Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

Uncle Bert was talkative. “We have been expecting you to come and go to college here,” he was saying between chunks of fried bangus †and mouthfuls of rice. “And of course, the room upstairs has been vacant since the boys left. You should try to find work in the daytime and study at night like I did. So it took me eight years to finish law, but I finished it. So it is true that you can get lawyers for two pesos now, but it is always an honor to be called Attorney, to have passed the bar. You know, first time I tried, I made it! More than two thousand of us and only seven hundred passed. Ha! Seven hundred! There is always room for a good lawyer and maybe you should also take up law.”

Tia Betty looked up from her cracked plastic plate. Her tired face was lined and her hair already had streaks of gray. “Do not impose your will on him,” she said. “I am sure he has plans.” Then to me, “Pepe, what course will it be?”

“Maybe I will just try liberal arts,” I said meekly. “I don’t know what I am good at — my mind still wavers. And besides, I don’t really like going to school.” I paused, knowing I should not have said that, but it was out, and they looked at me as if I were a freak, or worse, a heretic.

“I’m surprised,” Uncle Bert said. “Your father …”

“My father?”

“Tony would have urged you, and Emy— I know she did. Did you know how hard your father studied so that he could go to the United States and be a success? There is nothing that hard work cannot accomplish, no matter how poor, no matter what your origins.”

“My father?” I asked again.

They realized then that Mother had never told me, nor Auntie Bettina. Aunt Betty looked at her husband, then at me, and since it could not be hidden anymore, she said slowly: “Well, you are no longer a child and if Emy never told you — or Bettina — then we may just as well do it. There is nothing wrong in your knowing it! I am sad that it has to come from us, but Tony was my brother. I loved him dearly and I should love you, too. And I do— That is, you are very welcome here, Pepe. You are our nephew … and we have no one in the house now.”

“Yes, yes. Very welcome. Very welcome,” Tio Bert repeated.

Tia continued. “It was so long ago, more than fifteen years, and I have forgotten that you are not supposed to know. I think Emy was ashamed, not because you were born …” she paused and did not quite know how to put it, “out of wedlock … but because she and Tony, first cousins, that is not supposed to be good.”

“No, not now. Not now. It is done now,” my uncle said.

“She is a very brave woman, your mother. You don’t know how courageous she was,” Auntie went on.

“Tell me about my father, Auntie,” I said. I could not eat anymore, though the hike from Quiapo had made me hungry. “Why did Mother hide it from me? It was so … so unnecessary.”

“Maybe she felt it was not time for you to know. That you were too young to understand.”

“I am twenty-two,” I said. “I am going to college.” Tears were starting to scald my eyes, and my chest was heavy.

“I don’t know everything,” my aunt said, turning away. “Your father got married to a very rich woman. I heard she died afterward, insane — that is what I learned. Before your father died … on that very same early morning he told me about you. Just before he died.” She stopped, looked at her plate, and toyed with her food.

“Your auntie visited Rosales afterward — after the funeral,” Uncle said. “And your mother,” he tried to smile, “where did she get the idea? Your father committing suicide? It was not an accident? But it was an accident! Betty?” he turned to her for confirmation, but Tia Betty did not speak.

“He was troubled, he was always thinking, forgetting things, forgetting where he was!” Uncle Bert insisted. “But the important thing … the important thing is that your father became successful. And we know you are talented — just like he was.”

“No, Tio,” I said. “My report card says I am not. I always failed.”

“But what is a report card?” Tio could not be dissuaded.

“I am not interested in school,” I said lamely. “I don’t know what I want. But I know I do not want to stay in Cabugawan.”

My auntie looked at me with pity. “You have to find a job and you cannot find a good one unless you are prepared, trained. This is so simple, I should not have to tell you.”

“I will work,” I said. “But I will not sweat trying to be somebody.”

“Surely,” Tio said, “you will want to eat well, dress well, live well. Surely, you would like to live in a place better than what you left.”

Food, clothes — they are important, but not that important. Still, I must not antagonize my relatives, not on my first day in their house. “Yes, Tio,” I said meekly. “I know that. I just don’t know what I want to be.”

Tio clapped his hands in delight. “So there. You see, Betty, Pepe will be a success. It is just that he still does not know what he wants. Give him a year, he will.”

In a year. I turned the words over in my mind, but even then I was already thinking how I would be able to free myself from the clutches of the world’s end, this street called Antipolo.

Monday, and I was left in the apartment to mark time. After a breakfast of fried rice, tuyo , and coffee with Tia Betty and her voluble husband, I went back to my room upstairs and lay on the old iron cot. How would I fit in this old house, in this dilapidated neighborhood, which, even in the hush-hush hours, was already noisy with the snort of jeepneys and the babble of housewives?

Downstairs, Lucy, the Bisayan atsay from Dumaguete, was singing softly the latest Nora Aunor song— I once had a dear old mother who loved me tenderly — for when I was a baby, she took good care of me .… My thoughts meandered to Cabugawan again. How would Mother be on this bleak June morning? At least her bastard son would not be around to annoy her, remind her of an ancient grief. I could see her now, the traces of sorrow in the somber eyes, and again, I was nagged by guilt, for here I was, with the money she had saved, to be what she wanted me to be. Tio Bert and Tia Betty, they, too, would be hounding me with fancy ideas about the lofty virtues of a college degree; only with it could I flee the deadening embrace of Cabugawan.

Just look at me, my uncle seemed to say; just look at me! He clerked for this Chinese merchant in Binondo and his morning ceremony was to polish the small brass sign beside our door: ALBERTO S. BULAN, and underneath, also in brass but in smaller letters, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW AND NOTARY PUBLIC. Having done that, sometimes with his handkerchief, sometimes with a paper napkin, he would zipper his cheap, plastic portfolio and then, puffing his chest, he would be on his way, waddling down the alley to Dimasalang for his jeepney. Moments later, Auntie Betty would leave by the same route for the elementary school in Sampaloc where she had been teaching for more than three decades — thirty years! Do people really work at the same dreary job for that long? The very thought was stupefying.

I was jolted from sleep when a train roared by, its horn blowing harshly, and the house shook like an empty crate. It was like an earthquake. I was so shaken I could not sleep anymore. But only that morning. I soon became accustomed to their roaring, clanging, shrieking — the diesel trolleys, the commuter trains, the Bicol Express, the Limited to Lucena, the baggage cars. Through their clangor I would sleep soundly on.

I walked around the neighborhood, taking in the narrow streets — Isagani, Sisa, Blumentritt — characters in Rizal’s novels. The wooden houses were old and weather-lashed and their tin roofs were rusty. Along our street was the same crowdedness, the shacks of squatters farther down the railroad line, and everywhere big-bellied, hungry children and jobless men in rubber slippers idling in doorways.