The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library)

by F. Sionil Jose

  “But it did not begin that way,” Lily explained. “He was a teacher’s aide, and after he taught school, he organized this youth dance to which we contributed. That was when we started going out.”

  When his term ended, Simpson returned to the United States by a circuitous route through Europe. Lily had written to him at the addresses he had left, but not once did he reply. When the baby came, someone told her to seek assistance at the American embassy, but she was too shy to do that. She had, of course, the ultimate proof in her arms—a handsome mestizo baby with brown hair and eyes that were blue “like his father’s.” The baby did not live long.

  In spite of motherhood, Lily had not lost her girlish charm or the innocence in her eyes. If only she had better food, her skin would be much clearer and there would be no blemishes on her arms or legs. It was a minor miracle how they managed—four children, two of them in high school, with her mother making only so much by taking in washing and peddling vegetables door-to-door.

  Their most intimate conversations floated across the alley to us; seldom could we hear the hiss of the frying pan to know that they were eating something more substantial than boiled vegetables and the scraps of fish that her mother could no longer sell.

  Lily’s mother coughed interminably and the younger kids always had skin sores. Then, one evening, Lily came home with two grocery bags and two smaller, oily ones, which, she said, contained fried chicken. Her face was flushed and happy when she passed me at the open window where I was reading, and she smiled at me before going up the stairs. Her brothers were squealing and the older ones, Boyet and Nanet, were full of questions. Her mother had started to cough again. She asked where she got the money to buy all that food and Lily was laughing and saying, “Mama, I have a new job and it pays better, much better than that store in Avenida. I am now a waitress in Makati. The tips alone! But I have to work starting at eleven until late at night.”

  A month later, Lily could no longer attend our programs or our Sunday meetings; she had to work on Sundays, too, and it was only on Tuesday, her day off, that she was free. For several days I had wanted to go out with her, just the two of us, before she got this Makati job. On those instances that I was free from school early, I even detoured to Avenida and went home to Bangkusay with her after the store closed. On this Tuesday afternoon, as I was starting for school, she also got out, not by coincidence, I now realize.

  “I am going shopping,” she said. We walked toward Bangkusay, avoiding the puddles in the alleys, and, once in the plaza where no one could hear, she said, “Pepe, I have something important to tell you. There is no one I can talk to.”

  “We can go see a movie now, if you wish,” I said.

  I had always wanted to be close to her in the dark so I could hold her, but then I remembered I had only fare money. “The devil—I don’t have money. Why don’t we just go to the Luneta and sit under the trees?”

  She smiled, “No, too many people there. Yes, we can go to a movie—let me pay.”

  “I will not permit that,” I said, but she won out, for I wanted to hold her.

  We got off at Recto. She gave me ten pesos to buy tickets, balcony, she insisted, so that we would be up there by ourselves. “You can still attend one of your classes,” she said. “I don’t want you to lose your scholarship.”

  It was one of those kung fu movies, but no matter how well Bruce Lee fought, he could not distract me from this girl. Once settled in our seats I put an arm around her. I tried to reach down her neckline, but she held my hand firmly and said, “Now, Pepe, don’t do that. What pleasure would you have holding a mother’s breast?”

  We laughed, then she started talking somberly, slowly, as if she were telling me her one and only secret, and perhaps it was.

  “Pepe, I do not know what to do.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Do not talk nonsense now.”

  “I am serious,” I said.

  “Don’t make jokes. You know it’s impossible with us. Please help me, tell me what I should do.”

  “Tell me your problem.” I held her closer and kissed her cheek.

  “Promise you will not tell anyone in the Barrio, not even Toto.”

  “I promise.”

  She paused, then said simply: “I am working in a massage parlor, Pepe … not in a restaurant.”

  For some time I did not know what to say and, noting my silence, she quickly added, a hint of irritation in her voice: “Now … now, don’t think what you are thinking. I am not a prostitute. The money I make … I get it straight, not even petting. I do not let them.”

  “I do not believe you,” I said hotly, then I was sorry I said it.

  She drew away, fury in her eyes. “I made a mistake in trusting you. If I can trust you, why can’t you trust me? You know that I cannot give you any proof.”

  I was silent.

  She continued, the anger in her voice had ebbed and in its place, this sorrow. “Did you know that until I got this job, we sometimes ate only once a day? And my baby, did you know he died because I had no money for medicine? You know that Mother makes so little, that Boyet and Nanet do not earn—and those two small ones …”

  I drew her to me, “Lily, forgive me.”

  Though not a sound escaped her, she was crying. I tilted her face and kissed her, saying, “Lily, I can do nothing to help you. Yet I cannot think of you in that place, with all those hands pawing you.”

  Her crying subsided and we were silent for some time. We even tried to watch the movie, but it was useless—we had to talk.

  She said, “Mother is getting suspicious, and I do not know what to do. Once, she said she wanted to come and see the restaurant. Boyet and Nanet do not care as long as they have something to eat. But Mother— I don’t know what to tell her. I never lied to her before, not even when I got pregnant.”

  I wanted to know the nature of her work, how much money she made, what she did with the money.

  “For the first time in our lives,” she said, “we are eating well. And I have saved a little. I have money in a savings bank in Makati, and I keep the bank book in my locker in the Colonial. For the job, I trained for two weeks at the Hospital Ng Maynila. That was not very difficult, and I can really give a good massage—a hard one if you wish. Someday, I will give you one, specially when you are tired.”

  “What else do you give?”

  Without hesitation, “Sensation—no more. The management wants us to give it if the customer asks. But not if he does not want it.”

  I pretended ignorance and was sorry afterward, for I was degrading her by asking her to explain.

  “I masturbate them,” she said simply.

  I was silent.

  She continued evenly. “All sorts of men, with all sorts of problems and all sorts of lives. I have to be nice to each one, short and tall, fat and thin, and it is very rare that they only want a massage.”

  “And you give it to them?”

  “No, Pepe, I swear. Just sensation.”

  “Shit,” I said, the anger rising in me again although I had no right to be angry with her.

  “Shit to you, too,” she flung back.

  “Look at your new clothes, that new wristwatch. Don’t tell me it is the Red Cross. You got those with more than sensation, like a …”

  “Like a whore? Is that what you want to say?”

  The words were rocks in my throat. I must not spew them out.

  “I am not a whore, Pepe. God sees everything, I swear to you. I don’t even let them touch me.”

  “God,” I cursed in my breath. “I want to believe you, within me I do!” And again, I embraced her, and my whole being ached.

  “What will I do, Pepe? What will we do?”

  She had included me. “We—” she said, and I held her hand tightly.

  “You must be honest with your mother,” I said. “Tell her everything. Maybe on a day that she is happy, on your day off when you can take her to Divisoria and buy her a few things.”


  “That’s bribery, she will not like it.”

  “Explain to her the money you need, your brothers and sisters, their schooling, her health,” I said.

  “It looks so hopeless.”

  “It is.”

  “Suppose the neighbors find out?” she asked. “I cannot live in the Barrio anymore.”

  “How will they know? I will not tell them anything. I do not think your mother will.”

  “It is better that we leave the place.”

  “And where will you go? Some expensive place in Makati?”

  “You know I will not do that. I will not be able to afford it.”

  “It is better in the Barrio. No one among your customers will find you there. No one among us— Shit, we don’t even have money for a haircut. We will never go to the Colonial.”

  A salesgirl in the same shop where she clerked went to the Colonial and earned in one day what she made in a month and she did not go beyond masturbating her guests. The training, Lily said, was easy, but it was the clearances, the physical examination that she detested; she went to San Lazaro twice a month, together with the other girls, and was examined by interns from the medical schools. They took vaginal smears, looked and poked into them as if they were hogs.

  “I hate it,” she said vehemently.

  Sometimes she had only a couple of “guests,” as their customers were called, but on a busy day, she had five or six. She now had several “regulars” who waited for her or sought her and, yes, almost everyone tried to seduce her, and several even offered to put her in a “garage”—to make her a mistress at the monthly rate of two thousand pesos, plus an apartment with all the appliances and furniture.

  “And it will last as long as he finds you pretty and interesting,” I said.

  She pinched my arm. “I humor them,” she said, “but I make sure they know I would not do it. They ask me to go out with them and I always have nice excuses, about how difficult it is for me to do so. They come back.”

  “For sensation.”

  She did not speak.

  “We make more than the nightclub hostesses on the boulevard, Pepe. And we don’t have to spend on clothes and we are not on display in a glass booth.”

  “But you sensation them.”

  “It is hard work; sometimes, when I have six guests in a row, my back, my arms ache; sweat pours down.”

  “It is honest work,” I said disconsolately.

  “Please don’t be harsh,” she said.

  “I love you,” I said, “and I cannot make you stop working there.” Her arms went around me, and she kissed me on the cheek.

  When we went out, to my surprise, it was already evening—we had been inside for more than three hours and had not really done much talking or touching; it could have been forever and I would not have known.

  “Your eyes,” I said. “They are swollen.”

  “I know.” She smiled.

  After dinner that night I borrowed Father Jess’s typewriter. He was in his khaki shorts, reading one of the new Teilhard de Chardin books that he also wanted Toto and me to read, but I had demurred for I did not like religious books. To please him, though, I did bring down The Phenomenon of Man only to find it unreadable.

  He put his book aside, looked at me, and said, grinning, “So you are going to be a writer.”

  “No, Father,” I said, “I just want to improve this personal essay—boyhood in a small village.”

  He beckoned to me to sit on the chair opposite him. We were going to have another session and I loathed it—it made me think.

  “Did you have a happy boyhood?”

  There was no telling him lies. The question had never been asked of me before, and without hesitation, I answered. “Yes, Father, a very happy one. I remember the fiestas, the rockets, the first rains of May, the grasshoppers and the frogs, the swimming in the irrigation ditches in the fields. Yes, I had a happy boyhood.”

  But what about the stigma of my being a bastard, the jokes I had to endure, the questions I could not answer? He noticed the uncertainty that had come over my face. “But?” he asked tentatively.

  “It was also unhappy.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  I had gone to him for my first confession. He knew about Lucy and the fountain pen I stole when I was in high school, but he did not know of my origins.

  “I am a bastard, Father. It is difficult being one, particularly when you are full of doubts, questions that no one, not even your mother, can answer.”

  “Remember,” he said softly, “there are no illegitimate children, there are only illegitimate parents—that’s not original. And sometimes it is not even their fault. Like Lily. You know that. And where is her young man now?”

  I did not speak.

  “There is always a reason,” I said after a while. “And we cannot avoid the most important of all.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Money, Father,” I said simply.

  He smiled benignly. “It is not the most important thing in the world.”

  “It is to me.”

  “I can understand that,” he said. “Maybe because I come from another place. Did you not say, no priest is poor?”

  I was embarrassed to hear him remember, but he kept on talking. “I must be crazy to have selected this parish, or started it anyway. I could die here of hunger and no one would be sorry—not my family, that’s for sure.”

  “Why not?”

  “You have been with me for almost a year now—that’s a long time—and yet you have never bothered to ask about my family? That is unusual. People gossip and there is no shortage of that, particularly here.”

  “Yes, I know about your going to nightclubs and your having gotten drunk.”

  He roared with laughter. “Soon they will be saying I have gotten a girl pregnant. One thing I like about the priesthood is the wine. I get a drop of it every morning.” He looked at me and burst out laughing again, this time so long that tears came to his eyes. “So—so, I have no more secrets, ha? You know me like you know the palm of your hand, ha? You and Toto, merely because you live with me, ha?”

  I grinned.

  “But you don’t know about my family, where I come from.”

  “From Negros. I overheard you talking to an American visitor about the sugar workers.”

  Father Jess was silent and a smile wreathed his rotund face. He shook his head and said, “You know, Pepe, if my family had not disowned me, I would have had enough money to build a beautiful church right here. And a row of apartments, besides. And we would have the biggest freezer in any kumbento in the country. Do you understand?”

  “We can still build a church—you have many friends, you are very good at raising money.”

  He sat back and said, almost in anger, “Build a church? Stone, stained glass, padded pews?”

  “Why not? Look at the cathedral in Intramuros … the churches of the Iglesia ni Kristo.”

  “Those are not churches, hijo. Those are buildings. Don’t you understand?” his voice leaped.

  I shook my head.

  “The church,” he bellowed, beating his massive chest, “is here. In the heart. Not an air-conditioned building with wooden saints, not people kneeling and crawling to the altar—those stupid people! Not processions. The church is here!” He beat his breast again so strongly, the sounds were loud thuds. His eyes flashed and the corners of his mouth curled as he spoke, “The church that we will build is here, and it will last forever. Buildings crumble, but the church that we will build will last. So look at this humble building that some are ashamed to go to. It is here where God lives, perhaps much, much more than anywhere else, but only if I can convince you and all those around that the real church is in us, in how we live, in the sacrifices we offer to Christ who is also in each of us. Everyone, my brother. But much, much more my kin is he who has nothing and suffers. To him I will give everything I have.”

  Sadness touched his face, his eyes now darkened, th
e ape hands now folded in repose. “I sometimes feel that I am in the wrong vocation. I am so involved with the things I do, and yet I feel that I am not doing enough. Take this place for instance.” He paused and looked out of the window, at the Barrio shrouded by night, at the relentless poverty that spread wherever we turned, the narrow passageways choked with refuse, cluttered with big bellied and dirty children in the daytime and, over everything, flies that never seemed to die. “I think of the place where I was born, of the houses of my relatives and of my former students—they are all comfortable and, yes, very rich … and here I am trying to move the world.”

  “You have the body for it,” I said. “You can push it one inch.”

  “Let’s make it two inches.” For a moment Father Jess regained his humor, his eyes narrowing into slits, his mouth wide open, baring yellow, uneven teeth. Then he was quiet again, the wide brow furrowed. “If only I had more resources, more money.”

  I did not know till now of his frustrations, having presumed that, as a priest, his job was easy: he did not have to worry about food and clothing, and when he was old, there was always the Church—omnipresent, omnipotent—to take care of him.

  “I hope,” I said lightly, “that someday—joke only, Father—that priests like you would be allowed to marry. It must be terrible, not being able to live like a normal man.”

  He shook his head and replied quickly. “That is a misconception that gets said again and again. Pepe, it is not the absence of sexual life that makes the priesthood difficult. We get used to it.”