The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (56 page)

“I masturbate them,” she said simply.

I was silent.

She continued evenly. “All sorts of men, with all sorts of problems and all sorts of lives. I have to be nice to each one, short and tall, fat and thin, and it is very rare that they only want a massage.”

“And you give it to them?”

“No, Pepe, I swear. Just sensation.”

“Shit,” I said, the anger rising in me again although I had no right to be angry with her.

“Shit to you, too,” she flung back.

“Look at your new clothes, that new wristwatch. Don’t tell me it is the Red Cross. You got those with more than sensation, like a …”

“Like a whore? Is that what you want to say?”

The words were rocks in my throat. I must not spew them out.

“I am not a whore, Pepe. God sees everything, I swear to you. I don’t even let them touch me.”

“God,” I cursed in my breath. “I want to believe you, within me I do!” And again, I embraced her, and my whole being ached.

“What will I do, Pepe? What will we do?”

She had included me. “We—” she said, and I held her hand tightly.

“You must be honest with your mother,” I said. “Tell her everything. Maybe on a day that she is happy, on your day off when you can take her to Divisoria and buy her a few things.”

“That’s bribery, she will not like it.”

“Explain to her the money you need, your brothers and sisters, their schooling, her health,” I said.

“It looks so hopeless.”

“It is.”

“Suppose the neighbors find out?” she asked. “I cannot live in the Barrio anymore.”

“How will they know? I will not tell them anything. I do not think your mother will.”

“It is better that we leave the place.”

“And where will you go? Some expensive place in Makati?”

“You know I will not do that. I will not be able to afford it.”

“It is better in the Barrio. No one among your customers will find you there. No one among us— Shit, we don’t even have money for a haircut. We will never go to the Colonial.”

A salesgirl in the same shop where she clerked went to the Colonial and earned in one day what she made in a month and she did not go beyond masturbating her guests. The training, Lily said, was easy, but it was the clearances, the physical examination that she detested; she went to San Lazaro twice a month, together with the
other girls, and was examined by interns from the medical schools. They took vaginal smears, looked and poked into them as if they were hogs.

“I hate it,” she said vehemently.

Sometimes she had only a couple of “guests,” as their customers were called, but on a busy day, she had five or six. She now had several “regulars” who waited for her or sought her and, yes, almost everyone tried to seduce her, and several even offered to put her in a “garage”—to make her a mistress at the monthly rate of two thousand pesos, plus an apartment with all the appliances and furniture.

“And it will last as long as he finds you pretty and interesting,” I said.

She pinched my arm. “I humor them,” she said, “but I make sure they know I would not do it. They ask me to go out with them and I always have nice excuses, about how difficult it is for me to do so. They come back.”

“For sensation.”

She did not speak.

“We make more than the nightclub hostesses on the boulevard, Pepe. And we don’t have to spend on clothes and we are not on display in a glass booth.”

“But you sensation them.”

“It is hard work; sometimes, when I have six guests in a row, my back, my arms ache; sweat pours down.”

“It is honest work,” I said disconsolately.

“Please don’t be harsh,” she said.

“I love you,” I said, “and I cannot make you stop working there.” Her arms went around me, and she kissed me on the cheek.

When we went out, to my surprise, it was already evening—we had been inside for more than three hours and had not really done much talking or touching; it could have been forever and I would not have known.

“Your eyes,” I said. “They are swollen.”

“I know.” She smiled.

After dinner that night I borrowed Father Jess’s typewriter. He was in his khaki shorts, reading one of the new Teilhard de Chardin books that he also wanted Toto and me to read, but I had demurred
for I did not like religious books. To please him, though, I did bring down
The Phenomenon of Man
only to find it unreadable.

He put his book aside, looked at me, and said, grinning, “So you are going to be a writer.”

“No, Father,” I said, “I just want to improve this personal essay—boyhood in a small village.”

He beckoned to me to sit on the chair opposite him. We were going to have another session and I loathed it—it made me think.

“Did you have a happy boyhood?”

There was no telling him lies. The question had never been asked of me before, and without hesitation, I answered. “Yes, Father, a very happy one. I remember the fiestas, the rockets, the first rains of May, the grasshoppers and the frogs, the swimming in the irrigation ditches in the fields. Yes, I had a happy boyhood.”

But what about the stigma of my being a bastard, the jokes I had to endure, the questions I could not answer? He noticed the uncertainty that had come over my face. “But?” he asked tentatively.

“It was also unhappy.”

“Tell me about it.”

I had gone to him for my first confession. He knew about Lucy and the fountain pen I stole when I was in high school, but he did not know of my origins.

“I am a bastard, Father. It is difficult being one, particularly when you are full of doubts, questions that no one, not even your mother, can answer.”

“Remember,” he said softly, “there are no illegitimate children, there are only illegitimate parents—that’s not original. And sometimes it is not even their fault. Like Lily. You know that. And where is her young man now?”

I did not speak.

“There is always a reason,” I said after a while. “And we cannot avoid the most important of all.”

“And what is that?”

“Money, Father,” I said simply.

He smiled benignly. “It is not the most important thing in the world.”

“It is to me.”

“I can understand that,” he said. “Maybe because I come from another place. Did you not say, no priest is poor?”

I was embarrassed to hear him remember, but he kept on talking. “I must be crazy to have selected this parish, or started it anyway. I could die here of hunger and no one would be sorry—not my family, that’s for sure.”

“Why not?”

“You have been with me for almost a year now—that’s a long time—and yet you have never bothered to ask about my family? That is unusual. People gossip and there is no shortage of that, particularly here.”

“Yes, I know about your going to nightclubs and your having gotten drunk.”

He roared with laughter. “Soon they will be saying I have gotten a girl pregnant. One thing I like about the priesthood is the wine. I get a drop of it every morning.” He looked at me and burst out laughing again, this time so long that tears came to his eyes. “So—so, I have no more secrets, ha? You know me like you know the palm of your hand, ha? You and Toto, merely because you live with me, ha?”

I grinned.

“But you don’t know about my family, where I come from.”

“From Negros. I overheard you talking to an American visitor about the sugar workers.”

Father Jess was silent and a smile wreathed his rotund face. He shook his head and said, “You know, Pepe, if my family had not disowned me, I would have had enough money to build a beautiful church right here. And a row of apartments, besides. And we would have the biggest freezer in any
kumbento
in the country. Do you understand?”

“We can still build a church—you have many friends, you are very good at raising money.”

He sat back and said, almost in anger, “Build a church? Stone, stained glass, padded pews?”

“Why not? Look at the cathedral in Intramuros … the churches of the Iglesia ni Kristo.”

“Those are not churches,
hijo.
Those are buildings. Don’t you understand?” his voice leaped.

I shook my head.

“The church,” he bellowed, beating his massive chest, “is here. In the heart. Not an air-conditioned building with wooden saints, not people kneeling and crawling to the altar—those stupid people! Not
processions. The church is here!” He beat his breast again so strongly, the sounds were loud thuds. His eyes flashed and the corners of his mouth curled as he spoke, “The church that we will build is here, and it will last forever. Buildings crumble, but the church that we will build will last. So look at this humble building that some are ashamed to go to. It is here where God lives, perhaps much, much more than anywhere else, but only if I can convince you and all those around that the real church is in us, in how we live, in the sacrifices we offer to Christ who is also in each of us. Everyone, my brother. But much, much more my kin is he who has nothing and suffers. To him I will give everything I have.”

Sadness touched his face, his eyes now darkened, the ape hands now folded in repose. “I sometimes feel that I am in the wrong vocation. I am so involved with the things I do, and yet I feel that I am not doing enough. Take this place for instance.” He paused and looked out of the window, at the Barrio shrouded by night, at the relentless poverty that spread wherever we turned, the narrow passageways choked with refuse, cluttered with big bellied and dirty children in the daytime and, over everything, flies that never seemed to die. “I think of the place where I was born, of the houses of my relatives and of my former students—they are all comfortable and, yes, very rich … and here I am trying to move the world.”

“You have the body for it,” I said. “You can push it one inch.”

“Let’s make it two inches.” For a moment Father Jess regained his humor, his eyes narrowing into slits, his mouth wide open, baring yellow, uneven teeth. Then he was quiet again, the wide brow furrowed. “If only I had more resources, more money.”

I did not know till now of his frustrations, having presumed that, as a priest, his job was easy: he did not have to worry about food and clothing, and when he was old, there was always the Church—omnipresent, omnipotent—to take care of him.

“I hope,” I said lightly, “that someday—joke only, Father—that priests like you would be allowed to marry. It must be terrible, not being able to live like a normal man.”

He shook his head and replied quickly. “That is a misconception that gets said again and again. Pepe, it is not the absence of sexual life that makes the priesthood difficult. We get used to it.”

“Yes, I hear they feed you papayas in the seminary morning, noon, and night till you are as limp as a squid.”

“Still, it is not sex,” he said. “I will tell you what is the most difficult about the priesthood. Obedience, that’s what. Damn, blind obedience. We have to obey, and if we cannot, we have to learn how to obey; we have to force ourselves to obey until in our conscience we have been conditioned to do so.”

“Like the army?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’d like you to go into retreat this year. Not so much to study your conscience as to be alone with yourself.”

“You can be alone in a crowd, Father.”

“Not that. But a chance to look at what you do. Do you think you have a conscience, Pepe?”

I fumbled; the question pushed me to the wall. “Doesn’t every man have one?” I asked instead.

“You are very clever,” he grinned. “What you are trying to say is, as a priest, perhaps, I don’t even have to bother with it. In the end, Pepe, we are all victims of circumstance. A world without injustice is not here; if it were, there would be no policemen, no courts—and yes, no priests. But there are things we do that give us happiness. That is one measure of a man.” He thrust a finger at me. “What gives you happiness?”

Without hesitation, “Food.”

He stood his full height, puckered his lips in mock anger, and pointed to the door.

So we aspired, we sweated to build a church here in Tondo, sought to bring light to its chicken-intestine alleys strewn with aborted hopes, slimy with crime; where no heavenly music floats above its rusting tin, and its flotsam soul drifts to the sea—not a sea of shining surf but muck and driftwood marsh awash with the turds of corruption. Look down here, those of you whose antiseptic residences will never be touched by our filthy hands, because it is not far off when the stench we breathe will give us the strength to surge beyond this dungheap into your perfumed enclaves, and with us the volcanic fires of vengeance; we will seep into each crack of your high and solid walls, flood over them like destiny, and you will not be able to hide, you will be transfixed.

Speed dreams, they have no place in my compass. I am here to survive and Tondo is just a way station, another rung in my climb
from one garbage pile to another garbage pile. But we build from the past, and be it damned forever. We can never escape it so how can I now flee the old thatched house of Cabugawan, the scent of newly harvested grain, of fresh-cut grass; how can I flee the browned fields of May stirring at last to the touch of rain, the weeds thrusting up, the river finally alive, and the croak of frogs at night?

Toward the end of the schoolyear my past, which I had not told to anyone except Father Jess, finally hounded me in school; I don’t know how it came about—perhaps there were those in the Brotherhood who did not like me and the attention Professor Hortenso was giving me. The national election of the Brotherhood was going to be held and I was now being groomed by him for a seat in the National Directorate.

“You are one of the most popular student leaders,” he said, “and as you very well know, there will be candidates from UP who will try to get all the positions.”

I balked at the prospects. In the first place, I would not have tried to run for any of the posts in school were it not for the proddings of people. But looking back, it had not been completely without benefits. There was this job that paid, the invitations to seminars—all expenses paid—and, of course, the free dinners and parties to which I was invited. Without admitting it, I had always felt inferior to those people at UP, not because they could afford to study there, but simply because they had always seemed brighter than most; they always seemed to top the board exams, in law, in medicine.