The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (8 page)

“Well, what we lack is national discipline and nothing else,” Dean Lopez said. “We are apt to blame our leaders for the mess we are in, but if we had discipline as a people such a mess would never have happened.”

“I think we don’t really know how to make democracy work,” Dr. Gomez said. He wore his gray hair long and he took pride in having served as technical assistant to no less than the president of the republic. “We are all fond of elections, but we don’t put the result of the ballot to work once elections are over.”

“You are thinking like an American adviser,” Dean Lopez said. “The American definition of democracy cannot work in benighted areas of Asia. Why, that’s a fact. Now listen, when I was in Germany …”

Tony knew what would come next. Listen now to Lopez bluff and bully his colleagues around, listen to him boast that only he, because he happened to have taken one summer course in a German university, could have the final word.

Now the talk became unbearable as the old men spewed big words about the mess at the university and in the whole country. They ranted about the challenges to the academic life that the school could not meet because the young teachers were cowardly or were not imbued with enough wisdom—ah, how they took liberties with words like academic freedom. And truth. And obligation. Tony knew all along, of course, that what they were trying to say with their abominable half-truths was that they were important, that age mattered
because it meant wisdom and experience. They did not say that they were frustrated and embittered with their small pay, their bleak future, and the fact that, in the university, with no other strength to boast of, they were prisoners of their own meager talents. What he heard now was not different from what he remembered about them six years ago.

“Am I not right, Dr. Samson”—he was being addressed as “doctor” by no less than the dean himself—“when I say that we are debased in spirit because we have not yet properly exorcised our colonial past?”

“Of course, sir,” he was saying, not quite sure that he was in pious agreement. He would have said more but Lopez had already returned to the other professors.

He must get used to that title, doctor, professor—associate professor, which the dean had conferred on him. After the other professors had left, the blustery voice was once more directed to him. “Hell, Tony, you’ll be a full professor before you are forty, and if you play your cards right you’ll be president of the university before you know it. And as a starter, you should be a member of the Socrates Club—I’ll see to that. Hell, not every Ph.D. can be a member of the club, but you are an exception. You are Ilocano.…” He roared good-naturedly.

Dean Lopez was short, but he made up for his lack of stature with a brusqueness in manner and speech. He was supposed to be an authority on English literature, too, but his diction was coarse and his speech full of clichés. In the two years that Tony had served him before going abroad, he knew that the dean was displeased with his writing popular articles for the magazines. Now the subject came up again: “You’ve got to make up your mind now, whether you want to be a pulp writer or a scholar.”

He had wanted to disagree, but he did not want to fall into the rut of an argument or antagonize his true benefactor. They were both Ilocanos—that was the finality to consider. The dean had, in fact, filled his faculty with Ilocanos so he would perhaps be assured of obedience and the comforting sense that none of his hirelings would ever revolt or intrigue against him.

Tony appreciated Dean Lopez’s interests in his welfare, but he knew that someday the dean would want to collect. The old man would not ask for a case of beer, as he often did with the graduate
students, nor would he ask for something as vulgar as a loan. It would have to be in kind, in loyalty—unquestioning fealty.

And loyalty, gratitude could take on many subtle forms in the university. It would mean speaking in favor of Lopez when the dean was discussed, as he always was in the faculty coffee sessions. It would mean putting in a good word for him when he was lampooned by the graduate students who had grown too big for the dean’s bullying. It would mean a line or two of flattery in articles on the university or on the disciplines or research projects the dean championed or sponsored. Wasn’t he an expert in linguistics? Wasn’t he the only authority on Ilocano culture and the Ilocano migration? There could be no work on these subjects without mentioning him in the introduction, without having him copiously represented in the bibliography and footnotes. He must now help sustain the myth that Dean Lopez was the scholar who had studied the Ilocanos more than any other man, a myth that had disintegrated before his very eyes long ago but which he had no choice but to recognize, to nurture. This myth was one of those mysterious and inexplicable assertions that made the university a vast riddle. He came upon the myth in Boston, when he went to the Widener Library looking for materials on the Ilocano migration and the Philippine Revolution. Sure enough, he came upon Dean Lopez’s “immortal book,”
An Examination of the Symbolic Pattern of the Ilocano Language.
But beside the book was an American scholar’s manuscript, ten years older than Dean Lopez’s. He took them both and started reading. The discovery was complete; the myth was built on sordid plagiarism.

He recalled how the graduate assistants in Dean Lopez’s department had grumbled when the dean collated their papers and affixed his name to their collective work. That was it—that was scholarship at the university. But while he loathed it, he couldn’t quite bring himself to hate the old man; it was he, after all, who had sent him to America and the beginning of wisdom.

America—and again there flashed in his mind that continent laved by ozone and smog; in his mind’s eye flashed the vast reaches of its green timberlands and frothy oceans, its still vaster space where the soul could wander and search. And so it happened in that wide and
tumultuous land, to him who was lonely—this one honest moment of self-scrutiny and self-seeking. Sometimes you look at yourself in the mirror and wonder why that nose looks as it does, or those eyes—what is behind them, what depths can they reach? Your flesh, your skin, your lips—you know the face you behold is not yours alone but is already something that belongs to those who love it, to your family and all those who esteem you. But a person is more than a face or a bundle of nerves and a spigot of blood; a person is more than talking and feeling and being sensitive to the changes in the weather, to the opinions of people. A person is part of a clan, a race. And knowing this, you wonder where you came from and who preceded you; you wonder if you are strong, as you know those who lived before you were strong, and then you realize that there is a durable thread that ties you to a past you did not create but which created you. Then you know you have to be sure who you are, and if you are not sure or if you do not know, you have to go back to those who hold the secret to your past. And the search may not be fruitful. From this moment of awareness there is nothing more frustrating than the belief that you have been meaningless. A man who knows himself can live with his imperfections; he knows instinctively that he is part of a wave that started from great, unnavigable expanses.

There was such a wave and a man who was a part of that wave. And this man, this grandfather who was part of that wave, was the personification of courage and intellect, because it was he who brought all of the Samsons from the ravaged hills of the Ilocos to the new land—to Pangasinan. Someday he would go to the old country to find out more about him. To Carmen he had confided: I’ll come across my grandfather’s name in the things he did. She had, in turn, told him bluntly, this Carmen who was a rich man’s daughter, this Carmen who squandered dollars on a sports car, clothes, and beauty aids that had all grown scarce in Manila: “
Esto
, you’ll end up thinking you are so good you can do no wrong. There are no supermen in this world, Tony, except in comic books. Look at what they did to the supermen in Germany. The Americans transformed them into peddlers and shopkeepers. And the Ilocanos—you think they can be supermen? Wait till you see Papa—there’s the superman for you. He can influence almost everyone—labor leaders, politicians, good-for-nothing daughters, and, I have a feeling, even errant teachers.”

•  •  •

He went out of the college cafeteria, the senseless palaver still in his head: Who are these tyrant regents dictating who shall get promotions this year? Politicians were hounding the deans who did not pass out appointments to their protégés—all the damnation that had long been embedded in the matrix of the university was out in the open again. And he was glad that he leaned on no less a personage than Dean Lopez; that blustery old man had given him a full load in the coming school year, plus that imposing title, associate professor, and the invitation to join the Socrates Club.

From the bus Tony surveyed the scene fondly, the white antiseptic buildings, the grass grown mangy and tan under the sun. In the afternoon the campus slept. Now the conductress, a short plump girl with flat-heeled shoes, screeched again: Quiapo
derecho
!
^§
The driver idled the motor, and as the bus stood in the sun, Tony could feel waves of heat lapping the interior of the vehicle. Only a handful of summer students were in the bus, and when the conductress saw no more prospective passengers coming, she thumped on the side of the vehicle and shouted, “Roll!”

Beyond the campus, suburbia bloomed: the new California bungalows, the well-tended gardens, the bougainvillea, the TV antennas; then the city flowed by: the wooden buildings, the gasoline stations, the atrocious billboards—how depressing they all were! And yet, one must accept these cheapnesses that America had inflicted upon his hapless country. Hapless—he had to define his country as such and insinuate, too, the gutlessness of his people and of himself.

In a while, Quiapo—the mass of jeepneys, the burning asphalt, and the smell of the living city. The heat coagulated again like an elemental fluid that submerged all—the nondescript crowds, Quiapo Church impiously painted cream against the pale, smoky sky.

He hurried across the plaza to the shaded sidewalk, where the sun was not as raw. It would be hot anywhere and it would be hottest now in the newspaper office where he was going. Godo’s last letter cursed this heat and at the same time lyrically reminisced about the New England he had known in his brief visit to America.

Godo Solar and Charlie worked on a magazine. They were his
friends, members of that undefined fraternity he had been drawn to when he was in college. The two had chosen newspapering and had lavish hopes, both of them, of writing the Great Filipino Novel, while he elected to be a history teacher because teaching was far more creative and challenging than newspaper journalism.

You could see at once—Tony had explained—the effect of your ideas upon young, pliable minds. It isn’t so with newspapering; you cannot know if your message gets across. The only praise you might receive would be from crazy letter-writers or from friends who won’t hurt your feelings. You have no way of finding out whether or not you are understood.

It was, however, Dean Lopez who made up his mind for him. To be in the periphery of newsmakers, to be hounded by deadlines, the dean had said, is to acquire some dubious glamour. Maybe Tony would have enjoyed the work, but he had had a taste of newspapers in college and he could not stomach the merciless dictation of deadlines and the very act of writing, which, though it meant a liberal education, was drudgery in itself.

The choice had not bothered him, and once or twice he had speculated on what would have happened if he had heeded the beckonings of Newspaper Row. He could turn to Charlie and Godo now for the answer, but it had been six years since he saw them last. How well off were they? Had marriage sobered Godo? Did they own their houses or cars now? Such questions were shallow and yet there seemed to be no other way by which success could be measured.

He had never done this before, measure success in such gross, material terms, not in those years when he had little to eat and but one pair of shoes, when the three of them were in college and bound together by a friendship that seemed enduring. And now that he remembered, this knowledge disturbed him.

They all contributed to the university paper, for which Godo also wrote an angry column that always damned the equal rights granted to Americans, the disparity between the rich and the poor, the corruption of high government officials, and the abdication of responsibility by the middle class—the little there was of it. The highest accolade they could hope for then was a word of approval from Miss Josephine Tinio, that fabulous woman, the epitome of understanding and tutorial genius, who conducted a class in creative writing. Under her wing they had found sympathy and knowledge for
more than two semesters after they went on to higher grades and could only wedge into their schedules a course or two in the humanities under her. She had understood their problems and had inspired them, and they often visited her at her home in Pandacan, the three of them, or as it sometimes happened with two other student-writers who were drawn to them. One was Angel, a soft-spoken engineering student from Iloilo who wrote poetry, the other was Jacinto, a sturdy peasant from Nueva Ecija whose one obsession in life was to get back the five hectares his father had pawned so that he might go on to college.

After a visit to Miss Tinio, and a
merienda
of tea and
galletas
,
^‖
they often walked to Quiapo, and while waiting for a ride to their homes, they would talk on and on about Jefferson, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Del Pilar.
^a
If it was at the university where they met, it was usually in the dimly lighted cafeteria in one of the old World War II Quonset huts; they would sit there toying with their empty ten-centavo cups of coffee till the owner closed for the night. If the weather was good and their stomachs could hold, they would go on talking at the bus stop, or sprawl on the grass, and they would agree always on the bleakness of the future, of the terrible challenge that was handed down to them by their fathers who were either betrayed or beguiled by destiny. They felt deeply about duty and responsibility and were convinced that the salvation of the race could only be earned by sacrifice. Then, toward the end of their junior year, Jacinto came with a proposal that tested their conscience as well as their dedication. He had stated it simply one evening in March: he was leaving school, he was going to the hills to join the Huks
^b
because he was convinced there was no other way. Did they want to join him? They need not bring anything except the clothes on their backs.…