The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (65 page)

Betsy now spoke with passion: “But why do you have to look down on the village? At least, even if the people there are poor, they and the village have a certain integrity.”

I did not let that pass. Briefly, there swooped into my mind the miserable lives that I have known in Tondo, the unending violence, the latent viciousness under the gloss of neighborliness that everyone seemed to exhude.

“Betsy,” I faced her, shaking my head sadly. “Thank you for the kind thought, but that is a lot of bull.” She turned away, and I was immediately sorry I had spoken so harshly.

“Sorry for the language,” I continued contritely. “But I just want you to know there is no honor among the poor. In the Barrio, who are the thieves? Our own neighbors who take the laundry we hang outside our hovels. They steal them to sell to secondhand clothing
stores. It is not the cats who get the fish we dry on our roofs; again, it is the neighbors who have nothing to eat. The Barrio is full of cheats, liars, drunks, sadists, perverts—and yes, we steal, we cheat, we lie because we don’t know where the next meal will come from. We grab what we can, from anyone. I ask you not to look at the village, at the poor, with rose-colored glasses. There is nothing romantic about poverty. It is totally, absolutely degrading.”

When the meeting was over Professor Hortenso sought me. “Pepe, that was a revelation! We will have to rely more on you.” He was complimenting me, and I was uneasy, for I did not like speeches even though they were mine, and most of all, I did not relish being a politician.

I did not want to leave with Betsy, but I had made her angry, and I wanted to tell her I was sorry; also, I was not resolute enough in my plan to avoid her. It was dusk. As we eased into the rain-drenched boulevard, she said: “I really should have kept my mouth shut, but then …” she laughed slightly. “If I did, you wouldn’t have opened up. It is all in my notes, Pepe. You said much more than a lecture on political science.”

Were we going again to that fancy restaurant? “No,” she said. “We are going to Angono.”

The rain had stopped, but the acacia trees still dripped and glistened in the fading light. The asphalt was as black as the thoughts that crowded my mind. Juan Puneta had drawn me out, he had made me speak against my wishes.

It was as if Betsy had divined my thoughts. “And I noticed, too, that Puneta was looking at you,” she said, glancing at me.

“Do you like him?” I asked.

She was silent for a time. She shifted gears as we neared the traffic lights at Padre Faura. “I don’t trust him,” she said.

“How can you say that of someone who has helped the Brotherhood generously?” I asked. “We have just eaten his sandwiches.”

She turned to me sullenly. “I suppose this is a personal feeling. He is very slick. There is something in his manner that is not sincere. I can feel it in his voice, in the way he conducts himself—as if he were studying everyone so that he will know how to use them. But
my father— We once talked about ethical business practices. I remember Papa saying Puneta’s flour company mixes cassava flour with wheat. Oh, I know that he should not be singled out.… I also hear he has a private army, what with all the guns he has. And that is no secret.”

“He goes around without a bodyguard,” I said, knowing that many wealthy Filipinos did not go to public places alone.

“He does not need protection from us,” Betsy said. “It is us who need protection from him. Did not your father warn us against men like him?”

I did not speak. I wanted to banish Juan Puneta into some unreachable corner of my mind. I wanted only the nearness of this girl in this rain-washed night that now bloomed with neon lights and the last purples of sunset. The clangor of traffic was around us, and it was a long, crooked way to Angono, but nothing mattered anymore. We crossed over Nagtahan, took Santa Mesa to Cubao, then turned right to EDSA. The road to Angono was jammed; it took a full hour to reach the environs of Marikina. We did not go to Angono, however; instead, she turned left onto a private paved road and continued until we reached the golf club to which her family belonged. She asked if I was hungry. I was, so we went to the restaurant and ordered chicken and ham sandwiches, which she asked the waiter to wrap up. Back in her car, we went through a gate with a sentry and up a slope, through ascending paved roads that traversed empty lots given to weeds till we reached a promontory. She stopped. Below us was Manila spread like a vast, splendored carpet; a million lights twinkled, jewels flashing in the soft dark. Overhead a jet whined in its descent.

“It is beautiful,” I said. “You don’t see the dirt.” I held her hand and she let me.

Then I was suddenly apprehensive; I was not armed, and though I knew a little karate it was not enough. “Isn’t it dangerous here?”

She smiled. “No,” she said, “this is patrolled and no car can come up here unless you pass the gate.”

“I am worried just the same,” I said.

“Don’t be,” she said. “I always come here when I am troubled and I want to think. I know this place very well—it belongs to my father.”

I was immediately silent and she noticed it. “I did not mean to brag,” she said quietly.

It was hopeless. What was I doing here with a girl who was beyond my reach? “Betsy,” I finally said, “I am not lying; I did write to you, but thought it better not to mail it.”

“And why not?”

I had to tell her. “I said good-bye to you in that letter. I was determined not to see you again. But I am a weakling, always have been. And this afternoon, when I saw you, God knows how happy I was.”

“I was, too,” she said simply.

Then I told her, but not about Lucy or Lily. “There is another girl.”

She bolted up, turned to me quickly; her eyes were expectant.

“I suppose you may say she was my first love. I grew up with her. She is dark, not fair like you. But you have her eyes—” I looked at her, “Yes, you have the same eyes as Ramona … clear, dark, brooding … but when she smiles, it would seem like daybreak.”

She turned away. “You must love her very much,” she said softly. “Will I ever meet her?”

I laughed. “You will never meet her.”

“Is she … is she dead?”

“No,” I said. “She is very much alive. I can see her now.” I closed my eyes and held her hand tighter. “But I can only love her in my mind. It is impossible. Like you, she is up there, and I, I am down here. Still, it is wonderful to be with you like this. Thank you for taking me along.”

“Why compare me with Ramona?” There was a sharp edge to her voice.

It was then that I told her of Mother’s humming the song “Ramona,” how I imagined Ramona hovering over me, unreachable like her.

She leaned closer. “This place is real,” she said. “The view may look unreal, but we know it is there. I have never brought anyone here or invited anyone before.”

“No one would believe we are here,” I said. “And it is just as well, for this is not really happening, except in my imagination.”

Her breath upon my face was warm and sweet. “But I am real!” she said huskily.

I touched her face and kissed her, her hair, her eyes. Softly.

We would have tarried, but I told her, although it was not true, that Father Jess and I were going to make a house call.

On the way back she was quiet; words could build walls between us so that this would never happen again. She wanted to take me to Bangkusay, but it was late, and I did not want anything happening to her. I got off at Mandaluyong, where I could catch a bus for Divisoria, and she went on to the Park.

I
t was not really my desire to sit at Ka Lucio’s feet and learn from him the odious truths of the past, but I had brought his name up at the meeting and I would be asked questions about him. I had not been to his house again, although it was just across the alley, since Toto and I visited him. He often smiled when I passed. He would sometimes be out in the churchyard sunning himself or talking with the older men in front of the small
sari-sari
store of Roger’s father, but he had never gone to church although he did talk sometimes with Father Jess.

This morning I walked over to his house after I was through with my chores. His two nieces were out, and he was in the kitchen, cooking. He appeared paler, but not once during my visit did he cough. “Ah, my young brother,” he said when he turned to the open door and saw me. “Come in and make yourself at home.”

He joined me in the cramped living room and asked if I wanted to watch television, but I barely looked at the set in the
kumbento.

“No,” I said quickly. “I came here—I hope you don’t mind my learning from you.”

He appeared pleased; with a wave of his hand, he said, “All that I know I’ll try to impart to you.”

“Some of us,” I said, “have decided that the time for revolution is now.” And if it comes, we would not surrender—this was what we had talked about. Why did he give up? After all those years fighting the Japanese, then the Constabulary? Was he tired, was he disillusioned, and where had his surrender brought him? This shack?

He looked at me, his eyes bright with understanding. He spoke softly, as always, without bitterness. “I must tell you—if this is the only thing that I can tell you—that this is not the time.”

“There would never be another time, and if you tell me now that we should wait, I tell you that we cannot. If the time is not ripe, we will help make it ripe. To believe otherwise is to have no faith.”

“Big words,” Ka Lucio said. His benign smile made me uneasy. “But what are the facts? I thought my time was the right one, too. But where did it get me? And how many years were wasted in remorse that I cannot express? But do not tell me that I had fought in vain, that I did not take one forward step.”

“We will make it three,” I said.

“No, you will be making three steps backward and only two forward. This is not the time. The people are not ready to accept violence. Do you know what they want? Just peace—peace so that we can continue our miserable lives. More than that, the Americans are here. They will interfere. The oligarchy will convince them your revolution is Communist even if it is not. And the rich … they are very strong, they are in power, in government. Where will you get the guns? The money? You will have to get them from the rich, and in the end, they will lead, not you. No, this is not the time.”

“Rizal said that, too,” I said. “Did you ask yourself when you went to the hills if it was time? Did the Huks get money from the rich?”

Ka Lucio bowed, as if in deep thought. “Everything you say, it all sounds familiar … very familiar.”

The pot in the kitchen started to hiss and boil, and he jumped up and took off the lid. He was cooking rice; when it had simmered, he returned to me

“Yes,” he said, “it is all very familiar. And I cannot argue against passion. There is no reasoning against the heart. But remember,
Pepe, we fought the Japanese, an alien enemy. You will be fighting your own people, your own brother.”

“He is worse,” I said, “because he is brown like me. The Japanese were foreigners.”

“You are saying all that we said. So we did not fight our brothers—and we got tortured and killed. If you must do it, do not forget: the pain cannot be endured. The pain …” he went on as if in a reverie: “Sometimes I wish I had died long ago in those hills. Of malaria, of hunger, of bullets. It does not matter. I courted death many times. I had seen my comrades die—three of them in my arms. I know when life finally ebbs away and the body grows limp, and the heart throbs no more. Though the eyes remain open, they no longer see. I know …”

He turned away as his voice cracked. He breathed deeply, shuddered, and with his palm, wiped off the tears that smudged his face.

“But I loved life—no matter how bitter, no matter how harsh. I would wake up at night out there in the fields and look at the stars and listen to the sounds in the darkness. Everything would be very quiet. I could hear my heart, the voices of the dead. And when I woke up at dawn, I knew there was some reason for me to go on living, not merely because I loved life, but because I have lived through many dangers and I could, perhaps, impart some of what I have learned. Life is a learning and not much more. It is not loving because there is more hate in this world than love.”

“What have you to teach us then?”

“First, stay alive.”

“And live long enough to be disillusioned? Or despised?”

“Yes. And do not commit the same mistakes we made—and there were many of them.”

“What are they?” I was anxious to know. I was assailed with doubts from the very beginning. I had talked too much, I realized that now, without knowing the books, relying on my own intuition as if that were enough.

“The first,” he said, “is that while violence is necessary, it is not the only instrument for change. There are others just as good. But you must accept violence—you cannot begin to build until you have destroyed. You don’t know love until you have hated.”

I knew that and aloud, “Yes, yin-yang.”

“What did you say?”

He did not know what I was talking about. “Night and day. Yes, Ka Lucio, I understand.”

“No, it is more than that,” he said. “You must destroy the rotten foundations to build a new edifice. You must know how to identify and hate injustice before you learn to value, above all, justice.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Your enemy,” he said coldly, “is the rich. You must be able to tell them that to their faces. And when you point the gun between their eyes, you must do it without passion—or compassion. Do it as duty, do it to survive.”

I thought of Betsy, my Betsy, her
burgis
parents. I could not do what Ka Lucio was saying. But Toto— Remembering him brought the old anger back in all its primal force.

“And to survive,” Ka Lucio went on, “you have to be cunning. Know human character. The evil around you. The poor are not saints, as you can see. You will see perfidy,” he was emphatic. “You will see it again and again until it has become so common that you think the whole world is against you. And you will not only be confused, you will also be angry at what you consider your poor judgment. You will see an enemy behind every rock, you will suspect every smile, every gift—and this is not as it should be. For in spite of the perfidy that may surround you, there is always goodness and even sacrifice, sometimes from those you least expect it. There will be men who will give their lives not just for the purposes you believe in, but for you—for you personally—not so much in friendship but in loyalty.”