The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (74 page)

“But the law—”

“The police, what do you think they care for? Their pay, first of all—and the more they can get, through foul means if necessary, the more they will get it. They are not here to help us; they are here to maintain order so that we will continue being what we are—poor.”

And it came to me clearly then as it never did before, the truth that this kind of order was not for me. Look at our Barrio. What did it need? Running water, so we would not get typhoid, and toilets, simple public toilets, nothing fancy, nothing expensive, but these could not be built, not by the government, not by the civic organizations. Why should they? Everyone up there was comfortable as long as we were down here. It was as simple as that. And this jail—it was so easy to tear it down, to build cell blocks that did not leak, and toilets that did not smell. And the greatest enemy, boredom, what was there to dispel it, to defeat it? The violence, of course, was the ultimate relief. It also sustained the power of those who watched over us, of those who wanted us deeper in the bog.

My mornings were tinged with gloom and uncertainty; my thoughts concerned that most basic of needs, food, and what there was was niggardly, unfit for human beings, but we were not humans anymore. Old rice with worms and pebbles in it, and dried fish that must have lain in some dank and foul storeroom for ages. It was no different at lunch or supper, and those of us who had no money had no choice, and we devoured it while those who were able to wrangle money from visitors had the canteen to go to, where one could have coffee boiled over three times, the usual cornerstone fare, moldy pieces of pastry, some candy, a few sorry-looking bananas, and other fruit rejects from Divisoria.

I really should not complain, for in that bleak compound I had three meals a day for doing nothing, though on the first day I could barely swallow the rice—not only was it sour, but it was also half-cooked, and as it was brought to the brigade in battered tin drums, it was covered with flies.

It was either the food or the foul air, but I could recognize it at once in the harsh light of day—the inmates had that unmistakable pallor of people in Tondo, the dirty, mottled, pallid skin that hunger brought to people. Indeed, I saw it then so clearly, so implacably real. The Barrio was the far more insidious prison, for while it had no walls, the people in it were really no different from those in this jail.

Something else happened to me in the city jail that I do not want to dwell upon, because it confirms what Roger had told me—the depravity that I had refused to believe and why I was helpless in the face of the power that had defiled me.

I should have had an intimation of it when, several times that day, Bing-Bong came around saying that he had not defecated for some time. But I did not understand their language then.

I could not fight even if I had wanted to; there were four of them who pressed me down on my stomach, pinioned my legs and arms. I felt the sharp point of an ice pick, perhaps the sharpened end of a thick wire, pressed against the back of my neck, the drip of something oily—cooking oil, they later told me—going down my buttocks, Bing-Bong, the King, grunting behind me, pumping, breathing hard and finally falling on my back like an obnoxious carcass.

This, too, was what Roger had spoken about. I was now initiated into this dismal world peopled by those whom I thought I would call my brothers. They were not my kin, for their legs and arms were tattooed. There was this malignant odor of cuspidors and urinals about them and they had the countenance of sick rooms. Their long hair was not the long hair of youth but of necessity. What did they know of dialectics, of responsibility, of nationalism as these have been dinned into us? They were here and I loathed them, for I knew that I could be any one of them, kindred in spirit, if I did not get out as fast as I could.

I was released on the fifth day of my incarceration. Someone was killed that night in the brigade next to ours, and through the iron grills I saw the body carried out of the compound as if it were a butchered pig, the body punctured with knife wounds—faucets, they called it. Chicken told me there was a killing also in our brigade the previous week. But no one talked—and no one asked questions.

I did not even know who had been killed, it was enough that the police saw it necessary to free us, for, in truth, no charges had been filed; we had been detained—that was all.

I went through the same cubicle where we were examined and, again, I stripped to be searched, then went to the desk beyond the wooden railing. The sergeant was eating noodles from a plastic plate; he looked at me perfunctorily and then ransacked his drawer for a sheaf of papers that he brought out, meanwhile looking at me with beady eyes, his mouth bulging with food. The ballpoint pen at
his desk refused to write so he stuck it between his lips, moistening its tip, then checked the papers until he found my name.

He kept me standing before his desk, but even at that distance I could smell his underarm odor, so strong and overpowering, I wondered which was stronger, the stench of the prison or that of his body.

“Here,” he said finally, taking a gulp from the tall glass of water at his right, “this is your name, is it not?”

I looked at it: Samson, José.

“Sign here,” he pointed to the blank bottom line.

I bent over the page and started reading. He stood up and the blow on my head made my ears ring. “I told you to sign,” he shouted, “not to read it.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, and scrawled my name hastily.

“Now, go!”

I walked out of the reception area and into a muddy yard festooned with laundry strung on the barbed wires and on the steel girders that fenced the cell blocks from each other.

I was told I was free—and I was shown the gate, beyond the yard cluttered with jeeps and old cars, past the small pond with the image of the Virgin shielded by a canopy of leaves, the stench of prison still all around me. Then I was out into the torrid heat of Quezon, the crowds eddying around me. I was in familiar territory close to my own university.

Back in the barrio I thought it best to tell Father Jess and Tia Nena only that I had merely gone to the province on an unexpected trip for the Brotherhood. I wanted to think about what had happened, ingest it, pummel it, conclude from it.

I wondered why it happened at all and what it had done to me. I have not accepted, and will never accept, the mindless act of Tarzan or the depravity of Bing-Bong as machinations of a supreme will, or even of fate. These men and what they did were the end products of a modern malaise that is spreading like a blob and covers, drowns, disfigures everything—the green of leaves, the fragrance of flowers, the blue of the sky. It is the evil that greed has wrought and these men were transformed; the air they breathed, the food in their stomachs, the sights that pleased them were all infected. They had died,
but they did not know it. Job is not the hero, then, but the villain—he had known success and affluence, but it was not God who took these away from him. It was Job himself who prepared his own downfall. Salvation did not come in his avowal of faith but in his renouncing the values that he had cherished. My torture was not punishment then, nor the humiliation that was heaped on me a diminution of my being; these were forms of revelation—an awakening from darkness, the coming to life of ashes. If only! Yes, if only the mind were not part of the body. This is my curse—that while I could distort and contort the mind, it was the body that yielded, it was the body that felt and lived and died.

I had thought of death in those nights that I could not sleep. The young do not think of death, but I have, so I am old. And much as I love life, I would have to bid it good-bye someday, perhaps soon, and it was not the living now that really mattered, but the how of it.

In my room the night I was finally freed, the memory of my torture came again, bringing a black, shapeless dread to my very core. I tried to banish my fear of having become impotent and wondered if I would ever be a man again. In the morning, when my bladder was full and I should have awoken with it erect and sticking up from under the sheet, I realized with some anguish that it was limp.

I asked for fifty pesos from Father Jess, saying I needed it badly, and then went to Makati.

It was past noon when I got to the Colonial and the after-lunch crowd from the nearby restaurants had not yet trickled in.

Lily had already checked in. After a brief shower, I went back to the cubicle. She was waiting at the door. “So, you are rich again,” she said as I drew her in.

She was an expert, she could do what Betsy could not, but I could not tell either of them what had happened, the details that degraded and humiliated me.

“Lily,” I said, “I did not come here for a massage. I have problems, emotional problems. Please help me.”

She laughed, that soft easy laughter I always liked in her. “Oh, Pepe, whatever your excuses, I like you just the same.” She bent down and kissed me, and I savored her moist lips, the saccharine recesses of her mouth.

She pulled away the towel I had draped around my waist, then sat on the narrow shelf and ran her fingers lightly over my chest. My
skin tingled, that sharp, delicious shivering that flowed down to my navel. But it stopped there. Then her hands floated down my legs, behind my knees, my buttocks. But though I felt sensually, delightfully aroused, I was not responding in the only way I wanted to.

“It is useless, Lily,” I said grimly.

I was about to rise, but she pushed me down. “You must concentrate,” she said. “Think of nothing else but me, and what I’ll give you.”

I lay on my back again, alive to the smell of cologne, the chatter of people in the passageways. Her expert hands could do nothing.

Then she bent over. I closed my eyes and surrendered—all of me in her mouth, all of me waiting, and then, after a while, she paused and when I opened my eyes, she was gazing at me happily. “I told you I could do it,” she said and rose. I had not been sure of what she was doing until she had mounted me, letting it slide neatly into place, then she gripped it, moistly, warmly, and started to gyrate.

“This is called ‘the helicopter,’ Pepe,” she said exultantly.

I
  left the Colonial, grateful to Lily for restoring my manhood and at the same time saddened by the knowledge that she had fallen down the abyss. I had said earlier only a slight nudge would be her undoing. I did not blame her.

Looking back, I understood only too well how it had been with me as well, how shamefully craven I had been in my desires. I was convinced that it is the rich who should not compromise because they are strong, not we who are poor, who cannot be steadfast or unswerving when our needs cry for satisfaction.

I cursed myself then for not being made of ironwood or some such granite material so I would be able to withstand the hunger that always knotted my stomach, the gross temptations that had betrayed me. Yet I have known early enough that all of living is a compromise, this was what was pounded into me in Cabugawan, from Mother and my aunt, who never earned enough from all their labors. I knew this even after I had gone with Betsy to that fancy French restaurant, because I had to return to Tondo and to a larder that was ample only because I lived in the
kumbento.

We compromise ourselves the day we are born. If we are looking for the original sin, there it is: our incapacity to live honestly with ourselves because we are human, because we are shackled by custom, by obligations, and we accept compromise only in the light of our individual conscience, answerable as we are only to ourselves.

This is a world not of black and white but of grays, and it is really in this huge gray geography where we act out our fates. I envy those who have chosen the black or the white, for, to them, they have simplified living. There are no more storms within them to be stilled, no more muddied choices; there is only one intractable way, clear and straight, and they cannot deviate from it.

Toto would not compromise, and if he had lived he would not have changed one bit. He would have come out of it more determined, more convinced not just of the inevitability or the necessity of his revolution, but of its righteousness. This is our hope and our curse because the righteousness exalts, and our curse because we would pursue it as Ka Lucio pursued it long after he, himself, had failed.

But I have learned from the fretfulness of older men, and what, after all, did I need in order to live? I brought back to mind those days that my stomach soured from its being filled with nothing but those abominable greens, and I knew that I could subsist on them forever, the days I saw nothing but the limits of Cabugawan, and within those confines I had wakened in the morning with wonder at the grass wet with dew, a sky swept clean. This feeling surged in me, I could do anything and God up there was smiling. Indeed, there was nothing for me to expiate in this miasma called Tondo, nothing in the world has changed but me. I had known what was beyond the stone highway and the railroad tracks. I had traversed not distance but depth, and when the discovery was over and revelation had come not as wisdom but as masochistic sorrow, there was still this me that longed not for more journeys or more sensual knowledge, but the pith, the marrow of living, why so many of us are mired in Tondo. This is, of course, no cabalistic question. I had known the answer way back, only now it must be made real.

I must no longer compromise.

Marcos, jail the young, jail all those who oppose your oligarchy and your grandiose plans. Imprison us, torture us, for by doing so
you will swell our piteous ranks, you will temper us with the harshness of truth so that we will rise from the flames singed and wounded but, by God, infinitely more steadfast and strong.

Then, November. The rains no longer lash down as frequently as in the earlier months, but the alleys of the Barrio are still murky with puddles, and from under the houses and along the shallow canals the odor of putrefaction rises like an implacable curse. But November presages Christmas, and even before the middle of the month, the radios are already noisy with carols, so that while there is darkness all around, there is, somehow, the promise of light.