All through the haze of day and through the night, thoughts of Tio Tony, Antonio Samson, my father, badgered me, and though I tried to imagine how it would be to love him the way I loved Mother, I just could not. I remembered his visit long ago to Cabugawan, the way Mother would change the subject abruptly if his name came up in conversations. Mother had kept a scrapbook of his writings as if it were the most precious of documents. When she was not around Auntie Bettina sometimes talked about him in tones of the highest esteem. I resented how he never came to claim me, or tell me, and I resented, too, Auntie and Mother, not for what had happened but for their not telling me.
At supper I asked about him again and Auntie Betty said he wrote a book—it was there on the shelf—that I should read so that I would know what his thoughts were. She was proud of how he had gotten his Ph.D. through perseverance, which, damn it, they said I should also have, and yes, they would help all they could. But most of all, how well he had married into the Villas and how rich he would have been, how comfortable we would have all been, if he had only lived!
How did he die? I finally asked the question that had bothered me all through the tedious day.
“An accident, a most horrible accident,” my aunt said.
Uncle Bert stood up, walked to the kitchen and pointed through the iron grills of the rear window that opened to the tracks. “There … there … that was where we picked him up. I mean, that was where we picked up the mangled pieces. It was early dawn—about five, or maybe four,” he said quietly. “He perhaps did not know that the train was on this track …”
I joined him at the window. The rails, almost choked with weeds, were shiny with the last vestiges of day, the rock bed dirty with the garbage and dust of the dry season. I could imagine him walking there, and the train rushing at him. I could see him beyond human shape, his blood on the iron, the rocks and weeds. He must have felt trapped or rendered deaf; the trains always slowed down when they approached this bend of the tracks, for a scant two hundred meters away was not only a crossing but the station of Antipolo. Besides, the train’s headlight could light up the house, my room, with the brightness of day. It was a senseless way to die.
I took his book from the shelf—The Ilustrados—but did not read it. I preferred literature. I felt strange handling my father’s book, leafing through it as if it were a part of him inanimate in my hands. These were his thoughts, but I did not want to know them, to know him, for there was one thing I was sure of: he did not care; he forsook me and Mother. The damn train. I would look out onto the tracks every morning and imagine him there, how it was when he died, what troubled his mind, for he must have been in deep thought as Tio Bert had said, so deep he did not hear the train coming! There are no more steam engines, but I remember them from when I was a boy, spewing steam, chugging, big black monsters with bronze bells clanging. They are all diesel now, but it was not a diesel train that had killed him. Could he really have committed suicide? He had written a book; he had married well. It should be me—living off my relatives, on my mother’s meager earnings. I could contemplate taking my own life, but that dastardly, foolish act, I couldn’t even think about it.
I went to Diliman, convinced that I could not enroll because my grades were low. If I had to take the entrance exams, I would have to review. I did not relish that or the idea of studying there, for it became clear that I would come across people who knew my father, and meeting them, being subjected to their inquisition, would be too traumatic for me to bear. I had to make the motions, however, if only for my uncle and aunt, who would then tell Mother how it was that I was not admitted to the University of the Philippines. The real reason, however, was that I had spent my tuition money, and all that was left after two weeks of cavorting was one hundred fifty pesos, not enough for the entrance fee. It did not happen in a way that would have left me chastised and sad; I saw two movies a day, gorged myself with fried chicken, siopao, mami, and pancit canton—all the goodies I never had in Cabugawan.
We had enough to eat in Antipolo, the infernal vegetable stew with almost no meat in it, and I got easily tired of that. A TV set adorned the living room, but it was there for display and rarely did my uncle and aunt look at it; they were saving on electricity, for they always went around the house turning lights off.
With the little money I had left, and worried that Mother would know I was not enrolled, I went to Recto with just enough for a quarterly payment. What was one wrong initial? If it was not UP, it was a diploma mill. No degree in the world could improve me anyway.
“Recto!”—the jeepney drivers shout it, the name circumscribes and describes youth, the urban malady, and pollution; bakya supermarket at one end, which is Divisoria, and vision and corruption, or whatever you want to call it, at the other … Malacañang. It is this other end, the vision-corruption part, that would be familiar ground to me for four years.
Recto! Rectum of Manila! Here are the odors of the posterior, particularly when the sun is warm and a busted sewer is gushing yellowish froth, with flies as big as bottle caps on the garbage piles. But we are young and if we see them, we look away. It will all be swept clean when the revolution comes and this Recto … this will be the boulevard of great erudition; it will be the avenue of hope. It already is to thousands upon thousands like me, for it is here where I go to school. Recto has these diploma mills, about half a dozen of them, and at dusk the students pour out of the airless schoolrooms, clogging the street and the narrow, smelly sidewalks, their young voices mingling with the noxious bedlam of a thousand jeepneys. Coming out of one of the Kung Fu movies on any afternoon, the faces I see have a certain pallid gloss to them—a trick of sunlight maybe, or it may just be the kind of funereal patina that covers everyone, for in this mass of young people are the great unwashed hoping to be scrubbed clean, hoping to be someone other than their anonymous selves.
I met Augusto Salcedo on my first day at school. Toto was as tall as I, with thick glasses that made him look like an underfed owl. He approached me in the corridor that morning and asked if the room beside me was for World Lit and it was, so he stayed and sat beside me when class started.
Our teacher, Professor Balitoc, had an M.A. in English literature from the University of California at Berkeley, and he never stopped reminding us of it. I liked him because he truly loved literature and could regale us with his own interpretations of the great novels he assigned to us.
Toto was taking liberal arts, too, but his course was heavy on science and math; World Literature was the only humanities subject he had that semester and it worried him, for he never liked works of the imagination. “Novels, they … they,” he stammered a bit, “are so difficult to follow and I get lost in the long-winded dialogues.”
“Read the comics,” I said.
He smiled. “That is what I do.”
I no longer had money to splurge on food, so I had to go home at noon to the vegetable stew my aunt had taught Lucy how to cook. The maid was alone most of the time, for my uncle and aunt worked the whole day. She had already finished cooking. She was dark and a little chubby, but her face was warm, friendly. She had finished high school and had wanted to study in Manila, but she did not have enough money. She had worked instead as a maid for one of Aunt Betty’s fellow teachers, but the teacher no longer needed her so she passed Lucy off to my aunt who took her grudgingly although Aunt Betty often complained how difficult the housework was.
“You can eat now if you want to,” Lucy said at the door. I was warm and perspiring, for though the rains had started and the brown weeds along the tracks had started greening, it was still humid.
The shower adjoined the kitchen and I started soaping myself with the laundry bar. I was a virgin. Though I knew all that should be done, the most that had happened was a brief interlude with Marie; she was in section B in my senior year and I often danced with her at our high school parties, holding her so tight her breasts were pressed close against my chest, and I could feel the smooth curve of her thigh
s. But there were few chances for us to be alone, and though we had some sort of understanding that we would continue the relationship when she got to college in Manila, her family could not raise the money for her tuition and board.
Anyway, I was soaping myself and had to do it again. It did not take long really and, though I enjoyed it, I looked forward to the time when it would be for real.
When I got out, Lucy was at the bathroom door, her face lighted up with mischief. I was very embarrassed when she asked in a bantering manner, “What have you been doing?”
She was slightly older than I, maybe twenty-five, and I asked angrily, “What do you do when you take a bath?”
“It depends,” she said. “I didn’t hear the shower for some time.”
“You do not rub off the dirt or soap yourself?”
“It was not soaping or rubbing,” she said, looking at me, the grin on her face telling me that she knew.
I fumbled and did not know what to say.
Then, confirmation, the laughter crinkling the corners of her mouth.
“You peeped!” and I went after her.
I did not want to hurt her, and I really was not angry, just embarrassed. I grabbed at her, but she was ready, and we were soon wrestling like two children from the kitchen on to the living room. I pinched her buttocks and she yelped aloud, then she grabbed my arm and bit it so hard, I cried at her to stop. When she let go, I held her and dragged her to the floor, then pinned her down, panting. She glared at me, her breasts heaving; I had her legs wide apart, my torso between them. Her arms were pinned down and she could not move except to try to bring her head up. Then, suddenly, I felt this stirring and, bending down but still holding her wrists so that she could not hit back, I kissed her breasts. Almost immediately her struggling ceased, and when I looked at her face, the fight was no longer there—instead, the unerring light of expectation, of wonder. Bending over, releasing her hand, I kissed her, thrust my tongue into her mouth.
I really did not care anymore if a sudden knock exploded on the door or if the windows were open, which they were not because they were always shut more as a matter of precaution against robbers than for privacy.
I thought conquest would be easy, for, by then, the compulsions that were surging in me could no longer be leashed. But Lucy started pushing me, wriggling, and was all arms and elbows and pointed knees. But these, more than anything, served only to heighten my resolve and convinced me afterward that there was a latent rapist in me. Her resistance, it turned out, was temporary; I do not know if it was just to show that she was no easy prey or that she wanted to test how determined I was. Or maybe she found out how physically strong and well beyond calming I was and that there was no further sense in lengthening the struggle.
My entry was gentle and smooth; through her gasps, she said: “Do not hurry … please. No one will be here … we have all the time.”
She did a lot of housework, but her hands were not rough. They were soft, beautiful hands, exquisitely expert and strong; her breasts were firm and after a time she cautioned me, for, as she said, they began to hurt.
After we had lain for a delicious length of time on the tiles, which were cold, we went up to my room. We had become impervious to cold, sweetly unconscious of everything but the rhythm and warmth of our bodies. We took our time upstairs as she had suggested, savoring each other in the light of day, and then it was dusk, time for her to cook dinner. Exhausted, it was an act of will for us to part.
Everything was not in the script, everything was not as I had read in those paperbacks that passed through our hands in high school—explicit American guidebooks to that mysterious domain that is woman. I had thought that I would be clear-minded and would recall everything—the step-by-step preparation, the plateau, the peak, the cozy, cuddling talk and display of tenderness that would cap it all—but I had merely acted out the hasty and irrational beast. I did not forget, however, to ask her if she was happy and in reply she looked at me—those big, black eyes dreamy and half-closed—and nodded.
I had fulfilled a prophecy made when I was thirteen by an aging sacristan named Lakay Benito. He was the oldest acolyte in the church, a tenacious remnant of a bygone age, out of place in a church where they also played guitars and sang Ilocano and English hymns. He was, however, at his best in the novenas held in our houses when he responded in Latin, his rich, sonorous voice booming Ora Pro Nobis. All the way back, as far as memory could drag me, he had been to us not only an acolyte, whose knowledge of Latin opened secret vistas, omnipotent talismans beyond the comprehension of many even in Cabugawan, but was also a brujo, an herbolario,‡ and he looked it. A wisp of a beard dangled from his chin and his white hair framed a dark face pocked by two piercing eyes, a large black mouth, and an eggplant protruberance for a nose. His legs were spindly and bowed and he could not wear shoes except Japanese rubber sandals because his toes were splayed from walking barefoot in the muddy fields for too many years. He performed the ceremony of manhood for all the boys in the village when they reached puberty. That early January morning six of us gathered in his yard, shivering in the cold. He had built a bonfire of dry bamboo slats and coconut leaves and we had sat around it, waiting. He came down the stairs in his cotton carzoncillo† and under his arm, an old, soiled kit and a bundle of young guava leaves. Then he led us to the creek.
Strips of fog floated over the calm, still waters. He picked me to be the first, maybe because he liked me, I think, enough to teach me my first oración,‖ a charm to ward away malevolent dogs—an oración in Latin that I should not repeat to anyone, else it would lose its potency.
We all stripped on the bank of the creek. I squatted before him, surrounded by the other boys, my fear spiced with curiosity as I watched him unsheath the razor, slide back the foreskin with a bamboo stick and then, with one swift whack, cut it off. It hurt a little, no more than a bee sting, but then the blood started to ooze and would not stop. He did not appear worried, but my anxiety now turned to fright. He chewed the guava leaves, then spat them on the wound, mumbling words I could not understand. The blood formed a small puddle on the dry earth. After what seemed like an hour, the bleeding stopped and he looked at me, his craggy face lighted up. “You are a bleeder, and that is very good.”
I went home to a special breakfast of fried eggs and adobo—a rarity in our house. Mother and Auntie Bettina were all smiles, but they never asked how it was. I had become a man.
Lakay Benito had wrapped the wound with a clean rag. I was not only a bleeder. In another day, the wound had swelled and frightened me again, I had to show it to him. “Big, overripe tomato,” he chuckled, his eyes shining, “Pepe, a few more years and I predict you will make your women very happy.”
* The beer bottle has four corners (cuatro cantos).
† Bangus: milkfish.
‡ Brujo: A sorcerer; herbolario: an herbalist or folk medicine man.
§ Carzoncillo: Men’s shorts that are tied around the waist with a string. Usually made of cotton, often knee-length.
‖ Oración: Prayer, usually in Latin (Sp.).
Paper Tiger
So much for the loss of my virginity.
At school my thoughts always meandered to the remembered feel of skin, silky motions, musky scents. I could hardly wait for the morning class to be over so I could hurry home and find out how efficient were the Masters and Johnson instructions, how true their thesis. But for all the grace of Lucy, I did not miss a day of school; a dogged sense of doing what was expected of me or perhaps a belated acceptance of duty kept me there.
One day, Toto, whom I had taken to be a serious student, asked if I wanted to join a student organization in the university, The Brotherhood. They were recruiting new members and I had seemed to him an excellent candidate.
“It is a very active organization,” Toto said. “You will like it; we discuss contemporary history in our meetings. And you know so much.”
I would be nice to Toto; after all, he occasionally invited m
e for a Coke and once or twice for siopao and coffee, although I had not been able to reciprocate. He was a scholar and also had a job as an acolyte for a priest in Tondo. He said he was an orphan and did not have to worry about saving money.
I had other ideas. I tried to hold off but I remembered his acts of kindness, the Coke, and the siopao, and he even gave me a paperback book that his priest boss gave him, a novel, Man’s Fate, by André Malraux.
Gratitude! Why do I always have to be grateful? Why couldn’t I do things because I liked to do them and not because I wanted to repay a favor? I came to Manila, to this university, not because I wanted to but because I did not want to displease Mother and Auntie Bettina. I tried to get home early, although there was no specific demand that I do so, because I wanted to be grateful to Tio Bert and Auntie Betty for the room and for the dinengdeng. And I did not try to impose myself on Lucy when my relatives were at home not because discretion demanded it but because I was grateful to her for being my first, grateful that she gave herself to me, and not because I was worried that she might lose her job if we were found out.
And here I was being grateful again to Toto, whose friendship I did not seek but who had nonetheless become my friend and was someone I could tell everything to, although I did not tell him about my father or Lucy.
We went to the small noodle restaurant at Recto and had siopao espesyal, and because Auntie Bettina had not arrived yet with my money, Toto paid again.
The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) Page 31
