Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

What am I to do? He should have answered this upon meeting Carmen. But he had chosen to ignore this question, not because he did not want to find out if he were merely vacillating, but because in time, the question might resolve itself without much pain.

The next morning Tony rose before Carmen. He had many things to do. The stories he would write on the inauguration of the mill and on the party Mrs. Villa would give — these must be finished within the week. It was better that Carmen slept on. It would be torture to face her this morning and suffer the silent lash of her scorn.

Don Manuel was at the breakfast table very early, too, and on this particular morning seemed ebullient. “Tony, I have been waiting for you. I have something to tell you.”

He sat down before his father-in-law. The news must be good enough to warrant the glow on Don Manuel’s face.

Don Manuel’s portfolio was on the breakfast table. “I wanted to speak with you last night, but I didn’t want to spoil your sleep. You see, I like to think that I am a very considerate man. That is why I am starting the day right by making you think.”

Tony could not get the drift. “What is it, Papa?”

“Let me get this clear,” the older man said. The maid brought in his orange juice and he took a sip. “I am very glad for what you did in the Sunday Herald. I knew you tried your best and sometimes it’s really the intention that counts.”

“I’m glad you feel that way, Papa,” Tony said.

“What I am trying to say, Tony, is that I have my ways of persuasion, too. Now don’t get me wrong again, but, you see, I could have very well done that on my own.”

“What are you trying to say, Papa?”

“Am I being too abstract?” Don Manuel laughed. He unzippered the portfolio and brought out a canceled check. “Here,” he pushed the check across the glass top to him.

Tony looked at the check and read Godo’s signature on it. The sum was two thousand pesos.

“I thought you said this friend of yours could not be bought. Well, his price is two thousand,” Don Manuel said, smiling.

The coffee had no taste in Tony’s mouth. He laid the check back on the table.

“I don’t gloat, Tony,” the entrepreneur said. “But look—” he waved the check, “you see what my method can do.”

“It isn’t fair, Papa,” he cracked his knuckles. “You shouldn’t have drawn Godo into a situation like this in the first place.”

“That’s the point.” Don Manuel laughed with great triumph. “A man’s character comes out only in a crisis, when temptation is before him. We are all weaklings, son. No man is expected to be of steel — and even steel melts. There isn’t much choice for a man once he is born. There is no certainty except death. One has to live the best way he can. I believe that. Your friend apparently believes that, too. That’s why I don’t hold anything against him. I only wish he were made of sterner stuff.”

We are all weaklings. These words were now wedged deep in Tony’s mind. He was saddened yet at the same time angered that Godo had not been the heroic figure he had expected him to be. It was Godo alone who could have stood up to Don Manuel, it was he alone who could have shown that, at least, there was some essence of purity left in a country where filth overflowed not only in garbage dumps but also in the most aristocratic of appointments.

How long ago had it been when he had ceased thinking that, somehow, there must be an inner strength in himself? Now he looked back and wondered if it was not some miracle instead that had uprooted him from Rosales and blew him away to Antipolo, then across the ocean to America and Spain, and finally to Sta. Mesa.

Was it weakness? How pleasant even now was the memory of distant places, of Maple Street, the old brick house, the doorbell that had to be twisted so that it would ring, the screened door that kept out the summer flies, and good old Larry, wherever he was now.

Why did they stick together? Was it because they both had but a nominal faith in God, was it because he seldom went to church and Larry himself had never been inside a synagogue? It was Larry who helped to shape the dream, out there in that spartan room on Maple Street. Larry, with his ambition to go forth and wipe poverty and prejudice from the earth. But Tony had said: Let poverty be erased from my lot first. The dream had long since become real and he would never know the nagging damnation of insecurity again. But this newfound security was not what he wanted. It was self-justification that he had been chasing blindly. Was it not the flame that drew him, as flame draws a moth inexorably to that searing and most glorious death?

We are all weaklings, Don Manuel had said.

He was about to leave his office at noon when his secretary announced that his Manang Betty was waiting outside. He had not seen her for weeks and a twinge of guilt now bothered him. He had not visited her or brought her the usual things, canned food and a little money to help tide her over.

“You should come and see me more often, Manang,” he said, trying to be blithe when she came in, but he himself realized there was a lameness in his effort.

Her face was ashen and grave. “I have never come to you for help,” she said. “I’m not asking for help now, but this is something that we must share.”

She did not cry when she finally told him the news. She had long been beyond the rapacious reach of grief, and she told him what there was to tell with the casualness of a neighbor passing on the latest gossip. Only the tightness of her lips and the sorrow in her eyes showed the grief that she wanted to share.

The promise he had made to the old man flashed through his mind.

“He wanted to be buried beside Mother,” Tony said. “What did Manong Bert say?”

His brother-in-law did not know yet. A man had simply gone to the school where she taught and relayed the news to her. “What shall we do, Tony?” she asked in a squeaky, frightened voice. “I don’t know what I must do.”

“You must understand, Manang,” he said hesitantly. “Carmen — She never knew about Father. You know what I’m trying to say?”

Betty sat on the upholstered sofa beside his desk. How plain his sister looked, and now, in her grief, she wore that pinched, wasted mien of old maids. But she held her head up with dignity, this woman who had helped send him through college and to whom he would always be grateful. “I know, I know,” she said, almost in a moan. “You don’t have to tell me that. The children … the lies I had to tell. Will Father ever forgive us?”

He could not answer. After a while, he assured her that their father would be buried with proper Christian rites, and that someday, perhaps, the two of them would be able to go to the penitentiary and get the old man’s remains and transfer them to Rosales, to a plot beside their mother’s grave, just as the old man had desired.

Much later, after Betty had gone, he pondered the finality of what he had done, and in his mind intruded the specter of dissecting rooms, of his father’s body ready to be butchered by unfeeling, unknowing hands. He wanted to banish the thought, but it persisted. Henceforth, he would have to live with it for as long as he was Antonio Samson.

On his way home that evening he passed the church where Carmen and he were married. It was open and he went in. The scent of calla lilies on the altar wafted around him. He had visited scores of churches in Europe, particularly in Spain, and had planted candles in his mother’s memory in the cathedral in Barcelona, but he had never believed in the potency of prayer. Still, there were tears in his eyes when he whispered, “Father, please forgive me.”