Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

Just across from our window was Lily and her mother and brothers and sisters. They lived in a two-story shanty; on the ground-floor living room-kitchen were her brothers. She stayed in the room upstairs with her mother, who was suffering from TB. Lily had a baby who died, whose father was a Peace Corps volunteer. He had worked in the village school as a teacher’s aide.

Ka Lucio, an ex-Huk commander, and his nieces lived next to Lily’s house. Farther down the alley was the house of Roger, the leader of the Tayo-Tayo gang.

Tia Nena was disgusted with Roger. “So young, so capable — and what does he do all day? Just sits in that tienda , ‡drinking gin and seeing to it that no one ever crosses his path.”

Tia Nena moved about the kumbento quietly. When I arrived, she acknowledged my presence with a mere nod, and I felt that I had to win her approval. It was Roger’s gang, she said, that blocked the organization of the young people in the Barrio. At Father Jess’s suggestion, the youth had organized to keep away from trouble and to find out how they could be trained for work outside of the village.

Once, because Toto and I had to pass the tienda every day whenever we went to the city, Roger, who was there with his usual coterie, asked us to drink with them. Toto had always excused himself. Given his eyeglasses and weak eyes, they did not consider it manly to tangle with him. But here I was. I said, “Thank you, Roger, but please, not more than one small sip. Father Jess would not want me drunk.”

They laughed and Roger gave me his glass. He did not have a shirt on; he was pimply, fat, and on his chest a tattoo of a cobra with bared fangs, and on his arm a red heart impaled with a blue dagger.

Toto tried to drag me away, but it was better to know them, and this was an opportunity through which I could get closer to them. I raised the glass and downed the gin in one gulp. The boys looked at me in amazement, then they all broke into laughter. Even Roger laughed, his small eyes disappearing into narrow slits, his mouth studded with buckteeth yellow with nicotine.

“Next time,” I said, “it will be my turn to invite you.”

We hurried to the kumbento , Toto behind me, and when we got there, I rushed to our room. I never drank gin, and now I was drunk.

Then the rains stopped, but mud puddles scarred the alleys; nothing changed in Tondo except at night, when darkness brought a little quiet. But the darkness did not eclipse the life — the radios, the babble of children. Then the morning would drift in, heightening the putrefaction, the smell of feces that was thrown in the pathways at night, in the knee-deep waters between the houses, along the canals. The voices of children all around, the laughter of mothers who had no milk in their breasts, no rice in their kitchens. The day came brilliant and harsh, bouncing off the rooftops like silver.

Toward Christmas the sky was often cloudless and blue. At times the winds were rough. They churned the sea and brought to us the rancid smell of the bay. The clouds would boil, then darken, and waves would batter the sea wall. The fishermen could not sail out of the channel and they sat in the tiendas instead, drinking gin and wishing for the sea to calm. But even on days when they had a good catch of crabs and fish, it was never enough and they would always return to this island as poor as before.

It was better at night not only because there were dreams. I had read once that there was this man in a concentration camp having a nightmare, but his fellow inmates did not wake him because they knew no nightmare could be more horrible than the reality to which he would wake up.

Now I went to school in the afternoons and on toward evening. I was in the church the whole morning, and Father Jess had more time to go around, looking for jobs for the young people in the Barrio who had finished college. He was also trying to set up a vocational school. In the afternoons, he was at the archbishopric, where he assisted in the work of Catholic Charities. Sometimes he would return with a sack of powdered milk, which we then transferred into smaller plastic packets and distributed to nursing mothers. I always slipped a few to Lily across the alley; she needed them for her mother and brothers and sisters, and it pleased me to give her whatever I could.

Father Jess permitted me to work with the youth group and the first thing I did was to call a meeting. I asked them individually and they all agreed we could do a lot. But Roger’s gang stood in the way. His boys called me and Toto homosexuals. Still, we had to be together. I asked Roger and his boys if they wanted to affiliate with the Brotherhood, which was rapidly growing in the city and all over the country. They said they did not oppose it, but there was no hearty approval, either. In the end, I simply assumed that they would not object to our first project — to cement the basketball court so that we could play there even during the rainy season or use it for dances. I also planned for us to raise money for paint so we could beautify the multipurpose building and grade school, and transform the rusty brown sidings into something colorful.

There was plenty of skepticism at first; even Toto thought I was starting out wrong, with more imagination than was practical.

Yet something was missing; all through my first days in the Barrio, I kept thinking of Cabugawan, how very much the people in my village and in Tondo were alike, how they had come to this place, too, with nothing. The government had reclaimed this land from the sea and it was not meant to be a warren of squatter homes. But no one could turn away the hordes of jobless who had taken over the railroad flanks of Antipolo, the vacant lots in Quezon City, and this huge scab of idle land that was meant for commerce.

Ennui hounded me no matter how hard I worked on the school paper, in church. I swept the tile floors and scrubbed them where the mud of many rainy seasons had caked.

I swept the ceiling, too, of cobwebs and helped in the kitchen, although Tia Nena did not want me there. She was often quiet when the three of us ate at the small table in the kitchen. It came bit by bit that she was once in Mandaluyong — the mental hospital.

I tried not to worry about Mother and Auntie Bettina, and I did write to them, saying that I had moved to Tondo, that I had a job, and Mother had answered — it took so long, almost a month — saying how glad she was. She was proud of me, she hoped for me to be somebody, when all I wanted really was to see movies and eat Tia Nena’s wonderful cooking, something she learned when she worked for a Spanish family in her younger days.

I had reveries of Lucy and our first encounter, how we had wrestled and done it on the floor. Memory burned bright; I could not blot her from my mind or diminish my sense of loyalty even when I recalled her affair with my uncle. As she had explained, it was business. Auntie Betty and he were no longer sleeping together — she was in her menopause and sex repelled her. At first Lucy felt that she should leave, but Uncle Bert had not made any physical demands at home, for there Lucy was always a servant. Lucy was helping a sister in college who was “brighter” and could make a future for the farming family in Dumaguete. At first, Tio Bert’s offer was just fifty pesos, but Lucy told him she was a virgin, so he increased it to a hundred — the most he could afford. They would meet during lunchtime, maybe three times a month, near his Binondo office, then they’d trot over to a small hotel with a side entrance in an alley off Juan Luna, and they would spend an hour or two together. It was fifty pesos each visit, fifty pesos that went a long way in helping out the father in Dumaguete and the sister in Manila, who was their only hope.