Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

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.