Francisco Jose: The Samsons: Two Novels

On the night her husband left her, Mrs. Antonio Samson could not sleep. It was not the first time she had committed an indiscretion. In the past few weeks she had lied to him and acted as if she had always been the faithful wife, and she had easily gone to sleep feeling sure that, even if her husband found out, he would not be able to do anything about it except, perhaps, make a nasty little scene. She was sure of him and of his reactions, just as she had long grown accustomed to the taste of his mouth, his smell, and the contours of his body. It was a comforting knowledge, and it gave her a sense of power and security which grew out of an intimacy that transcended the clasping of bodies and the living together. She had always been very intuitive, and when she occasionally looked back, she knew that everything fell neatly into place — her meeting Antonio Samson in Washington, his diffidence, and her final acceptance of him springing not out of human necessity but out of curiosity and the need to be possessed by someone who did not care if she was Carmen Villa.

But tonight, alone in the big room that had been their sanctum all their married life, she was nagged for the first time by a pang of regret and remorse so sharp and intense it actually hurt. All her life she had been pampered, had everything she desired. The things she valued were never those that could be bought, but those small tokens of truth and dogged fidelity that she, herself, could not give to anyone. It was not the first time that she would sleep alone; there were the times her husband had gone on business trips, and she had gotten used to such absences knowing that they were not permanent, that he would be back. Tonight, however, she was not sure. She had tried reading the books from the shelf by their bed — some anthologies, journals, and pocketbooks that her husband always had close by, but her mind could not latch on to anything she could retain. She stood up and, noticing the torn bits of paper with which her husband had littered the floor, started picking them up out of curiosity more than anything, and read the old, yellowed pages of the book that they had brought back from the Ilocos. It was in Latin and, of course, she did not understand. Then, as if she remembered that these bits of paper were important, she scooped them up and placed them in the shoe boxes that lined one of the closets in the room. The work tired her a little but still sleep would not come. For the first time, she was afraid that Tony Samson would never return, that when he said good-bye the parting was permanent, as final as death itself.

When she did fall asleep it was almost light and the east was already gray. She slept briefly but well, and when she woke up she immediately missed the arm that was usually flung across her breast, the warm nearness of a body she had known. She was angry at herself without quite knowing why, and when she drew the curtains, the sunlight that flooded the room hurt her eyes; she looked at herself in the mirror and, without her makeup and lipstick, she told herself that she was becoming a hag; the dark lines around her eyes, the beginning of a double chin, the start of wrinkles around her neck — these brought to her the presence of time, the enemy. She had once told her husband: I won’t mind growing old, I won’t mind really, as long as I have you always beside me and doing what would make me happy.

But he was not by her side, and shortly afterward her father knocked on the door and told her in a flat, toneless voice that her husband was dead — a horrible accident at the tracks in Antipolo Street — and remembering this later on, she marveled at her presence of mind, how she took the news calmly as if it was the most natural thing to have happened. Her first reaction was of disbelief; it was not true, he had just gone off somewhere, to sulk, to let his jealousy pass; he was not dead, he was coming back, and not only because with her he had finally been freed of that dreary place where he had come from. This would be just one reason for his return, of course; the real reason would be because he loved her and would take her for all that she was — good and bad, sinner and saint.

But the past is irreversible; the funeral she attended together with her parents was nothing but a blur; she did not want to believe that the man she had loved, who had possessed her and lived with her for more than a year, was in that beautiful, sealed mahogany casket, never again to talk with her, to share her gossip. And somehow, aware of this at last, of the finality of it all, she felt that she could not bear the loneliness, not so much of being alone but of knowing that she had perhaps driven him to his death.

When the funeral was over she decided for the first time to visit the place where he had lived; she had extracted the address from Tony’s sister, who was clear-eyed and stony-faced throughout the funeral service, and she had driven the sister and her husband back to Antipolo Street. They showed her that portion of the tracks where they had picked up the mangled pieces of his body, and she stopped and touched the earth and the rockbed of the tracks, which were still stained with blood, and as she did something within her snapped. The last time she saw his blood was in the winter past; they had gone out for a walk in the fresh snow in Central Park and he had sneezed violently; he had a nosebleed, not a cold, and the blood speckled the snow, brilliant crimson against angel white, and even in that awful moment he had paused before the pattern and exclaimed, “How beautiful!”

They took her up the narrow alley, lined with people and children who stared at her, to their clapboard house and up the narrow flight to the small room where Tony had lived. His two suitcases were placed on one side and she asked if she could bring them back to their home, but they did not want her to; they wanted to keep something that belonged to him, to remember him by; she offered them money but they would not take it. There must be something he left behind, they said; and she said, yes, there were many things, but mostly memories. She looked around her; she had never been cooped up in a place as small as this, and yet, somehow, it did not depress her as she was sometimes depressed at home. She looked down the window, at the tracks again, and along the tracks more shacks fronted by patches of camote and greens, and suddenly she could not stand another moment in this place, in this Antipolo where Tony had lived. She went down, trembling and sweating in the morning heat, and to each of the youngsters in the living room she thrust paper bills. They took her to the car she had parked at the other end of the alley, and to their mumbled apologies about their inability to entertain her in the best way possible, she whispered a listless thank-you and then drove off, a thousand accusations tormenting her. The whole wretched city now seemed one vast prison closing in on her and she would no longer be someone apart, with an identity all her own, but a member of the nameless mass, an insignificant fragment of the crowd. It was different when Tony was alive, for he had given her not just love and devotion but, in a real sense, a personality that she had not known was there: he had been very honest with her, sometimes too damning in his criticism, but always, in the end, ever lavish in his praise. Her virtues stood out — her capacity to see her role as a woman, her indifference to the vulgar tastes of her crowd, her own rebelliousness not so much against her family but against what her family had stood for: the vaunted privilege, the snobbery, when these were never real in a society as wide open as Manila’s.