The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (76 page)

“Remember?”

I do not have a good memory for dates but I knew.

“The first time,” she said.

I kissed her as she gave me her ring to slip onto her finger. It was quite heavy and I asked why.

“Platinum,” she said.

She took my left hand and slipped the ring on my finger. It fit snugly. “I was too optimistic, I guess,” she said. “But we are one nonetheless.”

I embraced her and promised myself I would never take it off. My chest was tightening. “There are things I will never understand,” I said, my throat sandpapery. “Simple things like … like breathing. And these precious things I will lose not to some enemy but to my own cowardice.”

“You are wrong,” she said. “It is not cowardice. It is honesty.”

“I am not honest. I have been selfish, and as your mother said, if I loved you, I would let you go, because with me there is no future.”

“I have made the choice,” she said, clinging to me.

“It is fate,” I said humbly.

“Don’t hide behind words.”

“I wish I could still hide,” I said. “But not anymore. I must face it. Here I am—unable to be with you, to have an open relationship. I must do what is right.”

“And what is that?”

“It sounds so melodramatic,” I said, “as if it is all lifted from those cheap Tagalog movies, the dialogues those nitwits are churning out for the housemaids. Let me tell you how and I’d like to listen to it myself, this big moment. Now really is the time for us to say good-bye—”

“You do not mean it,” she said, pressing her face to my chest.

“Of course, I mean it. But how can I forget? You are now part of my life,” the words were pouring out. “You are here within me, in my blood, the air in my lungs, the juices in my stomach. Listen now, what your mother wants is for you to have a good life, marry well— even someone ugly—but someone
not like me, a castaway. What future is there with me? Nothing but sorrow. Your place is there, among your kind. You are asleep now, and when you wake up, what then?”

She said simply, “I want to be with you, awake or asleep.”

I disregarded her. “You will grow older and someone soon enough will come knocking on your door.”

She did not speak.

“Thank you, Betsy, for everything.”

She hugged me, her heart thrashing against my chest, her body shaking as she cried soundlessly. That would help ease this last sorrow I had inflicted on her.

I
  go back to Tondo, my accursed present, my consecrated future. I have learned so much here and I know myself now as I never did before. My needs were so basic—a stomach, for instance, that had to be filled. Contemplation is a luxury that could waylay and lull me into forgetting that my hunger was just a symptom of a far greater need … all those we emblazoned in the streets, our placards crying for justice, for revolution—they had sounded so hopelessly unreal. Not anymore.

Beyond the houses the sea slammed on the seawall, bringing with it the perennial stench of oil and rotting fish and all the accumulated smells of the cesspool that the bay had become. In the late evenings when the bray of traffic had died down and the living noises had been stilled, I sometimes went out to the narrow churchyard, the night arched above me, alive with the pungencies of the swamp and above the narrow ring of rooftops, the sky—how serene and distant the stars. It brought to mind how it was in the fields of Rosales at night when I was alone in that thatched farmer’s shed, surrounded by the dark that pulsed and heaved around me with the scent of grass, the crickets alive in the folds of the earth. It seemed
then that I could hear my heart, my thoughts as they took shape, and it seemed, too, that there was peace—lasting and deep—only because I was alone.

Now I was alone again, surrounded by these melancholy shapes, these decrepit lives. I would always be alone, I could rely on no one but myself. A poet said that the strongest man is he who stands alone—but there was no strength in me, only this wanton disregard for time that would bring me nothing but unhappiness, a desolation of the spirit in which there would be no resurrection, no green shoot to nourish so that it would grow, as the bamboo grows. I would die, but this was no longer so horrible a fate, an abomination to be feared, for at least I would be able to do something with my life and not just breathe the foul air or fill to overflowing this pit that is my stomach.

On the day before the Misa de Gallo
^*
started Juan Puneta came to Tondo. He had left messages everywhere, in the
kumbento
, at the office of the school paper, at Professor Hortenso’s house, and once his driver came saying he wanted to see me. I had made excuses, but now there was no avoiding him. Father Jess received him as I was in the sacristy, helping Roger and the members of the Brotherhood string the colored lightbulbs for the church front.

“Ah, Pepito,” he said, embracing me like a brother he had not seen in ages. He was in a khaki safari suit. He smelled of cologne.

“I have wanted to see you for some time now. Where have you been?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said, “I have been working hard—you see, my scholarship …”

“I still would like very much to take you to the house. We have so many things to discuss.”

“But I have work to do. We are finishing the Christmas decorations and …”

“It is all right, Pepe,” Father Jess interrupted me. “Roger can take care of that.”

I turned to Father Jess, but he could not read my urgent signals,
and having no more excuses, I sighed as Father Jess walked us to the door.

“He will be back before lunch, Padre,” Juan Puneta said.

A blue Mercedes 280 SE was parked on the street and it was Juan Puneta who drove.

“I have so many things to tell you,” he gushed. “But first, tell me how you have been. I hear that the next demonstration will really be big. Are you prepared for it—I mean for the violence that will surely come?”

“We are now prepared,” I said.

He was silent. “What about the things that the Huk commander was going to write?”

“Ka Lucio?”

He nodded.

“He was murdered,” I said. “Didn’t you know?”

He looked surprised.

“The police came, asked questions. It was not even mentioned in the newspapers. Who would care for an ex-Huk commander in the first place?”

“I hope you learned a lot from him,” Puneta said. We were going over Del Pan bridge and soon we would be in another country, the antiseptic, manicured boulevard, then the golden ghetto of Makati.

“Nothing. Nothing,” I lied. I had asked Cora after Ka Lucio’s funeral if there was anything he had written that I could read. But there was nothing; she knew of the ruled pad where he was writing, but it could not be found. We searched his bookcase, his desk, but it was not there.

“It is sad, very sad,” Puneta kept repeating and cracking his knuckles as we paused in the traffic.

Puneta’s house was at the other end of the Park, shaded by giant acacia trees on whose trunks clambered vines and orchids. At the gate he got out and unlocked the door, then we drove in. The grounds were surrounded by a tall ivy-covered wall—an expanse of green, well-trimmed grass, hedges. At the far end was a pool, and still farther, a stable.

Puneta parked in the driveway. No one was in the house, not a guard, not a maid. “The maids’ day off and they will not be back till five in the afternoon. As for my wife, she has gone with the kids to visit her mother. They will not be back till this afternoon. Which is
very good—we can talk without interruption. Then we can go down and shoot, have a meal. I cook, you know. You can help. And someday, you should try my
caldereta.
”

This is it. This is where I pay back the five hundred.

We went to the kitchen where he prepared two cups of coffee. It was nothing like Tia Nena’s cubbyhole; it was airy and as wide as the whole
kumbento
itself; on one side, an array of stoves, ovens on the wall. On another, cabinets, a giant freezer, and a refrigerator. The breakfast nook as he called it adjoined the kitchen, actually an antiseptic-looking dining room by itself.

“I was not able to report to you on the money you gave me,” I said. “I gave three hundred pesos to Cora, Ka Lucio’s niece, for the funeral. I spent some of it myself—and, yes, I have found the best sauna in town.” I was watching him, looking for a sign that would betray him, but his ivory mestizo face was bereft of expression. “I have been to three of them, but the best is in Makati. The Colonial.”

Not even a flicker of interest.

“We should go there one day then. Now, if possible, but it does not really open till noon,” I continued.

“That’s interesting,” he merely commented. “Yes, we should go there. But that is pretty tame, Pepito. We can go to another place where there are girls—as well as boys.”

Now the proposition.

“It is quite expensive … but money is no problem. If you want girls. Or boys.”

I smiled. “I prefer girls,” I said. “As for the boys—”

“Are you willing to try?”

I was about to answer, but the phone jangled. He picked it up and said, “Hello,” then he spoke in Spanish. “Yes, but wait, there is someone here with me. I will answer you in the bedroom. Call again.” He hung up the phone and to me, he said in Tagalog, “A moment—”

He left and soon the phone rang again. On the second ring, when it was interrupted, I picked it up, too.

They were speaking in Spanish again: “Who is that with you?” the voice at the other end was anxious.

“Just one of those dumb village boys. But it is all right, I am here in the bedroom and he is in the kitchen. Besides, he cannot understand Spanish. What is it,
chico
?”

The man seemed frantic. “What is this I hear about another big demonstration in January? Shall we tell our men to work on the kids again? They want more money this time. After all there were more than ten killed in the last …”

“Of course, of course,” Juan Puneta said with exasperation. “They have to be there. Always, I don’t care how many get killed. They must simply make sure that the kids will blame the Metrocom, the police, for everything.”

“They already do that.”

“Make the fire hotter,” Puneta said, “and money is of no consequence, as you know. You can pick up my share at the Casino tomorrow.”

“The Army and Navy Club,” the other man said, “I have a lunch there.”

“All right then.”

“Anything new from Tondo or from Tarlac?”

“After that Huk commander in Tondo was disposed of, nothing new,” Juan Puneta said.

“Tomorrow then,” the man said, and hung up. I waited till Puneta had put the phone down; then I put mine down, too.

How neatly everything was falling into place. Mrs. Hortenso was right after all, and Betsy, too—one could depend on women and their intuition. But since men depend so much on logic and verifiable data, well, here they were. Betsy had told me how Puneta had traveled in style, the same way he had come to Tondo, in his big, fat Continental. He used a helicopter to ferry his ice, his caviar, and his pate to those distant and forgotten mountainfolds where he hunted—a reconnaissance of the battlefields of the future. His gun collection was public knowledge though few had seen it. How convenient it was for a rich man like him to have his arsenal right here, legitimate, open—all in the name of hobby.

I went to the cabinets where the saucers and cups were and started setting the table. The water had started to boil and I was taking it off the electric stove when he joined me.

“I am sorry for the interruption,” he said, “an important business call.” He saw what I had done and he smiled. “You really don’t waste
time.” He brought the Nescafé. “A special European blend.” He continued, “We were talking about my favorite subject, sex. What have you got against boys?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing really.”

“That’s good. We will have plenty of time. Now, I must show you my shooting range.”

We left the coffee cups in the sink. I followed him across the vast, carpeted living room to a corridor lined with paintings, on to the master bedroom and beyond, a mirror with a carved gilt frame that occupied the whole end of the corridor. He pressed a button behind a small picture frame and the mirror swung open to reveal a red-carpeted stairway. It led down to a brilliantly lit cavern underneath the house.

“Surprise, surprise,” he said, grinning. “Only my best friends know this place, Pepito. You are one of the anointed few. It is completely soundproof.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

“I have been collecting for a long time now,” he explained. A whole wall was lined with guns, carefully oiled. At one end of the hall were target frames, ever ready for shooting. He walked to the first cabinet. “There,” he said, “is one of the earliest guns used by the Spaniards in the eighteenth century. And that is a Mauser over there, used during the revolution. And yes, that blunderbuss over there. And
lantaka
—” he pointed to a Muslim brass cannon as stout as a coconut trunk.

“What is your favorite, sir?” I asked.

“Handgun or rifle?”

I didn’t know the difference.

“Well, these old ones—that Krag over there, those Garands, and these Thompsons. They are all serviceable. Even that Nambu machine gun over there—” a sleek, futuristic-looking gun, mounted on a tripod; it stood on a platform with six other machine guns. “You know, it is in working order. The Japanese made it, and according to ordnance intelligence it is the best machine gun the Japanese produced. The caliber is small, but its velocity is terrific.”

We walked over to a cabinet with more rifles and shotguns. About two dozen of them, and he paused before one particular long-barreled rifle. “This is the Winchester magnum,” he said. “It has range, power. It can stop a charging elephant in its tracks.”

“Have you shot one, sir?”

“Of course,” he said expansively. “I have been on safaris in Africa. In Ceylon, we hunted leopards. And, of course, Sumatran tigers—” He pointed to three tiger skins on the floor.

We stopped before a table case, glass-topped, and, within, an array of handguns—revolvers, automatics, and small-caliber pistols that could be held in one’s palm. He slid open the glass panel and picked out a revolver, its barrel a shiny blue. “This is considered the world’s finest revolver,” he said. “And I am partial to it. Revolvers don’t jam. Unlike automatics. Remember that shoot-out in a nightclub two months ago?”