Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

His tone became tense, conspiratorial: “I worked very hard, saved all I could, and started pushing early. I had only three shirts in college, a couple of dark pants, a pair of black shoes — Ang Tibay. But I kept them clean. And when I had saved enough, I bought a car — a secondhand Ford, but I kept it running. Then I looked around for the fortune to be made. It was not difficult, the girls, the boys who were spendthrifts, who never knew the likes of me, slaving to make it to their level. And I did it and here I am, still making money off the bastards!”

He emptied his cup. “One thing you must remember,” he said, easing himself back into his chair, “everyone can be corrupted because everyone is human. Give me an hour — maybe that is too long — with your student leaders, with your nationalist idols in Congress, and I will have their price.”

As I pondered what he said, he asked: “What is your price, Pepe?”

His question did not surprise me. “I don’t know,” I said.

“What is it you want most?”

It was as if I had known the answer to this question all along; I wanted to live well, to be rich, but now that it was put to me in its utterest simplicity, I had no ready, unequivocal reply.

“To be truly alive,” I said tentatively, wondering if those were the right words, and then it came to me in all its morning clarity. Indeed, this was what I desired, to be fully alive, to have a real meaning to my waking and sleeping, that I was no vegetable in a simple photo-synthetic relationship with the sun, that every pore in me exuded not just animal sweat but the essence of me. “To be honestly, truly alive,” I repeated.

He sat back as if stupefied by my reply. “That is very tricky of you,” he said somberly. “What is it then that makes you alive? Money? Food? Women? Reading — ah, I noticed you are fond of books.”

“Those and more,” I said.

“Money,” he mused, “can buy everything.”

I shook my head. “Not friends,” I said. “Because if money can buy them then they are not friends. Not loyalty. Not love.”

Kuya Nick toyed with his empty cup. His hair was thick, but at the crown it had started to thin. It was deep black as the dye was fresh.

I had come up with a good definition of my wants, but I did not want to make him feel I had confounded him. “You act as if you have planned everything. Did you ever plan on being in love?” I asked.

He glanced at me and again, a smile crossed his rotund face. He gazed at the bright capiz globe dangling from the paneled ceiling. “Yes, Pepe, I have been in love. Still am. No, it’s not Mila, whom I like very much. Do you know where she came from? Rather, where I salvaged her? I don’t want to boast about what I do. I have a wife and three children — the oldest is now in his teens — and I love them and shield them from what I am, from what I know.” His voice became stern. “I have told you more than I should,” he said, his eyes piercing into me. “But only because I think you are honest. You must never do this: get people to know you, be really close to you, to read you like a book.”

“I will remember that.”

“There, up there in the enclaves of privilege, they know me as Nick, efficient, trustworthy, dependable. I come across with the goods, the contacts, and the contracts — at the time agreed upon. They don’t need to sign stacks of paper with me. My word is enough. Real estate dealer, customs broker — everything. My office is small, but it is up there, too. The other things I do, they don’t know. My family, where I live — these I keep away. These are mine alone. And elsewhere, I am Nick the avenger, the merciless harbinger of my law.”

“I don’t want to be on any side other than yours,” I said. “I am scared. Besides, it will not be decent.”

“Do not think about decency, Pepe,” his voice rose again. “This is an indecent world. All those people dressed up, attending those concerts, those fancy parties splashed in the society pages — they are all indecent. Each has his little scheme and in the end, they all use people.”

“You use people, too,” I reminded him.

He balled his fists. “Listen, I will not deny that, but when I use you, you will know it and you will get what is your due, just as it has already been so. And you will get more, if you are smart. That makes the difference!”

We stood up and walked back to Antipolo, through the shuttered stalls of the market, the leaves, and the garbage thick as shingles on the asphalt and on the sidewalk, and the stench of rotting vegetables around us. Then Kuya Nick told me why he had waited for me; he was a master politician, he had really worked me over, molded me to the form he could handle best, and he did this with his homilies, his ingratiating confidences that could have been lies but sounded sincere.

This was one of those emergencies and he would not have thought of me were I not dependable. Indeed, I was the man for it, with my capabilities and endowments.

“You will enjoy it,” he said, pausing in our walk, his eyes narrowed into serious slits. “I would not bother you, Pepe, you know that, unless it was really serious. I am compromised.”

The job was vague at first, but now it became unmistakably clear, and I should have been revolted by it, but I was not.

“You can do it — you have done it,” he said, breaking into a nervous laugh, and of course, he was right. “It will not be different. It will be in an apartment, with privacy, and you won’t even know who will be watching. No cracks in the wall. A one-way mirror.”

I had one last argument and it would have sufficed, but he had a ready answer for that, too.

“You will be with someone familiar. As a matter-of-fact, she is quite good-looking if I may say so.”

We hurried to Makati. It was an unhealthy August evening, a break from the nine-day rain, with this strangling humidity that permeated everything, enervated the senses, and fogged the mind. We banged away through rutted streets, and in his air-conditioned Mercedes we were free from the gummy clutches of the hour, free from the warm glue of traffic, free from the urinal odor of neighborhoods. Then Quiapo, Taft, and the new highway to Makati, the center embankments screaming with the posters of revolution, Ibagsak ang Pasismo, Marcos Diktador * …

But there will be no revolution, no change in this rimless bog of creation; the poor have always been with us, Cabugawan, Tondo, and everywhere, the hovels and the scum. Bonifacio and Sulaiman — where are they now? What have they really left behind except a Tondo that will be there for another millennium? There will be no revolution, not while the only honest thing we can perceive is in our gonads.

We stopped before one of those spindly apartment buildings in Makati. At the far end of the lobby, aglow with capiz shell lamps, across the shimmering expanse of Romblon marble, Mila was waiting. She walked to us, her high heels a rhythm on the stone. As she passed below the capis chandeliers she looked beautiful, the contours of her breasts thrust against her blue jersey blouse, her legs creamy and well formed below the mini-skirt. She went to Kuya Nick and planted a dutiful peck on his cheek, then turned to me, eagerness aglow on her face. We got off the elevator on the fourteenth floor and walked an additional flight up. We were at the penthouse terrace, lined with palmettos and shrubs. Beyond the grill and greenery Manila was ablaze in the last furnace reds of sunset and, to our left, the neons of Makati burned against a heavy, clouded sky. The boy who opened the door greeted Kuya Nick with cloying obsequiousness, which Nick did not acknowledge. If the apartment was not his, he had seen a lot of it, for he took us directly across the parquet-floored living room, furnished with overstuffed leatherette sofas, to a wide room with a massive, circular bed, a wall lined with bric-a-brac, and a corner dominated by an Ifugao grotesquerie — the headhunter with a severed head, the hunter’s face in an immemorial pose of calm victory.