I looked at Betsy. “How long is short time?” she asked.
“Four hours, miss.”
“Mrs.!” she corrected him.
“Mrs.” the boy said sheepishly. “It is twenty-two pesos.”
“I do not have that much money,” I whispered to her.
“All right,” she said, opening her handbag. The boy said we could pay later, but she paid at once.
Alone by ourselves, with the latch on, I watched her sit uneasily on the edge of the wide bed. When she looked at me, she blushed so beautifully I went to her, kissed her cheek, and said, “Mrs. Samson, I don’t need any proof.”
Her arms went around me tentatively, then tightly, and her mouth was warm and sweet. “Yes, you do,” she said.
In spite of her sophistication and her liberty with words like fuck and bullshit, the truth was that she was prim, even prudish. Alone at last, she could not even undress with me before her. She went to the bathroom, and when she finally emerged, a sheet was draped around her. She had all the blinds drawn. It took us so long to begin—more than two hours, I think, and I was surprised that I was the first. And it was all there—the tiny blotches on the sheet, stark red on white. She had grimaced, but did not complain and I had thought, having read once how ecstasy and pain contorted a woman’s face in the same manner, that she had been lifted to orgasmic heights, but in truth, she had suffered, and when it was over, we examined the mess. She embraced me and whispered, “We are now one.”
After a while, she nudged at me, but I, too, had been hurt and could no longer respond. Also, I could only think of that silly mirror that I had forgotten to look at, and that after all these years, I had finally lain on a bed with a mattress. I remembered the two hamburgers we did not have the foresight to bring along, for by then I had become really hungry.
We were quiet most of the way back to the university. The immensity of what had happened began to worry me; it should have been the fulfillment that it was, but I was only being dragged deeper into a bog of contradiction. I wanted to escape. Still, I was grateful for her gift of love—our oneness now of spirit and being. I was humbled by this girl who would never really be mine, who had proven not her virtue but her willingness to take me as I am.
No one can explain me better than myself. How many times have I stood before the mirror of the old cabinet in Antipolo, before the cracked mirror in the cramped and narrow room I had shared with Toto and pointed the accusing finger at this face and said to him, “You sonofabitch. You screwed up everything again.” And I have done this, loathing this bundle of nerves and arteries, knowing no one stands between myself and perdition. I should be grateful to Betsy, she could have everything and need not be encumbered by me. I can bring her nothing but bad luck and hardship. Who am I to covet her? Why should she breathe the same foul air that is in my lungs? I should not repeat what my father had done.
I wanted to tell her all of this and of my days in the sun, the scent of new harvest, of early evenings and December chill when smoke from morning fires was around us in a haze and the world was silvery with promise; but she came from a planet beyond my vision, and I could only mumble senselessly about the damn traffic, my having to see Professor Hortenso; I even forgot to thank her when we finally reached Recto.
Professor Hortenso was in the faculty room. I told him that I had received an urgent phone call but could not tell him about it in the presence of the other professors. He stepped out with me into the corridor.
“You must be careful now,” he said. “Did you notice that there are new faces in the classrooms, students who are older than most? They are being admitted though the semester is about to draw to a close.”
I did not notice them, not in our classes of sixty. Professor Hortenso said they were intelligence agents, and they may have already infiltrated the Brotherhood.
“But what can they find out?” I asked. “Everything we do is public, our publications. Surely, they know everything.”
Professor Hortenso paused; the bell had rung and students had started to file out of the classrooms, transforming the sweaty corridors into rivulets of babbling, jostling humanity.
“You are wrong, Pepe,” he said. “You cannot have revolution without conspiracy. You and I, we are members of that conspiracy. The leaders of the Brotherhood—and you are one—are involved.”
“I am not aware,” I protested.
“You will be,” he assured me.
I told him about Juan Puneta, that he had gone to Tondo again, left his card at the kumbento and that he wanted me to ring him up.
He seemed thoughtful. “I don’t know what he wants. But just the same, give him a call and tell me what happens.”
He was going to his class, and he asked me to walk with him to the Education building, where he was handling a graduate seminar on Philippine culture.
“They have taken some of our boys in Diliman,” he said. “We have not heard from them. We don’t know what has happened to them. We have tried tracing them but without success. They just disappeared. So, be careful, Pepe. We can all be easily disposed of.”
“They can arrest me any time they want,” I said. “They will find nothing on me.”
He shook his head. “Pepe, they will find many things. Just be careful.”
I remembered Ka Lucio’s warning. But what was there to betray? I knew no secrets, made no important decisions.
Professor Hortenso went on. “If I disappear, or if I leave Manila, do you know where to find me?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know where many of our Directorate members live.”
“I can always find you then,” he said, “in the church.”
“And you?”
“I am helping set up our committees in Central Luzon—Tarlac, Nueva Ecija. You were right, Pepe, the Huks, their children who are now grown up, they are important links not only to the past but to the masses—our base.”
“Ka Lucio—”
“Yes,” he said, “I am now sure his help is very important.”
After my eight-thirty class, I went to a small crummy bookshop on Recto where there was a pay phone and dialed the number Puneta left. No, he was not in—it was one of the maids who answered. But would I leave a message as to where I could be reached tomorrow? He would not be back till late that night.
I will be in school in the late afternoon, I said; and in the Barrio the whole morning.
Hortenso’s warning disturbed me. I was slowly being sucked into a whirlpool, and I did not like it. Ka Lucio’s warning, his lecture on betrayal, bothered me, too, but as I told Professor Hortenso, I knew no secrets and I was not about to join any armed group, much as I longed to avenge Toto’s death. It is not that I was afraid of violence—I saw it every day in the Barrio, the slow, deadly violence inflicted on us, the gang fights, the knifings that were common in Tondo, the malnutrition, the stifling dreariness that deformed the body and the spirit. But I had also begun to know a woman’s love, to eat not just enough but what I wanted; with a little more effort, I would not be just an acolyte; the doors that had been shut to me were finally opening and, beyond them, heroin dreams were beckoning. I was not beguiling or deluding myself merely because I had become a member of the National Directorate or a full scholar in school; after studying Spanish, I realized that if I worked hard at things I really liked, I could excel at them. And being a revolutionary was not in my compass. I could appreciate what Ka Lucio had done, what the Brotherhood was doing, and I was doing a bit if only to merit my position and to salve my conscience; but from the very beginning, politics and politicians had been a bore to me, and I was not now ready to transform myself into that slimy creature I had always loathed.
There should be ways by which I could withdraw unobtrusively from the Brotherhood’s Directorate. After all, I earned nothing there. At the same time, I wanted to keep Professor Hortenso’s friendship, not because it was necessary for my continued employment on the school paper, but because I had grown to respect and like hi
m and his wife. I would still participate in the demonstrations, help in the planning, write manifestoes, things expected of me, but I would be in the shadows, then ease myself away before I finish college.
My new relationship with Betsy bothered me, not with guilt feelings but with confusion. I loved her, but at the same time I desired Lily, too, and despaired for her, wondering about her customers, and the “sensation” she gave them. I often lay awake at night, waiting for her to come home, and could only go to sleep when I heard her walk up the alley, bidding her mother good evening. She would sleep till about ten in the morning at about the same time I would be through with my cleaning, and she would talk with me from her window—nonsense things about us and the Barrio. Then she would be off by eleven after a hurried lunch, for she was expected to be at the Colonial from noon to midnight. If she was late, she would be fined, and if she was late three times in a week, she would be suspended for a week. It was only on Tuesdays that she could really talk with me, but these days were spent more on shopping, sewing, and helping her mother.
Sometimes we reminisced about Toto. Now I was working very hard in the church, and Father Jess increased my allowance. I had asked if he was going to take another fellow, but he told me flatly it was going to be my decision, because the new boy would have to share the room with me; wasn’t it like that with Toto? It was he who brought me to Tondo. Roger, who lived close by, was helping a bit in the church now. Furthermore, I began to like being alone, and would find it difficult to adjust to a new roommate the way I had grown accustomed to Toto.
Yes, I missed him, his subdued and steady pushing when I flagged and, most of all, our quiet talks. I often caught myself asking questions aloud and somehow expecting them to be answered. But Toto was not there, and Roger was not bright enough to take his place.
I decided to see Ka Lucio again. I would have seen him more if only to listen to his stories about the war with the Japanese. Professor Hortenso had frightened me with his knowledge that some of our members had disappeared without any trace and that there were more who would certainly vanish.
I will not ask those asinine questions that had rankled us in the past, those impertinent questions about the validity of government, the obligations of the governed and those who govern. I had learned the answers to these early in Cabugawan.
I have also seen a bit of those forums, those university lecturers, the semantic convolutions into which they go, pondering questions that are really the pastimes of those who sit in the comfort of high offices. There is no blood to their inquiries, no dirt under their feet, the air they breathe is perfumed.
Ka Lucio had the answers, and he did not learn them in the Sierra Madre. One is this: nothing is given free. While Juan Puneta gave those niggardly “tokens” to the Brotherhood, he would someday ask for a bigger payment in kind, yet what did he need money for? He wallowed in it and would probably choke on it.
I have also asked myself what it is that I have done with my life, how has it been used? What right had I to make judgments about others without making them about myself? Indeed, I have tried to look deeply and honestly into my being—pried open the skin, fingered the nerves, the veins, and examined the blood in them. And what did I see?
Anger—and it was what has kept me alive, although I had tried to still it, keep it from flowing out, defined it in another way, and expressed it not with violence but with cynicism.
Ka Lucio had said earlier that there are two ways of looking at our lives—either as fate or as conflict. Only hogs are fated, because they cannot do anything except feed on the trough before they face the butcher’s knife. But men are men; they can do something about the future, and our life is in conflict then. They—or us. Self-defense, survival. Whatever we do, we can put it simply thus. And government? Ka Lucio did not have to tell me that it was an instrument of the rich, that government committed violence on us every day by not providing us with justice. Remember, Ka Lucio had said, we are demanding justice. Here in the Barrio we live with injustice and get to know it as part of life. It is not. And it is when we learn this that the decision is made: us—or them.
There was no equivocation then about my survival; I loved myself dearly, passionately. Ka Lucio had amassed experience to live this long. He would tell me.
He was writing in longhand, on a yellow ruled pad, when I entered—the door of his house open as usual. He had just finished cooking, and the small dingy kitchen was still smoky. He bade me sit; then, putting his hands on his lap, he asked how the revolution was going.
It embarrassed me, for as it was last time, I could not quite make out whether he was making light of us or was in earnest. I decided to ignore the remark. “It won’t start without you, Ka Lucio,” I said.
He laughed then and asked if I wanted a cup of coffee; he had just heated water and the powdered stuff had hardened—if I did not mind it that way. He stood up; how thin he had become, and it was only a few weeks since I last saw him. I wondered if he was getting any medicine or the right kind of food—he never went inside the church, and though he often greeted Father Jess and talked with him about inanities, he never asked for help although I was sure he needed it.
“I hope you are writing your memoirs,” I said.
“No, Pepe. My last conversation with you has set me thinking. I am writing a manual: how to organize the peasantry, how to raise funds, how to fight—you know, a question-and-answer handbook.”
“Ka Lucio,” I said, “that is perhaps the most useful thing we need right now, particularly organizational guides.” I told him how I brought him up in our committee meeting as the wellspring of wisdom. In our youthful audacity, we had not considered how people like him had so much to give. He looked at me gratefully for having remembered.
“You know many of these things because you came from the village,” he said.
“But you tested them all,” I said, “and what I need is confirmation. Do you trust us enough? Would your former men like to help again—their children in particular?”
“Pepe, of course, they will help. Didn’t you know? Once a rebel, always a rebel. It is in the blood. You don’t join the Huks because you want adventure or money—and even if you did join for these reasons, afterward, the fighting, the living together, they change you.”
I understood what he meant; I had joined the Brotherhood for my own reasons, but I was now, it seemed, slowly being drawn into its vortex. Though I wanted to get out, to be uninvolved in the conspiracy that Professor Hortenso had told me about, I had found myself half wanting to become part of it, maybe because the Brotherhood meant my meeting with Betsy, maybe because I was angry at what had happened to Toto.
“How did you manage to escape the Japanese? Were they really all that bad?”
He sat back, a look of shock on his face. “I keep forgetting,” he said, “that the war was three decades ago, that your generation has not known what it is to live under an occupying army. Yes, Pepe, there would have been no successful guerrilla movement, we would not have been able to organize the peasantry if the people did not suffer under the Japanese. They killed many of us, but we got more of them.”
He recounted how they mounted ambushes in the rivers of Pampanga, how the waters turned red. He did not go into details; it was as if he was merely recounting incidents. He melted with the people he said, and yes, he smiled in recollection, there were many times when he wore women’s clothes.
I would have stayed longer, but Tia Nena was looking for me—I had a visitor—so I hurried back to the kumbento. It was Juan Puneta’s driver asking if I would like to have lunch with Dr. Puneta? The car was out in the street, waiting.
“You are really going up—up,” Father Jess said when I asked his permission.
I wanted to ride with the driver up front, but he said I should stay in the rear. It was my first ride in an air-conditioned Continental, and I was awed. I toyed with the electric knob that raised the window and then sat back. On my side was a panel, and it controlled th
e radio and cassette player. I turned it on and listened to a noisy announcer urging the destruction of the Marcos regime and another march of students to Malacañang. He had a stentorian voice and must have been in love with it, for he rolled his r’s, and made those pauses that only actors make. “We cannot tolerate any longer a man who looks with disdain at the people, who makes a mockery of democracy, who has sold this country to the Americans …”—clichés, so I switched to another station. The Bee Gees were beautiful—
How can you mend a broken heart …
How can you stop the sun from shining …
We were crossing Del Pan, into the handsome country of tall, antiseptic buildings, the Rizal Park. He slowed down on the boulevard and turned left to a Spanish-looking building.
“Please,” the driver said, “Don Juan is inside—just ask the waiter.”
The doorman hurried to the car and opened the door. In my jeans and T-shirt, I walked into the bastion of the mestizo elite. Puneta was in the restaurant drinking beer with a couple of mestizos in white pants—an affectation, for white pants were not worn anymore, although, as Uncle Bert once said, before the war everyone went to work in white drill suits even in the heat.
Juan Puneta came to me and squeezed my hand, saying gustily: “Well, Pepito, it is wonderful to have you accept my invitation. I have been wanting to have a long talk with you.” He guided me to the table and introduced me to his companions in Spanish, adding that I was one of the brightest student leaders. I understood everything and, for a moment, I was tempted to speak in Spanish, but I held back. They shook my hand, then asked to be excused. Although I was confident of my Spanish with Tia Nena and Father Jess, I had not tried it with someone born to the language. I kept quiet and sat down as he reverted to English, asking me what I wanted to drink.
From books and magazines, I knew a bit of bar exotica, but beer or gin was all I really knew. I had never been to a place like the Casino, so I asked him to do the ordering. “Sangria,” he said. “I could ask for Jerez, but there is nothing like the Sangria that the bartender here makes.”
The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) Page 52
