Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

“Well, what we lack is national discipline and nothing else,” Dean Lopez said. “We are apt to blame our leaders for the mess we are in, but if we had discipline as a people such a mess would never have happened.”

“I think we don’t really know how to make democracy work,” Dr. Gomez said. He wore his gray hair long and he took pride in having served as technical assistant to no less than the president of the republic. “We are all fond of elections, but we don’t put the result of the ballot to work once elections are over.”

“You are thinking like an American adviser,” Dean Lopez said. “The American definition of democracy cannot work in benighted areas of Asia. Why, that’s a fact. Now listen, when I was in Germany …”

Tony knew what would come next. Listen now to Lopez bluff and bully his colleagues around, listen to him boast that only he, because he happened to have taken one summer course in a German university, could have the final word.

Now the talk became unbearable as the old men spewed big words about the mess at the university and in the whole country. They ranted about the challenges to the academic life that the school could not meet because the young teachers were cowardly or were not imbued with enough wisdom — ah, how they took liberties with words like academic freedom. And truth. And obligation. Tony knew all along, of course, that what they were trying to say with their abominable half-truths was that they were important, that age mattered because it meant wisdom and experience. They did not say that they were frustrated and embittered with their small pay, their bleak future, and the fact that, in the university, with no other strength to boast of, they were prisoners of their own meager talents. What he heard now was not different from what he remembered about them six years ago.

“Am I not right, Dr. Samson”—he was being addressed as “doctor” by no less than the dean himself—“when I say that we are debased in spirit because we have not yet properly exorcised our colonial past?”

“Of course, sir,” he was saying, not quite sure that he was in pious agreement. He would have said more but Lopez had already returned to the other professors.

He must get used to that title, doctor, professor — associate professor, which the dean had conferred on him. After the other professors had left, the blustery voice was once more directed to him. “Hell, Tony, you’ll be a full professor before you are forty, and if you play your cards right you’ll be president of the university before you know it. And as a starter, you should be a member of the Socrates Club — I’ll see to that. Hell, not every Ph.D. can be a member of the club, but you are an exception. You are Ilocano.…” He roared good-naturedly.

Dean Lopez was short, but he made up for his lack of stature with a brusqueness in manner and speech. He was supposed to be an authority on English literature, too, but his diction was coarse and his speech full of clichés. In the two years that Tony had served him before going abroad, he knew that the dean was displeased with his writing popular articles for the magazines. Now the subject came up again: “You’ve got to make up your mind now, whether you want to be a pulp writer or a scholar.”

He had wanted to disagree, but he did not want to fall into the rut of an argument or antagonize his true benefactor. They were both Ilocanos — that was the finality to consider. The dean had, in fact, filled his faculty with Ilocanos so he would perhaps be assured of obedience and the comforting sense that none of his hirelings would ever revolt or intrigue against him.

Tony appreciated Dean Lopez’s interests in his welfare, but he knew that someday the dean would want to collect. The old man would not ask for a case of beer, as he often did with the graduate students, nor would he ask for something as vulgar as a loan. It would have to be in kind, in loyalty — unquestioning fealty.

And loyalty, gratitude could take on many subtle forms in the university. It would mean speaking in favor of Lopez when the dean was discussed, as he always was in the faculty coffee sessions. It would mean putting in a good word for him when he was lampooned by the graduate students who had grown too big for the dean’s bullying. It would mean a line or two of flattery in articles on the university or on the disciplines or research projects the dean championed or sponsored. Wasn’t he an expert in linguistics? Wasn’t he the only authority on Ilocano culture and the Ilocano migration? There could be no work on these subjects without mentioning him in the introduction, without having him copiously represented in the bibliography and footnotes. He must now help sustain the myth that Dean Lopez was the scholar who had studied the Ilocanos more than any other man, a myth that had disintegrated before his very eyes long ago but which he had no choice but to recognize, to nurture. This myth was one of those mysterious and inexplicable assertions that made the university a vast riddle. He came upon the myth in Boston, when he went to the Widener Library looking for materials on the Ilocano migration and the Philippine Revolution. Sure enough, he came upon Dean Lopez’s “immortal book,” An Examination of the Symbolic Pattern of the Ilocano Language. But beside the book was an American scholar’s manuscript, ten years older than Dean Lopez’s. He took them both and started reading. The discovery was complete; the myth was built on sordid plagiarism.

He recalled how the graduate assistants in Dean Lopez’s department had grumbled when the dean collated their papers and affixed his name to their collective work. That was it — that was scholarship at the university. But while he loathed it, he couldn’t quite bring himself to hate the old man; it was he, after all, who had sent him to America and the beginning of wisdom.

America — and again there flashed in his mind that continent laved by ozone and smog; in his mind’s eye flashed the vast reaches of its green timberlands and frothy oceans, its still vaster space where the soul could wander and search. And so it happened in that wide and tumultuous land, to him who was lonely — this one honest moment of self-scrutiny and self-seeking. Sometimes you look at yourself in the mirror and wonder why that nose looks as it does, or those eyes — what is behind them, what depths can they reach? Your flesh, your skin, your lips — you know the face you behold is not yours alone but is already something that belongs to those who love it, to your family and all those who esteem you. But a person is more than a face or a bundle of nerves and a spigot of blood; a person is more than talking and feeling and being sensitive to the changes in the weather, to the opinions of people. A person is part of a clan, a race. And knowing this, you wonder where you came from and who preceded you; you wonder if you are strong, as you know those who lived before you were strong, and then you realize that there is a durable thread that ties you to a past you did not create but which created you. Then you know you have to be sure who you are, and if you are not sure or if you do not know, you have to go back to those who hold the secret to your past. And the search may not be fruitful. From this moment of awareness there is nothing more frustrating than the belief that you have been meaningless. A man who knows himself can live with his imperfections; he knows instinctively that he is part of a wave that started from great, unnavigable expanses.

There was such a wave and a man who was a part of that wave. And this man, this grandfather who was part of that wave, was the personification of courage and intellect, because it was he who brought all of the Samsons from the ravaged hills of the Ilocos to the new land — to Pangasinan. Someday he would go to the old country to find out more about him. To Carmen he had confided: I’ll come across my grandfather’s name in the things he did. She had, in turn, told him bluntly, this Carmen who was a rich man’s daughter, this Carmen who squandered dollars on a sports car, clothes, and beauty aids that had all grown scarce in Manila: “ Esto , you’ll end up thinking you are so good you can do no wrong. There are no supermen in this world, Tony, except in comic books. Look at what they did to the supermen in Germany. The Americans transformed them into peddlers and shopkeepers. And the Ilocanos — you think they can be supermen? Wait till you see Papa — there’s the superman for you. He can influence almost everyone — labor leaders, politicians, good-for-nothing daughters, and, I have a feeling, even errant teachers.”