“Not all the way,” I said. “It is one way of getting something—a scholarship, money.”
“Just as I thought,” he sighed. A waitress with high wooden clogs and a flat chest asked if he needed another cup, but he waved her away. “It’s all right,” he continued, “as long as you know what you want. But be careful, you may start believing what you say—and then you forget the important things.”
“Important things?”
He sat back, his brow creased. “It is important that you know the nature of man, of the society in which we live.” He sounded like a college instructor, his English impeccable though interspersed with Tagalog.
“Would you believe it, Pepe?” he enthused. “I was a working student, went to Ateneo, and finished with a B.A. in sociology. The first thing you must understand is that we are status-conscious; we easily believe in appearances. At night, I was a waiter and a pimp in Dewey Boulevard. I often fell asleep during the lectures. You would not think, looking at me now—my cars, these clothes—that I did not wear shoes until I reached high school.”
“You have climbed very high,” I said.
“Ha!” he leaned over, his eyes alight with pleasure, his mouth drawn across his fleshy face in a grin. “School helped a lot—the friends I made there, the contacts, the entry into the homes of the genteel upper class. Upper class!” he snorted contemptuously.
His tone became tense, conspiratorial: “I worked very hard, saved all I could, and started pushing early. I had only three shirts in college, a couple of dark pants, a pair of black shoes—Ang Tibay. But I kept them clean. And when I had saved enough, I bought a car—a secondhand Ford, but I kept it running. Then I looked around for the fortune to be made. It was not difficult, the girls, the boys who were spendthrifts, who never knew the likes of me, slaving to make it to their level. And I did it and here I am, still making money off the bastards!”
He emptied his cup. “One thing you must remember,” he said, easing himself back into his chair, “everyone can be corrupted because everyone is human. Give me an hour—maybe that is too long—with your student leaders, with your nationalist idols in Congress, and I will have their price.”
As I pondered what he said, he asked: “What is your price, Pepe?”
His question did not surprise me. “I don’t know,” I said.
“What is it you want most?”
It was as if I had known the answer to this question all along; I wanted to live well, to be rich, but now that it was put to me in its utterest simplicity, I had no ready, unequivocal reply.
“To be truly alive,” I said tentatively, wondering if those were the right words, and then it came to me in all its morning clarity. Indeed, this was what I desired, to be fully alive, to have a real meaning to my waking and sleeping, that I was no vegetable in a simple photo-synthetic relationship with the sun, that every pore in me exuded not just animal sweat but the essence of me. “To be honestly, truly alive,” I repeated.
He sat back as if stupefied by my reply. “That is very tricky of you,” he said somberly. “What is it then that makes you alive? Money? Food? Women? Reading—ah, I noticed you are fond of books.”
“Those and more,” I said.
“Money,” he mused, “can buy everything.”
I shook my head. “Not friends,” I said. “Because if money can buy them then they are not friends. Not loyalty. Not love.”
Kuya Nick toyed with his empty cup. His hair was thick, but at the crown it had started to thin. It was deep black as the dye was fresh.
I had come up with a good definition of my wants, but I did not want to make him feel I had confounded him. “You act as if you have planned everything. Did you ever plan on being in love?” I asked.
He glanced at me and again, a smile crossed his rotund face. He gazed at the bright capiz globe dangling from the paneled ceiling. “Yes, Pepe, I have been in love. Still am. No, it’s not Mila, whom I like very much. Do you know where she came from? Rather, where I salvaged her? I don’t want to boast about what I do. I have a wife and three children—the oldest is now in his teens—and I love them and shield them from what I am, from what I know.” His voice became stern. “I have told you more than I should,” he said, his eyes piercing into me. “But only because I think you are honest. You must never do this: get people to know you, be really close to you, to read you like a book.”
“I will remember that.”
“There, up there in the enclaves of privilege, they know me as Nick, efficient, trustworthy, dependable. I come across with the goods, the contacts, and the contracts—at the time agreed upon. They don’t need to sign stacks of paper with me. My word is enough. Real estate dealer, customs broker—everything. My office is small, but it is up there, too. The other things I do, they don’t know. My family, where I live—these I keep away. These are mine alone. And elsewhere, I am Nick the avenger, the merciless harbinger of my law.”
“I don’t want to be on any side other than yours,” I said. “I am scared. Besides, it will not be decent.”
“Do not think about decency, Pepe,” his voice rose again. “This is an indecent world. All those people dressed up, attending those concerts, those fancy parties splashed in the society pages—they are all indecent. Each has his little scheme and in the end, they all use people.”
“You use people, too,” I reminded him.
He balled his fists. “Listen, I will not deny that, but when I use you, you will know it and you will get what is your due, just as it has already been so. And you will get more, if you are smart. That makes the difference!”
We stood up and walked back to Antipolo, through the shuttered stalls of the market, the leaves, and the garbage thick as shingles on the asphalt and on the sidewalk, and the stench of rotting vegetables around us. Then Kuya Nick told me why he had waited for me; he was a master politician, he had really worked me over, molded me to the form he could handle best, and he did this with his homilies, his ingratiating confidences that could have been lies but sounded sincere.
This was one of those emergencies and he would not have thought of me were I not dependable. Indeed, I was the man for it, with my capabilities and endowments.
“You will enjoy it,” he said, pausing in our walk, his eyes narrowed into serious slits. “I would not bother you, Pepe, you know that, unless it was really serious. I am compromised.”
The job was vague at first, but now it became unmistakably clear, and I should have been revolted by it, but I was not.
“You can do it—you have done it,” he said, breaking into a nervous laugh, and of course, he was right. “It will not be different. It will be in an apartment, with privacy, and you won’t even know who will be watching. No cracks in the wall. A one-way mirror.”
I had one last argument and it would have sufficed, but he had a ready answer for that, too.
“You will be with someone familiar. As a matter-of-fact, she is quite good-looking if I may say so.”
We hurried to Makati. It was an unhealthy August evening, a break from the nine-day rain, with this strangling humidity that permeated everything, enervated the senses, and fogged the mind. We banged away through rutted streets, and in his air-conditioned Mercedes we were free from the gummy clutches of the hour, free from the warm glue of traffic, free from the urinal odor of neighborhoods. Then Quiapo, Taft, and the new highway to Makati, the center embankments screaming with the posters of revolution, Ibagsak ang Pasismo, Marcos Diktador* …
But there will be no revolution, no change in this rimless bog of creation; the poor have always been with us, Cabugawan, Tondo, and everywhere, the hovels and the scum. Bonifacio and Sulaiman—where are they now? What have they really left behind except a Tondo that will be there for another millennium? There will be no revolution, not while the only honest thing we can perceive is in our gonads.
We stopped before one of those spindly apartment buildings in Makati. At the far end of the lobby, aglow with capiz shell lamps, across the
shimmering expanse of Romblon marble, Mila was waiting. She walked to us, her high heels a rhythm on the stone. As she passed below the capis chandeliers she looked beautiful, the contours of her breasts thrust against her blue jersey blouse, her legs creamy and well formed below the mini-skirt. She went to Kuya Nick and planted a dutiful peck on his cheek, then turned to me, eagerness aglow on her face. We got off the elevator on the fourteenth floor and walked an additional flight up. We were at the penthouse terrace, lined with palmettos and shrubs. Beyond the grill and greenery Manila was ablaze in the last furnace reds of sunset and, to our left, the neons of Makati burned against a heavy, clouded sky. The boy who opened the door greeted Kuya Nick with cloying obsequiousness, which Nick did not acknowledge. If the apartment was not his, he had seen a lot of it, for he took us directly across the parquet-floored living room, furnished with overstuffed leatherette sofas, to a wide room with a massive, circular bed, a wall lined with bric-a-brac, and a corner dominated by an Ifugao grotesquerie—the headhunter with a severed head, the hunter’s face in an immemorial pose of calm victory.
Mila followed Kuya Nick and I behind them, wondering how it would be when the moment came. He patted his mistress softly on the cheek and cast an assuring look in my direction: “Pepe,” he told her, “will know what to do.”
I don’t know how I rated with my audience behind that wide mirror, which occupied almost half of the wall beside the bed. I was sure, however, that Mila had long been denied her needs by her lover, whose mind, if not his values, was beyond my comprehension.
Kuya Nick had been extra kind to us—he did not let us meet our audience, which, he later told me, included a couple of senators, some millionaires, and other assorted members of the upper class. They left immediately when the show was over and, by ourselves, over bottles of beer and cold kimchi, he talked casually about what had happened, how his regular toro had been incapacitated. The toro’s wife—not his performing partner—had gotten jealous and angry because he was unable to perform in his own bedroom. As a consequence, his wife brought physical logic to the matter; while he was asleep, she simply snipped off that part of him which was denied her.
* Ibagsak ang Pasismo, Marcos Diktador: Down with Marcos!
Serve the People
My one-night stand may have been a smash—I could deduce that from Mila’s exalted and adroit performance, her whispering that she wanted it again and again—but it left me in a state of depression. It simply revealed how detached and cynical I could be. My mind had shut out everyone and everything, and knowing this reinforced my suspicion that though I considered myself human and warm, I was also a gross animal creature. This saddened and disturbed me, for I had considered Kuya Nick as such and I realized that I was cast in the same ugly mold.
By now, too, he had become bothersome, for he was intent on recruiting me, and many a morning he would be parked by the alley, and many a morning, too, he would give me a lift to school with the usual spiel that soon it would be November, the semester was about to end and I should transfer to Ateneo since “that would be closer to Maryknoll—and think of the variety, Pepe, that a young toro like you would get there.”
Damn him and his vitamin E; he could not even satisfy his mistress! But I did not covet Mila, for to do so would be to live dangerously; she was, after all, his property, and what had transpired in Makati was with his consent.
One morning he was peeved, for I had moved the bulky narra cabinet to the wall where the crack was and no longer could they see Lucy and me. I had a plausible excuse: the cabinet was heavy and, where it had been, the beam had started to sag.
“No more shows then,” Kuya Nick shook his head with a smirk.
It was not he and his mistress, however, who made Antipolo so oppressive I could no longer endure being there. Everytime I looked out of my window, I would imagine Father lying there on the tracks. I was in the same room, with the same bed, where he had slept. His memory often dominated the conversations at the table—how good he was, how full of promise, how well he had married, and what a waste it had all been.
But it was Lucy who really pushed me away. At first I tried to stay in Recto the whole afternoon, sweat through karate, read in the library, or devote time to the college paper and the Brotherhood. The Student Council did not require much effort. I was a representative of the freshman class and we had few talky sessions.
Lucy was quick to notice the changes. Maybe she did not expect the pleasant arrangement to end, but it was difficult for me to accept my uncle as the man who made love to her and paid for it. The most I did was buy her a cheap cotton dress at the Central Market and an inexpensive bottle of Intimate, the first perfume she ever had, and for which she was so pleased and grateful, her eyes shone.
From the moment that she revealed my uncle’s perfidy, I had tried to understand, to cast aside the discordant demands of ego and see ourselves as victims. The effort was futile. I had become too enmeshed with her, wanted her for myself alone, or not at all.
By now, Toto and I had also become inseparable; he had helped me much more than I ever could repay him. I did not, however, tell him the real reason why I wanted to leave Antipolo Street—that since I was already making a little money, a hundred and forty pesos a month as literary editor, I should be independent so that I could go home in the late hours if I chose to.
He had suggested that I move in with him. He would talk with Father Jess and I could help in church and have free board and lodging, but we might no longer go to school together in the next semester because if I stayed in the kumbento, I would have to assist in the mass, clean the chapel, list births, marriages, deaths, and do other chores.
The idea of living in a kumbento as an acolyte repelled and fascinated me, but whatever my feelings, they had to be subdued for the more practical purpose of acquiring distance from relatives whose concerns were not mine no matter how well-intentioned they have been. Besides, there was always that lingering belief that priests, like policemen, were never hungry; I would finally be free from the infernal vegetable stew!
I had never been religious, although I liked the religious holidays, the solemnity of Holy Week and its somber processions, the gaiety of Christmas, the dawn mass and the biting cold. God was a personal experience and belief; He fitted in my hierarchy of authority only as a last resort, the ultimate explanation of all the things too recondite for me to grasp. But He was no arbiter of right or wrong; it would seem that He did not care. He did not reward virtue; it was the scheming and the dastardly strong who lived happily ever after. Babies without sin die and so do mothers who are poor and cannot afford medicine or expensive doctors.
But I would work in a church just as unquestioningly as I would work in an abatoir. Besides, I had had experience in the sacristy, although that was long ago and traumatic.
Lakay Benito, the ancient sacristan and dispenser of talismans, had ushered me into this job as acolyte after I was circumcised and my voice had started to change. Much earlier, like most of the children in my village, I had gone through catechism and knew all about the body of Christ and His holy blood. I had tasted the communion wafer but had never had a sip of wine till that afternoon, the second day of my short-lived career as sacristan. I had just finished cleaning the sacristy when I noticed that the cabinet where the vestments and the wine were kept was open, and there it was—the blood of Christ—a half bottle of it, waiting. I was determined to take just one tiny sip, no more, but one tiny sip became two, then three, and before long the whole sweet bottle was empty. With a prayer of thanksgiving on my lips, I fell into a dreamless sleep.
It was already evening, time to toll the Angelus, when I woke up and realized the immensity of what I had done. The bottle had to be refilled for the morning mass and I must do that quickly. I searched the other cabinets, but there were no bottles there. I hurried to the market and, with my hard-earned money, bought half a bottle of cane wine—at least that was what I thought it was. It would be a different wine in the same bot
tle and, perhaps, it would not have done so much harm had I been more careful. Alas, the bottle I bought was filled with a similarly colored liquid and from the same cane, only the basi* had fermented and had turned to vinegar. I need not recount the high drama that transpired the following morning; needless to say, it ended my brief career in the service of the Lord.
Now, among the few, I was being called again, and this time, if only for the fact that I knew priests eat very well, I heeded the call.
My relatives did not like the idea at first, but Uncle Bert saw its necessity. Lucy was restrained in her objections. We no longer made it frequently and she accepted that, too, with little questioning. As my departure drew near, she exacted a promise that I would visit her during lunchtime as always.
I did not know if I had made the right choice; Antipolo Street could be limbo or purgatory, but the barrio was purely and simply Hell. Yet, as Roger and all its denizens would tell me later, it was much better than the penury, the deadening monotony, and the slow death in the villages in the Visayas that they had left.
There was not much for me to take that could not fit into the old canvas bag; my only new acquisitions were half a dozen books scrounged from the bargain counters on the sidewalks of Avenida, dog-eared rejects from Clark Air Base and some library in the United States, and a couple of books that opened new vistas of Mexico and the civilization of the Andes Indians.
Toto and I walked over to Avenida and took a jeepney to that huge emporium, Divisoria, then transferred from there to a jeepney to Bangkusay, the end of the line. We got off on a narrow street, for the moment expropriated by a covey of children, many of them emaciated and soiled, playing in the dirt, while in front of the battered apartments and houses idle men gathered in small groups, talking away the tepid afternoon.
The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) Page 39
