The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (37 page)

“Well, sir,” Lawrence Bitfogel said calmly, “that is a pretty good definition. But freedom, the one I’m thinking of now, is in the mind more than anywhere else. It enables one to dream. And there’s no ceiling to those dreams.”

It was almost midnight when the party broke up. They had talked of many things—agriculture, the national economy, Europe, and the Common Market. On the way home, Ben de Jesus was quite excited.

“Look,” he said as they slid down the highway to Santa Mesa Boulevard, “I don’t quite agree with you when you say that reform and development must start with the land. Why, you are voicing what some radicals and the Huks have been saying all along.”

“I am sorry if I gave that impression,” Larry said, trying to sound apologetic. He was weary and did not want to argue anymore. “That is just an opinion, really. It isn’t dogma. After all, I don’t know much about your agrarian conditions except what I have read and heard from people like Tony.”

“That’s the trouble,” Ben said. “I wish you would study the situation more. I told you I majored in farm management. I have a farm in Nueva Ecija and I know just how to make it produce more. I’m starting to mechanize it now. That’s the only way to make the farm productive. But the tenants, they know nothing about mechanization. They are impossible. It will take them centuries to learn the value of tractors and fertilizers. They are also thieves and they are ignorant—it’s useless teaching them new things.”

“I can’t comment on that,” Lawrence Bitfogel said. “But you must be sure of what you want the land for. And as for your tenants, if they don’t own the land, don’t expect them to make sacrifices. It never works, you know. Besides, the transition shouldn’t create dislocations. It isn’t easy to shift from agriculture to industry.”

“Talk about dislocations,” Ben said with a hint of impatience. “Do you know what the supposed intellectuals are trying to do? They are campaigning to have the tenant get the land at our expense—and they call it the Magsaysay Revolution. I call it robbery. The tenants don’t know how to work the land. They are so damned
ignorant. What do tenants know about farming and efficient production? They have never gone to school to learn these. I know all these things.”

Ben’s anger petered out as they drove along the quiet streets. After a while of leaden silence, Ben spoke again, this time in a lighter vein. “Look, Dr. Bitfogel, why don’t you drop in at the house? There’s a cafe-espresso set that I bought in Italy last year. I’d like you to have some really good coffee.”

Bitfogel wanted desperately to return to his room and shake off the tedium and useless talk to which he had been exposed all evening. “I don’t want to impose on you. It’s so late and—”

“It won’t take long,” Ben said, and before Larry could say anything else the landlord ordered the driver to proceed to Pobres Park.

The coffee, as Ben had said, was strong and excellent. Sitting in the couple’s cozy living room, Larry examined everything in it—the gray marble floor; the rich, upholstered sofas; the heavy blue drapes; the oil portraits of Filipino patriarchs and landscapes, the finely paneled walls and, beyond the living room, the gleaming crystal and silver of the dining room, the appurtenances of Filipino upper-class living. The whole house was air-conditioned, and the air was spiked with the refreshing scent of cologne. He remembered his own home in Cleveland, the simplicity of its furnishings, and again there rushed to his mind in all its vividness the room he once shared with Tony—its two iron beds, the porcelain washbowl, the sagging wooden cabinets …

“I must say, your good taste shows in the way you have furnished your house,” he told Nena de Jesus. She had not talked much and now, at the compliment, she started gushing. “It was a difficult thing to do. You must understand my problem. It was difficult ordering the furniture. It’s good that I was able to go with my husband abroad again last year. Notice the drapes—they are from Marshall Field’s—and the furniture, well, I managed to gather odds and ends together.”

He felt like a heel asking about it, but he asked nevertheless, “Did Tony and his wife have a home of their own?”

“No,” Mrs. de Jesus said with keen interest now. “That’s the trouble. They never lived away from his in-laws. You don’t know how terrible
Mrs. Villa can get sometimes. Heavens, she is close to me, she adores me, but she can get on one’s nerves.”

Ben finished his cup and asked the sleepy maid standing by the door of the dining room to pour another cupful. He nodded to his wife’s talk.

“I always say,” Nena said firmly, “that young people should be able to experience a little suffering, that they should start from the bottom. When we were married, Ben and I … you know what happened? Father packed us off to that horrid farm, to an old house. Imagine, we had only five servants and an old Ford. I was angry at Father, but, of course, he always knows best. That’s the root of it all. Carmen and Tony—they were pampered. They never knew what it was to start from the bottom or to live alone as we did.”

He drained his cup, turned to Ben de Jesus, and finally asked the question that had tightened his stomach all evening: “Is it true that Tony committed suicide?”

Ben smiled broadly and he answered with the readiness and familiarity conviction engenders. “Carmen believes it’s suicide,” he said. “Her father, too. But me, I don’t. It was an accident, what else could it be? Why, the fellow had absolutely no reason at all. What more can a man want? His luck—it couldn’t happen to just any guy, not in a million years.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” Ben said impatiently. “Why should the man commit suicide? Everything was laid out for him—the future, all the money and the comforts he wanted. And most of all, you should have seen his wife then. She’s slimmer now—this breakdown business is simply sapping her vitality. But she’s a knockout, a real beauty. Tell him, Nena.”

Mrs. De Jesus smiled. “She had a wonderful figure. She’s thin now, but she’s still lovely. Why, I think she is one of the loveliest girls in the country. I never could understand how she fell for Tony Samson, his being Ilocano and all that.”

He did not want the couple to accompany him to his hotel, but they insisted. There was nothing more they could talk about. Nena tried to point out some of the impressive houses in the Park, but they seemed shapeless and anonymous, and so were the names of the residents she rattled off, names she tried to impress upon him as important. To her prattle Bitfogel could only reply with polite, meaningless
grunts. It was only much later that he understood why Ben had wanted very much to take him to Pobres Park. It was not only to show him the accoutrements of the De Jesus residence, but also to point out with an almost personal pride that this Park was the epitome of gracious living and could compare with the richest neighborhoods in the United States. In the two weeks that he was in the Philippines, he was to see the Park again in the daytime—its fire trees in bloom, the whitewashed fences and sprawling residences almost uniform in their ostentatious bigness, so uniform in fact that even after he had left the Philippines he could not recall what the houses in Pobres Park looked like, although he could readily bring to mind the poetry of the nipa huts and the shell-adorned windows of the frail wooden houses that lined the main streets of the small towns.

They were now driving out of the Park and were crossing an expanse of open country that separated it from the less affluent suburbs of the city, and it was on this highway, away from the cozy security of high fences and armed guards, that a rear tire of the de Jesus limousine blew out.

They got out of the car, shaken by the explosion, which had sounded ominously loud in the night, and Larry could sense the urgency in Ben’s voice: “We cannot stay here at a time like this!” To the driver he said, “Hurry up. Do something!”

Larry looked at his luminous watch. It was already three o’clock and the sky above them arched immensely black and wonderful with its millions of stars. The air was sharp, and above the smell of the asphalt he could make out the familiar odor of grass and living earth. “I don’t think you should worry,” he said lightly. “If it’s only a tire, I can help.”

The driver had already opened the rear compartment of the car and was heaving the spare tire out. “Of all things,” Nena could not hide her apprehension, “here on this road. Do you know, Dr. Bitfogel, that robberies have been committed here?”

“Well, you can always give the robbers what they want,” Lawrence Bitfogel said lightly. “We can also walk back to the Park. It’s so near. Or we can flag down a car. Do you think a car will stop?”

Ben de Jesus answered with a meaningless grumble and, with his wife, moved toward the narrow shoulder of the road. The driver
fumbled in the dark, and when he could not see what he was doing, he would strike a match and the little flame would cast light on his shadowed, anonymous face and the apprehensive faces of Ben de Jesus and his wife.

In a while two bright headlights appeared and came streaking toward them. The vehicle screeched to a stop behind them. A babble of voices—young, high-pitched, and raucous—followed, and Larry soon recognized the vehicle as one of those converted jeeps that crowded the city streets. From it there poured out more than a dozen men.

It was around him, standing on the asphalt, that they crowded. “Whatsa trouble, Joe?” one of them asked.

“A flat tire,” Larry said, trying to make out the faces before him. He was surprised to find that they were all youngsters. The jeep engine was running, its headlights on. Orientals always look younger than Occidentals, and he roughly placed their ages at eighteen and below. One carried a guitar and another a ukelele. All of them wore some sort of uniform—white shirts with frilled cuffs and dark pants that sank into what looked like cowboy boots.

“We can help, Joe,” the fellow who held the guitar said. The guitarist gave orders to the rest of the boys, and the uniforms took the names of Rod, Clem, Roger, Sam, and what else. A flashlight materialized and Larry joined them, watching their young enthusiasm translated into swift, sure movements, into gawking at the car and its fine finish, while all the time, on the narrow shoulder of the road, Ben and his wife stood motionless and silent.

“I see that you are wearing a uniform,” Larry said to no one in particular. All the bolts of the flat tire were already loosened and two of the boys were helping the driver to pull the tire off.

“Yes, Joe,” the guitarist replied. “We are called the Gay Blades.”

“What’s that?” He did not understand.

One of the boys brought from the jeepney what looked like a bass fiddle. The only difference was that it had only one string and at the other end of the silly-looking contraption was an empty gasoline container—the rectangular kind that usually went in the rear of an old U.S. Army jeep as a reserve gas or water tank. On this container was painted in bold, unerring red, The Gay Blades.

“We do many things—play basketball, sing. We’re the Gay Blades, Joe. You have something in the States like we have here, Joe?”

“My name’s not Joe,” Larry said, a bit annoyed.

“Sorry, Joe,” the guitarist went on. “We just came from a contest, you know. Good luck for us. We won second prize. We will beat the Roving Troubadors, yet. Just watch us, Joe.”

From the shadows, Ben de Jesus and his wife finally emerged and joined the group. The last bolt was being tightened and some of the boys—the one who carried the improvised bass fiddle and the one with the ukulele—went back to the jeepney.

Then the driver stood up. A look of triumph brightened his face and the faces of the youngsters who had helped him.

“Well, Joe,” the guitarist said, moving toward Larry with an extended hand. Lawrence took the hand and shook it. “We better roll now.”

It was only then that Ben spoke. “No, wait,” he said. He went to the youth and thrust out a bill. “Here—here, take this.”

They spoke in the vernacular and argued a bit and, from the drift and tone of the young men’s voices, Larry knew that the payment was being refused. “It’s Christmas—it’s Christmas anyway,” Ben was saying.

Some discussion had started in the jeep now and then they poured out—the bass fiddle and the ukuleles and a pair of bongo drums—and there in the open highway, under the stars, Larry heard the Gay Blades and the song they had adapted, the song they spiced with bongos, ukuleles, and the silly-looking bass fiddle—a medley of “White Christmas” and “Jingle Bells” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”—and while the boys sang, two cars slowed down, then zoomed on, and in the glare of the headlights he saw them clearly, fully: the lean, young faces, the alert eyes, the shiny black boots and the blue pants, the immaculate white silk shirts. But most of all, he relished hearing them, the clear voices welded as one, and in the end, after the final flourish of instruments and voices, the guitarist stepped forward. And having received the money from Ben, he shook Larry’s hand again.

“Merry Christmas,” the Gay Blades said.

When he returned to his room, Larry was amazed at himself, at how in the end he had managed to stand up to Ben de Jesus. He had never been quick to anger and he could not immediately trace
the root of his vehemence, for he often prided himself on his self-control. His voice had trembled and, even now, there was the empty feeling that always sucked in his belly when he was angry. He wondered how Ben and his wife took his rudeness, particularly after they had invited him to their house and shown him their hospitality.

He did not feel sleepy, although it was almost daybreak, and an unusual freshness and clarity of mind suffused him instead. Above his anger, everything that he had heard and seen was lucid and well-defined. He decided to write down his impressions on this early dawn—a useful habit he had acquired since he started working for the agency in South America. After a few sentences, however, he gave up. The impressions were incisive, yes, but always he could hear, like some grating and endless commercial in the back of his mind, the blustery talk of Senator Reyes and Don Manuel and the cocksure assertions of Ben de Jesus.