Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

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.

“It is useless, Lily,” I said grimly.

I was about to rise, but she pushed me down. “You must concentrate,” she said. “Think of nothing else but me, and what I’ll give you.”

I lay on my back again, alive to the smell of cologne, the chatter of people in the passageways. Her expert hands could do nothing.

Then she bent over. I closed my eyes and surrendered — all of me in her mouth, all of me waiting, and then, after a while, she paused and when I opened my eyes, she was gazing at me happily. “I told you I could do it,” she said and rose. I had not been sure of what she was doing until she had mounted me, letting it slide neatly into place, then she gripped it, moistly, warmly, and started to gyrate.

“This is called ‘the helicopter,’ Pepe,” she said exultantly.

* Wen, Manong: wen —“yes” in Ilocano dialect; Manong —form of address to an older person.

† Paki: Please.

‡ Crame: Camp Crame; Philippine army base.

I left the Colonial, grateful to Lily for restoring my manhood and at the same time saddened by the knowledge that she had fallen down the abyss. I had said earlier only a slight nudge would be her undoing. I did not blame her.

Looking back, I understood only too well how it had been with me as well, how shamefully craven I had been in my desires. I was convinced that it is the rich who should not compromise because they are strong, not we who are poor, who cannot be steadfast or unswerving when our needs cry for satisfaction.

I cursed myself then for not being made of ironwood or some such granite material so I would be able to withstand the hunger that always knotted my stomach, the gross temptations that had betrayed me. Yet I have known early enough that all of living is a compromise, this was what was pounded into me in Cabugawan, from Mother and my aunt, who never earned enough from all their labors. I knew this even after I had gone with Betsy to that fancy French restaurant, because I had to return to Tondo and to a larder that was ample only because I lived in the kumbento.

We compromise ourselves the day we are born. If we are looking for the original sin, there it is: our incapacity to live honestly with ourselves because we are human, because we are shackled by custom, by obligations, and we accept compromise only in the light of our individual conscience, answerable as we are only to ourselves.

This is a world not of black and white but of grays, and it is really in this huge gray geography where we act out our fates. I envy those who have chosen the black or the white, for, to them, they have simplified living. There are no more storms within them to be stilled, no more muddied choices; there is only one intractable way, clear and straight, and they cannot deviate from it.

Toto would not compromise, and if he had lived he would not have changed one bit. He would have come out of it more determined, more convinced not just of the inevitability or the necessity of his revolution, but of its righteousness. This is our hope and our curse because the righteousness exalts, and our curse because we would pursue it as Ka Lucio pursued it long after he, himself, had failed.

But I have learned from the fretfulness of older men, and what, after all, did I need in order to live? I brought back to mind those days that my stomach soured from its being filled with nothing but those abominable greens, and I knew that I could subsist on them forever, the days I saw nothing but the limits of Cabugawan, and within those confines I had wakened in the morning with wonder at the grass wet with dew, a sky swept clean. This feeling surged in me, I could do anything and God up there was smiling. Indeed, there was nothing for me to expiate in this miasma called Tondo, nothing in the world has changed but me. I had known what was beyond the stone highway and the railroad tracks. I had traversed not distance but depth, and when the discovery was over and revelation had come not as wisdom but as masochistic sorrow, there was still this me that longed not for more journeys or more sensual knowledge, but the pith, the marrow of living, why so many of us are mired in Tondo. This is, of course, no cabalistic question. I had known the answer way back, only now it must be made real.

I must no longer compromise.

Marcos, jail the young, jail all those who oppose your oligarchy and your grandiose plans. Imprison us, torture us, for by doing so you will swell our piteous ranks, you will temper us with the harshness of truth so that we will rise from the flames singed and wounded but, by God, infinitely more steadfast and strong.

Then, November. The rains no longer lash down as frequently as in the earlier months, but the alleys of the Barrio are still murky with puddles, and from under the houses and along the shallow canals the odor of putrefaction rises like an implacable curse. But November presages Christmas, and even before the middle of the month, the radios are already noisy with carols, so that while there is darkness all around, there is, somehow, the promise of light.

The Brotherhood had been very active, and Roger and his boys had drawn up a list of the poorest of our poor. They had started making the rounds of the offices in Santa Cruz and Binondo asking for gift pledges.

Even Tia Nena, now that Toto was no longer with us, had to think far ahead; this morning, she was aglow — not that absent-minded expression she had on her face sometimes, but a beatific smile that radiated warmth. She came to my room and started poking into the boxes that were piled in one corner, the Christmas lights that we would string in front of the church, the lanterns that folded that were to be dusted and hung in the lobby of the kumbento. She had been flitting about with this happy countenance the whole morning and it seemed as if she had gotten over the death of Toto.

She had found the colored lights, the sockets, and tested them. She sat on the stool opposite me, folding her gnarled, thin hands on her lap, her eyes squinting in the sunlight that poured down the alley into our room.

“Pepe, you have been here a long time. And you have done many things, made changes …”

“Not really, Tia,” I said, wondering what was in her mind.

“Well, you have. Padre Jesus is happy with the Brotherhood — the young people working together, their attendance in church, their activities.”

“It is nothing,” I said. “I just befriended them, that’s all.”