That was where I woke up, in the chill dawn, the east already amber, the other houses already stirring with the womenfolk who must cook the morning meal. When I looked at the banana heart, indeed, it had already dipped.
I rose and walked to the house hoping that my steps would be light and some unfamiliar strength would suffuse me, but I felt instead cramped and feverish and when I sneezed, I knew that I had caught, not an incredible talisman, but a cold.
The stairway that led to the karate school wound through floors occupied by nondescript law offices and companies that must have survived through sheer tenacity. Past doors tarnished with age and secured with three or four padlocks, I finally got to the top—the karate school—and the beginning of a new wisdom if ever I was to survive in a deformed physical world. So here I was, ready for another kind of school, not just to build my stamina but to discipline my body. My lessons were to be twice a week, but I could come every afternoon if I wanted to for the karatistas liked having people around. Various schools of self-defense had proliferated in the area—tae kwan do, kung fu, and judo—and the competition was very keen. It was eighty pesos a month, plus thirty pesos for my very rough cotton uniform. I was not aiming for a black belt or to smash bricks and planks of wood. I was just interested in self-defense. I did not have a gun, not even a knife. My instructors were all young, and they enjoyed their work, for when they were not teaching they were always practicing. They lived in the school itself to save on rent. Cups they had won from various tournaments adorned the shelves. When I went for my first lesson I was amused at the ritual of bowing to the instructor before the actual exercises started. Rading, who was the best, took me under his wing, although he was available for instruction anytime. He asked where I went to school, and when I told him he said he went there, too, but was just taking a few credits in accounting, for he wanted to be a karatista. He was about twenty-one, slightly taller than I, and his taut frame was all muscle.
I wanted to tell Toto what I did during my disappearances in the afternoons or early evenings, or sometimes in the mornings, but he would not understand. Though he was all talk about violence and revolution, these were mere ideas; I suspect he would not pull the trigger or stick a knife in someone else’s belly when the time came.
There was no day that the name of Father Jess did not obtrude into our conversation; Toto really looked up to the priest. He was the father he never had. And as for a mother, in their kumbento* was an old woman—Tia Nena, he called her—who was once deranged or had come from the Psychopathic Hospital at Mandaluyong. She did the cooking and the laundry for Father Jess. It was, to my mind, a weird household, set up from driftwood.
As the election for the Student Council was soon, Toto made plans for my candidacy. I was pestered by doubts. Though I was popular in my own class and in the other sections where I was enrolled, I did not have a university following. Furthermore, I did not want to spend my money on handbills or for those simple posters made from newspapers that we would plaster on walls and bulletin boards. That money would be a hedge for something more urgent.
“I will ask Father Jess for money,” Toto assured me. “And the Brotherhood will help. You must not forget that.”
I finally got to meet him. We went to San Beda where he was going to address the senior class in social studies and history. Just as he started with the usual greetings, the platitudes, we took seats in the empty front-row seats because I wanted to hear what this minor god said. Toto was too shy to walk down the aisle and sit there with all the students, teachers, and priests on the stage looking at us late-comers, but I did not care—the Sagittarius in me again—so he followed me reluctantly.
Father Jess glanced at us, then went on. He was really huge, with thick bristly hair, thick lips, wide forehead, a jutting jaw, and eyes crinkled into two slits. He could have been an overfed Japanese or Chinese were it not for his dark complexion. He was not in a soutane, but instead wore denims and sandals, which I learned from him afterward were JC boots (Jesus Christ boots), and as a concession perhaps to his vocation, he had a gray close-necked jacket, a tiny silver cross on the collar.
There were more than three hundred in the auditorium—the entire senior class—and the lecture was one of six that the students would receive every week as part of their final orientation course. The air-conditioned hall was chilly, for it was not even half full. Father Jess had finished with the niceties and now his tone turned serious. Even without the loudspeaker, he could carry on like any bomba politician. His vocabulary was without bombast, earthy English spiced with Tagalog that had a very strong Visayan accent. Benedictine seminarians in white cassocks were in the front rows, and his first remarks were addressed to them. He spoke about the change that had come to the Church—a change that had been a long time in coming. He dredged up the encyclicals that were not believed in, about rituals that had become meaningless because they were not part of our lives. And finally, he spoke about the new role of priests: going to the masses, the poor, to prepare them for the liberation that was sanctioned by Christ.
Cliché stuff.
Then he spoke of the elite schools, how they had produced graduates who became the Establishment and how it might be necessary in the future to close these schools, for they were only perpetuating a decadent elite and the corruption in society.
This raised some questioning looks from the priests behind him on the stage.
The priest smiled at the bomba he had tossed. “I will tell you about this Establishment to which you—and I—belong,” he said. “It is a word so often used, it has lost its meaning. But it is real, like syphilis. We have it and, like syphilis, we don’t know it. We have to know it first before we can cure ourselves.”
Fuck yourselves, I thought, but listened intently just the same. We had a neighbor in Cabugawan who worked in the railroad station; he had gone to the whorehouse near the rice mill and the day after he could not urinate except in terrible pain. And later there were sores all over his body. They said that not only did he have the sickness given by a woman, but the worst case one could get. He had to go somewhere for treatment, both he and his wife, whom he had also infected.
Father Jess described how big men made the laws, how these laws enriched them, how poverty became the way of life of the masses because they were made poor on purpose. And the poor—he lashed at us—we did not know any better, we did not organize, we did not define our purpose and mark our enemies so we would know whom to fight if only so we could get what was ours by right because it was we who worked the land, the factories.
He may have been telling something new to the students, but not to me. Though I had scant knowledge of what went on in Congress or the life that throbbed in Pobres Park and in other places where the rich slop it up, I always knew that it was the strong, the powerful who ruled, who drank the sweet juice of life. I could see that in the children of the landlords, who were my classmates in grade school, who then went to Manila for high school; how the rich women of the town always haggled with Mother no matter how hard she worked. Years bent before that damn machine and what had she to show for it? Not a big house, not jewels, just me going to Manila, to listen to this drivel.
I did not resent Father Jess, though. I was just sad that he could narrate these so clearly, so neatly. Cabugawan was in my mind, and leaving it, though it had not seemed that way then, was a painful wrenching away. I saw myself playing again in the dirt road that was never widened or asphalted. How would Cabugawan look in this year’s rainy season? That dirt road would be churned by carabaos as they went to the fields beyond. The houses would be lashed by winds, their cogon roofs disheveled, their buri walls rotting and dripping; the bananas all tattered. And after the rains, the dry season—in April the wind lifted our kites, brought music to the bamboos as they bent, sounds I would not hear, sights I would not see. And I left them so I could be like the wind, meandering where it pleased.
The applause brought me back. It was loud and long, as if the auditoriu
m was full, as if they had just heard the most exhortatory of speeches. Toto had this dazed, rapt look and he was applauding madly, too. Reluctantly I started to clap. There were questions, a whole hour for them, and I thought they would never stop. I could have easily disposed of the questions with words like “shit,” or “drop dead,” and when I could not stand the aridity of the questioning anymore I stood up with Toto hissing under his breath about how impolite I was.
“We came to listen to the speech, not to those questions,” I said.
We waited for Father Jess outside. It was dusk and the girls from Holy Spirit and Centro were filing out; they were in white-and-pink uniforms that hid their legs and obscured their good-looks. A short time later Father Jess appeared: “Hoy, you should have waited inside. There was merienda—pancit and sandwiches.”
Toto introduced me. Father Jess was six feet tall, as swarthy as Idi Amin, and his grip was very tight.
“He tells me you are a very good politician,” Father Jess said affably.
“I don’t like being one, Father.”
“What do you want to be then?”
“I’d like to be the country’s karate champion,” I smiled.
He gave my arm a playful chop. “You should visit us in the barrio. Where do you come from?”
I told him.
“I know the place,” he said. “That is in eastern Pangasinan, isn’t it? You know, they have a lot of faith healers there. And there was an uprising once and some tenants were killed. Are the Colorums still strong?”
It quickly brought to mind my grandfather, who had gone to jail for that uprising. “No, the Colorums are not there anymore,” I said. “But the landlords still are.”
We walked to the corner where they boarded a jeepney. I decided to walk to Quiapo. Even in that crowded evening, in that oozing human flood which Recto’s sidewalks become at this time of day, I was alone and back in Cabugawan again, stoking long-dead memories and giving shape to limpid ghosts of people I never saw, whose names we utter in reverence commingled with shame—grandfather, granduncle, and who else from our village—all the brave and angry men who marched into town a long time ago, burned the municipio and the Rich Man’s house, then killed him, his wife, and children. The Colorums are gone, but the landlords are still with us, leeches beyond satiety. But the landlords are no longer the mestizos of yesteryear—imperious, fair-skinned, and loud of speech. Now they were brown like us, their origins not from Spain but from the village, farmers’ children who had gone to school to be lawyers, had grown fat with the spoils of the land, the children of farmers who had forgotten what their fathers were and therefore were no different from the landlords they had replaced.
Around me, the milling mass of students, puny people loaded with speed dreams, here in Recto to slave for their diplomas from the mills so they could get jobs and eat three times a day. Nothing edifying, nothing lofty. And who knows, some day they would be landlords, too. But to think about the future now was to daydream. We were concerned with jeepney fare, mami and siopao, an occasional movie, clothes. Many of my classmates did not even wear shoes but cheap Japanese rubber slippers. Their blemished skins, their thin bodies showed only too well how badly undernourished they were.
I would have continued in Kuya Nick’s employ. But the niggardly pleasures as I knew them, being able to see, feel, and appreciate the whorl and whirl around me could end in a job such as Kuya Nick’s. I loved being alive, being here in Recto.
I survey the rubble of my past, the excesses I have committed without even really knowing why, and Mother comes to mind again and a sharp pang of regret, of sorrow, courses through me.
What is it that I really want? Certainly not to live in Cabugawan, although I miss the friends with whom I swam the flooded irrigation ditches and caught the silver fish in the shallows; the schoolhouse whose wooden floors I had scrubbed, and those high school dances when I held them close—Letty, whose breasts were small, whose thighs were silky; Marie, whom I often kissed when the boys, on purpose, switched off the lights. All the wonderful confections that are kept stored in the mind to tide one over when there are no coins jingling in the pocket, when the stomach is a yawning pit that contains nothing, none of the rice cakes that Auntie Bettina made, and those things Mother saved, a piece of fried pork, bread with margarine.
What is it that I really wanted? The whole world but no sweating for it, opportunities for which all I would have to do is to appraise them and refuse them. But it was not that way, it would never be that way. I’m walking on a one-way street to perdition.
Excitement, affluence—I craved these. I’ve spent time in thought but not for any ennobling cause, least of all my own betterment. So here I am by myself, alone. I could be blown down by one chill wind, and it is perhaps for the best then that I sleep through it all, the season of thunder and lightning. I had listened to an old lullaby that shut my eyes and dulled my brain, for this, too, was what I wanted: to be lulled into forgetting. But how can I forget that young bird I had picked up, fallen from its nest in the buri palm, unable to fly because it was too young?
I have asked myself how far I should go, what it is that should make me happy, urge me on, and always it has been a full stomach, a sound sleep. Now, I am not too sure anymore of these desires, though they still command my waking hours. All I know is that there should be wings on my feet and light in my mind where once all was darkness and mustiness and age.
What have I really done with my years? I am older than almost all of my classmates. Perhaps I have held on foolishly to the bliss of youth, that there need be no justification for this breathing. Yet in the depths of me I had been perhaps in love with death, not life, because I have not cared for anyone but myself and the self dies as surely as flesh rots, and death, after all, is the boundary. And this selfish, unthinking self had failed to give, not even to Mother and Auntie Bettina, a little of itself.
I would like now to be different?
Will I be permitted this? Will I be strong? I know it will be difficult, for it is the strong who write the laws, make the prisons. Will I be like them? Will I also feed the weak with lies, just as I fed the hogs in Cabugawan with mush so they would fatten easily?
I crossed the underpass to Quezon and headed for Plaza Miranda. My stomach was beginning to churn and I was sorry we had not waited for Father Jess in the auditorium so we could have eaten. The thought of hurrying back to Lucy’s dinengdeng was depressing. It was too late now for the other pleasure, for my aunt and uncle would already be home and Lucy absolutely, resolutely refused once they were there. One night I had gone down on the pretext of going to the toilet, but had detoured to her cot under the stairs. She woke up, and when she realized it was me who was kissing her, she hit me in the stomach so hard I almost screamed. Then she whispered sweetly, softly: “Pepe, they are here.”
I paused before a crummy noodle restaurant, then went in. Nothing like a bowl of steaming noodles. These tasted soapy and the siopao espesyal, God knows what meats were in it. When I was through, I decided on a double feature, a war picture and a bomba—at Life.
I really like movies; I even kept a listing of the films I had seen since I got to Manila and rated them. I was partial to science fiction. They propelled me into another world, real in the mind, plausible to reckon with.
It was drizzling when I got out, that soft, malevolent rain that one expects to pass but instead goes on interminably. There were a few jeepneys and I could easily clamber into one, but I decided to walk home. Auntie Bettina would be coming soon; she said she would be in Manila in a month, but two months now had gone by.
I should not be walking this late; there were robberies and people did not bother reporting them to the police anymore. I knew a little karate and felt a bit safe; besides, what could they possibly extort from a student like me, walking in the rain perhaps to save jeepney fare? When I got to Recto, however, as if by some heavenly signal, the rain abruptly stopped. It was not a long walk to Dimasalang and Antipol
o, and I recalled Mother telling me that she and Father walked this distance when they were students to save on jeepney fare.
It all came to me, hazy and cob webbed like some disordered dream, his visit to Cabugawan, the few things he had written that I had read, fragments of ideas, and through it all, I could not quite understand why Mother kept it away from me, this one truth that would have meant so much, particularly when I was young and would be asked who my father was. It became clearer now, Auntie Bettina and Mother, they both wanted me to be like him, a university professor maybe, so that I could also marry properly—an heiress perhaps.
The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) Page 36
