The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (52 page)

This was one of those emergencies and he would not have thought of me were I not dependable. Indeed, I was the man for it, with my capabilities and endowments.

“You will enjoy it,” he said, pausing in our walk, his eyes narrowed into serious slits. “I would not bother you, Pepe, you know that, unless it was really serious. I am compromised.”

The job was vague at first, but now it became unmistakably clear, and I should have been revolted by it, but I was not.

“You can do it—you have done it,” he said, breaking into a nervous laugh, and of course, he was right. “It will not be different. It will be in an apartment, with privacy, and you won’t even know who will be watching. No cracks in the wall. A one-way mirror.”

I had one last argument and it would have sufficed, but he had a ready answer for that, too.

“You will be with someone familiar. As a matter-of-fact, she is quite good-looking if I may say so.”

We hurried to Makati. It was an unhealthy August evening, a break from the nine-day rain, with this strangling humidity that permeated everything, enervated the senses, and fogged the mind. We banged away through rutted streets, and in his air-conditioned Mercedes we were free from the gummy clutches of the hour, free from the warm glue of traffic, free from the urinal odor of neighborhoods. Then Quiapo, Taft, and the new highway to Makati, the center embankments screaming with the posters of revolution,
Ibagsak ang Pasismo, Marcos Diktador
^*
 …

But there will be no revolution, no change in this rimless bog of creation; the poor have always been with us, Cabugawan, Tondo, and everywhere, the hovels and the scum. Bonifacio and Sulaiman—where are they now? What have they really left behind except a Tondo that will be there for another millennium? There will be no revolution, not while the only honest thing we can perceive is in our gonads.

We stopped before one of those spindly apartment buildings in Makati. At the far end of the lobby, aglow with
capiz
shell lamps, across the shimmering expanse of Romblon marble, Mila was waiting. She walked to us, her high heels a rhythm on the stone. As she passed below the
capis
chandeliers she looked beautiful, the contours of her breasts thrust against her blue jersey blouse, her legs creamy and well formed below the mini-skirt. She went to Kuya Nick and planted a dutiful peck on his cheek, then turned to me, eagerness aglow on her face. We got off the elevator on the fourteenth floor and walked an additional flight up. We were at the penthouse terrace, lined with palmettos and shrubs. Beyond the grill and greenery Manila was ablaze in the last furnace reds of sunset and, to our left, the neons of Makati burned against a heavy, clouded sky. The boy who opened the door greeted Kuya Nick with cloying obsequiousness, which Nick did not acknowledge. If the apartment was not his, he had seen a lot of it, for he took us directly across the parquet-floored living room, furnished with overstuffed leatherette sofas, to a wide room with a massive, circular bed, a wall lined with bric-a-brac, and a corner dominated by an Ifugao grotesquerie—the headhunter with a severed head, the hunter’s face in an immemorial pose of calm victory.

Mila followed Kuya Nick and I behind them, wondering how it would be when the moment came. He patted his mistress softly on the cheek and cast an assuring look in my direction: “Pepe,” he told her, “will know what to do.”

I don’t know how I rated with my audience behind that wide mirror, which occupied almost half of the wall beside the bed. I was sure, however, that Mila had long been denied her needs by her lover, whose mind, if not his values, was beyond my comprehension.

Kuya Nick had been extra kind to us—he did not let us meet our audience, which, he later told me, included a couple of senators, some millionaires, and other assorted members of the upper class. They left immediately when the show was over and, by ourselves, over bottles of beer and cold kimchi, he talked casually about what had happened, how his regular
toro
had been incapacitated. The
toro
’s wife—not his performing partner—had gotten jealous and angry because he was unable to perform in his own bedroom. As a consequence, his wife brought physical logic to the matter; while he was asleep, she simply snipped off that part of him which was denied her.

M
y one-night stand may have been a smash—I could deduce that from Mila’s exalted and adroit performance, her whispering that she wanted it again and again—but it left me in a state of depression. It simply revealed how detached and cynical I could be. My mind had shut out everyone and everything, and knowing this reinforced my suspicion that though I considered myself human and warm, I was also a gross animal creature. This saddened and disturbed me, for I had considered Kuya Nick as such and I realized that I was cast in the same ugly mold.

By now, too, he had become bothersome, for he was intent on recruiting me, and many a morning he would be parked by the alley, and many a morning, too, he would give me a lift to school with the usual spiel that soon it would be November, the semester was about to end and I should transfer to Ateneo since “that would be closer to Maryknoll—and think of the variety, Pepe, that a young
toro
like you would get there.”

Damn him and his vitamin E; he could not even satisfy his mistress! But I did not covet Mila, for to do so would be to live dangerously;
she was, after all, his property, and what had transpired in Makati was with his consent.

One morning he was peeved, for I had moved the bulky narra cabinet to the wall where the crack was and no longer could they see Lucy and me. I had a plausible excuse: the cabinet was heavy and, where it had been, the beam had started to sag.

“No more shows then,” Kuya Nick shook his head with a smirk.

It was not he and his mistress, however, who made Antipolo so oppressive I could no longer endure being there. Everytime I looked out of my window, I would imagine Father lying there on the tracks. I was in the same room, with the same bed, where he had slept. His memory often dominated the conversations at the table—how good he was, how full of promise, how well he had married, and what a waste it had all been.

But it was Lucy who really pushed me away. At first I tried to stay in Recto the whole afternoon, sweat through karate, read in the library, or devote time to the college paper and the Brotherhood. The Student Council did not require much effort. I was a representative of the freshman class and we had few talky sessions.

Lucy was quick to notice the changes. Maybe she did not expect the pleasant arrangement to end, but it was difficult for me to accept my uncle as the man who made love to her and paid for it. The most I did was buy her a cheap cotton dress at the Central Market and an inexpensive bottle of Intimate, the first perfume she ever had, and for which she was so pleased and grateful, her eyes shone.

From the moment that she revealed my uncle’s perfidy, I had tried to understand, to cast aside the discordant demands of ego and see ourselves as victims. The effort was futile. I had become too enmeshed with her, wanted her for myself alone, or not at all.

By now, Toto and I had also become inseparable; he had helped me much more than I ever could repay him. I did not, however, tell him the real reason why I wanted to leave Antipolo Street—that since I was already making a little money, a hundred and forty pesos a month as literary editor, I should be independent so that I could go home in the late hours if I chose to.

He had suggested that I move in with him. He would talk with Father Jess and I could help in church and have free board and lodging, but we might no longer go to school together in the next semester
because if I stayed in the
kumbento
, I would have to assist in the mass, clean the chapel, list births, marriages, deaths, and do other chores.

The idea of living in a
kumbento
as an acolyte repelled and fascinated me, but whatever my feelings, they had to be subdued for the more practical purpose of acquiring distance from relatives whose concerns were not mine no matter how well-intentioned they have been. Besides, there was always that lingering belief that priests, like policemen, were never hungry; I would finally be free from the infernal vegetable stew!

I had never been religious, although I liked the religious holidays, the solemnity of Holy Week and its somber processions, the gaiety of Christmas, the dawn mass and the biting cold. God was a personal experience and belief; He fitted in my hierarchy of authority only as a last resort, the ultimate explanation of all the things too recondite for me to grasp. But He was no arbiter of right or wrong; it would seem that He did not care. He did not reward virtue; it was the scheming and the dastardly strong who lived happily ever after. Babies without sin die and so do mothers who are poor and cannot afford medicine or expensive doctors.

But I would work in a church just as unquestioningly as I would work in an abatoir. Besides, I had had experience in the sacristy, although that was long ago and traumatic.

Lakay Benito, the ancient sacristan and dispenser of talismans, had ushered me into this job as acolyte after I was circumcised and my voice had started to change. Much earlier, like most of the children in my village, I had gone through catechism and knew all about the body of Christ and His holy blood. I had tasted the communion wafer but had never had a sip of wine till that afternoon, the second day of my short-lived career as sacristan. I had just finished cleaning the sacristy when I noticed that the cabinet where the vestments and the wine were kept was open, and there it was—the blood of Christ—a half bottle of it, waiting. I was determined to take just one tiny sip, no more, but one tiny sip became two, then three, and before long the whole sweet bottle was empty. With a prayer of thanksgiving on my lips, I fell into a dreamless sleep.

It was already evening, time to toll the Angelus, when I woke up
and realized the immensity of what I had done. The bottle had to be refilled for the morning mass and I must do that quickly. I searched the other cabinets, but there were no bottles there. I hurried to the market and, with my hard-earned money, bought half a bottle of cane wine—at least that was what I thought it was. It would be a different wine in the same bottle and, perhaps, it would not have done so much harm had I been more careful. Alas, the bottle I bought was filled with a similarly colored liquid and from the same cane, only the
basi
^*
had fermented and had turned to vinegar. I need not recount the high drama that transpired the following morning; needless to say, it ended my brief career in the service of the Lord.

Now, among the few, I was being called again, and this time, if only for the fact that I knew priests eat very well, I heeded the call.

My relatives did not like the idea at first, but Uncle Bert saw its necessity. Lucy was restrained in her objections. We no longer made it frequently and she accepted that, too, with little questioning. As my departure drew near, she exacted a promise that I would visit her during lunchtime as always.

I did not know if I had made the right choice; Antipolo Street could be limbo or purgatory, but the barrio was purely and simply Hell. Yet, as Roger and all its denizens would tell me later, it was much better than the penury, the deadening monotony, and the slow death in the villages in the Visayas that they had left.

There was not much for me to take that could not fit into the old canvas bag; my only new acquisitions were half a dozen books scrounged from the bargain counters on the sidewalks of Avenida, dog-eared rejects from Clark Air Base and some library in the United States, and a couple of books that opened new vistas of Mexico and the civilization of the Andes Indians.

Toto and I walked over to Avenida and took a jeepney to that huge emporium, Divisoria, then transferred from there to a jeepney to Bangkusay, the end of the line. We got off on a narrow street, for the moment expropriated by a covey of children, many of them emaciated and soiled, playing in the dirt, while in front of the battered apartments and houses idle men gathered in small groups, talking away the tepid afternoon.

We entered a narrow street, half submerged in slime, more children
playing, screaming, fighting around us, past tables with cooked food and swarms of flies, and more tables with wilted vegetables and dried fish, more men talking, and still more packing-crate houses, sorrier-looking than the ones in Antipolo.

We were in the Barrio.

I had read somewhere that to get into it was to enter a demented world where perspectives changed, as if one saw through cracked lenses or glass smeared with mud.

Years ago, shortly after the war, this whole area was a putrefied expanse of mudflats, the bay foreshore. In one of those rare, foresighted moves of government, this was filled up, and for some seasons weeds and other green things sprouted here, bearing plumes of white. Then the hordes from the provinces came and built shanties from packing crates, bamboo, cardboard, burnt tin, construction debris, anything that would shield them from the rain and the sun.

Not all the Barrio people were poor or from the lowest castes. There were politicians who enriched themselves with their pickings in the slums, and they built houses of stone with high walls, incongruous structures surrounded by dismal shapes and dismal lives. Policemen also built houses, which they rented out, promising protection to their tenants and their neighbors, for here the policeman was not just a man in uniform or a figure of authority, he was also the arbiter of justice.

There were no sewers; if government were more humane, sewerage would be the first thing it would have provided for the Barrio. And because there were no sewers, around us was the pervasive smell of rot, heavy and powerful in the rainy season and much more so when the sun shone. In spots, the waters never drained and planks were laid where the water was deep; otherwise, we would have to take off our shoes and walk in blackish mud.