Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

I released him and he rose, white-faced and shaken.

“Pepe,” he said in a gasp, “you are very good.”

“That’s really nothing,” I said. “You should see what I can do if someone attacks me with a bolo.”

We dressed slowly, then went down, hardly speaking, and walked over to the noodle restaurant below the karate school and ordered mami and siopao. He had no appetite and toyed with his food.

“Please, Roger, do me a favor.”

He looked at me, his face expressionless.

“Don’t ever tell anyone what we did just now,” I said.

He was surprised.

“Not even Toto knows that I take karate,” I continued, which was true. “And if Father Jess knows, I would lose my job. And I won’t be able to go to school anymore. He does not like violence.”

He was now grinning. “Oh, no … no, I will not tell anyone. But, hoy , you should really be a Tayo-Tayo. You will be a very useful member. You can teach us many things.”

“What will the others say?” I asked. “You have been calling Toto and me syoki * … maybe you should join the Brotherhood instead.”

He squirmed, obviously embarrassed. “I will explain. That’s what we call all sacristans anyway,” he said. “As for your group, maybe I became religious. Ha! Father Jess asked me. And who can refuse Father Jess? Why don’t you ask him to invite us for merienda at the kumbento ?”

“ Lutong macao ,” I said. “Can I ask you for other things?”

“Anything. As long as I can do it.”

“You can,” I said. “First, we should form a basketball team. Then we will cement the basketball court so we can play the whole year. We can also use it for meetings. For dances. Your boys should really try to police the whole village — I mean, do the work of real policemen so that there will be no thieves, at least in our place. And our women will be safe. Then we will cement the walks so they will not be muddy.”

He looked at me, eyes blinking.

“You will make a good president, Roger. You have organizational ability. Anyone who can organize your boys the way you have has real talent. I can be your secretary and Toto — you know he is very honest — can be the treasurer. And when everything is ready, we will have a program. Perhaps a dance. But you will have to make a speech. All presidents do.…”

I was going too fast, hindsight told me this; he was grinning, then his face clouded. “But my men, you know, they are not educated.”

“They will be members, but this group will be called the Brotherhood. There will be younger people — Ilocanos, Bikolanos, Pampangos, not just Bisaya. And there will be girls.…”

He laughed. I ordered another siopao , which he now devoured. When he boarded the jeepney back to Tondo, although he had not had even a sip of gin, he was so talkative he could have been mistaken for a drunk.

But Roger did not support the Brotherhood immediately, as I had hoped he would. Looking back, I now realize I had underestimated the native and intuitive wisdom that made him a leader. He did not put it to me directly, how my book learning, my karate, and my being a student were of no consequence, if not utterly useless, in the treacherous and slimy world he knew and dominated through his cunning.

In the weeks that followed I was to catch stray glimpses of it in conversations when he dropped by the kumbento for a cup of coffee and crackers with Tia Nena’s blessings. I had first thought of their rituals, of their secret tattoos, as juvenile antics until I learned they were invoked as a matter of life and death. For it was with these that the gang was welded together in a far more stringent way than the Brotherhood could ever unify its members.

I once told him of my escape from the maniacal drug addict whose car I jumped from, and he had merely smiled patronizingly and said that I had been in no real danger. We talked about how it was in Muntinlupa, what solitary confinement for a month was, the beatings, the sordid indignities; karate was useless, for when one was killed in the penitentiary for infringing on the gang taboos, he was disposed of with skill, the victim unaware. And bloodshed — had I ever seen a man who was being punished, forced to eat his own ears, which he himself had to broil before his judges? And had I ever played bowling with a decapitated head in the cell block alley during a prison riot? The perversion of Kuya Nick … ha! Did I know that sodomy was practiced as a matter of course in the penitentiary?

I had considered all these at first as macho drivel, but knowing that Roger did not have that kind of fetid imagination, I soon came to believe his stories and marvel at how he had lived through them without going insane.

Now, at least, his relations with me were warmer, and he was less pugnacious. Maybe Roger was always patronizing toward Toto because Toto never crossed his path, but as I see it now, he was protective of Toto. Roger could talk condescendingly to him, but only Roger did that, no one in his group had that privilege. I did not understand why until Toto told me that Roger had also come from the Hospicio, but had strayed too far. Toto was the key. But the lock was never turned until much, much later, and when it was finally done, when Roger and his group finally joined, the cost was too great.

After I had set up the Brotherhood in the Barrio I had more time for Lily. She had been reluctant to join and be an auditor, for, as she said, she already had a past — an illegitimate baby that had died, fathered by an American she no longer saw. She was a salesgirl at a Chinese store in Avenida and was away all day, from early morning, when she would battle for a seat on a jeepney at Bangkusay. She attended our Sunday meetings during which we worked out athletic and social programs and even an excursion to Bataan across the bay.

She was out in the alley once, in a printed green dress that had known many washings yet was so becoming, and I wondered aloud why all that beauty was going to waste.

“She would make a good bed partner,” I said more to myself than to anyone, but Toto heard and the ferocity of his reaction surprised me.

“Animal!” he screamed and I turned around to see him glaring at me, his face contorted with rage. “Can there be no other thing but filth in your mind? Don’t you ever know how to show respect? Have you never learned that?”

I rose, and still in a jocular tone said, “Friend, I was just making an observation. Don’t be so angry. I have not done anything to you.”

Then it struck me; all through the days that I had known him, this girl often drifted into our conversation and I had missed it all. Quickly, I added, “Sorry, Toto, I had forgotten you love her.”

He sat down on my cot, his voice quickly drained of anger. “Yes, yes, I love her — and there is nothing I can do.”

And much, much later, I learned how he would have married her had she permitted it because he wanted to give her child a name, his name, although everyone knew the baby was not his.

I once visited her at the Avenida dry goods store where she was supposed to receive eight pesos daily, the minimum wage, but actually got only six. Her shoes and clothes were more expensive for they were all bought on installment. But even in her plain cottons, she was the prettiest in that shop, in the Barrio even, and I often wondered if her Chinese boss molested her. Her disgracia was brought about by a lonely Peace Corps volunteer named Paul Simpson, and it was possible that Lily may have thought that the American was the key to the good life, to America and its cornucopia of Avon cosmetics, double knits, and Detroit excesses that clotted Manila’s streets. Escape from poverty was often possible only through migration to the United States, but the quotas were full, the visas were difficult to get, and thus, whether it was in the anonymity of some rural village or in Tondo itself, it was many a girl’s dream to be married to an American. And those Angeles bar waitresses — dark and homely and raucous — were actually envied when, through some inexplicable alchemy, they were able to entice their American lovers into marrying them. Not so with middle- and upper-class women; while they liked American men, they often balked at the idea of getting married to them, not so much because there was no genuine emotion involved, but because they would be excoriated, mistaken for prostitutes and washerwomen with whom the Americans in the bases trucked.