Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

She read the note twice, then she asked for a pen and a pad. The nurse took her to the doctor’s table and she sat down and wrote with deliberation: “I know now why this happened and I also know what else will happen soon. I will lose my sense of smell, and after that, my sense of touch. Then I will lose my sight, I will be alive but only because I will still be breathing. I realize there is no cure for what ails me.”

She paused and wondered if she should put down the monstrous thought: I wish I were dead! But it was better not to state it. She turned to her dear father, who waited patiently before her, and the bleary eyes that met her gaze were beseeching. She could see the same troubled expression on her mother’s face and she wondered how deeply worried she was about her. Her mother had always seemed too detached from human travail; her tragedies were parties that did not turn out dazzling enough, the extra folds of fat on her stomach, thighs, and arms that she could not get rid of. Once, Carmen herself was nagged by the thought that she, too, would develop into the tub of lard that her mother was. Now, both her parents seemed like two ordinary people — familiar, yes, but without any special attachment to her, without any niche in her heart.

She handed the note to Dr. Clavecilla, and as the three started to read it, she wondered what they would do now that they knew what had truly ailed her all these years. If only — the thought crossed her mind briefly — if only they, too, could realize what was wrong with them!

It was not the visit that bothered Tony, because it was as inevitable as the genuflection of the faithful and was the first thing to do once he was home. The visit was more than a duty. But he also knew that it was just a gesture; he had been honest with himself and what he was going to see was an old man who had been given up, forgotten, and denied. It appalled him, of course, to think of his father this way, yet there was no denying the reality; the past was, after all, not a pool of total darkness but a clear spring. In it he often saw his reflection, and what he saw sometimes frightened him. To recall those incidents that had battered the soul was like flagellating oneself and yielding to phantoms. There was, after all, warmth and friendship in this world, and all the niggling sins committed against him and his father might now be ignored. There were alternatives open to those who recognized them. A man could still fashion his life to his specifications. As for the poor, there would always be a lot of them, in varying degrees of destitution and corruption.

The stone highway to the penitentiary was flanked by flat, brown fields with huge blobs of black, for at this time of year the straw from last year’s harvest that had been left in the fields was burned, and the patches of black were thickest where grain had been most abundant the previous year. It was much easier to plow the soil when there was no straw to obstruct the plowshare. Also, the farmer considered the ashes fertilizer. In the distance, from the speeding bus, he could make out the dried water holes near the irrigation ditches. The fields were no different from those in Rosales, where he had hunted for frogs in the fissures of the earth, baked and cracked by the sun. In the late afternoons he brought home a string of frogs, and his mother always said he would not starve anywhere in the world because he knew how to look for food. But Rosales and its fields and Cabugawan where he was born were but a memory now, he had left the town forever, and the old house and the farm were no longer there.

And yet, the thought of going back was always in his mind; it stirred the old aches, brought back to the inner eye the images of dew-washed mornings and fields lavished with green after the first rain of May; now came a loneliness that gnawed at the heart and made Antipolo and all the remembered places — Cambridge and Barcelona — alien and spiritless. He loved his beginnings, but the boy was no more, for he had been vanquished by the man.

It was this same man who felt superior to his father; it was a sinful thought, but Tony felt he could live contentedly, even smugly, with his limitations. He knew, however, that his father was his moral superior, and as a son, he could never aspire to the heroism the old man had shown.

He had regarded his father with awe and even fear in his younger days — a fear that pushed between them a silence that was torn away only after his father went to prison. He recoiled with dread and self-pity every time he remembered how he had gone to the Rich Man’s house for the first time. One of his grade school classmates was the Rich Man’s son. There was no school that afternoon, for it was the start of the Christmas season, and they had spent the whole morning cleaning their classroom and setting up a Christmas tree of agoho pine that they had cut from the Rich Man’s yard. They were friends — the Rich Man’s son and he. They ate in the Rich Man’s kitchen and, after lunch, played in the dark caverns of the bodega where sacks of grain were stored, piled high to the very rafters. He had never before seen so much grain all in one place, and the abundance had overwhelmed him. When he returned home late that afternoon, he gushed about what he had seen, and then mentioned that he had eaten in the Rich Man’s kitchen. He had never seen his father angry before; the old man did not talk much but neither did he seem to be remiss in his affection. But now his father dragged him down the house to the yard and shoved him to the sled. He lay still, his feet dangling on one end, his stomach pressed to the bamboo floor of the sled. The first lash of the horsewhip cut across his back with a sharp, cruel pain, followed by another and still another until it didn’t hurt any more. His mother had cried helplessly, “Kill him, kill him, your own flesh and blood, kill him if you cannot kill your mortal enemy.”

It took more than a month for the wounds to heal, and during all this time that he could not lie on his back, he learned to sleep lying on his stomach. When the wounds finally healed, his mother often looked at them and broke into tears again and again.

Not once, however, did he see a sign that the old man was sorry; not once — and it was only years afterward that he realized why his father had whipped him. Then he understood the tortured emotions that had propelled his father to anger and violence. Then, too, were all his suspicions about his father’s incapacity for warmth and understanding dispelled.

The last time he saw the old man seemed ages ago, but the pain that past meetings evoked always seemed raw. When he and his sister first moved to Manila from Rosales after his mother had died, he visited his father frequently — once a week, if he had fare money. Those occasions were planned, and because of the poor provisions of the inmates he always brought something — a new handkerchief, a cake of soap, a piece of fried fish or pie — anything that would improve his life and cheer him up. It was Tony who talked then, recounting freely what was happening to him, his scholarship and the future spread out at his feet, waiting to be reaped. If the conversation turned to Rosales at all, it was with some proprietary feeling and nostalgia that he spoke of home; they would all go back someday and live again among friends and relatives. But soon his visits to Muntinlupa became less frequent, and each had to be prefaced with embarrassed explanations that were, of course, true. After all, Muntinlupa was far from Manila. There was work in the university and a scholarship that had to be maintained by diligence; he was tired, and when Sunday came he usually slept the whole day and rested for the grind that followed week after week. And then, between the uneasy silences, it was the old man who talked, not about life in prison but about what Rosales could have been, what things they could have possessed.