The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (69 page)

I have also seen a bit of those forums, those university lecturers, the semantic convolutions into which they go, pondering questions that are really the pastimes of those who sit in the comfort of high offices. There is no blood to their inquiries, no dirt under their feet, the air they breathe is perfumed.

Ka Lucio had the answers, and he did not learn them in the Sierra Madre. One is this: nothing is given free. While Juan Puneta gave those niggardly “tokens” to the Brotherhood, he would someday ask for a bigger payment in kind, yet what did he need money for? He wallowed in it and would probably choke on it.

I have also asked myself what it is that I have done with my life, how has it been used? What right had I to make judgments about others without making them about myself? Indeed, I have tried to look deeply and honestly into my being—pried open the skin, fingered the nerves, the veins, and examined the blood in them. And what did I see?

Anger—and it was what has kept me alive, although I had tried to still it, keep it from flowing out, defined it in another way, and expressed it not with violence but with cynicism.

Ka Lucio had said earlier that there are two ways of looking at our lives—either as fate or as conflict. Only hogs are fated, because they cannot do anything except feed on the trough before they face the butcher’s knife. But men are men; they can do something about the future, and our life is in conflict then. They—or us. Self-defense, survival. Whatever we do, we can put it simply thus. And government? Ka Lucio did not have to tell me that it was an instrument of the rich, that government committed violence on us every day by not providing us with justice. Remember, Ka Lucio had said, we are demanding justice. Here in the Barrio we live with injustice and get to know it as part of life. It is not. And it is when we learn this that the decision is made: us—or them.

There was no equivocation then about my survival; I loved myself dearly, passionately. Ka Lucio had amassed experience to live this long. He would tell me.

He was writing in longhand, on a yellow ruled pad, when I entered—the door of his house open as usual. He had just finished cooking, and the small dingy kitchen was still smoky. He bade me sit; then, putting his hands on his lap, he asked how the revolution was going.

It embarrassed me, for as it was last time, I could not quite make out whether he was making light of us or was in earnest. I decided to ignore the remark. “It won’t start without you, Ka Lucio,” I said.

He laughed then and asked if I wanted a cup of coffee; he had just heated water and the powdered stuff had hardened—if I did not mind it that way. He stood up; how thin he had become, and it was only a few weeks since I last saw him. I wondered if he was getting any medicine or the right kind of food—he never went inside the church, and though he often greeted Father Jess and talked with him about inanities, he never asked for help although I was sure he needed it.

“I hope you are writing your memoirs,” I said.

“No, Pepe. My last conversation with you has set me thinking. I am writing a manual: how to organize the peasantry, how to raise funds, how to fight—you know, a question-and-answer handbook.”

“Ka Lucio,” I said, “that is perhaps the most useful thing we need right now, particularly organizational guides.” I told him how I brought him up in our committee meeting as the wellspring of wisdom. In our youthful audacity, we had not considered how people
like him had so much to give. He looked at me gratefully for having remembered.

“You know many of these things because you came from the village,” he said.

“But you tested them all,” I said, “and what I need is confirmation. Do you trust us enough? Would your former men like to help again—their children in particular?”

“Pepe, of course, they will help. Didn’t you know? Once a rebel, always a rebel. It is in the blood. You don’t join the Huks because you want adventure or money—and even if you did join for these reasons, afterward, the fighting, the living together, they change you.”

I understood what he meant; I had joined the Brotherhood for my own reasons, but I was now, it seemed, slowly being drawn into its vortex. Though I wanted to get out, to be uninvolved in the conspiracy that Professor Hortenso had told me about, I had found myself half wanting to become part of it, maybe because the Brotherhood meant my meeting with Betsy, maybe because I was angry at what had happened to Toto.

“How did you manage to escape the Japanese? Were they really all that bad?”

He sat back, a look of shock on his face. “I keep forgetting,” he said, “that the war was three decades ago, that your generation has not known what it is to live under an occupying army. Yes, Pepe, there would have been no successful guerrilla movement, we would not have been able to organize the peasantry if the people did not suffer under the Japanese. They killed many of us, but we got more of them.”

He recounted how they mounted ambushes in the rivers of Pampanga, how the waters turned red. He did not go into details; it was as if he was merely recounting incidents. He melted with the people he said, and yes, he smiled in recollection, there were many times when he wore women’s clothes.

I would have stayed longer, but Tia Nena was looking for me—I had a visitor—so I hurried back to the
kumbento.
It was Juan Puneta’s driver asking if I would like to have lunch with Dr. Puneta? The car was out in the street, waiting.

“You are really going up—up,” Father Jess said when I asked his permission.

I wanted to ride with the driver up front, but he said I should stay in the rear. It was my first ride in an air-conditioned Continental, and I was awed. I toyed with the electric knob that raised the window and then sat back. On my side was a panel, and it controlled the radio and cassette player. I turned it on and listened to a noisy announcer urging the destruction of the Marcos regime and another march of students to Malacañang. He had a stentorian voice and must have been in love with it, for he rolled his
r
’s, and made those pauses that only actors make. “We cannot tolerate any longer a man who looks with disdain at the people, who makes a mockery of democracy, who has sold this country to the Americans …”—clichés, so I switched to another station. The Bee Gees were beautiful—

We were crossing Del Pan, into the handsome country of tall, antiseptic buildings, the Rizal Park. He slowed down on the boulevard and turned left to a Spanish-looking building.

“Please,” the driver said, “Don Juan is inside—just ask the waiter.”

The doorman hurried to the car and opened the door. In my jeans and T-shirt, I walked into the bastion of the mestizo elite. Puneta was in the restaurant drinking beer with a couple of mestizos in white pants—an affectation, for white pants were not worn anymore, although, as Uncle Bert once said, before the war everyone went to work in white drill suits even in the heat.

Juan Puneta came to me and squeezed my hand, saying gustily: “Well, Pepito, it is wonderful to have you accept my invitation. I have been wanting to have a long talk with you.” He guided me to the table and introduced me to his companions in Spanish, adding that I was one of the brightest student leaders. I understood everything and, for a moment, I was tempted to speak in Spanish, but I held back. They shook my hand, then asked to be excused. Although I was confident of my Spanish with Tia Nena and Father Jess, I had not tried it with someone born to the language. I kept quiet and sat down as he reverted to English, asking me what I wanted to drink.

From books and magazines, I knew a bit of bar exotica, but beer
or gin was all I really knew. I had never been to a place like the Casino, so I asked him to do the ordering. “Sangria,” he said. “I could ask for Jerez, but there is nothing like the Sangria that the bartender here makes.”

Though he was in his early forties, Juan Puneta looked more like thirty. He had obviously taken good care of his body for he did not have a paunch and his arms were muscular and wiry. He kept cracking his fingers.

Our sangria came. “
Salud
,” he said, raising his glass to me, his eyes shining. Then I saw it. The eyes, cagey and shifty, gave him away—not his gait, not his mannerisms. There was in his eyes, now that he was grinning, a certain sharpness. I had never objected to homosexuals—there was no reason for me to do so. In Cabugawan, we had one for a neighbor; he lived with young boys from the other barrios and made a living frying bananas, making rice cakes, and selling them. His cakes—particularly his
cochinta
and his
puto
—were superior to any other in our town. To to and I had a couple of classmates, too, and they were entitled to their preferences as long as they did not bother me. I like girls, always did, and I did not care to change.

I was amused by Juan Puneta because he looked so masculine, so very macho, and yet Lily had told me otherwise. He did the ordering—fried squid to start with, then bouillabaisse, which he said was excellent, and tripe, then dessert and coffee.

The squid came, deep fried and cut into small pieces, crunchy, almost like
chicharrón.
Around us was the babble of businessmen, the denizens of Pobres Park, the social elite, and I could pick up snatches of their talk, prices of minerals, saucy gossip, trips to Europe. “You know, Pepito,” Puneta said, getting serious; he had exhausted all the small talk—the weather, the increasing anarchy. “You must really give attention now to organizational work. I listened to you last time, you know. You can really organize in the rural areas. How do you feel about it?”

He gave some money to the Brotherhood, so I must not antagonize him. I must be nice, polite. Meekly: “I don’t really know, sir.”

“Don’t ‘sir’ me,” he said in mock anger. “Really, I am not your teacher, and don’t let my age and my Ph.D. intimidate you.”

“Yes, sir.”

He laughed. “Well, if you cannot call me by my nickname, which is Juan, then a plain Mr. will do.”

“Yes, Mr. Puneta,” I had no intention of calling him Dr., not after the way Mrs. Hortenso had talked against him. “I have not given it any thought, but whatever assignment will be given to me, I will do it.”

“Excellent!” he enthused, cracking his knuckles again.

The bouillabaisse came. “This is the specialty of the Casino,” Puneta said. I remembered reading about it as a dish from Marseilles, a thick soup with pieces of fish, clams, crab—seafood chop suey—and I liked it.

Then he asked me about the former Huk commander in the barrio.

“He is writing,” I said. I held back, not sure whether I should tell him what Ka Lucio had told me, the handbook he was doing, the list of former members we should see—in Laguna, Tarlac, Pampanga, Nueva Ecija, Pangasinan, Bicol, even in far off Panay, in Mindoro, and in Mindanao. I did not know they had organized that far. I thought the Huk movement was confined to Central Luzon, particularly Tarlac and Pampanga.

“What is he writing?”

“His memoirs,” I lied. “He is very sick.”

“I should see him then,” Juan Puneta said. He seemed thoughtful. “I am sure he needs help.”

Our tripe came. I had expected us to discuss politics; I wanted to find out how well he knew Philippine communism—the subject of his Cambridge dissertation—and how intellectually sharp he was. I asked him if I could read his thesis, but he dismissed my request with an imperious wave of the hand. “Just one of those academic requirements,” he demurred. “Better read the new collection of essays that I have written; it will be published soon.” Then, without any warning, he asked if I had ever gone whoring.

I was caught off guard. I fumbled and could not reply. He shook a finger at me and grinned: “You seem more interested in politics than in sex.”

I expected him to proposition me then, but he continued blithely: “Revolutionaries should not have emotional entanglements with women. It is bad because they will then be vulnerable. You can always go whoring for release.”

I did not speak.

He suspected, perhaps, that I was not pleased. “I mean it,” he
said. “It is one way by which you can get release. Are you twenty already, Pepito?”

“Twenty-four going on twenty-five,” I said.

“Well, you are at the height of your sexual powers. There is nothing unhealthy about whoring—if you are careful.”

“I have never tried, sir,” I said.

“Try it sometime,” he said. “It will keep your mind away from girls who will smother you.”

“I have not even—” I thought about what Lily had told me, “tried anything tamer—like the sauna and massage.”

He threw his head back and laughed. “You must be a Puritan, then, working with that priest in Tondo.”

“No, sir,” I said, “I certainly am not.”

He shook his head and went on grinning: “Well, saunas, that is one place I have never been to.”

How easily he lied. “But try going to one, find out which is best, then someday”—his eyes twinkled—“we can go together.”

Much, much later I thought about the bizarre meeting and wondered why Juan Puneta had wanted to see me. He had talked about women, he was bragging about his techniques, how necessary it was to have women under male control. He had a very extensive collection of pornography, he said, which I must see some time. But more than that, I must visit him at his home, and he made a date right there—a week from Friday, at nine in the morning; I should come to his office and we would go target-shooting—no, not in a cat house, at his home, he had a shooting range there. He also collected guns and I must learn how to shoot and shoot well if I am going to be in the vanguard of the Brotherhood. As a matter of fact, he said, if I wished, we could go to his house that very moment. But I told him I had classes in the afternoon, and it was past three.

He signed the chits, asked if I wanted anything other than the small glass of
anisado
^‡
—my first drink of liqueur—I downed it in one gulp and burned my throat. The sangria had gone to work, the
anisado
, too, and I was voluble and careless. No, I did not want anything more. I should go straight to school; our finals were at hand
and I did not want to lose my scholarship. If not for this I would go with him target-shooting, not only in his house.