The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (34 page)

“I didn’t know I had a market value or that I had some snob appeal,” Tony said.

“Don’t talk smart, I said. What I’m trying to say,” Mrs. Villa came forward and shook a pudgy finger at him, “is: have some sense. Someday you’ll find that what’s good for the Villas is also good for you.”

Tony could not face Mrs. Villa anymore. “I’m leaving, Mama,” he said with finality. “I don’t know, but if I change my mind, you’ll be the first to know.”

Mrs. Villa shook her head. “I know your kind,” she said softly. “When you make up your mind it’s made up. Once you’ve gone through that door you’ll never return.”

“Am I such an open book?”

Her hand drifted to his arm, held him tightly but her grip relaxed as Tony moved to the door.

“It will never be the same again, Tony,” she said sadly. She followed him to the hall.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” he said, holding the suitcases firmly. They seemed lighter now and he carried them, almost blithely, down the rear stairway and to the back entrance, where he called a cab.

The night was quieter when he reached Antipolo. Traffic had not cluttered Blumentritt yet, and beyond the asphalt and the weeds, the street where he once lived was what it had always been—narrow, incongruous, wooden frame buildings thrusting their ugly roofs, their shapeless forms, from the black earth. A few jeepney drivers who lived in the shanties farther up the narrowings and curvings of the road were at Mang Simeon’s store, drinking cheap coffee, their jeepneys parked before the store, waiting for the meager traffic that would stir when the Bicol Express arrived.

It had been weeks since he was here last and he remembered with a dull ache how he had tried to forget the street. Now he was back like some criminal returning to the scene of his crime, for it was here where he had done people wrong—his sister Betty, Emy, and, finally, himself.

He carried his suitcases across the narrow alley flanked with scraggly weeds. The door to which he went was closed, but within
the house a faint light burned. He knocked twice, wondering how he would tell his sister what had happened. His knocking did not stir anyone in the house, so he rapped again, this time a little louder, calling out, “Manang Betty, Manang Betty,” his voice resonant in the night.

Finally, a stirring sounded from within. A lightbulb above the door went on and, at the door, Betty’s squeaky voice: “Who is it?”

“Tony,” he said. The door opened and Betty stood before him, looking thinner. He had not seen her since she told him of their father’s death, and the shame that nagged at him now formed an impossible barrier to all that he wanted to say, the words of entreaty and regret. He stood in the light, the suitcases on the ground. The sight of him in the night must have startled his sister and, for a while, they just stood there, wordless. Then Betty spoke, as if this was Tony coming home from school or a binge: “Come in with your things before some rascal picks them up. It’s good you remembered to visit us.”

Tony could glean the sarcasm. He had expected it, for had he not really forgotten them—his sister who had sent him to school and this wooden crate that was home? And yet it did not hurt as much as he had imagined it would, because it was his sister who spoke. She had a right to feel aggrieved. Never had he realized it as fully as he did now that he had really strayed away and forsaken them all the while that he was in Santa Mesa, all the while that he roamed in an ethereal region that was never meant to be his.

Wordless, he followed Betty to the living room. It had not changed, either—the battered
bejuco
furniture with the knife marks inflicted by his young nephews; the starched white doilies that Emy had left behind; the Ocampo painting that still hung by the staircase, dominating everything in the house with its splurge of color. Yes, nothing in Antipolo was altered.

“I’m not here on a visit, Manang,” he said humbly. “I’m here to stay, and I hope you will take me back.”

Now Betty’s sarcasm was more defined: “What has happened now? Have you at last decided that you belong here and not in that palace in Santa Mesa?” Triumph tinged her voice.

“I don’t know how you will take it,” Tony said, not caring really about what Betty’s answer would be. “Maybe I’m foolish, but I have left Carmen.”

Betty sat on the rattan sofa beside the stairway and regarded her
brother. She had become amiable again and she smiled. “Your Manong still snores like a hog, and so do the children. Listen to them now. They didn’t even hear you knocking, although the whole neighborhood has been roused.”

But Tony did not want to talk light. “Tell me, Manang,” he said, “did I do right? Don’t bother about the reason. Did I do right?”

“You have to tell me why you left her,” Betty said.

Tony turned away. “It does not matter, really,” he said. “I quarreled with Carmen, that’s all.” Deep within him what he wanted was confirmation, not denial. What he wanted was sympathy, not the truth.

“You were wrong,” his sister said evenly. “You were wrong to leave. I was trying to tell you: your beginning is there. Not here. This is the end, Tony. You’ll never get the same chance again.”

“But I’m free now,” he insisted, his voice faltering with emotion.

Betty laughed bitterly. “Pride is not for us, it’s for the wealthy. How many times have I told you that?”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I mean it,” Betty said. She stood and listened to the snoring from upstairs. She turned to Tony. “How long are you staying here?”

“I don’t know,” he said, rising, too. “Maybe I’ll stay here for as long as you will let me.”

“It will be crowded,” Betty said, her displeasure completely banished. “You’ll be needing quiet. Are you going back to teach at the university? Have you any savings?”

He shook his head. “I will not teach and, of course, I have no money.”

“You will not find this neighborhood quiet anymore. And what will the neighbors say? Everyone knows how well you have married. Everyone teases me when I wear my old rags, or when we have nothing but
tuyo
for lunch.”

“You are right. I’ll stay here until I find a new place. And, most important, after I find a job.”

“Is that what you will do in the meantime? Look for a job?”

He nodded. “I need the money not only for myself but also for my pledge to you.”

“You can forget that,” Betty said amiably. “As long as your Manong and I have jobs we will be able to send the children to school.”

“I know my duties,” Tony said. “And that’s final. But, really, it’s Emy who worries me most. Her son …”

“She shouldn’t worry you. She can take care of herself and her boy.”

“Yes, she can. But her son … he’s mine, Manang. I didn’t know it until last week when I went to Rosales.”

Betty bent forward, not quite convinced by what she had heard.

“Yes,” Tony repeated, “the boy is mine. Six years—how she has suffered!”

“But Tony, what can you do now?” she asked after a long silence.

“I don’t know.”

“What did she say?”

“She despises me. She didn’t say so, but I felt it.”

“I wouldn’t be so harsh if I were you,” Betty said. “If I know Emy, she would never be that harsh.…”

“She has a right to be harsh,” Tony said.

“But what will you do now? Marry her? You know you can’t do that. We don’t divorce, and Carmen—Will she let you go?”

“I don’t care anymore what she does. And as for Emy, I want to do right by her.”

“And what is that?”

“I don’t know. Give her things, perhaps—the things she never had. And more so now that there’s the boy. I don’t want him to grow up hating me. I’m his father and it feels so different being one.”

“Still, you can’t marry Emy.”

“I know.”

“I’d like to help you,” Betty said with feeling. He had not asked for her assistance and her offer touched him. “I may have been a little impossible—that’s the schoolteacher for you. But I want to help.”

“The family, we … we will always stick together.”

“You are my brother. You may steal, you may murder, but you are still my brother. I’ll fix you a place to sleep.” She turned and went up the wooden stairs.

Alone in the house where he had known possession and its haunting joy, it finally occurred to him that he was, after all, part of the herd—the herd with the gross instincts of self-preservation.

He stood up and walked to the window. Through the iron bars he looked into Antipolo, which was as dark and disreputable as ever.
This is corruption, this is decay of both the spirit and the body, this is home. Then, above his own musings, he heard his brother-in-law, Bert, saying thickly, “I’m sorry, Tony. I was sound asleep, I didn’t know.”

Bert was standing beside him in his underwear as chubby as ever. His hair was still cropped short and his face shone swarthy and full in the light.

“It’s I who should be sorry, Manong. Waking you up at such an hour.”

“Betty told me about your leaving Carmen. It’s a big mistake. You know what I mean.”

He smiled. “I don’t think it’s a mistake, Manong.”

Betty joined them. “Go on up and sleep,” she said, tugging at his sleeve.

Tony sat down on the sofa instead. All of you have a reason to go on living, he thought, but I have lost everything that is good and true. Emy, the future—I’ve lost all of it because there is inherent corruption in me. It’s something entwined with my flesh and I can’t wash it off. My God, I should have known this long ago. I should have known then that I was weak and that I hadn’t suffered enough. He turned the words over in his mind, and because they were true, he pounced on them as if they were the only nuggets his soul could treasure.

“I am not really sleepy,” he said, laying a hand on the old narra sofa. It had a lot of bedbugs once and he remembered how he took it out in the sun between the railroad tracks and poured boiling water on it, then left it there, exposed, the whole, hot afternoon.

“Your bed upstairs is being used by the boys now,” Betty said, “but I will spread a mat for you on the floor. It’s not soft—you haven’t slept on the floor for years, I know. But it will be daylight soon.”

“It’s all right,” Tony said. “I’ll go out and take a walk and maybe I’ll be able to think better.” He lied, of course, because never before had his mind been as clear as it was now. He moved to the door.

“You need sleep,” Bert said.

“It’s all right, Manong,” he said. “I need the walk more.”

They accompanied him to the door, telling him to be careful because this was Antipolo and not Rosales, and danger lurked in the
crevices and alleys. He stepped out into the night after appropriate assurances that he could really take care of himself here in Antipolo, which was the beginning. Would this also be the end?

The realization that it was swept over him and strangled all hope, all sense of enduring life. He had gone so far, trying to leave Rosales and then Antipolo. He could not return to Rosales now, not anymore, for he could not face Emy, whom he had wronged, or look into the eyes of his son, who would grow up in a world he might not want and might never be able to change. But the boy would be different. He would take after his mother, who would dote on him, teach him, and imbue him with a courage as true as blood. That was it: the boy would be rooted in the land, unlike him who had severed his roots. And while he could hope for the boy and keep him always in his thoughts, Tony could not reach out to him, hold his hand, claim kinship with him. He had sinned not only against Emy but also against this son and, from the depths of him, the agony was wrenched out:
Emy, forgive me, forgive me.

There was no warm hand to touch him and tell him everything was going to be all right. There was no Emy to loosen the deadening grip of what he had discovered—that it was she whom he really loved; it was Emy after all who was a part of him, who could have been his salvation if he had possessed but a fraction of her faith.

He was here in this desolate and meaningless geography, this Antipolo. Yes, this would be the end, when all his life he had tried to run away from it, repudiate it, this ugly street and its clinging smell of old ammonia and foul decay. And now he was back, inexorably, it seemed, because there was nowhere else he could turn, not Rosales and Emy, who had sent him away, not the university, which he had discarded, and not Newspaper Row, either, because there his frustration would rekindle itself into that wild, consuming fire that had already burned out men of more vigor and vision than he. Would he end up like Godo and Charlie, afraid of the slightest stirring of the wind, who had sublimated their fears and their insecurity with senseless bravado? No, none of these alternatives were for him.

The knowledge that he had been rejected implicitly by everyone, that there was really no place he could turn to now for one single, saving bit of peace, of belonging, shriveled all his pride. He had never felt as lonely as he felt now—not even in America, in that iron-cold winter, nothing of this terrible loneliness had ever touched him
before, for it was too huge, too engulfing to be defined. Although, of course, it was not new, for this loneliness was actually the final growth of that greater loneliness called truth or living that had corroded him from the start without him actually being aware.

Perhaps it would help if he cried just a while. Then the ache would be eased. But only a sob broke in his throat. No tears came to his eyes, and the tightening vise upon his chest seemed to choke all blood and breath.

He turned to the alley that ended in the railroad tracks, and from the distance he heard the unmistakable whistle of the train—the Bicol Express, perhaps—echoing in the early dawn.

Now the vision was clear and reassuring, as if he had vaulted the last terrifying abyss of doubt. It was not so much really what Carmen had done that tortured his mind; he could forgive her easily, for he was, after all, broad-minded and capable of taking a less personal attitude to her treachery—did he not believe in the
ulog
and in the primordial faithlessness of man’s urges? Perhaps they could still make something out of their marriage and he could still live with her and share with her the beneficence of the Villas, making believe that this was what he wanted, this surfeit of ease.