Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

My name is Samson, and I have always known I was different no matter how often Mother had repeated to me, shrieked at me, or told me in soothing and dulcet words that I have an honorable name. But José Samson, Pepe, Pepito, Joe Samson is simply, honestly, irrevocably, and perhaps resolutely a bastard. It is not difficult to bear this indelible yet invisible tattoo, but not an Igorot facial emblem or a deep, keloid surgical scar can erase — thank God (do I utter His name in vain?) — the origins that have not been wrought on my face, nor deformed my physical being. Yet this is me, unerring in the devastation of the inner self.

Sometimes, I wish I were never born.

Still, I like being here, transfixed on this plain, this vast limbo without rim called living. I like being here, feeling the wind and the sun upon my skin, the fullness of my stomach, and the electric surge of an orgasm — now that I know it.

The only times I was really depressed was when I filled out those awful forms which demanded that I name my father and I would put “deceased.” As far as I was concerned he died long ago because I never knew about him then, although Mother — and she is an honorable woman — loves him still, his memory. Auntie Bettina, too — she worships him though she never told me who he was no matter what wiles I used. The way they had quarreled, Mother always telling her to shut up for my sake. I knew Auntie Bettina had known him well, that something in the dark shriveled past went awry. No, as Auntie had hinted, it was not Mother’s fault, nor anyone else’s. It was in the stars, written with precision and clarity, infallible and inescapable, this, my damnation: to be in Cabugawan forever, a destiny that would hound me because a crime had been committed not by my mother and her sister but by my father. I need no proof of this, for I am here, wearied and rotting with self-pity and misshapen under a burden too heavy to bear.

Yet I am Sagittarius, and I am supposedly easygoing and frivolous. The planets cannot chain me to any spot for I am fated to strike out, but to where? Is Tondo any better? Here, where for a year I have lived and known this warren of tin shacks and fouled air as I knew Cabugawan, too? But I am no bastard here; no shadow hounds me, for I am Pepe the scholar, the loyal comrade who will rise to any challenge, scour faraway places, and if I choose to be a priest, I would certainly be archbishop, or if I veer the other way, I would be the czar of crime of the barrio, mightier than Roger will ever be. After all, I organized the Brotherhood here, extracted the mindless ferocity from the gang and gave it a purpose other than thievery and drinking bouts. With this Brotherhood, I showed them how they could extort gin money, contributions for the fiesta from flinty politicians in the name of charity, civic pride, and all those shibboleths that plastic nationalists swear by.

My career as a politician is assured if I so decide to become one, that is what Father Jess had said, shaking his ponderous head at the prospect. But I will never be a politician. Though interested in people, I detest being friendly to those I feel no vibes with, not because I am not hypocritical, which I easily can be, but because it takes so much effort, so much violence to one’s self to attempt friendliness where there is nothing but indifference or contempt. Sagittarius — I am friendly — this is my nature; I am open to anything. I have a mind like a sponge that absorbs oil, water, muck, and dirt, a cast-iron stomach; I eat anything. They also say I am an achiever, that I can do what I set my mind to; in the two years I have been in Manila, what wonders have I done to my mind, to my body, to me? Two years — how many light years is it to the nearest galaxy, and even if we got there, in the end, will the trip be worth it? How long did it take the pterodactyl to disappear from the swamp, for the diamond to be? A baby feeds on its mother’s womb for nine months and is strangled slowly after birth because it does not have milk or proteins. Does it make any difference if it dies in nine months or before the age of nine? I have long known that time is an enemy rather than a friend, a deceiver, because it lulls us into thinking it can solve everything and, therefore, nothing. So it has been two years here in Manila, and what can I show for those years? Calloused knuckles of a novice karatista, the muddled brain of an aspiring politician?

If I deprecate myself too much, then this is also my nature, for I really cannot understand myself sometimes. For instance, why was I glad to leave Cabugawan where I was born, where I knew people and where people had been good to me? I don’t know why I had been unkind to Auntie Bettina and to Mother most of all, for it had never been my intention to hurt them, but that was what I did when I left.

* * *

Home. But where is home to this free mind, to this heart that throbs and expands beyond its prison of flesh? I could very well forget this home, this blob of black upon the green side of the earth; here, where dreams are slaughtered, and having buried them, I could strike out to other reaches and lift myself away from this Cabugawan, this enclave to which I was doomed as were those before me — those stunted people from the North who first came to this village and are now but memories, their presence ever with us when we talk before our meager meals, when we unfold the buri mats and prepare for the night. They hover around us, their remembered images blurred by years — uncles and aunts and grandfathers and great-grandfathers, their names, their lineage, their ghosts drifting up the grass roof with the soot and smoke of the kerosene lamp, and out into the night. Who are they but names of old men who fought with bolos, whose blood washed this land and whose bones are now embedded in the soil, their hatreds forgotten and unresolved, their ambitions unresurrected by those they left behind, certainly not by me, least of all, who could fancy an armalite spraying the sky not in anger but in wonderment that I could ever possess a two-thousand-peso toy and, with it, perhaps rob some bank so that once and for all I would finally be away from this blob of black, this home.…

Cabugawan is a village not really far from town, so I cannot say I am a farm boy, for I did spend a lot of my time in town, in the marketplace and around the movie house. Follow the dirt road from the main street, head south, cross a wooden bridge, and you are in Cabugawan, a huddle of thatch-roofed houses, though a few are roofed with galvanized iron now, for some of our neighbors have pensions from the government and a few families have relatives on the West Coast. Mother told me once that all who lived here were tenant farmers, and the bright ones were those who left.

The village street is just wide enough for bull-carts and an occasional jeepney. During the rainy season it is churned into mud by carabaos plodding through. In some places, the village street is lined with madre de cacao *bloom. On both sides are our homes, mostly walled with buri palm leaves, surrounded by fences of split bamboo that rot and fall apart. The yards are swept clean. Fruit trees — tamarind, papaya, pomelo, caimito †—surround the houses.

I know all the houses and their interiors — the cheap wooden furniture, the low eating tables, the kitchens sooty with years, the calendar frames and covers of Bannawag pasted on the walls, a cracked mirror, yellowed photographs of weddings and funerals, and on one side, the crude wooden chests where starched clothes and trinkets are stored. The village road dips down an arbor of bamboo, green and cool in the sunlight, and beyond it, the open fields. I have wandered here, swam in the irrigation ditches, gathered snails, and helped in the rice harvest.

It is difficult to explain my restlessness. I have not been hungry, as some of our neighbors had been during the planting season when they ate only twice a day. Thank God, Mother had good customers who paid her for her sewing, and Auntie Bettina is a schoolteacher. I cannot take pride in being Ilocano; I am not industrious, frugal, or serious, but I do have this desire to rush into the unknown, and I did that through books passed down to me by Mother and Auntie Bettina. I have meandered into the recesses of the imagination, wondered how it was when they first came to Rosales — those ancestors who had named the villages after the towns they came from. But I am not eager to know about them or why they came, by what means and with what infernal motivations. Perhaps it is just as well that I was born in Pangasinan, where, somehow, the Ilocano mystique has been diluted and where there is little affinity with the Ilocos, no real ties with the venerable towns that our forefathers had left; perhaps it was best that I was thrown into this cauldron called Tondo, for here, though we were still Warays, Maykenis, and etceteras, the distinctions have been muted and we are what we are, and the great equalizer is the fact that we all live here, and we live here because we cannot live in Santa Cruz or Quezon City or Makati. Still, there was no denying it, the Iglesia ni Kristo had more followers than Father Jess’s Church.