The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (51 page)

I often slept inside this basket, curled at the bottom with my dog, Pugot. An earlier pet, also named Pugot, a big, fat pig, was much too heavy for me to bring inside. We had no farm, so the underhouse was not to house work animals except when the pig Pugot, which we had gotten from one of Mother’s customers as a piglet, grew into a beautiful beast. When it was big enough to sell, the money would be shared by Mother and the owner. Pugot was a “mestizo,” with pink skin, white bristles, a very short snout, elephant ears, a tail that curled, rosy hooves, and the bluest eyes. In the mornings before the dew had vanished, I went to the fields beyond the arbor of bamboo and gathered leafy weeds, which, together with leftovers and bran, I cooked for him. He recognized his name; when I called he would rush to the gate grunting, then lie on his side as I stooped to scratch his stomach. I sometimes slept under the house with him on frayed jute sacks laid on the ground, and more than once I had rested my head on his belly. I had feared for his life when he was castrated and felt it a gross injustice to this handsome animal to have been treated thus and made to grow unlike a normal being, but grow up he did, into a huge and lumbering thing—so heavy that
once, in his eagerness to meet me as I was coming home from school, he threw me to the ground.

By then, Mother and I were tired. There were not enough leftovers from the neighbors who also had pigs of their own, nor enough edible weeds in the field or free bran from the mill. The dry season came, then it was June and always, in June, there was this harried scrounging for money for the school opening.

The day before school opened I returned from the fields where I had gone to catch grasshoppers for our evening pot. For the first time, there was no white behemoth rushing to me. A chill came to my heart as I raced up the bamboo ladder to where Mother was at work, taking advantage of the last vestiges of afternoon light. She turned to me, her face pained and drawn. I had always anticipated Pugot’s fate, but I cried just the same when she confirmed it. She told me how much we got for Pugot, that I could go on to school, although I did not care for it. She told me then—and this I will never forget—that we will lose all those dear to us, and those we hate, we must face.

Then Auntie Bettina gave me a black puppy. I came to love him like I did Pugot. The dog was a mongrel, but a beautiful animal nonetheless, with sad, luminous eyes and soft glossy fur. It had belonged to a fellow teacher who was migrating to the United States. There was no one to take care of the puppy. Auntie Bettina happened to be in Manila for one of those interminable bouts with the bureaucracy, and her friend asked if she would please take the puppy. He grew up, not big and cumbersome like Pugot, but just as handsome and well admired by the women who came to the house.

One of them was the mayor’s wife, a stick of a woman with a dozen children, who loved loud colors, dazzling reds and deep blues, so that when she flapped down the street, one knew it was she even at a distance. She had a demanding, grating voice, and if she did not order a dress almost every week, Mother would not have put up with her as a customer. When she first saw Pugot, her face was immediately agleam with the same acquisitive expression she had when she saw a gaudy piece of cloth.

Pugot may have sensed the evil in her, for he would cower and whimper no matter how she tried to coax him in the kitchen or under the house. She was asthmatic, her breath coming in gusts that plumed out of her flaring nostrils and her gaping, painted mouth.
When she had attacks, so we learned, she would hug the pillows and wet them with her frothing, her wheezing tormenting her household. Her husband took the frustrations of sleepless nights out on the luckless people in the
municipio
, lashing out at the underpaid clerks and policemen, his bleary eyes and listless mien transforming him from a mild and gregarious politician into a ranting devil—a state that lasted the whole morning but disappeared when he had slouched on his sofa and gotten a drink of gin and the sleep he had missed.

It was he who came to the house one day and said that he wanted Pugot for his wife. He was offering a lot of money only because Pugot was all black with not a single patch of white on him.

Mother told him I should be consulted, although I had listened to the whole transaction from the kitchen, where I cuddled Pugot. The mayor told Mother about her working without a license, that she was not paying income tax, also contrary to law. And finally, his wife would take her business to another dressmaker, but—some hesitant laughter here—all these would be “conveniently forgotten” and never dredged up again if Mother was willing to part with an insignificant little dog. He would also give her thirty pesos for it, which was just too much.

“And what have you to say, Pepe?” Mother asked.

“Why do you want Pugot,
Apo
?” I asked. He smiled beatifically; he had not yet had his gin or his nap, for his eyes were bleary and the smile became one gurgling laughter that tapered into a sigh. “Ah, my boy, you should come and see!” He brought out a wad of bills and started counting. Mother received the money glumly.

After he had gone, the whimpering dog in his arm, I followed him. He was just going up to his house when I reached their gate. I called out and he turned to me, his blob of a head shaking in disbelief.

“You really want to know?” he asked.

I nodded.

In their living room, the mayor’s wife was seated on a rattan chair; she was fanning herself, and when she saw Pugot she stood up, came to me, and hugged me like a leech saying in a breath that stank how grateful she was that I would give up my pet. Yes, it would not be in vain for now her asthma would be cured.

With her was Lakay Benito; we went to the
batalan
—the open
space behind the kitchen where the earthen jars and the wash were hung and where, in most provincial houses, the artesian well also stood. I pitied Pugot and was disgusted at myself, the mayor, and the people around us. Reciting some incomprehensible phrases, Lakay Benito went to the table where Pugot lay, his paws now bound together. The mayor held the dog up while Lakay Benito, now finished with his mumbling, raised a small gleaming knife, searched for the vein in my dog’s throat and with one swift stroke, slashed into it. Pugot started to thrash but to no avail, and as blood spurted out, the mayor raised the dog higher. His wife now stood before him, her cavernous mouth open, her eyes closed. The blood splattered into that cavern, and down her neck, onto the front of her dress. She lapped it, making happy throaty sounds while Pugot thrashed and quivered, then stopped moving altogether.

They said I could wait for some dogmeat to bring home, but I did not linger; they laid my dead Pugot on the table and the mayor’s wife glanced at me, her eyes glistening with gratitude. She came to the house the following day and ordered three new dresses, but she never had a chance to wear them, for that same week she died in her sleep.

How would it be when Lucy left? Would we part with recriminations that would scar us both? I could no longer bear staying in Antipolo. Hearing the trains rumble by, smelling the fetid decay along the weed-choked tracks, repelled me, angered me.

Mila next door had become a sweet nuisance as well, for her invitations had now become indiscreet. She seemed to know just when I would leave for school, and once, on the pretext that she was going to Quiapo, she walked with me to Dimasalang.

I was really taken aback that same evening when Kuya Nick was at our door, apparently waiting for me. He asked me to walk with him to Avenida, to one of the new air-conditioned restaurants near the railroad crossing. On the way he had remained matter-of-fact, his face serene and quiet. He wanted me to order dinner, but hunger had left me, and I asked instead for coffee. He, too, had a cup—nothing more, and with the first sip, he shook his head with displeasure. “Now,” he said, “there’s really nothing like coffee from Benguet. Better
than Batangas. You should learn to patronize your own, you know.”

I was no coffee connoisseur; in Cabugawan, our morning coffee was really corn roasted black, then brewed and flavored with milk and raw cane sugar, and the brew was far more exhilarating than what I now had. I was apprehensive; I thought he had learned of Mila’s efforts to seduce me. I did not expect him to start with a nationalist spiel and had, somehow, never connected him with such interests, so when he asked if I was an activist, I was not sure why he asked.

“Not all the way,” I said. “It is one way of getting something—a scholarship, money.”

“Just as I thought,” he sighed. A waitress with high wooden clogs and a flat chest asked if he needed another cup, but he waved her away. “It’s all right,” he continued, “as long as you know what you want. But be careful, you may start believing what you say—and then you forget the important things.”

“Important things?”

He sat back, his brow creased. “It is important that you know the nature of man, of the society in which we live.” He sounded like a college instructor, his English impeccable though interspersed with Tagalog.

“Would you believe it, Pepe?” he enthused. “I was a working student, went to Ateneo, and finished with a B.A. in sociology. The first thing you must understand is that we are status-conscious; we easily believe in appearances. At night, I was a waiter and a pimp in Dewey Boulevard. I often fell asleep during the lectures. You would not think, looking at me now—my cars, these clothes—that I did not wear shoes until I reached high school.”

“You have climbed very high,” I said.

“Ha!” he leaned over, his eyes alight with pleasure, his mouth drawn across his fleshy face in a grin. “School helped a lot—the friends I made there, the contacts, the entry into the homes of the genteel upper class. Upper class!” he snorted contemptuously.

His tone became tense, conspiratorial: “I worked very hard, saved all I could, and started pushing early. I had only three shirts in college, a couple of dark pants, a pair of black shoes—Ang Tibay. But I kept them clean. And when I had saved enough, I bought a
car—a secondhand Ford, but I kept it running. Then I looked around for the fortune to be made. It was not difficult, the girls, the boys who were spendthrifts, who never knew the likes of me, slaving to make it to their level. And I did it and here I am, still making money off the bastards!”

He emptied his cup. “One thing you must remember,” he said, easing himself back into his chair, “everyone can be corrupted because everyone is human. Give me an hour—maybe that is too long—with your student leaders, with your nationalist idols in Congress, and I will have their price.”

As I pondered what he said, he asked: “What is your price, Pepe?”

His question did not surprise me. “I don’t know,” I said.

“What is it you want most?”

It was as if I had known the answer to this question all along; I wanted to live well, to be rich, but now that it was put to me in its utterest simplicity, I had no ready, unequivocal reply.

“To be truly alive,” I said tentatively, wondering if those were the right words, and then it came to me in all its morning clarity. Indeed, this was what I desired, to be fully alive, to have a real meaning to my waking and sleeping, that I was no vegetable in a simple photo-synthetic relationship with the sun, that every pore in me exuded not just animal sweat but the essence of me. “To be honestly, truly alive,” I repeated.

He sat back as if stupefied by my reply. “That is very tricky of you,” he said somberly. “What is it then that makes you alive? Money? Food? Women? Reading—ah, I noticed you are fond of books.”

“Those and more,” I said.

“Money,” he mused, “can buy everything.”

I shook my head. “Not friends,” I said. “Because if money can buy them then they are not friends. Not loyalty. Not love.”

Kuya Nick toyed with his empty cup. His hair was thick, but at the crown it had started to thin. It was deep black as the dye was fresh.

I had come up with a good definition of my wants, but I did not want to make him feel I had confounded him. “You act as if you have planned everything. Did you ever plan on being in love?” I asked.

He glanced at me and again, a smile crossed his rotund face. He gazed at the bright
capiz
globe dangling from the paneled ceiling. “Yes, Pepe, I have been in love. Still am. No, it’s not Mila, whom I like very much. Do you know where she came from? Rather, where I salvaged her? I don’t want to boast about what I do. I have a wife and three children—the oldest is now in his teens—and I love them and shield them from what I am, from what I know.” His voice became stern. “I have told you more than I should,” he said, his eyes piercing into me. “But only because I think you are honest. You must never do this: get people to know you, be really close to you, to read you like a book.”

“I will remember that.”

“There, up there in the enclaves of privilege, they know me as Nick, efficient, trustworthy, dependable. I come across with the goods, the contacts, and the contracts—at the time agreed upon. They don’t need to sign stacks of paper with me. My word is enough. Real estate dealer, customs broker—everything. My office is small, but it is up there, too. The other things I do, they don’t know. My family, where I live—these I keep away. These are mine alone. And elsewhere, I am Nick the avenger, the merciless harbinger of my law.”

“I don’t want to be on any side other than yours,” I said. “I am scared. Besides, it will not be decent.”

“Do not think about decency, Pepe,” his voice rose again. “This is an indecent world. All those people dressed up, attending those concerts, those fancy parties splashed in the society pages—they are all indecent. Each has his little scheme and in the end, they all use people.”

“You use people, too,” I reminded him.

He balled his fists. “Listen, I will not deny that, but when I use you, you will know it and you will get what is your due, just as it has already been so. And you will get more, if you are smart. That makes the difference!”

We stood up and walked back to Antipolo, through the shuttered stalls of the market, the leaves, and the garbage thick as shingles on the asphalt and on the sidewalk, and the stench of rotting vegetables around us. Then Kuya Nick told me why he had waited for me; he was a master politician, he had really worked me over,
molded me to the form he could handle best, and he did this with his homilies, his ingratiating confidences that could have been lies but sounded sincere.