Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

Our immediate neighbors, my aunt said, were nice; most of them had lived in the area as long as they. An Ilocano clerk was to our right and the new tenant, though she had been there for almost two years, occupied the apartment to our left; I saw her once coming out of the house with her maid; she was pretty and about my age, with shapely legs and breasts that begged to be fondled. She was the mistress of a businessman, or police agent, and he often parked beyond the alley in his green Mercedes 220, the only evidence of affluence in our neighborhood. She was very quiet, very polite, and as Auntie said, she could have been anyone’s ideal wife.

All through the haze of day and through the night, thoughts of Tio Tony, Antonio Samson, my father, badgered me, and though I tried to imagine how it would be to love him the way I loved Mother, I just could not. I remembered his visit long ago to Cabugawan, the way Mother would change the subject abruptly if his name came up in conversations. Mother had kept a scrapbook of his writings as if it were the most precious of documents. When she was not around Auntie Bettina sometimes talked about him in tones of the highest esteem. I resented how he never came to claim me, or tell me, and I resented, too, Auntie and Mother, not for what had happened but for their not telling me.

At supper I asked about him again and Auntie Betty said he wrote a book — it was there on the shelf — that I should read so that I would know what his thoughts were. She was proud of how he had gotten his Ph.D. through perseverance, which, damn it, they said I should also have, and yes, they would help all they could. But most of all, how well he had married into the Villas and how rich he would have been, how comfortable we would have all been, if he had only lived!

How did he die? I finally asked the question that had bothered me all through the tedious day.

“An accident, a most horrible accident,” my aunt said.

Uncle Bert stood up, walked to the kitchen and pointed through the iron grills of the rear window that opened to the tracks. “There … there … that was where we picked him up. I mean, that was where we picked up the mangled pieces. It was early dawn — about five, or maybe four,” he said quietly. “He perhaps did not know that the train was on this track …”

I joined him at the window. The rails, almost choked with weeds, were shiny with the last vestiges of day, the rock bed dirty with the garbage and dust of the dry season. I could imagine him walking there, and the train rushing at him. I could see him beyond human shape, his blood on the iron, the rocks and weeds. He must have felt trapped or rendered deaf; the trains always slowed down when they approached this bend of the tracks, for a scant two hundred meters away was not only a crossing but the station of Antipolo. Besides, the train’s headlight could light up the house, my room, with the brightness of day. It was a senseless way to die.

I took his book from the shelf— The Ilustrados —but did not read it. I preferred literature. I felt strange handling my father’s book, leafing through it as if it were a part of him inanimate in my hands. These were his thoughts, but I did not want to know them, to know him, for there was one thing I was sure of: he did not care; he forsook me and Mother. The damn train. I would look out onto the tracks every morning and imagine him there, how it was when he died, what troubled his mind, for he must have been in deep thought as Tio Bert had said, so deep he did not hear the train coming! There are no more steam engines, but I remember them from when I was a boy, spewing steam, chugging, big black monsters with bronze bells clanging. They are all diesel now, but it was not a diesel train that had killed him. Could he really have committed suicide? He had written a book; he had married well. It should be me — living off my relatives, on my mother’s meager earnings. I could contemplate taking my own life, but that dastardly, foolish act, I couldn’t even think about it.

I went to Diliman, convinced that I could not enroll because my grades were low. If I had to take the entrance exams, I would have to review. I did not relish that or the idea of studying there, for it became clear that I would come across people who knew my father, and meeting them, being subjected to their inquisition, would be too traumatic for me to bear. I had to make the motions, however, if only for my uncle and aunt, who would then tell Mother how it was that I was not admitted to the University of the Philippines. The real reason, however, was that I had spent my tuition money, and all that was left after two weeks of cavorting was one hundred fifty pesos, not enough for the entrance fee. It did not happen in a way that would have left me chastised and sad; I saw two movies a day, gorged myself with fried chicken, siopao, mami , and pancit canton —all the goodies I never had in Cabugawan.

We had enough to eat in Antipolo, the infernal vegetable stew with almost no meat in it, and I got easily tired of that. A TV set adorned the living room, but it was there for display and rarely did my uncle and aunt look at it; they were saving on electricity, for they always went around the house turning lights off.

With the little money I had left, and worried that Mother would know I was not enrolled, I went to Recto with just enough for a quarterly payment. What was one wrong initial? If it was not UP, it was a diploma mill. No degree in the world could improve me anyway.

“ Recto! ”—the jeepney drivers shout it, the name circumscribes and describes youth, the urban malady, and pollution; bakya supermarket at one end, which is Divisoria, and vision and corruption, or whatever you want to call it, at the other … Malacañang. It is this other end, the vision-corruption part, that would be familiar ground to me for four years.

Recto! Rectum of Manila! Here are the odors of the posterior, particularly when the sun is warm and a busted sewer is gushing yellowish froth, with flies as big as bottle caps on the garbage piles. But we are young and if we see them, we look away. It will all be swept clean when the revolution comes and this Recto … this will be the boulevard of great erudition; it will be the avenue of hope. It already is to thousands upon thousands like me, for it is here where I go to school. Recto has these diploma mills, about half a dozen of them, and at dusk the students pour out of the airless schoolrooms, clogging the street and the narrow, smelly sidewalks, their young voices mingling with the noxious bedlam of a thousand jeepneys. Coming out of one of the Kung Fu movies on any afternoon, the faces I see have a certain pallid gloss to them — a trick of sunlight maybe, or it may just be the kind of funereal patina that covers everyone, for in this mass of young people are the great unwashed hoping to be scrubbed clean, hoping to be someone other than their anonymous selves.

I met Augusto Salcedo on my first day at school. Toto was as tall as I, with thick glasses that made him look like an underfed owl. He approached me in the corridor that morning and asked if the room beside me was for World Lit and it was, so he stayed and sat beside me when class started.

Our teacher, Professor Balitoc, had an M.A. in English literature from the University of California at Berkeley, and he never stopped reminding us of it. I liked him because he truly loved literature and could regale us with his own interpretations of the great novels he assigned to us.

Toto was taking liberal arts, too, but his course was heavy on science and math; World Literature was the only humanities subject he had that semester and it worried him, for he never liked works of the imagination. “Novels, they … they,” he stammered a bit, “are so difficult to follow and I get lost in the long-winded dialogues.”