The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (29 page)

I
t was early evening when Tony reached home. Carmen was out and the maid simply said that Ben had picked her up at sundown. He brought his manuscripts out and went through them again, but the urge to work escaped him. At suppertime, when Carmen was not yet back, he went down to dinner without her.

“Ah, Tony,” Don Manuel looked up from a batch of papers beside his soup. “I thought you wouldn’t return tonight. Remind me to show you something tomorrow.”

“There wasn’t much to do in the old hometown, Papa.” He had lied about the trip and said that he would stand as sponsor at a baptism. “I think I wasted my time. You know how baptisms are.”

Mrs. Villa, her hair done up in pins, her flabby face oily with cleansing cream, nudged her husband. “Better tell Tony that, with the factory almost finished, there’s got to be something social about it. A big party. I’ll think up one. And this means that there will be more work for him. And the opening celebration—that’s the most important thing. Let’s get the President and the First Lady.”

“I think that’s your department, Tony,” Don Manuel said. “Tomorrow we will have the last transformer installed and then in the
afternoon we hope to have a trial run of all units. I leave it all to you—the plans for the opening, all the ballyhoo you can cook up.”

“The plans will be tentative, Papa …”

“It’s all yours as long as you show me your plans tomorrow and we can talk them over.”

Tony idled through the meal, and when it was over he rushed back to the room and took a warm shower. The shower should have relaxed him, but it didn’t. If Carmen were only here now, perhaps she would understand and be sympathetic, tell him to do what was right.

He tried once more to attend to the manuscripts on which he had been working, but the words would not take shape, and the cohesion that would string his thoughts in an orderly fashion just would not come. The notes on the migration to Mindanao, for instance, did not jell and he found himself repeating the same tired phrases about the courage of the Ilocanos, their adventurous nature and their capacity to retain their identity even when they were surrounded by a polyglot of Muslim and Visayan farmers.

He went to bed with a detective story, but that was useless, too. He was already asleep when Carmen switched on the chandelier, which flooded the room with its bright, pinkish glow.

“Where have you been?” he asked, blinking in the light. He glanced at the clock near the bed. It was two o’clock in the morning.

“Stop it,” she said hotly. “Do you have to know everything I do, examine everything I tell you to see if I’m lying? I’ve been with Ben. He had to take me to the rehearsal because you weren’t in—you were in that hick town of yours.”

He rose and found his slippers. He walked to her. “I’m not cross-examining you. I just want to know where you have been. I’m your husband, am I not?”

There was no belligerence in his voice and he laid a hand softly on her shoulders. She shook the hand off and faced him. “I have to be frank with you, Tony,” she said, frowning. “You know damn well I’ve a life to live, too, and I’m not to be cooped up here. I have to have interests. If they keep me out the whole night, you have to be understanding. I understood you enough to have gone with you to look up your crummy ancestors.”

Her manner defied explanation. It annoyed him but only for an instant, because he had something much more important to tell her.

He held her and looked into her eyes and said, “Baby, listen
now. I meant to tell you this earlier, but I wasn’t sure. I’m sure now because … well, I have been there.”

“You are talking in riddles,” she said, unmindful of what he was saying. She took off her earrings and laid them on the dresser, then started undressing.

“This is important, baby.”

“All right,” she said, unbuttoning her dress with a hint of annoyance. “Is it something you have already done or something you are planning to do?”

“It has been done.…”

“Water under the bridge.
Esto
, if it’s done, then what’s the use telling me about it?”

“This is important—this thing I have to tell you. Listen, there was something in the past that I never told you. Seven years ago, before we met, when I was just a mere graduate assistant at the university, there was a girl …”

Carmen didn’t even look up. She had started brushing her hair.

“This doesn’t interest you?” he said.

“Of course it does, darling,” she said. “Everything you do interests me. Now go on with your delightful little story.
Esto
, I was beginning to think you had lived a puritanical life.”

“This girl, you must understand— I didn’t even know you then. And I didn’t expect it to happen, either.…”

“Those are famous last words.”

“It’s the truth. But that isn’t as bad as the fact that this girl is my cousin.”

Carmen turned to him and laughed merrily. “You need not feel so guilty about it, honey. It’s done all the time. Have you met Nora Lardizabal? Well, she’s married to her first cousin.
Oye
, you told me once about this being done by the
hacenderos
in your part of the country.… Well, it just happens that Nora’s parents are sugar planters. She isn’t a social outcast. She is very respectable.”

“You don’t understand, baby,” he said, shaking his head. “You don’t understand at all.”

“But I do, honey.”

“Would you still be smug if I told you there’s a child?”

She bolted up.

“There’s a boy,” he said, as if he were again at the confessional,
and the confession was a growing flame in his throat. He waited for her to speak, but she did not. She merely looked at him, the beginning of a smirk playing on her face. Then she sat back and was silent.

“You don’t even want to know what happened? You don’t care about children and this particular child, my child?”

“Is there anything you want me to say—or do?”

“You can be angry with me, you can do something,” he said in quiet desperation. “After all, I had gone to Rosales to see for myself. It is true, honey. I saw Emy again and this child—this son of mine.”

“Well, can you change that?” she asked with hint of impatience. “If it’s your son, well, let him be your son. You are not going to turn away from him, are you?”

“No,” he said, amazed at her indifference.

“I’m not angry,” she said with a yawn, “and I’m sleepy now. Maybe we can talk more about it in the morning.”

He let it go at that, but, somehow, he could not quite banish the thought that Carmen did not care about his son, about children, or even about him. She had sounded so uninvolved and there was something about her attitude that now recalled to him the girl he had met in Washington, the young dreamy-eyed girl who was warm, not this woman who was now with him. Or had she simply camouflaged her feelings so well that he was unable to recognize them? Could there be some depth in her that he could not reach? He was telling her about his son; he was being truthful to her; he was conceding to her his fallibility, and all she did was say that she was sleepy. Her attitude baffled him. Still, Carmen was human—not a cold, unfeeling hunk of stone.

Much later, when she was quietly snoring, he watched her, the softness of her features, the easy peace upon her face.

Somewhere in the nameless reaches of the night a cock crowed. It would soon be morning and that morning would be unwanted. The sky would still be the same cerulean blue and the wind wandering among the agoho pines in the garden would still be the same wind that cooled Antipolo and all the ancient rooms he had stayed in. But one great change had, at last, caught up with him, and it was not the kind of change he wanted. During those bleak years that he
was in college, during those days when he had but one pair of army boots, and
pan de sal
with margarine for lunch, he had nourished in the quiet core of his mind a dream of peace and abundance. The dream did not include a girl like Carmen or a job such as the one her father had given him, a job writing anemic press releases. Carmen’s aspirations were not his. If he had understood this before, the knowledge would have helped him and he would have been able to look at her, her father, and the whole Villa clan in a less opaque perspective. Almost his whole life he had lived in the gravest of want, amid the most vicious uncertainties. It was different with Carmen. Her aspirations were directed toward people and objects that could be possessed. How happy she had been to know that she could tell him to do things, that she was listened to and believed, that she was desired and loved. These were the measure of her needs.

What am I to do? He should have answered this upon meeting Carmen. But he had chosen to ignore this question, not because he did not want to find out if he were merely vacillating, but because in time, the question might resolve itself without much pain.

The next morning Tony rose before Carmen. He had many things to do. The stories he would write on the inauguration of the mill and on the party Mrs. Villa would give—these must be finished within the week. It was better that Carmen slept on. It would be torture to face her this morning and suffer the silent lash of her scorn.

Don Manuel was at the breakfast table very early, too, and on this particular morning seemed ebullient. “Tony, I have been waiting for you. I have something to tell you.”

He sat down before his father-in-law. The news must be good enough to warrant the glow on Don Manuel’s face.

Don Manuel’s portfolio was on the breakfast table. “I wanted to speak with you last night, but I didn’t want to spoil your sleep. You see, I like to think that I am a very considerate man. That is why I am starting the day right by making you think.”

Tony could not get the drift. “What is it, Papa?”

“Let me get this clear,” the older man said. The maid brought in his orange juice and he took a sip. “I am very glad for what you did in the
Sunday Herald.
I knew you tried your best and sometimes it’s really the intention that counts.”

“I’m glad you feel that way, Papa,” Tony said.

“What I am trying to say, Tony, is that I have my ways of persuasion, too. Now don’t get me wrong again, but, you see, I could have very well done that on my own.”

“What are you trying to say, Papa?”

“Am I being too abstract?” Don Manuel laughed. He unzippered the portfolio and brought out a canceled check. “Here,” he pushed the check across the glass top to him.

Tony looked at the check and read Godo’s signature on it. The sum was two thousand pesos.

“I thought you said this friend of yours could not be bought. Well, his price is two thousand,” Don Manuel said, smiling.

The coffee had no taste in Tony’s mouth. He laid the check back on the table.

“I don’t gloat, Tony,” the entrepreneur said. “But look—” he waved the check, “you see what my method can do.”

“It isn’t fair, Papa,” he cracked his knuckles. “You shouldn’t have drawn Godo into a situation like this in the first place.”

“That’s the point.” Don Manuel laughed with great triumph. “A man’s character comes out only in a crisis, when temptation is before him. We are all weaklings, son. No man is expected to be of steel—and even steel melts. There isn’t much choice for a man once he is born. There is no certainty except death. One has to live the best way he can. I believe that. Your friend apparently believes that, too. That’s why I don’t hold anything against him. I only wish he were made of sterner stuff.”

We are all weaklings. These words were now wedged deep in Tony’s mind. He was saddened yet at the same time angered that Godo had not been the heroic figure he had expected him to be. It was Godo alone who could have stood up to Don Manuel, it was he alone who could have shown that, at least, there was some essence of purity left in a country where filth overflowed not only in garbage dumps but also in the most aristocratic of appointments.

How long ago had it been when he had ceased thinking that, somehow, there must be an inner strength in himself? Now he looked back and wondered if it was not some miracle instead that had uprooted him from Rosales and blew him away to Antipolo,
then across the ocean to America and Spain, and finally to Sta. Mesa.

Was it weakness? How pleasant even now was the memory of distant places, of Maple Street, the old brick house, the doorbell that had to be twisted so that it would ring, the screened door that kept out the summer flies, and good old Larry, wherever he was now.

Why did they stick together? Was it because they both had but a nominal faith in God, was it because he seldom went to church and Larry himself had never been inside a synagogue? It was Larry who helped to shape the dream, out there in that spartan room on Maple Street. Larry, with his ambition to go forth and wipe poverty and prejudice from the earth. But Tony had said: Let poverty be erased from my lot first. The dream had long since become real and he would never know the nagging damnation of insecurity again. But this newfound security was not what he wanted. It was self-justification that he had been chasing blindly. Was it not the flame that drew him, as flame draws a moth inexorably to that searing and most glorious death?

We are all weaklings, Don Manuel had said.

He was about to leave his office at noon when his secretary announced that his Manang Betty was waiting outside. He had not seen her for weeks and a twinge of guilt now bothered him. He had not visited her or brought her the usual things, canned food and a little money to help tide her over.

“You should come and see me more often, Manang,” he said, trying to be blithe when she came in, but he himself realized there was a lameness in his effort.

Her face was ashen and grave. “I have never come to you for help,” she said. “I’m not asking for help now, but this is something that we must share.”

She did not cry when she finally told him the news. She had long been beyond the rapacious reach of grief, and she told him what there was to tell with the casualness of a neighbor passing on the latest gossip. Only the tightness of her lips and the sorrow in her eyes showed the grief that she wanted to share.