Professor Hortenso was saying, “Your essay was easily the best and it should be in the first issue of the paper. We will offprint about a thousand, distribute them within the organization, to other schools, paste them on bulletin boards. Then the Student Council, and afterward, maybe secretary, and, finally, president. With this essay, you will be very popular on the campus. Your election is almost assured.”
We would have stayed longer talking about politics and the Brotherhood, but he had a class at three and I was eager to rush home to Lucy.
As we walked toward the boulevard for the ride to Dimasalang, Toto was all questions: “What did you put in that essay? You made such an impression on Professor Hortenso, he even told me you could easily be the best editorial writer the paper ever had. I always knew you could write, ever since that paper you wrote on Don Quixote.”
“I read Cervantes three times. And not in comic books.”
“What did you say in the essay?” he was insistent.
“What they wanted to hear,” I said with some disgust. “What else would I say? I can dance to any tune they play, I anticipate their moods, their desires. I was not being honest, the way I am honest with you. Those blasted judges—sorry, Toto, but I suppose this includes Professor Hortenso—they are full of shit. They expect us to be full of shit, too. I just wrote what they wanted. It was so damn easy to fool them.”
“Pepe!” he sounded aghast. “You are joking again.”
“I am not,” I said. “What do you think the role of the youth is?”
We paused and he turned to me, his eyes afire with purpose, with vision and all the blather that the Brotherhood had pounded into him. “To look toward the future,” he said in a tone almost exalting. “To see to it that the mistakes of the past will not be committed again. To create a society that is egalitarian, that is dedicated to the upliftment of the masses. To serve the people, that is what!”
“Bullshit!” I shouted at him. “Now listen, my friend. The youth have no role. They have no jobs. They have no money. They are not in power and they do not make decisions. If there is going to be a war, they will all be dumped into the army. And they will be killed like young men everywhere have been killed—whether or not they believe in the war. Having no role is their role.”
He stared at me, unbelieving. “You really think that?”
I nodded.
“And still wrote differently?”
I nodded again.
He took a deep breath, then it came, “Son of a whore! Cheat, liar!”
“Son of a whore yourself,” I flung back. “I did it for something. Can you not see that? How can I pay back the five pesos you loaned me? The siopao you stuffed into my stomach? Get it into your simple head that I need the money, the scholarship. I am honest with myself, Toto, and with you. So, damn you, don’t you ever call me a liar. You are my friend so I am telling you this. Now—” I poked a finger at his face. I had become really angry with him, and we had stopped on the sidewalk. “Now, shall we go on being friends, or is this the last time I will talk with you?”
Toto bowed and shook his head; when he turned to me again and we started walking, his eyes, even with his eyeglasses on, were misty. “I understand, Pepe,” his voice quavered. “Yes, we will always be friends. But can you not see?” His face was taut and pale. “It is so clear. You had to do this, to lie, to cheat—things you really don’t like to do—and only because you—” his voice was now hoarse, “you … we, Pepe … we are poor. The Wretched of the Earth—read it some time. We—the poor—have no choice.”
His voice faltered and he turned away; he was crying, so I placed an arm around his shoulder. We had reached the boulevard.
A jeepney to Dimasalang had come. “But we are not alone now, Toto,” I said, then broke hastily away from him. What he had said skewered me, lanced me, hurt me so grievously it was almost physical.
Lucy did not help ease my depression. By now she was used to my erratic schedule and took my late arrivals with grace. Without my telling her, she lighted the kerosene stove and heated a lunch of snail and mudfish, but the food at Professor Hortenso’s had sufficed. Perhaps she was surprised that I gave her but a perfunctory kiss when I arrived, and when I called from upstairs that I was not hungry, she came up to my room and lay beside me.
For some time now, I had been thinking about our relationship—extremely convenient and pleasurable—but there were aspects of it that were hazy. Too many questions had begun to form in my mind that needed to be answered. What, for instance, if she got pregnant.
“You don’t have to worry about that,” she assured me, pressing her belly to my side. “I am taking pills.”
“Where did you get them?”
“Do you need to know?”
“I would like to.”
“Come with me to the Family Planning Center in Dimasalang—that is where I sometimes go when I say I am going to my sister’s.”
“You had to fill out forms?”
She laughed. “Do I have to tell the truth?”
“Did he start you on pills?”
She was silent.
“We cannot get married, you know that.”
“Because I am just a servant?”
That never entered my mind as the reason. “No,” I protested. “I cannot feed you.”
“I can feed myself,” she said with a laugh.
But her relationship with the other man irritated me. “Do you still see him?” I asked, hoping she would not avoid the question.
She stood up. “I thought this is something we will not talk about,” she said pointedly. “If I see him now and then, it’s not important to you.”
“It is,” I said, rising and confronting her. “I don’t want to share you with anyone.”
“I am not your wife.”
“You prostitute!” I lashed at her.
She looked at me aghast, then turned and ran down the stairs.
I did not follow her; I had uttered the word and quickly realized my mistake. Remorse filled me. I had no money to give Lucy. How about him, whoever he was? And why was she not faithful to him if she loved him?
She was in the living room when I went down, lying on the sofa; her eyes were red from crying, but there were no more tears. I sat beside her, and she turned on her back. “Lucy,” I said, “forgive me. I love you.”
I surprised myself, telling her I loved her, holding her hand, kissing her hair. “I cannot bear the thought that another man …”
She remained immobile; she did not push my hand or turn away as I kissed her cheek. Words were not enough, but still … “Be honest with me. I love you, can you not see that? Who is he? What has he that I don’t have, that you still have to go to him making all those pretenses that it is your sister you are seeing? Why can’t you leave him? Does he give you a lot of money—and I cannot even give you a centavo …”
She turned on her side and hugged me. “Pepe,” she said in a voice husky with sorrow, “we cannot change things now. Yes, your uncle gives me money.”
* Kumbento: The part of the sacristy where the priest lives.
Litany of Slavery
It was just a matter of time before I would lose Lucy—this I knew not as instinct but as implacable fate, and the knowledge seared. She was the first; she was, like myself, a victim of this vicious condition, this living. Could we have avoided not just this entanglement but this very station into which we were flung? Always, there is something conspiratorial about circumstances that merge and fit, about feelings that ravage, showing how human and fickle we all are.
I always remember what Mother told me when I was about nine or ten: all those we love we will eventually lose, all those we hate we will eventually face. This is the inevitable sequence, the deafening roll that follows the lightning flash, the drab brown of the fields after the living green of the rainy season.
My first loss that Mother had described came the year the harvest had been niggardly. I thought I would never be able to continue school
ing, which would not have mattered, except that, for Mother, this would have meant the end of the world.
I was fond of animals as if they were friends with whom I talked—stray dogs, cats, carabaos, hens and the roosters that chased and mounted them. I understand now the refusal of Buddhists to kill animals although they may not hesitate to dispose of their fellow men who cross them. They would eat meat as long as they did not do the actual butchering. I read somewhere that the cows roaming the streets of India are holy not because they are anointed but because, in rural India, they provide milk for the people and fire for their stoves. They may just be a pack of old, rickety bones held together by tough, dried-up skin, but an Indian writer said he could not endure to see them killed for meat because he had grown up with them, slept with them on the same earthen floor.
I understand this feeling.
The space below our house was walled with split bamboo, and there we stored battered furniture that could no longer be salvaged but were still precious enough not to be dispatched as firewood. Under the house, too, were four solid hardwood posts uprooted from the Ilocos. A huge bamboo basket sat in the center, circular and tall as a man and wide enough to contain a calf. During the harvest season it was half filled with the grain some of Mother’s customers used to pay her. But in June, July, and August, the basket was empty, for we had either eaten all the grain or Mother had sold it for my school expenses.
I often slept inside this basket, curled at the bottom with my dog, Pugot. An earlier pet, also named Pugot, a big, fat pig, was much too heavy for me to bring inside. We had no farm, so the underhouse was not to house work animals except when the pig Pugot, which we had gotten from one of Mother’s customers as a piglet, grew into a beautiful beast. When it was big enough to sell, the money would be shared by Mother and the owner. Pugot was a “mestizo,” with pink skin, white bristles, a very short snout, elephant ears, a tail that curled, rosy hooves, and the bluest eyes. In the mornings before the dew had vanished, I went to the fields beyond the arbor of bamboo and gathered leafy weeds, which, together with leftovers and bran, I cooked for him. He recognized his name; when I called he would rush to the gate grunting, then lie on his side as I stooped to scratch his stomach. I sometimes slept under the house with him on frayed jute sacks laid on the ground, and more than once I had rested my head on his belly. I had feared for his life when he was castrated and felt it a gross injustice to this handsome animal to have been treated thus and made to grow unlike a normal being, but grow up he did, into a huge and lumbering thing—so heavy that once, in his eagerness to meet me as I was coming home from school, he threw me to the ground.
By then, Mother and I were tired. There were not enough leftovers from the neighbors who also had pigs of their own, nor enough edible weeds in the field or free bran from the mill. The dry season came, then it was June and always, in June, there was this harried scrounging for money for the school opening.
The day before school opened I returned from the fields where I had gone to catch grasshoppers for our evening pot. For the first time, there was no white behemoth rushing to me. A chill came to my heart as I raced up the bamboo ladder to where Mother was at work, taking advantage of the last vestiges of afternoon light. She turned to me, her face pained and drawn. I had always anticipated Pugot’s fate, but I cried just the same when she confirmed it. She told me how much we got for Pugot, that I could go on to school, although I did not care for it. She told me then—and this I will never forget—that we will lose all those dear to us, and those we hate, we must face.
Then Auntie Bettina gave me a black puppy. I came to love him like I did Pugot. The dog was a mongrel, but a beautiful animal nonetheless, with sad, luminous eyes and soft glossy fur. It had belonged to a fellow teacher who was migrating to the United States. There was no one to take care of the puppy. Auntie Bettina happened to be in Manila for one of those interminable bouts with the bureaucracy, and her friend asked if she would please take the puppy. He grew up, not big and cumbersome like Pugot, but just as handsome and well admired by the women who came to the house.
One of them was the mayor’s wife, a stick of a woman with a dozen children, who loved loud colors, dazzling reds and deep blues, so that when she flapped down the street, one knew it was she even at a distance. She had a demanding, grating voice, and if she did not order a dress almost every week, Mother would not have put up with her as a customer. When she first saw Pugot, her face was immediately agleam with the same acquisitive expression she had when she saw a gaudy piece of cloth.
Pugot may have sensed the evil in her, for he would cower and whimper no matter how she tried to coax him in the kitchen or under the house. She was asthmatic, her breath coming in gusts that plumed out of her flaring nostrils and her gaping, painted mouth. When she had attacks, so we learned, she would hug the pillows and wet them with her frothing, her wheezing tormenting her household. Her husband took the frustrations of sleepless nights out on the luckless people in the municipio, lashing out at the underpaid clerks and policemen, his bleary eyes and listless mien transforming him from a mild and gregarious politician into a ranting devil—a state that lasted the whole morning but disappeared when he had slouched on his sofa and gotten a drink of gin and the sleep he had missed.
It was he who came to the house one day and said that he wanted Pugot for his wife. He was offering a lot of money only because Pugot was all black with not a single patch of white on him.
Mother told him I should be consulted, although I had listened to the whole transaction from the kitchen, where I cuddled Pugot. The mayor told Mother about her working without a license, that she was not paying income tax, also contrary to law. And finally, his wife would take her business to another dressmaker, but—some hesitant laughter here—all these would be “conveniently forgotten” and never dredged up again if Mother was willing to part with an insignificant little dog. He would also give her thirty pesos for it, which was just too much.
“And what have you to say, Pepe?” Mother asked.
“Why do you want Pugot, Apo?” I asked. He smiled beatifically; he had not yet had his gin or his nap, for his eyes were bleary and the smile became one gurgling laughter that tapered into a sigh. “Ah, my boy, you should come and see!” He brought out a wad of bills and started counting. Mother received the money glumly.
After he had gone, the whimpering dog in his arm, I followed him. He was just going up to his house when I reached their gate. I called out and he turned to me, his blob of a head shaking in disbelief.
“You really want to know?” he asked.
I nodded.
In their living room, the mayor’s wife was seated on a rattan chair; she was fanning herself, and when she saw Pugot she stood up, came to me, and hugged me like a leech saying in a breath that stank how grateful she was that I would give up my pet. Yes, it would not be in vain for now her asthma would be cured.
With her was Lakay Benito; we went to the batalan—the open space behind the kitchen where the earthen jars and the wash were hung and where, in most provincial houses, the artesian well also stood. I pitied Pugot and was disgusted at myself, the mayor, and the people around us. Reciting some incomprehensible phrases, Lakay Benito went to the table where Pugot lay, his paws now bound together. The mayor held the dog up while Lakay Benito, now finished with his mumbling, raised a small gleaming knife, searched for the vein in my dog’s throat and with one swift stroke, slashed into it. Pugot started to thrash but to no avail, and as blood spurted out, the mayor raised the dog higher. His wife now stood before him, her cavernous mouth open, her eyes closed. The blood splattered into that cavern, and down her neck, onto the front of her dress. She lapped it, making happy throaty sounds while Pugot thrashed and quivered, then stopped moving altogether.
They said I could wait for some dogmeat to bring home, but I did not linger; they laid my dead Pugot on the table and the mayor’s wife glanced at me, her eyes glistening with gratitude. She came to the house the following
day and ordered three new dresses, but she never had a chance to wear them, for that same week she died in her sleep.
How would it be when Lucy left? Would we part with recriminations that would scar us both? I could no longer bear staying in Antipolo. Hearing the trains rumble by, smelling the fetid decay along the weed-choked tracks, repelled me, angered me.
Mila next door had become a sweet nuisance as well, for her invitations had now become indiscreet. She seemed to know just when I would leave for school, and once, on the pretext that she was going to Quiapo, she walked with me to Dimasalang.
I was really taken aback that same evening when Kuya Nick was at our door, apparently waiting for me. He asked me to walk with him to Avenida, to one of the new air-conditioned restaurants near the railroad crossing. On the way he had remained matter-of-fact, his face serene and quiet. He wanted me to order dinner, but hunger had left me, and I asked instead for coffee. He, too, had a cup—nothing more, and with the first sip, he shook his head with displeasure. “Now,” he said, “there’s really nothing like coffee from Benguet. Better than Batangas. You should learn to patronize your own, you know.”
I was no coffee connoisseur; in Cabugawan, our morning coffee was really corn roasted black, then brewed and flavored with milk and raw cane sugar, and the brew was far more exhilarating than what I now had. I was apprehensive; I thought he had learned of Mila’s efforts to seduce me. I did not expect him to start with a nationalist spiel and had, somehow, never connected him with such interests, so when he asked if I was an activist, I was not sure why he asked.
The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) Page 38
