Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

“Well,” Don Manuel said suavely, grinning, “don’t just sit there, all of you, and pretend to be ignorant. What are we so secretive about?” He turned to the American and smiled wanly. “There’s really nothing to hide, Professor. But you see, my daughter, Mrs. Antonio Samson — how she likes using that name! — is at this moment indisposed. Hell, that’s one way of saying it. She is in the hospital now with a psychiatrist, whatever you call him. She is high-strung and emotional. She is going crazy. Is she to blame for the death of her husband? She thinks it was suicide. I insist that it wasn’t. Still, I know that boy and I have reason to think that it was so. And Carmen — my Carmen — do you know what she did? A month — one full month, thirty days — she did nothing but piece together the things that her husband had written and torn apart. A full month. And when it was ready she had the book published. She hadn’t worked that hard before and with such dedication — never before. Why then should a young man commit suicide if his wife loved him so? God, people quarrel. Mama, how many times do we quarrel in a day?”

“Papa, please,” Mrs. Villa placed another restraining hand on Don Manuel’s arm.

“It’s all right, Mama. Everyone is talking about us anyway.”

“I’m very sorry, sir,” Larry said, almost choking on the words.

“I don’t know what made him do it. Was it an accident? I can’t believe that one hundred percent. How am I to know? When a person dies, he takes with him all his secrets. He had freedom, that Tony. That’s the most important thing, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what you mean by freedom, sir,” Larry said. He tried to smile, but he just could not make himself do it.

“Freedom,” Don Manuel said, taking another glass of scotch and raising it to his lips, “is there more than one kind?”

He hated having to explain himself, but he was cornered. “Well, sir,” he said cautiously, “the word takes on other meanings when spoken by other groups.”

“Ah,” Don Manuel sighed, “you are like Tony, too damned technical and precise. When a man can wander to great heights — that’s what I call freedom. Tony called it mobility.”

“Well, sir,” Lawrence Bitfogel said calmly, “that is a pretty good definition. But freedom, the one I’m thinking of now, is in the mind more than anywhere else. It enables one to dream. And there’s no ceiling to those dreams.”

It was almost midnight when the party broke up. They had talked of many things — agriculture, the national economy, Europe, and the Common Market. On the way home, Ben de Jesus was quite excited.

“Look,” he said as they slid down the highway to Santa Mesa Boulevard, “I don’t quite agree with you when you say that reform and development must start with the land. Why, you are voicing what some radicals and the Huks have been saying all along.”

“I am sorry if I gave that impression,” Larry said, trying to sound apologetic. He was weary and did not want to argue anymore. “That is just an opinion, really. It isn’t dogma. After all, I don’t know much about your agrarian conditions except what I have read and heard from people like Tony.”

“That’s the trouble,” Ben said. “I wish you would study the situation more. I told you I majored in farm management. I have a farm in Nueva Ecija and I know just how to make it produce more. I’m starting to mechanize it now. That’s the only way to make the farm productive. But the tenants, they know nothing about mechanization. They are impossible. It will take them centuries to learn the value of tractors and fertilizers. They are also thieves and they are ignorant — it’s useless teaching them new things.”

“I can’t comment on that,” Lawrence Bitfogel said. “But you must be sure of what you want the land for. And as for your tenants, if they don’t own the land, don’t expect them to make sacrifices. It never works, you know. Besides, the transition shouldn’t create dislocations. It isn’t easy to shift from agriculture to industry.”

“Talk about dislocations,” Ben said with a hint of impatience. “Do you know what the supposed intellectuals are trying to do? They are campaigning to have the tenant get the land at our expense — and they call it the Magsaysay Revolution. I call it robbery. The tenants don’t know how to work the land. They are so damned ignorant. What do tenants know about farming and efficient production? They have never gone to school to learn these. I know all these things.”

Ben’s anger petered out as they drove along the quiet streets. After a while of leaden silence, Ben spoke again, this time in a lighter vein. “Look, Dr. Bitfogel, why don’t you drop in at the house? There’s a cafe-espresso set that I bought in Italy last year. I’d like you to have some really good coffee.”

Bitfogel wanted desperately to return to his room and shake off the tedium and useless talk to which he had been exposed all evening. “I don’t want to impose on you. It’s so late and—”

“It won’t take long,” Ben said, and before Larry could say anything else the landlord ordered the driver to proceed to Pobres Park.

The coffee, as Ben had said, was strong and excellent. Sitting in the couple’s cozy living room, Larry examined everything in it — the gray marble floor; the rich, upholstered sofas; the heavy blue drapes; the oil portraits of Filipino patriarchs and landscapes, the finely paneled walls and, beyond the living room, the gleaming crystal and silver of the dining room, the appurtenances of Filipino upper-class living. The whole house was air-conditioned, and the air was spiked with the refreshing scent of cologne. He remembered his own home in Cleveland, the simplicity of its furnishings, and again there rushed to his mind in all its vividness the room he once shared with Tony — its two iron beds, the porcelain washbowl, the sagging wooden cabinets …

“I must say, your good taste shows in the way you have furnished your house,” he told Nena de Jesus. She had not talked much and now, at the compliment, she started gushing. “It was a difficult thing to do. You must understand my problem. It was difficult ordering the furniture. It’s good that I was able to go with my husband abroad again last year. Notice the drapes — they are from Marshall Field’s — and the furniture, well, I managed to gather odds and ends together.”

He felt like a heel asking about it, but he asked nevertheless, “Did Tony and his wife have a home of their own?”

“No,” Mrs. de Jesus said with keen interest now. “That’s the trouble. They never lived away from his in-laws. You don’t know how terrible Mrs. Villa can get sometimes. Heavens, she is close to me, she adores me, but she can get on one’s nerves.”

Ben finished his cup and asked the sleepy maid standing by the door of the dining room to pour another cupful. He nodded to his wife’s talk.

“I always say,” Nena said firmly, “that young people should be able to experience a little suffering, that they should start from the bottom. When we were married, Ben and I … you know what happened? Father packed us off to that horrid farm, to an old house. Imagine, we had only five servants and an old Ford. I was angry at Father, but, of course, he always knows best. That’s the root of it all. Carmen and Tony — they were pampered. They never knew what it was to start from the bottom or to live alone as we did.”

He drained his cup, turned to Ben de Jesus, and finally asked the question that had tightened his stomach all evening: “Is it true that Tony committed suicide?”

Ben smiled broadly and he answered with the readiness and familiarity conviction engenders. “Carmen believes it’s suicide,” he said. “Her father, too. But me, I don’t. It was an accident, what else could it be? Why, the fellow had absolutely no reason at all. What more can a man want? His luck — it couldn’t happen to just any guy, not in a million years.”