The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (79 page)
Read The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) Online
Authors: F. Sionil Jose
It should not be difficult to erode the constructions of sand whereon the mighty are perched. And who am I to attempt this? I would, in all likelihood, be lost or swallowed up, a pebble in a bog, with not even a splash or a ripple. But why should I make this splash? This ripple? Each is a step forward, in the right direction, said Ka Lucio; but why was it not three steps or ten? Those who made them, those behind me, those with me, they failed, I think, because they wanted to be more than men, invulnerable, incapable of venial sin. They failed because, as Ka Lucio said, they were textbook robots who fancied themselves as the sole bringers of light, the infallible harbingers of grace, unswerving and self-righteous. As Kuya Nick said, they are not “in the compass.” They lost direction because
they were bloated with self-importance. If they only knew how to enjoy themselves, if they only knew how it is to love and, therefore, to forgive! I will not be like them, and even if I should die, which I surely will, even in the ennui, in the tawdry futility of it all, I will live as I have always lived, amassing memories.
Leaving this Barrio, then, is not leaving at all; it is an act of being welded deeper, stronger, with all those nameless people of my boyhood, these faceless people here who will live and die without knowing what it is to be alive.
And how about Bing-Bong, Chicken, Tarzan, White Sidewall, and all those demons of the other world that I had glimpsed? Could they be recycled from the junkyard like Roger? It had often come to me like a bad recurrent dream, and it always brought a quiet chill to my heart—my torture, how my flesh and mind were ripped apart. Was there any design to it other than to jar me, to wake me up? They were all creatures of circumstance, but this circumstance can now be changed. It should be changed! And all that pain—it was part of living after all, and it made me know the limits of experience, and the limits are yet to be enlarged.
I lay in my cot and waited for the dark; the shuffle of mah-jongg chips,
Silent Night
on someone’s radio disturbed the quiet. I thought of waiting for Lily, to say good-bye to her, but she’d be back close to midnight and would be very tired; she would most probably not understand and would rather hurry to her dreamless sleep. Lily, only twenty but hardened by the Barrio and fallen down the abyss. No, I will not bother her, I will wish her sweet dreams so that in the morning she will wake up fresh and ready again to tackle the hordes at the Colonial. I hoped to God that she would make enough money in five years so that she could quit.
I thought of Betsy, my Betsy, away from all the niggling frustrations that had tormented us. I had lain awake nights after she had gone, remembering those tenuous moments we had shared. At the airport I had tried to keep away, but she had scanned the crowd and seen me behind one of the pillars. She had run to me, away from her friends, and in a final and futile gesture she kissed me, suppressing a sob as she did. “Pepe, thank you for coming!” Then she went back to her parents, her friends, as if nothing had happened, and I fled from them onto the viewing roof, lost in the crowd, and watched her trim
figure in yellow go up the ramp, her eyes searching the waving crowds, searching…
Her letters had started to come. She wrote every day, but for how long? She wrote of her loneliness, of the ghastly and impersonal city to which she had been exiled, the nondescript course she was taking and how, after the New Year, she would return and go straight to the Barrio, not to the Park. But she would not find me and she would not know where to look.
It had become dark. Around me were familiar things—my small cabinet, the cracked cement floor that was now dry but during the rainy season was wet from the water that seeped in and was ankle-deep, and we had to walk around in rubber boots. How many times had I lain on this wooden cot, my pillow smelling of my sweat, the palm leaf mat scratching against my back where it had frayed, and listened to the sounds of the Barrio, the blare of a jukebox across the yard, the quarrel of couples, the tinkling of an ice cream cart.
The darkness had started to hide everything, the misshapen dwellings of rusting tin, driftwood, and packing crates, the alleys rank with decay. Will there ever be a good roof over my head? I turned to the strip of sky above my window now flecked with stars—how luminous, how eternal the heavens were.
On the shelf beside my bed were my old books from Father Jess, a dozen from Betsy, and at the foot of my bed, propped up by hollow blocks so that the water would not touch them, my clothes. I can count them—five undershirts, five jockey shorts, two denim pants, one khaki and olive green for ROTC, one black double knit, a barong, five shirts, the white in need of stitching where the collar had frayed. They would all fit into the old canvas bag.
I switched on the light and got a sheet of paper from my drawer; the Sheaffer pen I was going to use was Betsy’s birthday gift. What can I tell her now? It was after she had gone that it came, a longing for her so intense that the ache was almost physical. Many times in a crowd, although I knew she was far away, a turn of a head, the color of green, a dash of scarf, and all would come back—the coffee shop, that night on the hill overlooking Manila, and here in Tondo. Dear Betsy, I would like to tell you now how much I need you. I have purposely held off writing this to you, and in doing so, I had turned over and over in my mind, all these past few days, why I am here and you are there—so far and so beyond my reach …
It had always been that way, and I have always known it, better perhaps than you ever will. My perception of the world is different from yours; it is not just a matter of age, or of different geographies. It is just that you are up there and I am down here
.
I do not want to say good-bye again, or to repeat what I have said, that in these two years you have become a part of my life, and I feel for you what I feel for myself, these tissues, this skin. I have grown so familiar with you, the contour of your body, the smell of your breath, the soft, warm crevices of your mouth and the whole wonder of you. I know now how difficult it is to be alone, to be here in this senseless confine not only of my own being but of this wretched city, and to know that you are not here where I can glory not just in your nearness but in the thought that you did love me.
And at night I lie awake, and I speak your name as if it were some incantation that would dispel this loneliness, for now I am really alone. I whisper to these cold, rusting walls; to the damp, cement floor; to the emptiness around me, Betsy, Betsy … but I can only hear the echo within me and so I wonder how you are, if you are happy as I hope you will be, and I pray that you be not tormented as I am, that your nights are slept and your days are bright, and if you remember, may they be those times that we shared, the coffee shop, the tawdry rooms and the sheet that was stained with red, the books that had to be read, and Tondo where I had tasted your sweat; yes, so many of these now crowd my mind, and they are all crystal clear, pictures, events, places—all of them important only because we knew them, lived them, and they have become us
.
I did not want to write this letter, but it is one way by which I can escape this bleakness that now encompasses me. Now, too, I know how it is to be what I am and to remember what you are, life-giver, my joy and my sorrow
.
You will forget, not because you are young, but because you are far away, and having forgotten, it will all be over and you may, on some occasion, remember, perhaps, because this is the way things are and we cannot change them. I don’t know if I will forget; one can never be sure, but I know that
you are now my wife, not because God or a priest has sanctified our union but because this is how I regard you. Though I may sleep with other women, I know there will always be you, separate from all the rest, not just because I feel that you have given me yourself, or your faith and trust, all of which I do not deserve, but because I have given myself to you as I will never give myself to anyone.
I will be leaving Tondo now and I wish I knew my final destination, but I do not. The compulsions that we have talked about will take me to regions I will not recognize, but wherever they may be, there will be a light to guide me, a talisman that will make me endure and you are all of these
.
But above all, you are the proof I will always hold precious and true. Thank you, dear Betsy, for being with us in thought and deed. There are a few like you, comfortable and secure, who have chosen to be with us; I will doubt them in a way I once doubted you and they must bear the burden of proving themselves as you have done. Only time will tell and time, alas, is fickle in a way I will never be, now that I know who I am, now that I know what to do.
So let me go away loving you, and losing you, for, in the end, we will lose all those we love.
I merely signed, JS.
I folded the letter, Father Jess would have to mail it for me; he would also be my only link with Betsy and with all the others whose lives I have touched and who would, perhaps, surrender themselves lightheartedly to the end that awaits us.
I unzipped the canvas bag and on top of the guns and the money I placed my clothes, my pen knife, and a notebook. I would have many thoughts to jot down and they will not have anything to do with what I am and what I will be; the past is stored here in my mind, inviolate, days when I was young, when I marveled at how the leaves of the acacia trees close at dusk, how it would have been if there was a father to explain to me why this was so, what was it that closed the leaves of the
bain-bain
if I as much as breathed into them? Where could all this wisdom be? I saw
Man’s Fate
, which was Betsy’s gift, then Father’s
The Ilustrados
; she had told me to read the
last chapter and reluctantly, I sat back, remembering what Professor Hortenso had also said.
“Your father committed suicide,” Betsy had told me. “Mama is convinced that what Carmen Villa said is true. That is why Carmen Villa died, too—slowly, insanely.”
The Filipino elite is flawed because the individuals who comprise it, even though they come from diverse backgrounds, do not really see themselves as leaders of a nation. They see themselves as leaders of factions, of families, of cozy coteries. Their rhetoric will deny, even attack, this assumption—but their deeds will bear their parochial, factional, and, therefore, antinationalistic loyalties
.
“—it is a great book and only a great mind is capable of writing it …”
The Filipino elite in its present composition is doomed not because of the inexorable march of history, not because the dialectic of change has condemned it. It is doomed because dinosaurs were doomed. But even the last dinosaur, in its death throes, trampled the grass
.
“Why do you hate him? You were young, Pepe; you didn’t know. Please give him a chance.”
The corruption of the
ilustrado
class was accomplished not by bribery from the Spaniards, nor by the high offices that the Americans or the Japanese gave them. Their corruption started when they started believing—with great righteousness and pride—that they were equal to their rulers. By aspiring for equality they became imbued, therefore, with the same values as their masters, values that perpetuated the very injustices they sought to avenge
.
The
ilustrados—
the intellectuals—should have no role in the revolution, in any revolution. They equivocate, they argue, they procrastinate. Writers and academics who think they have a role in revolution are flattering themselves; what they really want to do is to be part of it, to lead it, without having to raise the sword. Only those with the sword can participate in revolution, for revolution means destruction, not contemplation
.
“Even if he did not see your mother as you said, why did she love him to the end? Why did she ask you to honor and respect him? She would have been the first to hate him—because he married another.…”
Revolution can only succeed when men who believe in it can translate their beliefs into a conspiracy—all-embracing in its call for adherents. But to admit into the leadership of the revolution the old elite, no matter how well-intentioned they may be, would be to condemn the revolution to suspicion and even betrayal. A class war is precisely that—a class war. The revolution failed because it did not adhere to this basic requirement; a class is weakened not by the identified enemy but by the unidentified subverter who dilutes and weakens its leadership
.
“He had integrity, Pepe. He saw how rotten the system and the people he had joined were; he had to cleanse himself. Carmen Villa was right: his suicide was an act of courage.”
Courage, integrity—what frightening words! How many are there who can really carry them without being crushed? They had never really meant much to me, but now I understood not only what they meant but also the horrendous burden they were.
But how does one measure their weight upon the poor? Who can point with an unerring finger to those among us who have borne them?
Instinctively, I remembered Lucy and Lily, and much as I loathed thinking of what they had to go through to live, I knew deep within me that they had acted with courage and fortitude, and I can only curse myself for my incapacity to understand them.
I had been wrapped up in a fine gauze of a dream through which I could neither see nor break away. I had deluded myself without being quite aware, and, thank God, there had been an awakening.
My father’s book now seemed clear to me. Reading him now, knowing the people he had to live with, I could imagine how he felt, the dilemmas he had to wrestle with so that the comforts that he knew would not blind him and bind him when, all along, memory kept shunting him back to the Antipolo that we both knew and beyond, Cabugawan, which was the beginning.
Yet it had never really occurred to me, in spite of Betsy’s promise and Puneta’s clever urgings, to join them no matter how I longed for the ease, the comfort of which their world had a surfeit. No matter how sincere Betsy was, I knew now that I would lose her in spite of herself, and only time would tell how soon. I could easily be lulled into thinking that she would be constant, and she would be, but I belonged to Cabugawan, not to Pobres Park, and as long as I kept that in mind, what happened to Father would never happen to me. But I did not deride him now; I had learned from him. The end that he chose for himself was not an act of pride or of despair. It was courage, which I must surpass if the son is to be better than the father, if the child is to become a man.