, the face of the old man he had talked with in Po-on earlier in the day, and finally the faceless vision of the gentleman, the ancestor, who, perhaps, could have been in this very room with a pen in his hand. How did they in their listless youth face the chasms between fact and fancy? One refused to pioneer, to forsake the barren land, and the other wrote a book and then, on his puny legs, led a whole clan on a journey to a strange, new land.

But what happened to them? And what happened to his father, who had tried to be brave in his own, narrow way when the times demanded another form of courage? He could look back now to Cabugawan, his birthplace and his stigma, and he would find the answers there.

“Baby?” He spoke tentatively.

“Please,” she still sounded angry, “I’ve already told you that I’ll buy it. I will buy everything you need if the priest won’t give it for free.”

He stood up and walked to the window. Beyond the wide, vacant churchyard the whole town lay quiet and asleep. They would most probably leave in the morning and she would surely be glum. To her this was not a vacation—it was a meaningless jaunt into some benighted towns. But he would not mind. What was important now was getting back to the city to glean the small parts of himself that he had scattered to the shiftless wind. If he could only teach and write again—he must teach and write again.

Standing there, pondering the implications of Cabugaw, he wondered how soon morning would come sneaking into this musty room.

I
t was too easy to be true, and looking at the lean, handsome face of Don Manuel on the cover of the
Sunday Herald
, Tony felt achievement glow all over him. Godo had been very thoughtful; he had sent this advance copy on a Wednesday when the board was to meet, so that Tony could show the magazine to everyone. Below the smooth, angular face of Don Manuel was the title in bold type: Man of Steel.

He immediately delved into the magazine and was even more amazed. Godo had given Don Manuel a six-page spread with the fewest ads, and the story included the latest photographs of the steel mill and statistical graphs on the steel needs of the country.

The article brimmed with authority and prestige because it sported Godo’s byline. Tony read it, tried to ferret out any of Godo’s barbed cynicisms that would easily nullify the story, but after going through the article twice he found not a single line in it that went sour. Don Manuel was right after all—friendships were important. He had invited Godo to the house only twice, and on the third visit he had made the pitch. Godo had not acted smart-alecky. He had
said, I’ve done it for people less significant, and now, sell me Don Manuel. It had not been easy, of course, for by then Don Manuel’s many transactions, particularly the timber concessions in Mindanao, were under fire. But the mill was significant; it symbolized national aspirations and dignity. Steel was the foundation of modern society. The barrio could not rise from the dung heap unless it was energized by domestic steel mills that would cut down the huge imports of steel. That was it: steel was the bedrock of progress.

But it was not so simple. Tony had boned up on steel, and after the many board meetings he had attended and the conversations with Don Manuel, he had stored up a vast amount of knowledge. He had told Godo: we have limitless iron-ore deposits, and only the fringes of these deposits—in Mindanao, the Visayas, and Luzon—have been tapped. The figures are merely illustrative, but here they are: we export iron ore to Japan for processing at a mere thirty centavos a ton, and when we get this back in pig iron or elementary steel materials, do you know how much we have to pay? Three hundred pesos a ton. The opponents of Philippine steel are, of course, the American importers in Manila. Once a steel mill in this country is set up they will lose a very profitable market. And their arguments are downright silly. So what if our coal is bad and low grade and we don’t have coke! That is cheap and we can import it. Japan imports coke. And that is not all—hydroelectricity is becoming cheaper and our hydroelectric projects continue to be built. I’ve seen them in Mountain Province, and the Bontoc Igorots have been transferred from their ancestral homes because many new dams are being built there. Two are already finished. And there is this new Swiss process that is going to be very cheap. We can adopt it here. We don’t have to cling always to America’s apron strings. It’s not only being patriotic or nationalistic to ask that we support a local steel industry now, it’s also good business. It will absorb the surplus agricultural workers of the lethargic barrios. It’s nationalism—and Godo took the bait.

Don Manuel was in his office. Without a word Tony laid the magazine before the entrepreneur. The older man stood up, looked at the magazine, then went to his son-in-law and slapped him expansively
on the shoulder. “I don’t have to tell you how happy I am about this, son.” His eyes were shining.