The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library)

by F. Sionil Jose

“Yes, I know many things,” the old fellow coughed. “And everything is here, stored in my mind.” He brought his forefinger to his temple and gestured. “Everything there is to know I know.” His beady eyes closed, the old man turned and climbed up.

  Tony stood dumbly before the crude ladder, waiting for him to reappear, and when the old man did not return, Carmen nudged Tony. “Perhaps we’d better go.”

  Their guide, aware of their discomfiture, mumbled an apology, then went up into the house. In a while she returned and behind her hobbled the old man, looking at them dourly.

  “I hope I’m not a bother, Apo,” he started suavely again.

  “Of course you are,” the old man said.

  “Don’t mind him, please,” their guide told them and, to the old man, raised her voice. “They were from this place once, Grandfather, and they want to know if some of their relatives are still in our midst.”

  The angry countenance vanished. “Who were they, my children?” he bent forward, eager to know. The arrogant chin had dropped and the cracked voice had become warm.

  “They left about a hundred years ago,” Tony Samson said simply.

  The old man picked up the talk. “A hundred years! I’m not that old, but I know there were many who left in search of better land. I was one of the few who stayed and now I’m alone. I could have gone, too, but my place was destined to be here.”

  Tony groped for the proper words. “He was an acolyte, Apo,” he said, searching the crumpled face for a sign of recognition. “The family name was Samson. My grandfather … he migrated to Rosales. That’s in Pangasinan. He had wanted to go to Cagayan Valley but the land in Pangasinan tempted him. He couldn’t resist.”

  “Yes, Pangasinan,” the old man eased his back against the rung. “All of them wanted to go there, where they said rice grew taller than a man. Fate shackled me to this land. Maybe I was not strong enough to cut the umbilical cord that tied me to this place. But there’s no cause for regret. God willing, this land still produces and its kindness still suffices.”

  The talk was drifting away and Tony quickly salvaged it. “The family name was Samson, Apo. Surely you know of some people who bear it.”

  The old man faced him again. “Samson?” His brow crinkled. “There’s not one Samson in all Cabugaw whom I know. So your grandfather went to Pangasinan, eh? The first trips were difficult, or so I was told, and some were killed by the Igorots. A few drowned in crossing the bloated rivers. I knew of their problems in the new land. I would have joined them, too, but I didn’t feel the need. It’s only now that my days are numbered that I do.”

  “You never heard of him, Apo?” Tony leaned forward and smelled the old man’s sour breath. His voice was impatient, demanding. “He was a scholar, a teacher. All Cabugaw knew him. He started as an acolyte and wrote in Latin, too. That’s what my father remembers.”

  “Oh yes,” the old farmer continued. “There were some learned men among those who left.”

  “You didn’t know of a Samson among them? Or if there is a Samson left behind?”

  The venerable head shook.

  “We should have gone to the church first when we passed through the town,” Carmen said sharply as they drove out of the village. He nodded and gazed fondly at the scene once more, the yellow fields, the catuday trees with their edible white flowers, and Po-on itself unchanged and everlasting.

  Dusk fell slowly as if it had lengthened the day for him to sum up all—the quiet trees, the blurred shapes of houses. I must find him, press my feet upon his footprints and feel the solid, permanent things his hands shaped. What am I? he had once asked Carmen in a moment of self-scrutiny. Impossible, that’s what you are, she had told him. They had gotten married after some misgivings, but she had always reassured him of his own competence. “Every time I introduce you to my friends I say, I’ve married a man whose wealth does not jingle.” What a condescending cliché! But she believed in it, even before she met him at that cocktail party. She had gone to America ostensibly to take up interior decoration and public relations, but actually, she admitted to him sheepishly later, “to hook a man, since the best hunting ground is no longer Manila or Hong Kong, but America. Look at all my friends or look at the men my sisters bagged—oafs and loafers,” she often told him, “that’s what they are. Why, they can’t even use the word eclectic; to them, all Marxists are people who should be lined up against a wall.”

  She swung the car out of the gravel road and now, on the stone highway, the engine purred steadily. The landscape was flat again and to the right, in the direction of the sea, the sky was a purple ribbon stretched along the far horizon.

  “Oye, just hope now,” she said above the steady thrum of the car, “that there’s a priest who knows what you are looking for. Records. They keep all sorts of papers there.”

  He grunted in reply. The night covered the land completely and the yellow blobs of the headlights showed the white road, the edges of the fields, and some farmers trudging home with neat bundles of grain balanced with poles on their shoulders.

  Cabugaw, like most Ilocano towns, was shabby, and it did not have the bold pretensions to progress, the profusion of soft-drink signs, and the brash architecture that the municipalities of Central Luzon had. The church was not difficult to locate. They had passed it earlier in the afternoon—a huge stone building with a tin roof, set on a green, weedy yard. In the darkness it loomed black and secret, with squares of yellow light framed in the windows of the adjoining convent.

  She drove into the yard. Together they went to the door—an unwieldy mass of wood that towered above them, solid like the walls of the convent itself. He lifted the iron knocker and rapped twice.

  “You’d better finish the interview as quickly as possible,” she said. “Remember, we still have a long drive to Vigan.”

  He grunted more in displeasure than assent. Footsteps echoed within the convent and dispelled from his mind what he wanted to say. In a while the low second door opened and a beefy man in a white soutane stood before them, a candle in his hand.

  “Good evening. We would like to see the parish priest,” Tony said.

  The priest peered at the darkness behind them—to see the car perhaps. “Yes, yes,” he said. “I’m the parish priest. Come in and sit down.” He was past middle age. The candle flickered, but it was bright enough to show the priest’s features, his rimless glasses, the smudges on his soutane, and its frayed cuffs. He smelled faintly of tobacco.

  “This is my wife, Padre,” Tony Samson said leading Carmen forward.

  The priest raised the candle higher to get a better look at her. “Yes, yes,” he repeated. “Do come in and sit down.”

  They entered what looked like a medieval cavern, a high-ceilinged room with a well-scuffed tile floor. The priest stood the candle on a circular table in the middle of the room and bade his guests sit on the wooden bench before it.

  “I came here now,” Tony apologized, “because I may not find another convenient time.”

  “Yes, yes?” the priest clasped his hands and nodded as if wanting to prod his visitors into talking more.

  “The drive has been very difficult,” his wife said, contributing her bit. “And my car hasn’t been broken in really. The roads are not uniform—gravel here, asphalt there, and then cement …”

  “Yes, yes,” the priest spoke mechanically.

  “I was a teacher,” he said as if nettled into admitting it. “I taught history in the university and did some writing. But I’m now in business.”

  “Where there’s definitely a lot more money,” Carmen added hastily.

  “Ah yes, yes,” the priest agreed in his toneless manner. “But have you eaten supper?” He called out a name and a boy emerged from the shadows. “Prepare two more plates,” he shouted, and the boy disappeared beyond the door. “Now, what can I do for you?”

  “It may seem foolish to you,” Tony said self-consciously. To his wife he turned for encouragement but she was not looking at him. She
had turned away, her eyes on the walls and the narrow grilled windows.

  “Why, why?” the priest asked, throwing his head back.

  “I’m Ilocano,” he said, naturalness settling back in his voice. “And my grandfather came from here. I’ve come to see if I have relatives left.”

  The priest rose. What he heard obviously impressed him. “I’ve never seen one like you, returning to where his ancestors were born—I mean, one going on a pilgrimage, sort of.” He spoke with enthusiasm. “Of course I know that Ilocanos—”

  “They are all over the country,” Carmen joined him. “The country is crawling with Ilocanos.”

  “Ah yes, yes,” the priest went on after a short, brittle laugh. He cracked his knuckles and peered at the woman. “Indeed you’ll find them saying that our root is in this or that town, but do they know what the Ilocos really looks like? I’ve been here all my life and I know that it hasn’t changed much. The houses are still small, the rice is still the same hard variety. They are planting Virginia tobacco now, too much of it—and that’s the only difference. And, of course, a few new houses with galvanized iron roofs …”

  The boy who had set the table returned and told them supper was ready. They padded through a dimly lit corridor and up a wide stairway into another wide room as shabby as the first.

  The boy hovered, a paper wand in his hand. As Tony had expected, the convent larder was well-stocked. They had fried rice, broiled pork, chicken broth, and an omelet.

  The priest made the sign of the cross. “Eat, eat,” he said amiably.

  Tony did not want to waste time. They had barely started with the soup when he spoke again: “You may have heard of my ancestor. You see, about a hundred years ago he used to be in this very church, serving as an acolyte.”

  The priest dropped his spoon. “No, no,” he said. “I cannot really say. A hundred years ago? But I wasn’t even born then. And Samson? I have met none of your relatives. There’s not one Samson in the whole town—that’s what I know.”

  “Surely, Padre,” Tony didn’t want to give up, “there must be something here that will be conclusive.” His appetite had dwindled. “Church records, baptismal notices. They could hold his name. You see, he migrated to Pangasinan with his whole clan. But this may not be true. And he was a scholar—that’s what my father always said. He wrote in Latin …” He felt proud.

  When they finished the dessert of preserved nangca,‡ the priest took them down again, explaining that they might find something among the records. They walked silently through corridors. The taper threw their shadows against the crumbling masonry and etched the thick, rotting posts and the red brick. They stopped before an appallingly large wooden cabinet, which seemed to sag into the very floor—an elaborately carved relic with iron handles rusty and immovable on their hinges.

  “We might be able to see something here,” the priest said. “Most of the old records are here—from 1800 up.”

  He gripped the rusty bar and, with a violent tug, opened it. “You’ll have to forgive the sorry state of the papers,” the priest said gravely. “I have no time to look after them.”

  The layer of age that covered the rooms assailed them, and Carmen instinctively held her palm to her nose. The priest picked one of the ledgers at random. Its cover was clearly marked Registro de Defunciones, 1840. He leafed perfunctorily through the pages of the death registry. The line marks, which may have been straight and black once, were all smudged, and the pages themselves threatened to break apart like flakes if they were flipped. In the sallow light, however, Tony Samson could trace the fine scrawl, the elaborate crosses of the t’s and the flourishes at the beginning of all the capital letters. The priest read aloud some of the names and, after two pages, stopped.

  The boy who had served upstairs at the table joined them with a Coleman lamp, and the shimmering light identified everything in the giant room—the old tile floor and the battered chairs. “Now we can see better,” the priest said. He reached for the top shelf and, at random again, got two ledgers and handed them to Tony.

  Tony read the inscriptions on the covers of the registries of marriages and births. One was marked Registro de Casamientos, 1860–1865. The other bore the equally elaborately written title Registro de Nacimientos, 1865–1867.

  “You’ll see that the names of the priest and his secretary who wrote these down are on the first page,” the priest told him, “What else do you know about your grandfather?”

  “He was a learned man,” Tony repeated with emphasis, “and he wrote in Latin as if the language were his.”

  “We will see,” the priest said, rubbing his hands. “There’s another batch of ledgers here.” He stopped and opened the lowest panel. “These are records of jobs, important decisions, some diaries.…” He held the ledger to his face, then turned thoughtfully to the young man. “What was his name again?”

  “Eustaquio Samson.”

  “I once saw a manuscript in Latin, a philosophical one, written by a Eustaquio. It should be somewhere here.” His pudgy fingers went through the ledgers, then he brought it out—a tattered black book. The priest glancing at the cover, read aloud: “Eustaquio Salvador.”

  Tony knew the name vaguely. Salvador, Salvatero, Sabado—many family names in Cabugaw used to start with the letter S, a convenient arrangement initiated by the friars. By knowing a man’s family name it would be easy to deduce what town he came from.

  Salvador!

  Then it struck him with its full and magic force and he remembered how once his father had told him that their name was not really Samson. Clasping the battered book, his heart now a wildly pounding valve, Tony turned to his wife and cried, “This is it, baby! Written in his own hand!”

  Carmen hedged closer: “It’s Salvador, not Samson.”

  “But didn’t I tell you once that his real name was Salvador and that he had to change it because of a fight with the Spaniards?”

  She laughed. “It’s an alias then. I wonder what the Spaniards did when they found out.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” the priest said, handing the manuscript to her husband.

  Tony read the title again. It was legibly written in block letters: Philosophia Vitae, Ab Eustaquio Salvador. “A Philosophy of Life,” he translated aloud and turned questioningly to the priest for confirmation.

  He nodded. “You know Latin?”

  “I had a year of it in college,” Tony said, “but that wasn’t enough.” He handed the book back to the priest. “Please read to me some lines.”

  The priest moved toward the light and opened the book to its first page. He mumbled the phrases and then recited haltingly: “Cum magna pretentione—it is with great pretension—est ut hunc librum scribere incipio—sed cum aliguis veginti unum annos tingit, est ilia temptatio desiderandi ad somnia ascribienda quae asperat …”

  He paused and glanced at the author’s grandson. “Well, I must admit that his Latin was not bad.”

  “What does it mean?” Carmen bent forward, trying to follow the reading.

  The priest went back to the first phrase: “Cum magna pretentione— It is with great pretensions that I start this book, but when one is twenty-one there is that temptation of wanting to record the dreams to which he aspires …”

  The priest stopped again.

  “Dreams,” Tony mused aloud and quoted the Spanish poet: “All of life is a dream and all those dreams are dreams …”

  “Yes, yes,” the priest intoned dully, “but, you see, he apologizes for that. He was but twenty-one.”

  “Please,” Tony repeated. “Do go on—one paragraph more.”

  The priest opened the book to the pages he had left. “… quia veginti anno annis majorem aetatem finaliter attingit … for at the age of twenty-one he finally comes of age.” His drab fleshy face brightened up. “Listen to this now,” he enthused. “Mundus viro no sperat. Eo tempus non habet— The world does not wait for a man. It has no time for him.” He returned the book to Tony and his voice was tin
ged with emotion: “He had the sensibility of a poet—and humility, too. This is the virtue of all those who create and who are great, no matter how obscure they may have been. Why, I believe that God, even in His greatness, was humble. Your forefather had this quality and more. He was restless, too, and now I know why he left Cabugaw.”

  Tony flipped the pages of the book and his whole being flamed and the vacuity within him seemed suddenly filled with something burbling and glowing that lifted him beyond the common touch. “Now I leave you to your discovery,” the priest sounded remote behind him. “And, of course, you have to sleep here. I’ll have the cots prepared upstairs. Come up when you are sleepy.”

  “Thank you, Padre,” he said happily without lifting his eyes from the engulfing maze, the fancy script, and the words he couldn’t read and understand. And, holding on to the ledger, he felt a kinship at last, tangible and alive, with this thing called the past. Maybe there is wisdom buried in this, or romance, or just a diurnal account of a young man’s fancy, his pride and his hurt. The transcription will not be important, he decided quickly. It was this solid memento that mattered, because it was the root on which he stood.

  “You can ask him for it. It is but a scrap of paper that he has no use for anyway,” Carmen said.

  He lifted the Coleman lamp, which had been left atop the wooden pedestal beside the cabinet. At the door the boy waited for them, his eyes heavy with sleep, and showed them to their room.

  As they lay on two cots that had been brought together, they held hands—a soothing domestic habit—and were motionless but for their measured breathing. Beyond the heavy sill and sash shutters, which were flung to the remotest edge, the stars shone clear and tremulous in the cloudless sky. A silky breeze floated in, laden with the scent of the warm earth. A dog barked in the unknown recesses of the dark, and in the rotting eaves Tony heard the soft scurrying of mice and the snap of house lizards.

  “It’s just like Washington,” she said after some time.

  “Why Washington?” he asked, pressing her hand.