Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

But not all of us in the Barrio were the flotsam of the country, nor were our houses of lowly shape and material. There were also those whose tables were laden, whose roofs did not leak, and even among the riffraff, some had power and influence that were real, though subterranean, because here were enclaves ruled by terror, by laws that applied only to us.

And among these men was Roger, Toto’s friend, although that did not seem possible at the time, considering how Roger teased and ridiculed him. Roger, Toto explained, was the leader of the Tayo-Tayo gang, one of the biggest and most powerful of the slum gangs. He was always around with his young toughs, most of them half-naked in the morning heat, their tattoos neatly etched on their gleaming brown bodies. He was fat and short and, that first morning, as we passed him on the way to Bangkusay for our jeepney, he stopped us.

“He will live with me in the kumbento , Roger,” Toto said in his usual halting manner.

Roger appraised me, then shook my hand in a viselike grip he thought would hurt. “You must bring us Father Jess’s wine one evening, and we will have a drinking party,” he said.

But though he did not warm up to me, he was not taciturn or menacing. And not once did he milk me for anything the way he did the strangers — the researchers, the journalists, the assorted do-gooders. He always extracted from them gin money, cigarettes, pens — anything that could be considered as tax for their working or just passing through his well-defined territory. I could very well get to like Roger, to understand him better than Toto, although Toto and I by then were like brothers. With Roger, it was easy to find out what he wanted, and what he wanted was not, in a sense, different from what I also desired.

It was Toto who confounded me — his seriousness of purpose, his narrow compass that was disturbing because of its rigidity.

At night, before we went to sleep, he would muse about his vision of the future. It evolved out of the Tondo that we knew, the Tondo that bothered him so much, not because we lived here but because it seemed so permanent and unchangeable.

And so, once bored by his quiet musings, I said that perhaps it was best if we just let people be, that we should just eat and run. This was what everyone was doing, and look at how comfortable and obese those who were good at it had become.

He raised his voice then. “We will bother,” he said, “because we are people, because we believe there is a just and merciful God.”

“Don’t bring religion into this,” I told him. “The God that you speak of is not merciful but cruel. And He is vengeful, too.”

I had read the Bible that Mother kept, a thick book with colored illustrations of bearded prophets, of Moses smashing the tablets, Jesus on a donkey, the Resurrection. I had loved the Old Testament because it was so tantalizing with all its gore and sex. I could look at Jesus as a historical man, a guerrilla leader who threatened the Roman empire and, when caught, must necessarily be executed by the Romans, not for his messianic preaching but for his subversive activities. But how could I explain this to Toto who was weaned on holy water and had breakfasted so long on communion wafers? How can I tell him that the God he worshiped admonished men to sell their garments to buy swords? Toto would need them, of course, to destroy the money changers at the temple, if not the temple itself; he would need them to tear down the shacks that were all around us so that this Tondo, this ugly scab upon the face of the land, would be banished forever.

So here I was, surrounded by the debris of the city. I had often thought how trivial was my life and the lives of those around me, how transitory this station. But Toto’s despair, this Tondo, had been here for years, for generations. My history book says so. It was here where Bonifacio started his Katipunan, that ill-fated secret society that he hoped would wrench from the Spaniards the freedom they had taken from us. Here, too, was where the organized labor movement began, only to be subverted and exploited by future generations of rapacious labor leaders. What had happened to those men, those professed paragons of righteousness who came from Tondo? Some reached the highest niches of government, and when they had gotten what they wanted, they fled Tondo to wallow in the perfumed precincts of Makati.

Still, a limbo like Tondo has its uses — it is a cause, a symbol people can cling to. It is a sordid reality that Father Jess and all those stodgy missionaries with big, fat cigars, those salivating messiahs oozing with human kindness, want to change. It is the wellspring for all those politicians who want to proclaim that their beginnings are lowly, who want some vestigial identity with the masses. It is the essence of which dreams are made, particularly by those who want to grow rich writing about the poor. No place in the country has been as religiously studied, surveyed, plotted, and discussed in seminars. How many doctoral dissertations have been written on its problems without those problems ever being attended to?

So we delight in saying that those who don’t look back to where they came from cannot go far, but some have gone far indeed while the rest stayed to rot where they are, to be visited again and again by the sins of their fathers.

Could anything be done? I have always looked with some envy at those romantics, Father Jess and Toto, for instance, who think that the human cussedness of which Tondo seems to have a surfeit can be tempered with good deeds and lofty thoughts. But I knew that the way was not through the pulpit, nor could it be lighted up by such slogans as those the Brotherhood had made.

I could take a kindlier view toward people like Father Jess, maybe, because I got to know the difficulties he had to live with, the condemnation of family, the sneering of friends, and the skepticism of most, including myself. There are so many imitators of Christ and some of them come in jeans, with long hair, but they refuse to raise the sword, to fire the armalite when the moment comes. Still, I must work with them, live with them, for they are allies and protectors at the moment. Would I protect them, too, if and when they need us?

There was one creature in Tondo who, I felt, needed me: Tia Nena. She could have been seventy or more, but after a time, age does not matter when it demands nothing but affection and respect. Though she was Father Jess’s servant, she was much more than that to Toto and me; she was a godmother from whom blessings flowed, for there was, in her silences and in her sweet forbearance, that quality of ageless compassion. Her face was lined, but her eyes were alert. There was something, in the way she was often bent at her chores, in how she spoke, that told me she had borne well and with fortitude a tragic burden. She spoke a little English and, I later found out, better Spanish. She had welcomed me quickly and took to washing my clothes as she did Toto’s and, on occasion, cooked especially for Toto and me. She smoked long black cigarettes sparingly, the lighted end in her mouth, and I always bought her a pack afterward. She knew almost everyone in the parish and even Roger, the gang leader, respected her. Toto and I were not spared an occasional sermon on punctuality, on thrift, the way she said she had lectured her two sons whose names came up again and again, as if she were measuring us against their images. Tia Nena opened up the neighborhood for me, saying to the people that the new sacristan was an Ilocano who could be trusted, unlike some Ilocano leaders.

It was not difficult getting to know the neighbors, particularly those close to the church, for, as in a village, we jostled one another like relatives and a secret did not seem possible among us.