Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

His voice faltered and he turned away; he was crying, so I placed an arm around his shoulder. We had reached the boulevard.

A jeepney to Dimasalang had come. “But we are not alone now, Toto,” I said, then broke hastily away from him. What he had said skewered me, lanced me, hurt me so grievously it was almost physical.

Lucy did not help ease my depression. By now she was used to my erratic schedule and took my late arrivals with grace. Without my telling her, she lighted the kerosene stove and heated a lunch of snail and mudfish, but the food at Professor Hortenso’s had sufficed. Perhaps she was surprised that I gave her but a perfunctory kiss when I arrived, and when I called from upstairs that I was not hungry, she came up to my room and lay beside me.

For some time now, I had been thinking about our relationship — extremely convenient and pleasurable — but there were aspects of it that were hazy. Too many questions had begun to form in my mind that needed to be answered. What, for instance, if she got pregnant.

“You don’t have to worry about that,” she assured me, pressing her belly to my side. “I am taking pills.”

“Where did you get them?”

“Do you need to know?”

“I would like to.”

“Come with me to the Family Planning Center in Dimasalang — that is where I sometimes go when I say I am going to my sister’s.”

“You had to fill out forms?”

She laughed. “Do I have to tell the truth?”

“Did he start you on pills?”

She was silent.

“We cannot get married, you know that.”

“Because I am just a servant?”

That never entered my mind as the reason. “No,” I protested. “I cannot feed you.”

“I can feed myself,” she said with a laugh.

But her relationship with the other man irritated me. “Do you still see him?” I asked, hoping she would not avoid the question.

She stood up. “I thought this is something we will not talk about,” she said pointedly. “If I see him now and then, it’s not important to you.”

“It is,” I said, rising and confronting her. “I don’t want to share you with anyone.”

“I am not your wife.”

“You prostitute!” I lashed at her.

She looked at me aghast, then turned and ran down the stairs.

I did not follow her; I had uttered the word and quickly realized my mistake. Remorse filled me. I had no money to give Lucy. How about him, whoever he was? And why was she not faithful to him if she loved him?

She was in the living room when I went down, lying on the sofa; her eyes were red from crying, but there were no more tears. I sat beside her, and she turned on her back. “Lucy,” I said, “forgive me. I love you.”

I surprised myself, telling her I loved her, holding her hand, kissing her hair. “I cannot bear the thought that another man …”

She remained immobile; she did not push my hand or turn away as I kissed her cheek. Words were not enough, but still … “Be honest with me. I love you, can you not see that? Who is he? What has he that I don’t have, that you still have to go to him making all those pretenses that it is your sister you are seeing? Why can’t you leave him? Does he give you a lot of money — and I cannot even give you a centavo …”

She turned on her side and hugged me. “Pepe,” she said in a voice husky with sorrow, “we cannot change things now. Yes, your uncle gives me money.”

* Kumbento: The part of the sacristy where the priest lives.

It was just a matter of time before I would lose Lucy — this I knew not as instinct but as implacable fate, and the knowledge seared. She was the first; she was, like myself, a victim of this vicious condition, this living. Could we have avoided not just this entanglement but this very station into which we were flung? Always, there is something conspiratorial about circumstances that merge and fit, about feelings that ravage, showing how human and fickle we all are.

I always remember what Mother told me when I was about nine or ten: all those we love we will eventually lose, all those we hate we will eventually face. This is the inevitable sequence, the deafening roll that follows the lightning flash, the drab brown of the fields after the living green of the rainy season.

My first loss that Mother had described came the year the harvest had been niggardly. I thought I would never be able to continue schooling, which would not have mattered, except that, for Mother, this would have meant the end of the world.

I was fond of animals as if they were friends with whom I talked — stray dogs, cats, carabaos, hens and the roosters that chased and mounted them. I understand now the refusal of Buddhists to kill animals although they may not hesitate to dispose of their fellow men who cross them. They would eat meat as long as they did not do the actual butchering. I read somewhere that the cows roaming the streets of India are holy not because they are anointed but because, in rural India, they provide milk for the people and fire for their stoves. They may just be a pack of old, rickety bones held together by tough, dried-up skin, but an Indian writer said he could not endure to see them killed for meat because he had grown up with them, slept with them on the same earthen floor.

I understand this feeling.

The space below our house was walled with split bamboo, and there we stored battered furniture that could no longer be salvaged but were still precious enough not to be dispatched as firewood. Under the house, too, were four solid hardwood posts uprooted from the Ilocos. A huge bamboo basket sat in the center, circular and tall as a man and wide enough to contain a calf. During the harvest season it was half filled with the grain some of Mother’s customers used to pay her. But in June, July, and August, the basket was empty, for we had either eaten all the grain or Mother had sold it for my school expenses.

I often slept inside this basket, curled at the bottom with my dog, Pugot. An earlier pet, also named Pugot, a big, fat pig, was much too heavy for me to bring inside. We had no farm, so the underhouse was not to house work animals except when the pig Pugot, which we had gotten from one of Mother’s customers as a piglet, grew into a beautiful beast. When it was big enough to sell, the money would be shared by Mother and the owner. Pugot was a “mestizo,” with pink skin, white bristles, a very short snout, elephant ears, a tail that curled, rosy hooves, and the bluest eyes. In the mornings before the dew had vanished, I went to the fields beyond the arbor of bamboo and gathered leafy weeds, which, together with leftovers and bran, I cooked for him. He recognized his name; when I called he would rush to the gate grunting, then lie on his side as I stooped to scratch his stomach. I sometimes slept under the house with him on frayed jute sacks laid on the ground, and more than once I had rested my head on his belly. I had feared for his life when he was castrated and felt it a gross injustice to this handsome animal to have been treated thus and made to grow unlike a normal being, but grow up he did, into a huge and lumbering thing — so heavy that once, in his eagerness to meet me as I was coming home from school, he threw me to the ground.

By then, Mother and I were tired. There were not enough leftovers from the neighbors who also had pigs of their own, nor enough edible weeds in the field or free bran from the mill. The dry season came, then it was June and always, in June, there was this harried scrounging for money for the school opening.

The day before school opened I returned from the fields where I had gone to catch grasshoppers for our evening pot. For the first time, there was no white behemoth rushing to me. A chill came to my heart as I raced up the bamboo ladder to where Mother was at work, taking advantage of the last vestiges of afternoon light. She turned to me, her face pained and drawn. I had always anticipated Pugot’s fate, but I cried just the same when she confirmed it. She told me how much we got for Pugot, that I could go on to school, although I did not care for it. She told me then — and this I will never forget — that we will lose all those dear to us, and those we hate, we must face.