Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

“You’ll see that the names of the priest and his secretary who wrote these down are on the first page,” the priest told him, “What else do you know about your grandfather?”

“He was a learned man,” Tony repeated with emphasis, “and he wrote in Latin as if the language were his.”

“We will see,” the priest said, rubbing his hands. “There’s another batch of ledgers here.” He stopped and opened the lowest panel. “These are records of jobs, important decisions, some diaries.…” He held the ledger to his face, then turned thoughtfully to the young man. “What was his name again?”

“Eustaquio Samson.”

“I once saw a manuscript in Latin, a philosophical one, written by a Eustaquio. It should be somewhere here.” His pudgy fingers went through the ledgers, then he brought it out — a tattered black book. The priest glancing at the cover, read aloud: “Eustaquio Salvador.”

Tony knew the name vaguely. Salvador, Salvatero, Sabado — many family names in Cabugaw used to start with the letter S , a convenient arrangement initiated by the friars. By knowing a man’s family name it would be easy to deduce what town he came from.

Salvador!

Then it struck him with its full and magic force and he remembered how once his father had told him that their name was not really Samson. Clasping the battered book, his heart now a wildly pounding valve, Tony turned to his wife and cried, “This is it, baby! Written in his own hand!”

Carmen hedged closer: “It’s Salvador, not Samson.”

“But didn’t I tell you once that his real name was Salvador and that he had to change it because of a fight with the Spaniards?”

She laughed. “It’s an alias then. I wonder what the Spaniards did when they found out.”

“I wouldn’t know,” the priest said, handing the manuscript to her husband.

Tony read the title again. It was legibly written in block letters: Philosophia Vitae, Ab Eustaquio Salvador. “A Philosophy of Life,” he translated aloud and turned questioningly to the priest for confirmation.

He nodded. “You know Latin?”

“I had a year of it in college,” Tony said, “but that wasn’t enough.” He handed the book back to the priest. “Please read to me some lines.”

The priest moved toward the light and opened the book to its first page. He mumbled the phrases and then recited haltingly: “ Cum magna pretentione —it is with great pretension— est ut hunc librum scribere incipio — sed cum aliguis veginti unum annos tingit, est ilia temptatio desiderandi ad somnia ascribienda quae asperat …”

He paused and glanced at the author’s grandson. “Well, I must admit that his Latin was not bad.”

“What does it mean?” Carmen bent forward, trying to follow the reading.

The priest went back to the first phrase: “ Cum magna pretentione — It is with great pretensions that I start this book, but when one is twenty-one there is that temptation of wanting to record the dreams to which he aspires …”

The priest stopped again.

“Dreams,” Tony mused aloud and quoted the Spanish poet: “All of life is a dream and all those dreams are dreams …”

“Yes, yes,” the priest intoned dully, “but, you see, he apologizes for that. He was but twenty-one.”

“Please,” Tony repeated. “Do go on — one paragraph more.”

The priest opened the book to the pages he had left. “… quia veginti anno annis majorem aetatem finaliter attingit … for at the age of twenty-one he finally comes of age.” His drab fleshy face brightened up. “Listen to this now,” he enthused. “ Mundus viro no sperat. Eo tempus non habet — The world does not wait for a man. It has no time for him.” He returned the book to Tony and his voice was tinged with emotion: “He had the sensibility of a poet — and humility, too. This is the virtue of all those who create and who are great, no matter how obscure they may have been. Why, I believe that God, even in His greatness, was humble. Your forefather had this quality and more. He was restless, too, and now I know why he left Cabugaw.”

Tony flipped the pages of the book and his whole being flamed and the vacuity within him seemed suddenly filled with something burbling and glowing that lifted him beyond the common touch. “Now I leave you to your discovery,” the priest sounded remote behind him. “And, of course, you have to sleep here. I’ll have the cots prepared upstairs. Come up when you are sleepy.”

“Thank you, Padre,” he said happily without lifting his eyes from the engulfing maze, the fancy script, and the words he couldn’t read and understand. And, holding on to the ledger, he felt a kinship at last, tangible and alive, with this thing called the past. Maybe there is wisdom buried in this, or romance, or just a diurnal account of a young man’s fancy, his pride and his hurt. The transcription will not be important, he decided quickly. It was this solid memento that mattered, because it was the root on which he stood.

“You can ask him for it. It is but a scrap of paper that he has no use for anyway,” Carmen said.

He lifted the Coleman lamp, which had been left atop the wooden pedestal beside the cabinet. At the door the boy waited for them, his eyes heavy with sleep, and showed them to their room.

As they lay on two cots that had been brought together, they held hands — a soothing domestic habit — and were motionless but for their measured breathing. Beyond the heavy sill and sash shutters, which were flung to the remotest edge, the stars shone clear and tremulous in the cloudless sky. A silky breeze floated in, laden with the scent of the warm earth. A dog barked in the unknown recesses of the dark, and in the rotting eaves Tony heard the soft scurrying of mice and the snap of house lizards.

“It’s just like Washington,” she said after some time.

“Why Washington?” he asked, pressing her hand.

“The Library of Congress,” she said. “The first printed Bible. The American Constitution. They were all nicely framed and lighted in special containers, heated to keep out the frost and the humidity. It must have cost some money to install those devices …” He had taken her there because “when you are in Washington you just can’t miss the biggest library in the world,” and she had valiantly tried deciphering the scrawls.

“You are way off the track,” he said, divining her thoughts.

She turned on her cot and tweaked his nose. She smelled clean and, in the faint light of the other rooms, he could make out her face. “Oh, now, I’m not saying that we will have to go to so much expense trying to preserve your grandfather’s manuscripts.”

“What then?”

“But you can do it, maybe have an Augustinian friar in Manila transcribe it, and then, who knows, it may be an important document in literature — or ecclesiastical history.”

“That’s not funny,” he chided her.

“But I’m not trying to be funny,” Carmen said. “I’m merely carrying to a logical end what you have started. If you won’t have it translated, then at least we can bring it with us — not just the book, mind you, but all the other papers that were written in his hand: Oye , think what wonderful conversation pieces they will make!”

“Is that all you think of? Conversation pieces to show off to your illiterate friends and relatives?”

“Now it’s you who are being silly,” she reproached him. “We drove over horrible roads, ate in that filthy restaurant in Vigan, and now we are sleeping in this convent — on smelly cots. Five hundred kilometers — and the gas, I spent good money for it …”

The situation had suddenly become ridiculous and he did not know whether to laugh or to curse. But the feeling subsided quickly and gave way to his old understanding of the unchangeable dung heap that surrounded him. He brought to mind once more the American lady in her sixties on the boat crossing the Atlantic. He had met her on his way to Europe during his summer study tour. She was on an almost religious mission to a Sussex hamlet in England to seek the wellsprings of her ancestry, which were, she was told, still intact. A genealogical research agency had promised to do the job for a few dollars. “It’s dirt cheap,” she had said of the deal with the patent exuberance of an American who had accidentally stumbled upon a bargain. Tony recalled, too, the rapt crowds in the National Art Gallery in Washington, in the Louvre and the Prado, the hordes gaping at the old pictures, searching for beginnings in the cemeteries of art as if they were afraid to drift into the limbo of their own making, and these paintings, these revered pictures and stone images, were the anchors that would make them and the future secure. Their faces were all indistinct yet vaguely familiar, exuding as they did an enthusiasm and a longing. He had now struck an infallible identity with them, because he, too, had gone to great lengths to find but a book and a vanished name in a small town. And yet everything could have been simplified: a gilded museum, an efficient gravedigger with an encyclopedic memory — these were all that would have been necessary to find the clues to that unalterable pattern that he did not shape but which shaped him. And his wife was all this because she had the money and he … he had only the dream.