Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

His throat was parched and his voice, which he heard only dimly, rasped, “You are so beautiful!” And as he thought of this and lived it all over again, the welcome and the abandon, sin no longer was sin but fulfillment.

“We will get married soon,” he said. “Even if we have to elope. I can’t stand it — meeting you like this, missing you and unable to do anything.”

Creases appeared quickly on her brow as she pouted. “My folks, Tony, you have to meet them. I’ve told them about us.”

“Everything?”

“Don’t be a fool,” she said, smiling.

* Hacendero: A landlord or owner of a hacienda or big tract of land.

They agreed to meet at Boie’s again at three. He toyed with a cup of coffee without cream and sugar — a sophistication he had acquired in Cambridge — and wished that the ordeal would soon be over. He knew he would meet Carmen’s parents someday, but in the past this expectation had not bothered him or filled him with foreboding as it did now, with the meeting so near.

It would have been vastly simpler if her parents were ordinary people and not mestizos. In the beginning, his awareness of this fact had been conveniently ignored, only to be resuscitated now that he was home. But before a host of equally depressing images could shape in his mind, Carmen arrived. She was prompt and Tony had not finished his cup.

She refused to sit down — no, they must leave right away. Her mother was home at the moment, and Don Manuel would be home before five — he was scheduled to play a round of golf before sunset. They sailed out, Carmen filled with banter, Tony uneasy and serious, into the sparkling sunlight.

Her Thunderbird, which had arrived with them on the ship, had been unloaded and serviced and was parked at the riverside lot. “The traffic is awful,” she said as they got into the low-slung thing, flaming red and a beauty among the old cars parked alongside it. “It’s like learning how to drive again.”

In a while they were free from the knot of traffic and the car hummed evenly on the asphalt. She had always been a careful driver and she was more so now because her car was new. There was no disconcerting shift of gears, no jerky stops. As the coupe hummed up the Santa Mesa incline, she placed a hand on his thigh.

“ Oye , remember now,” she said with a slight, knowing pressure, “Mama always goes by first impressions. It’s not that what she thinks matters. But, you see, she is my mother and yours, too, now. You may just as well get used to that fact. My family isn’t so bad, Tony, not half as bad as some people may have already made you think.”

He had not been attentive to her chatter, for he had been engrossed in what was ahead, in the scene that would probably be created, and he did not realize that, at last, a cool wind had swooped down upon them, clean and fresh, now that they had risen above the level of Manila and ascended the hilly suburb.

“Yes,” Carmen repeated with emphasis. “We aren’t the monsters some people think.”

“Who said that?” Tony asked, moving closer to her. The drift of her talk caught up with him.

She said seriously, “We are always supposed to have more malice and wickedness simply because we have money. That’s the proletarian way of thinking, isn’t it?”

“Don’t be too free with such words,” he chided. “This isn’t Washington anymore.”

Her hand went back to the wheel and she turned onto a road that branched from the wide street. Both sides of it were flanked by tall and leafy acacias that curtained the sun from the houses. They were all surrounded with high stone fences, with gates of wrought iron, and some even boasted guard houses. No jeepneys blundered into this street.

“Here we are,” Carmen sighed. They had stopped before a massive iron gate that stood at the end of a high adobe wall. Carmen blew the horn once and a servant ran up the driveway and opened the gate.

It was the first time he would see her home and his future in-laws — if they would accept him as a son. They would subject him to scrutiny and ask, perhaps, who is this servant that Carmen brings home? Is he after the money of the Villas or is he simply a lonely student to whom Carmen took a fancy while in Washington?

It was neither; he was here because it was the honorable thing to do, and besides, there was no sense in arguing with Carmen, who always had her way. She got out of her car below the wide sweep of the creamy marquee. The stairway was black Italian marble. From there Carmen led him into the wide hall, with its parquet floor. The hugeness of the house was now evident. The lamps were all huge and the sunburst at one end of the hall was massive; the hall was amply stocked with heavy, cream-colored upholstered chairs, and it had none of the antique and bejuco *furniture that many of the elegant houses he remembered had. In almost every panel, on every table or gleaming lattice, there was some memento of a country the Villas had visited: a Swiss cuckoo clock, Scandinavian earthenware, Venetian glass, African carvings, and even an Ifugao god from the Mountain Province — Tony recognized it immediately — in one corner of the room.

A maid in white appeared at one of the doors that opened to the hall and Carmen asked where her mother was. Holding Tony’s hand, she led him to the terrace and, cutting through a break in the hedge, they went down to the garden, an invigorating flood of Bermuda grass.

Tony took one of the iron garden chairs and gazed at the scene — the tile roof, the grand sweep of the rear wing of the house — while Carmen called, “Julia, Julia!” and when the maid appeared again ordered her to bring cold drinks and cookies.

“This damned heat,” Carmen said. “I can feel it again — the nausea. It’s back. The sooner I get over this, the better. For a full week now, ever since we arrived. Tony, I miss spring most. And here we are, in midsummer. We should have stayed in San Francisco until June.”

“Please,” Tony sounded a little peeved. “Let’s not go into that again. I’ve obligations, you know that. I have to be here before the school prospectus is made. My classes …”

“Esto, your classes,” Carmen said hotly. “And look at me. It’s been my death and God knows how long it will last.”

Tony was sympathetic. “It won’t be long, baby. My sister, when she had her first baby, she said the feeling lasted only until the third month.”

“My God,” Carmen said. “Just hope that I won’t feel this rotten at our wedding, Tony.”

He suppressed a desire to laugh at what was now a ridiculous situation. Here he was in her house to ask for her hand in marriage and he was already assured of fatherhood. Briefly, in his mind’s eye, he saw again her apartment in Washington, the tap that pelted like thunder in the dead of night, the wide handsome bed that squeaked.

With a sense of discovery, he also recalled the ulog of the Bontoc Igorots, which he had visited in one of his excursions to the north years before, remembered the smell of pine splinters burning in the chill dark, the young Igorot girls huddled around the flame and the frisky youths talking with them quietly. The ulog was not big; it was no more than a thatched granary sitting on a shelf overlooking a creek, and that evening it seemed even smaller. In the morning, when he revisited with his guide, he saw its dim interior — the cold ashes in the hearth at one end of the hut, the flat broad stones that were laid in some sort of mosaic as a floor, and the years of soot that clung to the walls and covered the floor, marking all those who visited it with a badge of black just as his khaki had already been marked. The ulog where the Bontoc youths met for trial marriage had one entrance and no window at all, but even in the dim light he could see it shorn of the exotic sensuality that had pervaded it the evening before.