Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

Many of the bushes were still in the churchyard, in the cemetery, and along the streets when Tony left Rosales. Their flowering marked the coming of the rains, the advent of the planting season, and the town fiesta. Tony always associated the town fiesta with rain because it was held in June — on the feast day of San Antonio de Padua — and June was always a rainy month. He liked the fiesta, with its rice-planting and flooded paddies; it was the paddies, of all the things he had left behind, that he remembered best, the brown mud, the growing rice, the frogs and the freshwater crabs, and the smell of earth touched by rain. But the paddies also brought to mind things that had nothing to do with grain and growth — his father, an embittered rebel, and his grandfather, who took a whole clan from the wretched narrowness and persecution of the Ilocos to the broad plains of Rosales, who joined the revolution and fell in some nameless battlefield.

Homecoming could be pleasant if it did not stir, as it did now, an ancient sorrow and that sense of utter inability to undo what had been done. When he stepped down from the air-conditioned coach in Paniqui an urge to rush back to the train or catch the next bus to Manila took hold of him. The helplessness was now compounded with a sense of guilt.

The train connection was waiting on the tracks beyond the cement platform, a battered diesel trolley with peeling orange paint, the black hump of its exhaust shaking and spewing thin wisps of gray smoke.

Tony went to it. The day was unusually humid and the fumes from the engine stung his nostrils. The wooden benches were wobbly and decrepit. Bamboo baskets, most of them empty, a few still filled with greens and bars of soap, lay on the well-scuffed wooden floor. Farm women talked in quiet tones around him. Their faces were dark with sun and work, and he could tell at a glance that they were homely, with sagging breasts and horned hands. They smoked cheap, hand-rolled tobacco-leaf cigars, and the smoke from their constant puffing and their earthy smell were all around him.

In a while the train started. It quavered along the rails, and as its whistle blew, choked and discordant, a sense of urgency filled him. He was going to Rosales after seven years, years that seemed no longer than a week or a month. In that time he had established himself in a precinct much more comfortable and secure than he had ever dreamed of. There, in that new domain, the past could not reach out and claim him. But it did hound him. How could he ever escape the tenacious grasp of conscience? He glanced about him and saw again the tired, deathless face of endurance of the common people. Day as bright as glass lay on the fields. Years ago, when he left Rosales, he was on this train and beside him was a girl named Emy, barely eighteen. It was April and the sun was a brown flood upon the land. She was beside him, fragrant of skin and breath. Years ago … and now he was returning to Cabugawan, to Emy, and to an uncertainty.

The fields that slipped by were a shimmering monotony. The trolley picked up speed, slid noisily along the rails, and the wind that whipped into the coach blew the dust up from the wooden floor. Every so often he could predict the approach of a whistle stop, for the trolley would screech and the rhythm of its engine would diminish. Then they would be upon the small sheds marked by rusting steel posts with painted names.

They drew into the town of Nampicuan, and beyond it loomed a bald, cogon-covered hill. Cuyapo was next, and after the foothills through whose shallow valleys the trolley sang, he finally saw the plain. At right rose the hump of Balungao Mountain, and at left Rosales declared itself — a patchwork of tin rooftops, rice mills framed in the white heat, and the shapeless houses of all small towns.

The trip from Paniqui took barely an hour, but it seemed less. I’m going to my son — he turned the words over in his mind — my son, for it was really to his son he was going, and Emy, whose stoic silence he could not fully understand even now. My son — he savored the words again, hoping they would pry from him some new or unusual response, an identifying sentiment perhaps. But no such feeling was evoked, because he had not seen the boy, he had not watched him grow or smelled his sweet baby breath.

My son — and a huge wave of remorse swept over him again, a living sadness reminding him that, maybe, it was not too late to learn to love this child who was his very own. How would the boy receive him? Would the boy rush up to him to be swept up in his arms? Now it was no longer sadness that bridled him but a feeling that was almost fear. He did not want to be hated, not even by a boy who was, after all, no common lad — and who was Emy’s, too.

He went down to the broad cement platform. The station had not changed — it was the same old stone building with galvanized iron roof painted dirty cream. The chicken fence still enclosed a yard planted to rows of gumamela *and papaya that never bore fruit. He went to the ticket window and asked the clerk when the train would start back for Manila. The clerk peered at him through cracked bifocals. The train would leave at three in the afternoon.

In the palisaded yard at the other end of the platform he boarded a carretela. The rig driver took him across the bridge and through the mounds of rice husks that the mills had spewed out. Then they were in the town, the old skinny mare jogging evenly.

How compact the town appeared — and how small. He saw it once more: the municipal building surrounded by banaba †trees, the tin roof shining in the sun. It was, of course, not the building that he knew when he was a boy — not the wooden edifice his father and his friends had burned in an evening of senseless, futile fury. The ruins had been quickly cleared away, a new building of stone had been erected, and the saplings that were planted had become these trees, these banaba with their purple blossoms, these broad acacia, and these agoho that soared as gracefully as the cypress.

But beyond the municipio , †in the wide vacant yard, the ruins of the Apo ’s house still stood, the broken brick walls covered with cadena de armor. ‡No one had cleared the wide yard, and it was completely shrouded with weeds. The Rich Man’s relatives had never visited Rosales, not after what had happened, and it was just as well that the old brick mansion was never rebuilt, for now these very ruins were here to speak a stern language, a warning and a vicious reminder of a past that could be conjured still. What an arrangement it was then — the municipal building, the Rich Man’s house, the whitewashed monument of Rizal, the stone schoolhouse, and the Catholic church. These were the ageless constructions that made up the Filipino plaza. Now the hacendero ’s mansion was gone. What would disappear next and what unknown force would demolish the next marker in this ancient grouping?

He did not stay long. His destination was beyond — Cabugawan, the sitio his grandfather founded, the corner wherein his father had raised him and told him of other places, of the Ilocos and the frothy sea and of the town of Cabugaw where they all came from. It was after this town in the far-off Ilocos, this ancestral home, that Cabugawan was named. The first settlers had not intended to stop here. They had hoped to cross the Cordillera range to Cagayan Valley, but in Rosales they came across these cogon wastes and still-virgin forest, so they unhitched their bull-carts, unloaded the sagat §posts of the houses they had uprooted in the Ilocos, and decided to try their luck in Rosales. The land was kind and the creek that ran through Cabugawan seldom ran dry. In time more Ilocanos came to Rosales. At first they came to help in the cutting of the grain and to glean the already harvested fields, but there was plenty of room for those who wanted to work, and so they lingered to build their own homes and risk the future. Like his grandfather, they did not reckon with the greed of the ilustrados. In another generation the settlers had become tenants. The families broke up. Some continued the long march to Cagayan Valley, others dared to cross the sea to the malarial jungles of Mindanao, still others were herded like cattle into cargo ships that took them to the pineapple and sugar plantations of Hawaii and the orange groves of California. But wherever they went they brought with them their traditional industry, thrift, and perseverance, and wherever they sank their posts their communities grew, linking them all with that clannishness they themselves could not explain. Those who stayed behind in Cabugawan were the least fortunate. They were born as tenants and they would die as such, unless they managed to get a little schooling and, with this initial strength, escape the lethargy of Cabugawan, to strike out for the uncertainty of tedious jobs in Manila, to live in dingy accesorias , such as those that cluttered Antipolo.