The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (6 page)

Tony left the window and sat on his cot. The sounds of evening were around him, and he could hear from downstairs his sister’s continued arguing with her husband. Why did they have to be so craven in their needs? If only they could see the hopeless limits of this street and accept this as the fate they must endure and not moan over.

The door opened and Bert stepped in. “You have to stuff your ears with cotton every time your sister speaks,” he said in an affected, jovial tone. “It’s the heat, and she’s tired. What’s more, there’s the summer vacation and no teaching, therefore no money. You know, the kids are already going to school.” He laughed lightly. “You know what I mean.”

“I understand, Manong,” Tony said.

Bert continued, “You shouldn’t think badly of her. As Betty said, when you are poor, you can’t have pride. Only the rich have pride. And we … we are stubborn, that’s all.”

“I know, I know,” Tony said, but his words were drowned as a freight train thundered by. For an instant, a yellow glare flooded the room and everything in it shook.

Bert moved to the chair and sat like an impassive Buddha. As the train moved on and its noise died away, he spoke again: “There is no sense troubling you, particularly now that you are about to be married. It’s just that your sister worries so much. You know what I mean?”

Tony nodded. “I am not angry with her. She will always be Manang Betty.”

“Yes,” Bert said with another shaky laugh. “And I’ll always be your Manong Bert.”

Tony nodded again.

Folding his stubby hands, Bert said, “I hope you have made the proper choice. Still, I always feel that a man should know women. Your sister— I’m not being unfaithful to her, remember this,” he spoke with some hesitation, and Tony felt uncomfortable because his brother-in-law was about to confide in him, and he never liked confidences. They served like heavy fetters that drew the confidant and the confessor cumbersomely together. There was no common ground between him and this fat, bumbling man who knew nothing better than clerking and dreaming of being a lawyer. But there was no way out; he couldn’t run away from this room; he must listen now to the drab tale. “There were three others before Betty came,” a slight, nervous laugh. “I had to make a decision. So here I am.”

“And here I am,” Tony said without emotion.

“You are making the right choice,” Bert said, “marrying into that family. But I hope just the same that you got some experience in the United States. Not just book learning and that sort of thing. Experience with women, you know what I mean.”

“Yes,” Tony said.

The older man’s eyes gleamed lecherously. “American girls are really hot, aren’t they, Tony?”

Tony could almost anticipate the next question, and watching his brother-in-law working up to it, watching the smile broadening on his rotund face, Tony felt uneasy and almost angry at having to answer such asinine questions.

“Everyone says that,” Bert went on, making sounds with his tongue. “Do tell me about them … not now, I know you are tired,
but some afternoon when you aren’t too tired and when your sister isn’t around. You know what I mean.”

Tony smiled. “Yes, when she is not around.” Relief came over him; he didn’t have to talk about American women now. It wasn’t that they were unpleasant to talk about, but talking about them involved deception. He had always found it difficult to talk about sex. He had never, for instance, talked about Emy. And now, even while he faced this inquisitive man, his mind wandered to thoughts of Emy—Emy as he had known her, chiding him, telling him he would be someone to look up to, and when one is respected, said Emy, can one possibly hope for more?

The sentiment was pedestrian and tritely put, but it had seemed so meaningful—the whole world was in it—when she had expressed it to him, in this very room, the evening before he was to leave. And now, if Emy knew what was going to happen to him, would she approve? What she thought of him meant so much, even now, and within him he could feel a flickering tenderness, tenderness for the girl who was the first, an indefinable feeling that was both sorrow and joy, for Emy now belonged to the past. This was not final—it could never be final. He was faithful to her—if not to her person at least to her memory. He had long wanted to ask Bert how she was. He couldn’t tell Bert that he had written to her and she had never answered; he just wanted to find out what she was doing, if she was well and happy or if she had married.

But the question as he would have worded it wouldn’t take shape, and the guilt that he had felt about her fed his anxiety instead. “I wonder how Rosales is. And Emy, too. Is she already teaching?” Just like that, matter-of-factly, as if she were someone who had merely touched the edges of his life.

“Well, not much has happened to Rosales,” Bert said. “I’ve never been there—you know that. And as for Emy …”

“I hope she has already found a job.”

“She is not teaching.” Bert spoke with some difficulty, as if he did not want to talk about her.

“Why not? She should have approached some politician—”

“It’s not that way,” Bert said. “That girl—Your Manang and I, we were disappointed with her. Something … something happened to her. Well, she had it coming, and you wouldn’t think it possible. She
was such an intelligent girl. She has a child and she’s not married. You know what I mean.”

Fear, sadness, and a hundred other feelings engulfed him. Not this, not the magnitude of this tragedy could befall Emy.

“She wouldn’t say who he was,” Bert continued. “But that girl did change a lot. You wouldn’t recognize her afterward. Remember how she used to be very well mannered? Well, she often went out alone. At night, too. After school, God knows where she went. This was after you had gone. We tried to talk to her, and we told her that nothing good would come out of her habits, but she refused to listen. There must have been a man she had been meeting some place all those nights that she stayed out late—sometimes past midnight. We warned her. But that girl— Why didn’t she have the man come to the house? Your Manang Betty said we would like to meet him. A wild one she turned out to be.”

Tony couldn’t believe what he was hearing, but somehow the truth of it seeped slowly in, and the pity that he felt for her vanished and in its place was something akin to loathing, not only for what had happened but for this city, which had destroyed her. In his heart there rose a helpless hatred for the street and all that it was—the repository of everything ugly and dark.

“She went home that Christmas for the vacation,” Bert continued, “and she never returned. She didn’t even write to your
manang.
We just learned afterward that she had this baby.”

“What’s she doing now?” Tony asked.

“Nothing. Tending the house and looking after her son and Bettina, the younger sister. Remember her? I hope nothing similar will happen to her. Since their father died …”

“Yes,” Tony said, “Manang Betty wrote to me about it.”

“Didn’t Emy write to you about it?”

“No,” he said. “I did write to her, then … I stopped.”

“I came upon her reading your letter,” Bert said with a smile. “She seemed absorbed in it. I tried to ask her what was in it, but she didn’t even answer. Well, fate is fate. Nothing can be done now.” Bert stood up and idled at the door, his bulk filling the frame. “I overestimated Emy. I always thought she was smarter than most girls. But when a woman is titillated, her mind becomes useless. You know what I mean?”

“Yes,” Tony said, walking to the window. Across the tracks the night was pocked with the lights of shabby wooden
accesorias.
Farther beyond, where the city blazed with neon, the night was pale orange. The four lines of black steel below him shone in the uncertain night.

Bert went on in a sonorous voice: “Tell me, Tony. As I said, you don’t have to be ashamed. I’m your brother-in-law. Are American girls really different? You know what I mean.”

Tony did not speak; the revulsion had always lain fallow in his mind and now it burgeoned fully, a disgust for this talkative slob whose only interest in America centered around its women.

He had a mind to lie, to tell him of satisfied hungers and nymphomaniacs ravishing the campuses, but Tony said instead, “They are the most incomprehensible and frigid women I’ve ever seen.”

“You must be fooling,” Bert laughed.

“I’m not,” Tony said, his words rimmed with sarcasm.

“I don’t believe you,” Bert said. “You are trying to fool me.”

“Maybe I am.”

“But you’ll tell me? You know what I mean?”

“Maybe I will.”

Bert left him, making clucking noises with his tongue as he went down.

Alone again, Tony despaired at the thought of having to be confronted with the same question, by other people in other places. And what could he say? It would perhaps be simple if Emy were still here and he could tell her the truth; she would then tell him how to go about elaborating on his American experience and saying the right things, the true things, because, as Emy said, the truth always mattered. Emy—she would make a good wife for any man.

They had shared this room, this single window, too. Between them, as a halfhearted concession to privacy, they had hung a curtain, an old Igorot-woven blanket, blue with stripes of black and red. He had gotten the blanket in the mountain province of Bontoc during an excursion there to do research on indigenous Igorot culture. It was slung across the room, and it shielded her from him when she was asleep or when she was dressing. There were times, however, when the blanket was ignored because it was warm or because they had something interesting to talk or argue about, and they would
face each other without shame. No one would have suspected that what happened would ever have happened, because they were first cousins. But it did, and remembering it, a twinge of pleasure compounded with sadness touched him. The first possession is bound to wedge deep in the mind—this seed, this wisdom, and this hurt that would never be blown away and be lost to the wandering wind.

It was the month before he left for America. It had rained that evening—one of those brief but heavy August showers—and he had tried to avoid the soggy ruts in the street. He had stepped into one instead and suddenly had wet his shoes, his only pair. Emy was asleep, and in the dark he took off his clothes silently, hoping not to make a sound, but he sneezed. Knowing that he would soon catch cold, he groped for the blanket on his cot. As he wrapped it about him, Emy stirred. She asked if he was drenched. Go on and sleep, he had told her, but she ignored him. As she lifted the blanket that hung between them, he could make her out standing before him in her nightgown. It must have been quite a
despedida
,
^c
she had said; what time is it? Past midnight, he had told her. He sneezed again, and without another word she went downstairs and made him some tea.

When she returned she switched on the small lamp on the table they shared when they studied their lessons, and she looked at him, her eyes aglow, and told him to lie on his stomach so she could rub his back with Mentholatum. He didn’t object because she was full of maternal solicitude. No, she had told him clearly, he had no business catching pneumonia, particularly now that he was leaving, and then she asked how the
despedida
turned out, who was there, which girls. What he said was incoherent, for he was aware only of her soft hands on his back spreading the ointment, patting it, pressing it below his shoulder blades. How delightful, how soft her hands felt, and as she bent lower, her breath murmured in his ear and warmed his neck, her thighs pressed close to him, he turned on his side and saw her young face, traces of sleep still on it, her eyes gazing down on him, full of care. Then it was all blurred, Emy in his arms uncomplaining, the stumbling to the table to switch off the lamp, the quiet remonstrations, the final surrender. It had happened without prelude, as if the moment was something inevitable and expected. The following morning he woke while the dawn was not yet alive
upon the city to find a delicious ache in his bones, and Emy cuddled close to him in his narrow bed, still asleep; the fragrance of her hair and her breath swirled all around him.

He had kissed her, tasted her mouth, and she had wakened with a start, stared at him, frightened and confused. Then she had turned away from him when realization came to her in all its happy, terrifying completeness, and she sobbed quietly. It was the first time a woman had cried before him and he didn’t know what to do except fumble and stammer and clasp her hand and tell her he loved her. And he said it with a thickness in his voice, for his cold had developed quickly and “I love you” sounded like a rusty whisper: “I love you, I love you.” And he kissed her again, telling her that she would catch his cold, too, and she stopped crying then and kissed him in that shy, wary manner of women who had finally discovered this first but lasting knowledge.

Love? Was it really love, and if it was, was he old enough to have understood its consequences? Emy had always been more firm, more sure of herself, and before he left, on the last hour that they were alone, she had told him: “Tony, you have to be sure. You have to be sure.”

It had sounded so dramatic and mushy afterward, and how often had he relived it, seen himself in that frustrating mirror called conscience. He was sure he loved her; he was sure that he would return to her, claim her, and take her away from the intractable damnation of Antipolo. He was so sure of all this, but time and distance conspired against him, and in the end he was no longer sure. He developed this sense of frustration about her, and in time the frustration turned to indifference. He had done what was expected of him—written to her religiously, avoiding those endearments that lovers shared, dropping but a few stray insinuations, fond recollections of the Mentholatum rub, the lamp on the table, the Igorot blanket. But to all his letters she had given but one reply, then all was silence.

He had once asked Betty where Emy was. Betty wrote briefly, told him that Emy was all right and back in the province, that her father had died. Emy was alive and she did not care.