He drained his cup, turned to Ben de Jesus, and finally asked the question that had tightened his stomach all evening: “Is it true that Tony committed suicide?”
Ben smiled broadly and he answered with the readiness and familiarity conviction engenders. “Carmen believes it’s suicide,” he said. “Her father, too. But me, I don’t. It was an accident, what else could it be? Why, the fellow had absolutely no reason at all. What more can a man want? His luck—it couldn’t happen to just any guy, not in a million years.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” Ben said impatiently. “Why should the man commit suicide? Everything was laid out for him—the future, all the money and the comforts he wanted. And most of all, you should have seen his wife then. She’s slimmer now—this breakdown business is simply sapping her vitality. But she’s a knockout, a real beauty. Tell him, Nena.”
Mrs. De Jesus smiled. “She had a wonderful figure. She’s thin now, but she’s still lovely. Why, I think she is one of the loveliest girls in the country. I never could understand how she fell for Tony Samson, his being Ilocano and all that.”
He did not want the couple to accompany him to his hotel, but they insisted. There was nothing more they could talk about. Nena tried to point out some of the impressive houses in the Park, but they seemed shapeless and anonymous, and so were the names of the residents she rattled off, names she tried to impress upon him as important. To her prattle Bitfogel could only reply with polite, meaningless grunts. It was only much later that he understood why Ben had wanted very much to take him to Pobres Park. It was not only to show him the accoutrements of the De Jesus residence, but also to point out with an almost personal pride that this Park was the epitome of gracious living and could compare with the richest neighborhoods in the United States. In the two weeks that he was in the Philippines, he was to see the Park again in the daytime—its fire trees in bloom, the whitewashed fences and sprawling residences almost uniform in their ostentatious bigness, so uniform in fact that even after he had left the Philippines he could not recall what the houses in Pobres Park looked like, although he could readily bring to mind the poetry of the nipa huts and the shell-adorned windows of the frail wooden houses that lined the main streets of the small towns.
They were now driving out of the Park and were crossing an expanse of open country that separated it from the less affluent suburbs of the city, and it was on this highway, away from the cozy security of high fences and armed guards, that a rear tire of the de Jesus limousine blew out.
They got out of the car, shaken by the explosion, which had sounded ominously loud in the night, and Larry could sense the urgency in Ben’s voice: “We cannot stay here at a time like this!” To the driver he said, “Hurry up. Do something!”
Larry looked at his luminous watch. It was already three o’clock and the sky above them arched immensely black and wonderful with its millions of stars. The air was sharp, and above the smell of the asphalt he could make out the familiar odor of grass and living earth. “I don’t think you should worry,” he said lightly. “If it’s only a tire, I can help.”
The driver had already opened the rear compartment of the car and was heaving the spare tire out. “Of all things,” Nena could not hide her apprehension, “here on this road. Do you know, Dr. Bitfogel, that robberies have been committed here?”
“Well, you can always give the robbers what they want,” Lawrence Bitfogel said lightly. “We can also walk back to the Park. It’s so near. Or we can flag down a car. Do you think a car will stop?”
Ben de Jesus answered with a meaningless grumble and, with his wife, moved toward the narrow shoulder of the road. The driver fumbled in the dark, and when he could not see what he was doing, he would strike a match and the little flame would cast light on his shadowed, anonymous face and the apprehensive faces of Ben de Jesus and his wife.
In a while two bright headlights appeared and came streaking toward them. The vehicle screeched to a stop behind them. A babble of voices—young, high-pitched, and raucous—followed, and Larry soon recognized the vehicle as one of those converted jeeps that crowded the city streets. From it there poured out more than a dozen men.
It was around him, standing on the asphalt, that they crowded. “Whatsa trouble, Joe?” one of them asked.
“A flat tire,” Larry said, trying to make out the faces before him. He was surprised to find that they were all youngsters. The jeep engine was running, its headlights on. Orientals always look younger than Occidentals, and he roughly placed their ages at eighteen and below. One carried a guitar and another a ukelele. All of them wore some sort of uniform—white shirts with frilled cuffs and dark pants that sank into what looked like cowboy boots.
“We can help, Joe,” the fellow who held the guitar said. The guitarist gave orders to the rest of the boys, and the uniforms took the names of Rod, Clem, Roger, Sam, and what else. A flashlight materialized and Larry joined them, watching their young enthusiasm translated into swift, sure movements, into gawking at the car and its fine finish, while all the time, on the narrow shoulder of the road, Ben and his wife stood motionless and silent.
“I see that you are wearing a uniform,” Larry said to no one in particular. All the bolts of the flat tire were already loosened and two of the boys were helping the driver to pull the tire off.
“Yes, Joe,” the guitarist replied. “We are called the Gay Blades.”
“What’s that?” He did not understand.
One of the boys brought from the jeepney what looked like a bass fiddle. The only difference was that it had only one string and at the other end of the silly-looking contraption was an empty gasoline container—the rectangular kind that usually went in the rear of an old U.S. Army jeep as a reserve gas or water tank. On this container was painted in bold, unerring red, The Gay Blades.
“We do many things—play basketball, sing. We’re the Gay Blades, Joe. You have something in the States like we have here, Joe?”
“My name’s not Joe,” Larry said, a bit annoyed.
“Sorry, Joe,” the guitarist went on. “We just came from a contest, you know. Good luck for us. We won second prize. We will beat the Roving Troubadors, yet. Just watch us, Joe.”
From the shadows, Ben de Jesus and his wife finally emerged and joined the group. The last bolt was being tightened and some of the boys—the one who carried the improvised bass fiddle and the one with the ukulele—went back to the jeepney.
Then the driver stood up. A look of triumph brightened his face and the faces of the youngsters who had helped him.
“Well, Joe,” the guitarist said, moving toward Larry with an extended hand. Lawrence took the hand and shook it. “We better roll now.”
It was only then that Ben spoke. “No, wait,” he said. He went to the youth and thrust out a bill. “Here—here, take this.”
They spoke in the vernacular and argued a bit and, from the drift and tone of the young men’s voices, Larry knew that the payment was being refused. “It’s Christmas—it’s Christmas anyway,” Ben was saying.
Some discussion had started in the jeep now and then they poured out—the bass fiddle and the ukuleles and a pair of bongo drums—and there in the open highway, under the stars, Larry heard the Gay Blades and the song they had adapted, the song they spiced with bongos, ukuleles, and the silly-looking bass fiddle—a medley of “White Christmas” and “Jingle Bells” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”—and while the boys sang, two cars slowed down, then zoomed on, and in the glare of the headlights he saw them clearly, fully: the lean, young faces, the alert eyes, the shiny black boots and the blue pants, the immaculate white silk shirts. But most of all, he relished hearing them, the clear voices welded as one, and in the end, after the final flourish of instruments and voices, the guitarist stepped forward. And having received the money from Ben, he shook Larry’s hand again.
“Merry Christmas,” the Gay Blades said.
When he r
eturned to his room, Larry was amazed at himself, at how in the end he had managed to stand up to Ben de Jesus. He had never been quick to anger and he could not immediately trace the root of his vehemence, for he often prided himself on his self-control. His voice had trembled and, even now, there was the empty feeling that always sucked in his belly when he was angry. He wondered how Ben and his wife took his rudeness, particularly after they had invited him to their house and shown him their hospitality.
He did not feel sleepy, although it was almost daybreak, and an unusual freshness and clarity of mind suffused him instead. Above his anger, everything that he had heard and seen was lucid and well-defined. He decided to write down his impressions on this early dawn—a useful habit he had acquired since he started working for the agency in South America. After a few sentences, however, he gave up. The impressions were incisive, yes, but always he could hear, like some grating and endless commercial in the back of his mind, the blustery talk of Senator Reyes and Don Manuel and the cocksure assertions of Ben de Jesus.
He stood up and lingered before the window. He could not see what lay beyond the glass, for the light of the table lamp diffused all images in the room. He turned the lamp off and the images before him jumped out—the lights of the ships that sat in the bay, the acacia trees brooding over the boulevard, the glistening mercury lamps, and the star lanterns of the shops and eateries. It suddenly seemed strange that he was here, alone in this distant, tropical land now undergoing the turmoil of change. How will it end? Lawrence Bitfogel wanted to divine the answer, and what immediately formed in his mind was unpleasant. But the big men he had met tonight were not representative of the race, for there were also other people to consider—the Gay Blades, for instance—and there was the pervasive malleability of the race itself that could always absorb a shock or be relied upon in a moment of need. Yes, the Villas and the Reyeses were not representative, but unless they were changed, and made impotent, weren’t they the people who controlled the country? Wealth dictates government, and in this fair Oriental land, wealth resided in a few hands, in the hands of people like Manuel Villa and Ben de Jesus.
And where were the young people like Antonio Samson, who had gone to the United States and to its fountainhead of wisdom if not of courage? They were destroyed because they were bribed. And because they were destroyed, the country and the beneficent change they would have brought were lost. The future that once seemed evocative and real when it was but an academic subject to be tossed around in a crowded room on Maple Street had been aborted in the dank bowels of the earth. Knowing the dark immensity of this fact, Larry felt all joy leave him. A tautness clutched at his heart, and in the quiet of this room he could hear his own grief welling up. He thought of Tony, fought back the tears that scalded his eyes, and when they stopped, when his hands were no longer shaking, he had one consolation left: he had told Ben de Jesus just what he thought.
He could not quite understand why the young businessman had been needlessly riled by the Gay Blades after they had helped change the tire. When they arrived at the hotel, Ben had checked the car’s hubcaps. As for the youngsters with those outlandish uniforms, he had dismissed them: “Juvenile delinquents, that’s what they are. They would have robbed us, too, of more than just the hubcaps if they had a chance. See what’s happening to our young people? They go about in the craziest costumes and they have lost all sense of respect.”
“I’m glad they came along,” Lawrence Bitfogel had said.
Now that he thought about the Gay Blades some more, and of their singing on the road just outside Pobres Park, he marveled at their capacity to improvise. The bass fiddle, for instance, and that jeepney they rode in, that omnipresent carrier in the narrow streets of Manila, gaudily painted, driven by impious individualists, rakishly modern with chrome and the most atrocious-looking fins—where else could one find something like it but in a country where ingenuity thrives and where the young people are capable of almost anything?
But de Jesus had chosen not to look at it that way, and he had snorted instead. “They are thieves, and they will kill you if you don’t give them what they want.”
It was then that Lawrence Bitfogel could not hold back the anger coiled within him, and when it sprang, it was clear and loud: “Damn you! Those kids are not thieves. The robbers in this country, the real murderers, are people like you. All of you—you conspired, you killed Antonio Samson. Why, the poor guy didn’t have a chance! You had snuffed out his life before he could fling himself on the tracks!”
He had left them speechless in the driveway, in the shadow of the acacias that fronted the hotel, and he did not even close the door of the car. He had raced up to his room and, alone at last, he had cried—something he had not done in years. Now, when was it that he had cried last? Was it when his father died? In a way he was glad that he had spoken his mind when the need for it finally came. This thought, though it all seemed so futile afterward, brought back to him that sense of peace that had eluded him all through the frantic evening. And he knew that if Tony Samson were aware of this, if Tony had seen him and heard him speak out loud, that dear old friend would have applauded.
—Marquina, Vizcaya
June 1, 1960
* Chico: Brown, golf-ball-size tropical fruit; also, a term of endearment.
Mass
To the memory of Eman Lacaba
and the youth who sacrificed for Filipinas,
and for
Alejo and Irwin Nicanor
They lied to us in their newspapers, in the books they wrote for us to memorize in school, in their honeyed speeches when they courted our votes. They lied to us because they did not want us to rise from the dungheap to confront them. We know the truth now; we have finally emptied our minds of their lies, discovered their corruption and our weaknesses as well. But this truth as perceived by us is not enough. Truth is, above all, justice. With determination then, and cunning and violence, we must destroy them for only after doing so will we really be free.…
—JOSÉ SAMSON, Memo to Youth
Let Water Burn
My name is Samson. I have long hair, but there is nothing symbolic or biblical about it; most people my age just have it as a matter of inclination, and nobody really cares. My long hair is a form of self-expression, of a desire to conform, to be with them. It is a measure of my indifference to remarks, even to Father Jess’s, to which I had countered that Christ had long hair and if God had intended us not to have it, He would not have given the likes of me a shaggy mane. I could let it grow down to my shoulders so I could tie it in a knot and then shave most of it off, leaving just a lock, a pigtail, such as Chinese gentlemen did generations ago. And look at the Chinese now, at Chairman Mao, whom so many of us revere—but it would perhaps only set me off as a freak, and that is not what I want, for I desire to be anonymous, to be simply the me nobody knows, for this me, this José Samson, a figure of no-good plastic that should be burned or buried under tons of scum. But plastic seems to survive all sorts of punishment. Please, I have self-respect and I know my sterling potential and what I am worth (which isn’t much), but this is how I was, this is what I am, how Mother knows me, and cutting my hair would not erase my stigma, my shame, or dim the glaring blunders of my past.
My name is Samson, and I have always known I was different no matter how often Mother had repeated to me, shrieked at me, or told me in soothing and dulcet words that I have an honorable name. But José Samson, Pepe, Pepito, Joe Samson is simply, honestly, irrevocably, and perhaps resolutely a bastard. It is not difficult to bear this indelible yet invisible tattoo, but not an Igorot facial emblem or a deep, keloid surgical scar can erase—thank God (do I utter His name in vain?)—the origins that have not been wrought on my face, nor deformed my physical being. Yet this is me, unerring in the devastation of the inner self.
Sometimes, I wish I were never born.
Still, I like being here, transfixed on this plain, this vast limbo without rim called living. I like being here
, feeling the wind and the sun upon my skin, the fullness of my stomach, and the electric surge of an orgasm—now that I know it.
The only times I was really depressed was when I filled out those awful forms which demanded that I name my father and I would put “deceased.” As far as I was concerned he died long ago because I never knew about him then, although Mother—and she is an honorable woman—loves him still, his memory. Auntie Bettina, too—she worships him though she never told me who he was no matter what wiles I used. The way they had quarreled, Mother always telling her to shut up for my sake. I knew Auntie Bettina had known him well, that something in the dark shriveled past went awry. No, as Auntie had hinted, it was not Mother’s fault, nor anyone else’s. It was in the stars, written with precision and clarity, infallible and inescapable, this, my damnation: to be in Cabugawan forever, a destiny that would hound me because a crime had been committed not by my mother and her sister but by my father. I need no proof of this, for I am here, wearied and rotting with self-pity and misshapen under a burden too heavy to bear.
Yet I am Sagittarius, and I am supposedly easygoing and frivolous. The planets cannot chain me to any spot for I am fated to strike out, but to where? Is Tondo any better? Here, where for a year I have lived and known this warren of tin shacks and fouled air as I knew Cabugawan, too? But I am no bastard here; no shadow hounds me, for I am Pepe the scholar, the loyal comrade who will rise to any challenge, scour faraway places, and if I choose to be a priest, I would certainly be archbishop, or if I veer the other way, I would be the czar of crime of the barrio, mightier than Roger will ever be. After all, I organized the Brotherhood here, extracted the mindless ferocity from the gang and gave it a purpose other than thievery and drinking bouts. With this Brotherhood, I showed them how they could extort gin money, contributions for the fiesta from flinty politicians in the name of charity, civic pride, and all those shibboleths that plastic nationalists swear by.
The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) Page 28
