Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

That was where I woke up, in the chill dawn, the east already amber, the other houses already stirring with the womenfolk who must cook the morning meal. When I looked at the banana heart, indeed, it had already dipped.

I rose and walked to the house hoping that my steps would be light and some unfamiliar strength would suffuse me, but I felt instead cramped and feverish and when I sneezed, I knew that I had caught, not an incredible talisman, but a cold.

The stairway that led to the karate school wound through floors occupied by nondescript law offices and companies that must have survived through sheer tenacity. Past doors tarnished with age and secured with three or four padlocks, I finally got to the top — the karate school — and the beginning of a new wisdom if ever I was to survive in a deformed physical world. So here I was, ready for another kind of school, not just to build my stamina but to discipline my body. My lessons were to be twice a week, but I could come every afternoon if I wanted to for the karatistas liked having people around. Various schools of self-defense had proliferated in the area — tae kwan do, kung fu, and judo — and the competition was very keen. It was eighty pesos a month, plus thirty pesos for my very rough cotton uniform. I was not aiming for a black belt or to smash bricks and planks of wood. I was just interested in self-defense. I did not have a gun, not even a knife. My instructors were all young, and they enjoyed their work, for when they were not teaching they were always practicing. They lived in the school itself to save on rent. Cups they had won from various tournaments adorned the shelves. When I went for my first lesson I was amused at the ritual of bowing to the instructor before the actual exercises started. Rading, who was the best, took me under his wing, although he was available for instruction anytime. He asked where I went to school, and when I told him he said he went there, too, but was just taking a few credits in accounting, for he wanted to be a karatista. He was about twenty-one, slightly taller than I, and his taut frame was all muscle.

I wanted to tell Toto what I did during my disappearances in the afternoons or early evenings, or sometimes in the mornings, but he would not understand. Though he was all talk about violence and revolution, these were mere ideas; I suspect he would not pull the trigger or stick a knife in someone else’s belly when the time came.

There was no day that the name of Father Jess did not obtrude into our conversation; Toto really looked up to the priest. He was the father he never had. And as for a mother, in their kumbento *was an old woman — Tia Nena, he called her — who was once deranged or had come from the Psychopathic Hospital at Mandaluyong. She did the cooking and the laundry for Father Jess. It was, to my mind, a weird household, set up from driftwood.

As the election for the Student Council was soon, Toto made plans for my candidacy. I was pestered by doubts. Though I was popular in my own class and in the other sections where I was enrolled, I did not have a university following. Furthermore, I did not want to spend my money on handbills or for those simple posters made from newspapers that we would plaster on walls and bulletin boards. That money would be a hedge for something more urgent.

“I will ask Father Jess for money,” Toto assured me. “And the Brotherhood will help. You must not forget that.”

I finally got to meet him. We went to San Beda where he was going to address the senior class in social studies and history. Just as he started with the usual greetings, the platitudes, we took seats in the empty front-row seats because I wanted to hear what this minor god said. Toto was too shy to walk down the aisle and sit there with all the students, teachers, and priests on the stage looking at us late-comers, but I did not care — the Sagittarius in me again — so he followed me reluctantly.

Father Jess glanced at us, then went on. He was really huge, with thick bristly hair, thick lips, wide forehead, a jutting jaw, and eyes crinkled into two slits. He could have been an overfed Japanese or Chinese were it not for his dark complexion. He was not in a soutane, but instead wore denims and sandals, which I learned from him afterward were JC boots (Jesus Christ boots), and as a concession perhaps to his vocation, he had a gray close-necked jacket, a tiny silver cross on the collar.

There were more than three hundred in the auditorium — the entire senior class — and the lecture was one of six that the students would receive every week as part of their final orientation course. The air-conditioned hall was chilly, for it was not even half full. Father Jess had finished with the niceties and now his tone turned serious. Even without the loudspeaker, he could carry on like any bomba politician. His vocabulary was without bombast, earthy English spiced with Tagalog that had a very strong Visayan accent. Benedictine seminarians in white cassocks were in the front rows, and his first remarks were addressed to them. He spoke about the change that had come to the Church — a change that had been a long time in coming. He dredged up the encyclicals that were not believed in, about rituals that had become meaningless because they were not part of our lives. And finally, he spoke about the new role of priests: going to the masses, the poor, to prepare them for the liberation that was sanctioned by Christ.

Cliché stuff.

Then he spoke of the elite schools, how they had produced graduates who became the Establishment and how it might be necessary in the future to close these schools, for they were only perpetuating a decadent elite and the corruption in society.

This raised some questioning looks from the priests behind him on the stage.

The priest smiled at the bomba he had tossed. “I will tell you about this Establishment to which you — and I — belong,” he said. “It is a word so often used, it has lost its meaning. But it is real, like syphilis. We have it and, like syphilis, we don’t know it. We have to know it first before we can cure ourselves.”

Fuck yourselves, I thought, but listened intently just the same. We had a neighbor in Cabugawan who worked in the railroad station; he had gone to the whorehouse near the rice mill and the day after he could not urinate except in terrible pain. And later there were sores all over his body. They said that not only did he have the sickness given by a woman, but the worst case one could get. He had to go somewhere for treatment, both he and his wife, whom he had also infected.

Father Jess described how big men made the laws, how these laws enriched them, how poverty became the way of life of the masses because they were made poor on purpose. And the poor — he lashed at us — we did not know any better, we did not organize, we did not define our purpose and mark our enemies so we would know whom to fight if only so we could get what was ours by right because it was we who worked the land, the factories.

He may have been telling something new to the students, but not to me. Though I had scant knowledge of what went on in Congress or the life that throbbed in Pobres Park and in other places where the rich slop it up, I always knew that it was the strong, the powerful who ruled, who drank the sweet juice of life. I could see that in the children of the landlords, who were my classmates in grade school, who then went to Manila for high school; how the rich women of the town always haggled with Mother no matter how hard she worked. Years bent before that damn machine and what had she to show for it? Not a big house, not jewels, just me going to Manila, to listen to this drivel.

I did not resent Father Jess, though. I was just sad that he could narrate these so clearly, so neatly. Cabugawan was in my mind, and leaving it, though it had not seemed that way then, was a painful wrenching away. I saw myself playing again in the dirt road that was never widened or asphalted. How would Cabugawan look in this year’s rainy season? That dirt road would be churned by carabaos as they went to the fields beyond. The houses would be lashed by winds, their cogon roofs disheveled, their buri walls rotting and dripping; the bananas all tattered. And after the rains, the dry season — in April the wind lifted our kites, brought music to the bamboos as they bent, sounds I would not hear, sights I would not see. And I left them so I could be like the wind, meandering where it pleased.