I held my penis; it was no longer numb, but was extremely tender. Even a feather touch seemed to inflame it. What had they done to me? Had they castrated me in flesh and in spirit?
I went to sleep, now used to the mosquitoes. Sometime in the night it drizzled and was iron cold, but there was no blanket to warm me. I woke up late in the day, and the coffee at my door was no longer warm. Toward afternoon voices rasped outside my door, and when it opened, White Sidewall and his gang were there.
It was always White Sidewall who talked to me throughout, and now he sounded contrite: “I am very sorry, Mr. Samson. But since we have decided to free you, I hope that you will forgive us for what happened. If you were in our place, you would understand.”
Shit, I said to myself.
“You will now shower. When you are ready, we will take you back to Tondo.”
They took me to the toilet that I had cleaned; it was spotless, just as I had left it. The water felt delicious and I lingered under it.
My clothes were on the chair outside the bathroom and I put them on. They blindfolded me, this time tightly. They walked me outside and helped me into the van—I knew its smell by now.
But they did not take me back to Tondo; they lied to me, cheated me, for when they removed my blindfold and opened the van doors, I recognized immediately the surroundings, the atmosphere. We were in the Ermita police station.
A line of brown Metrocom buses, windows covered with wire mesh, clogged the street and were filled with young people, some of them with white headbands, some with bandages on their faces. There had been a demonstration at the American embassy and the demonstrators were being hauled to Crame.‡ Now the buses were pulling out and the spillover crowd of students were waiting for their ride.
“The station is full; you can see we have no more room here,” the policeman at the desk was saying. “They have to go to the city jail. Why don’t you take him to Crame? You have all the room there.”
White Sidewall shook his head. “I have a date and I am already late. No, just do whatever you must with him.”
Another policeman in civilian clothes asked me questions, which he typed, and after that, I was fingerprinted, then they hustled me off to a mosquito-infested corner where I waited for the next hour.
Should I have protested then? Should I have screamed and lashed away at the police pigs and my torturers? I thought about it later; I did right appearing meek and submissive. I was a prisoner no matter what the law said; I did not carry a gun—they did.
A police van finally came at dusk, and together with the leftovers that could not be taken by the Metrocom buses, we were herded off to the city jail.
A brief ride, through Quiapo and its environs, the shops shuttered with plywood, the sidewalks piled with garbage, the low stone embankments in the middle of the street plastered with our slogans and posters.
We went down the underpass then made a U-turn; I had not realized that the city jail was here, beyond a cratered street and crumbling, old buildings roofed with rusting tin.
I must get in touch with someone and the first person who came to mind was Betsy. At the jail reception, I rang her number and was told by the maid that she was still in Bacolod for the semester break, which I knew but had hoped that she had not gone or had returned. Father Jess—but there was no phone in the kumbento. Professor Hortenso had no phone either, and at this time of the school year there would be no one in his office. I tried it nonetheless, but there was no reply. Then I thought of Puneta. But I did not want to be beholden to him, not even in this moment of need.
The policemen in civilian clothes at the reception desk were not pleased that we had to come in at night. They separated the girls and sent them to the brigade close to the entrance. We had to strip and be examined for drugs and weapons, then we were shunted off to the different brigades.
By now I had become inured to the discomfort of not having a mat or a blanket, but some of the boys were grumbling, saying they were not criminals, that they should see their lawyers. The sergeant who manned the desk and glowered at us said we could do that in the morning, that at least we had a roof over our heads.
I walked through a dimly lighted courtyard and crossed over through a barbed-wire gate that was padlocked for the night, then shown the building where I was to sleep.
It was dimly lighted, but I could make out the shapes of those asleep on the wooden bunks, stretched like carcasses, most of them half naked. Though it was already November, the heat and the humidity were still oppressive even at night, and the heat, particularly, seemed to cling like some stringent glue to the very pores of the skin. No one stirred and there did not seem to be any place for me. I squatted on the stone floor. Clothes were strung on wires, and beyond the grilled windows I could see the rooftops of Recto, some still ablaze with neon. Mosquitoes and the sounds of the city drifted in. I thought I would never be able to sleep, but reclining against the cement wall, I dozed off only to waken in the night to a wild screaming in the next brigade—as if a man was going through what I underwent. No one was disturbed, no one stirred. I was, indeed, in another dimension.
It was still dark when the brigade started stirring, and by daybreak we were all up. A single line formed at the toilet at the end of the brigade and I joined it. A middle-aged man, perhaps forty or so, was behind me; he grinned, “So you are the one who arrived last night.” I nodded.
The young inmates studied me. “You can put your clothes in that corner and sleep at the far end if you wish,” the man said. “You are new here, so you must know the rules. The king is Bing-Bong over there—” he pointed to a sturdy, bald-shaved man of thirty at the gate; he was looking at me and smiling. “You do whatever he tells you. We do whatever he tells us. To disobey is to be punished. No harm will come to you if you do what you are told.”
I wanted to tell him to shut up, but he seemed so friendly, and I did not really know what new ordeal I was to go through. He also had that look of having lived a long time; there was that tiredness and dumb resignation in his thin, pinched face, as if he were a chicken caught in the rain, all wet and with no shelter to go to.
I was the only one thrown into this brigade; the others were assigned to another building. Now I could see the whole jail. The battered buildings were arranged like spokes in a wheel with the main office and reception area, through which we entered, in the middle, topped by a low rusting tower. This was the Old Bilibid prison—the National Penitentiary—before it was transferred to Muntinglupa, as Chicken explained again.
The day wore on in tedious idleness, for there was nothing to do, nothing to read. We stayed in the cement courtyard, most of us in shorts, and I could see now the tattoos on arms, legs, chests, and backs, just as I had seen them in the Barrio, emblems of that other world which Roger himself wore with pride. One even kept his head perpetually shaved, for it was there that the tail of a snake was curled and the body ran down the back of his neck, coiled around his torso and down to his penis—the snake’s head being the penis head itself.
Chicken was some sort of emissary or chief clerk, and it was his job to acquaint all newcomers with the rules of the brigade—rules the prisoners themselves enforced because within the jail there was another law—not the law of those who guarded us.
There were no tattoos on Chicken’s skinny arms or chest. “I am too old for that,” he said, laughing. Then he told me why he was in jail. A rich man’s son who loved women and fast cars and was drunk most of the time had run over and killed someone. He did not stop. The people who saw the accident had taken down his license plate number and that was how he was tracked down; the victim’s relatives did not want any settlement, the bastard must go to jail, and because he was a rich man’s son that could not be. But justice must be done, the crime must be punished. It did not matter that Chicken did not even know how to drive—that was not important; what mattered was his confession.
“I was given five thousand pesos. Five thousand pesos!” Chicken said. “And t
hen, of course, there is the thousand pesos every month—every month. For the duration of my being here. And my son, he comes here every week you know, together with my wife, to bring me things. You know, we don’t eat enough here and one gets tired of fish and kangkong, fish and kangkong. You know.”
I nodded.
“And then, of course, the best lawyers defended me. When I get out there will be another five thousand. Where else can you find something like that? Here, I can eat regularly. And when I get sick, at least there is some medicine.”
“How do I get out of here?” I asked.
“If you are poor you cannot get out. There are no rich people in jail. They can afford bail, the best lawyers. They can even buy judges.”
“I am poor,” I said. “A self-supporting student. But I am innocent. I have not committed any crime. I swear to you …”
Chicken looked at me, his small sad eyes crinkling in a smile. “Who is innocent and who is guilty?” He shook his head. “The poor are always guilty and the rich are always innocent. Get some lawyer to stand for you. But while you are here, you must follow the rules—theirs and ours.”
“But the law—”
“The police, what do you think they care for? Their pay, first of all—and the more they can get, through foul means if necessary, the more they will get it. They are not here to help us; they are here to maintain order so that we will continue being what we are—poor.”
And it came to me clearly then as it never did before, the truth that this kind of order was not for me. Look at our Barrio. What did it need? Running water, so we would not get typhoid, and toilets, simple public toilets, nothing fancy, nothing expensive, but these could not be built, not by the government, not by the civic organizations. Why should they? Everyone up there was comfortable as long as we were down here. It was as simple as that. And this jail—it was so easy to tear it down, to build cell blocks that did not leak, and toilets that did not smell. And the greatest enemy, boredom, what was there to dispel it, to defeat it? The violence, of course, was the ultimate relief. It also sustained the power of those who watched over us, of those who wanted us deeper in the bog.
My mornings were tinged with gloom and uncertainty; my thoughts concerned that most basic of needs, food, and what there was was niggardly, unfit for human beings, but we were not humans anymore. Old rice with worms and pebbles in it, and dried fish that must have lain in some dank and foul storeroom for ages. It was no different at lunch or supper, and those of us who had no money had no choice, and we devoured it while those who were able to wrangle money from visitors had the canteen to go to, where one could have coffee boiled over three times, the usual cornerstone fare, moldy pieces of pastry, some candy, a few sorry-looking bananas, and other fruit rejects from Divisoria.
I really should not complain, for in that bleak compound I had three meals a day for doing nothing, though on the first day I could barely swallow the rice—not only was it sour, but it was also half-cooked, and as it was brought to the brigade in battered tin drums, it was covered with flies.
It was either the food or the foul air, but I could recognize it at once in the harsh light of day—the inmates had that unmistakable pallor of people in Tondo, the dirty, mottled, pallid skin that hunger brought to people. Indeed, I saw it then so clearly, so implacably real. The Barrio was the far more insidious prison, for while it had no walls, the people in it were really no different from those in this jail.
Something else happened to me in the city jail that I do not want to dwell upon, because it confirms what Roger had told me—the depravity that I had refused to believe and why I was helpless in the face of the power that had defiled me.
I should have had an intimation of it when, several times that day, Bing-Bong came around saying that he had not defecated for some time. But I did not understand their language then.
I could not fight even if I had wanted to; there were four of them who pressed me down on my stomach, pinioned my legs and arms. I felt the sharp point of an ice pick, perhaps the sharpened end of a thick wire, pressed against the back of my neck, the drip of something oily—cooking oil, they later told me—going down my buttocks, Bing-Bong, the King, grunting behind me, pumping, breathing hard and finally falling on my back like an obnoxious carcass.
This, too, was what Roger had spoken about. I was now initiated into this dismal world peopled by those whom I thought I would call my brothers. They were not my kin, for their legs and arms were tattooed. There was this malignant odor of cuspidors and urinals about them and they had the countenance of sick rooms. Their long hair was not the long hair of youth but of necessity. What did they know of dialectics, of responsibility, of nationalism as these have been dinned into us? They were here and I loathed them, for I knew that I could be any one of them, kindred in spirit, if I did not get out as fast as I could.
I was released on the fifth day of my incarceration. Someone was killed that night in the brigade next to ours, and through the iron grills I saw the body carried out of the compound as if it were a butchered pig, the body punctured with knife wounds—faucets, they called it. Chicken told me there was a killing also in our brigade the previous week. But no one talked—and no one asked questions.
I did not even know who had been killed, it was enough that the police saw it necessary to free us, for, in truth, no charges had been filed; we had been detained—that was all.
I went through the same cubicle where we were examined and, again, I stripped to be searched, then went to the desk beyond the wooden railing. The sergeant was eating noodles from a plastic plate; he looked at me perfunctorily and then ransacked his drawer for a sheaf of papers that he brought out, meanwhile looking at me with beady eyes, his mouth bulging with food. The ballpoint pen at his desk refused to write so he stuck it between his lips, moistening its tip, then checked the papers until he found my name.
He kept me standing before his desk, but even at that distance I could smell his underarm odor, so strong and overpowering, I wondered which was stronger, the stench of the prison or that of his body.
“Here,” he said finally, taking a gulp from the tall glass of water at his right, “this is your name, is it not?”
I looked at it: Samson, José.
“Sign here,” he pointed to the blank bottom line.
I bent over the page and started reading. He stood up and the blow on my head made my ears ring. “I told you to sign,” he shouted, “not to read it.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, and scrawled my name hastily.
“Now, go!”
I walked out of the reception area and into a muddy yard festooned with laundry strung on the barbed wires and on the steel girders that fenced the cell blocks from each other.
I was told I was free—and I was shown the gate, beyond the yard cluttered with jeeps and old cars, past the small pond with the image of the Virgin shielded by a canopy of leaves, the stench of prison still all around me. Then I was out into the torrid heat of Quezon, the crowds eddying around me. I was in familiar territory close to my own university.
Back in the barrio I thought it best to tell Father Jess and Tia Nena only that I had merely gone to the province on an unexpected trip for the Brotherhood. I wanted to think about what had happened, ingest it, pummel it, conclude from it.
I wondered why it happened at all and what it had done to me. I have not accepted, and will never accept, the mindless act of Tarzan or the depravity of Bing-Bong as machinations of a supreme will, or even of fate. These men and what they did were the end products of a modern malaise that is spreading like a blob and covers, drowns, disfigures everything—the green of leaves, the fragrance of flowers, the blue of the sky. It is the evil that greed has wrought and these men were transformed; the air they breathed, the food in their stomachs, the sights that pleased them were all infected. They had died, but they did not know it. Job is not the hero, then, but the villain—he had known success and affluence, but it was not God who took these away from him. It
was Job himself who prepared his own downfall. Salvation did not come in his avowal of faith but in his renouncing the values that he had cherished. My torture was not punishment then, nor the humiliation that was heaped on me a diminution of my being; these were forms of revelation—an awakening from darkness, the coming to life of ashes. If only! Yes, if only the mind were not part of the body. This is my curse—that while I could distort and contort the mind, it was the body that yielded, it was the body that felt and lived and died.
I had thought of death in those nights that I could not sleep. The young do not think of death, but I have, so I am old. And much as I love life, I would have to bid it good-bye someday, perhaps soon, and it was not the living now that really mattered, but the how of it.
In my room the night I was finally freed, the memory of my torture came again, bringing a black, shapeless dread to my very core. I tried to banish my fear of having become impotent and wondered if I would ever be a man again. In the morning, when my bladder was full and I should have awoken with it erect and sticking up from under the sheet, I realized with some anguish that it was limp.
I asked for fifty pesos from Father Jess, saying I needed it badly, and then went to Makati.
It was past noon when I got to the Colonial and the after-lunch crowd from the nearby restaurants had not yet trickled in.
Lily had already checked in. After a brief shower, I went back to the cubicle. She was waiting at the door. “So, you are rich again,” she said as I drew her in.
She was an expert, she could do what Betsy could not, but I could not tell either of them what had happened, the details that degraded and humiliated me.
“Lily,” I said, “I did not come here for a massage. I have problems, emotional problems. Please help me.”
She laughed, that soft easy laughter I always liked in her. “Oh, Pepe, whatever your excuses, I like you just the same.” She bent down and kissed me, and I savored her moist lips, the saccharine recesses of her mouth.
She pulled away the towel I had draped around my waist, then sat on the narrow shelf and ran her fingers lightly over my chest. My skin tingled, that sharp, delicious shivering that flowed down to my navel. But it stopped there. Then her hands floated down my legs, behind my knees, my buttocks. But though I felt sensually, delightfully aroused, I was not responding in the only way I wanted to.
The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) Page 56
