Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

“Ah, Tony,” Don Manuel looked up from a batch of papers beside his soup. “I thought you wouldn’t return tonight. Remind me to show you something tomorrow.”

“There wasn’t much to do in the old hometown, Papa.” He had lied about the trip and said that he would stand as sponsor at a baptism. “I think I wasted my time. You know how baptisms are.”

Mrs. Villa, her hair done up in pins, her flabby face oily with cleansing cream, nudged her husband. “Better tell Tony that, with the factory almost finished, there’s got to be something social about it. A big party. I’ll think up one. And this means that there will be more work for him. And the opening celebration — that’s the most important thing. Let’s get the President and the First Lady.”

“I think that’s your department, Tony,” Don Manuel said. “Tomorrow we will have the last transformer installed and then in the afternoon we hope to have a trial run of all units. I leave it all to you — the plans for the opening, all the ballyhoo you can cook up.”

“The plans will be tentative, Papa …”

“It’s all yours as long as you show me your plans tomorrow and we can talk them over.”

Tony idled through the meal, and when it was over he rushed back to the room and took a warm shower. The shower should have relaxed him, but it didn’t. If Carmen were only here now, perhaps she would understand and be sympathetic, tell him to do what was right.

He tried once more to attend to the manuscripts on which he had been working, but the words would not take shape, and the cohesion that would string his thoughts in an orderly fashion just would not come. The notes on the migration to Mindanao, for instance, did not jell and he found himself repeating the same tired phrases about the courage of the Ilocanos, their adventurous nature and their capacity to retain their identity even when they were surrounded by a polyglot of Muslim and Visayan farmers.

He went to bed with a detective story, but that was useless, too. He was already asleep when Carmen switched on the chandelier, which flooded the room with its bright, pinkish glow.

“Where have you been?” he asked, blinking in the light. He glanced at the clock near the bed. It was two o’clock in the morning.

“Stop it,” she said hotly. “Do you have to know everything I do, examine everything I tell you to see if I’m lying? I’ve been with Ben. He had to take me to the rehearsal because you weren’t in — you were in that hick town of yours.”

He rose and found his slippers. He walked to her. “I’m not cross-examining you. I just want to know where you have been. I’m your husband, am I not?”

There was no belligerence in his voice and he laid a hand softly on her shoulders. She shook the hand off and faced him. “I have to be frank with you, Tony,” she said, frowning. “You know damn well I’ve a life to live, too, and I’m not to be cooped up here. I have to have interests. If they keep me out the whole night, you have to be understanding. I understood you enough to have gone with you to look up your crummy ancestors.”

Her manner defied explanation. It annoyed him but only for an instant, because he had something much more important to tell her.

He held her and looked into her eyes and said, “Baby, listen now. I meant to tell you this earlier, but I wasn’t sure. I’m sure now because … well, I have been there.”

“You are talking in riddles,” she said, unmindful of what he was saying. She took off her earrings and laid them on the dresser, then started undressing.

“This is important, baby.”

“All right,” she said, unbuttoning her dress with a hint of annoyance. “Is it something you have already done or something you are planning to do?”

“It has been done.…”

“Water under the bridge. Esto , if it’s done, then what’s the use telling me about it?”

“This is important — this thing I have to tell you. Listen, there was something in the past that I never told you. Seven years ago, before we met, when I was just a mere graduate assistant at the university, there was a girl …”

Carmen didn’t even look up. She had started brushing her hair.

“This doesn’t interest you?” he said.

“Of course it does, darling,” she said. “Everything you do interests me. Now go on with your delightful little story. Esto , I was beginning to think you had lived a puritanical life.”

“This girl, you must understand— I didn’t even know you then. And I didn’t expect it to happen, either.…”

“Those are famous last words.”

“It’s the truth. But that isn’t as bad as the fact that this girl is my cousin.”

Carmen turned to him and laughed merrily. “You need not feel so guilty about it, honey. It’s done all the time. Have you met Nora Lardizabal? Well, she’s married to her first cousin. Oye , you told me once about this being done by the hacenderos in your part of the country.… Well, it just happens that Nora’s parents are sugar planters. She isn’t a social outcast. She is very respectable.”

“You don’t understand, baby,” he said, shaking his head. “You don’t understand at all.”

“But I do, honey.”

“Would you still be smug if I told you there’s a child?”

She bolted up.

“There’s a boy,” he said, as if he were again at the confessional, and the confession was a growing flame in his throat. He waited for her to speak, but she did not. She merely looked at him, the beginning of a smirk playing on her face. Then she sat back and was silent.

“You don’t even want to know what happened? You don’t care about children and this particular child, my child?”

“Is there anything you want me to say — or do?”

“You can be angry with me, you can do something,” he said in quiet desperation. “After all, I had gone to Rosales to see for myself. It is true, honey. I saw Emy again and this child — this son of mine.”

“Well, can you change that?” she asked with hint of impatience. “If it’s your son, well, let him be your son. You are not going to turn away from him, are you?”

“No,” he said, amazed at her indifference.

“I’m not angry,” she said with a yawn, “and I’m sleepy now. Maybe we can talk more about it in the morning.”

He let it go at that, but, somehow, he could not quite banish the thought that Carmen did not care about his son, about children, or even about him. She had sounded so uninvolved and there was something about her attitude that now recalled to him the girl he had met in Washington, the young dreamy-eyed girl who was warm, not this woman who was now with him. Or had she simply camouflaged her feelings so well that he was unable to recognize them? Could there be some depth in her that he could not reach? He was telling her about his son; he was being truthful to her; he was conceding to her his fallibility, and all she did was say that she was sleepy. Her attitude baffled him. Still, Carmen was human — not a cold, unfeeling hunk of stone.

Much later, when she was quietly snoring, he watched her, the softness of her features, the easy peace upon her face.

Somewhere in the nameless reaches of the night a cock crowed. It would soon be morning and that morning would be unwanted. The sky would still be the same cerulean blue and the wind wandering among the agoho pines in the garden would still be the same wind that cooled Antipolo and all the ancient rooms he had stayed in. But one great change had, at last, caught up with him, and it was not the kind of change he wanted. During those bleak years that he was in college, during those days when he had but one pair of army boots, and pan de sal with margarine for lunch, he had nourished in the quiet core of his mind a dream of peace and abundance. The dream did not include a girl like Carmen or a job such as the one her father had given him, a job writing anemic press releases. Carmen’s aspirations were not his. If he had understood this before, the knowledge would have helped him and he would have been able to look at her, her father, and the whole Villa clan in a less opaque perspective. Almost his whole life he had lived in the gravest of want, amid the most vicious uncertainties. It was different with Carmen. Her aspirations were directed toward people and objects that could be possessed. How happy she had been to know that she could tell him to do things, that she was listened to and believed, that she was desired and loved. These were the measure of her needs.