Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

“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 him 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.