“What are you trying to say?” Godo asked with a smirk. “That we should all commit suicide?”
“No,” Charlie said resolutely, “that we should accept life and live it. Life is to be lived. It’s that simple.”
Godo turned to Tony. “Does Carmen know?”
Tony nodded without looking up. “She had a right to know. I told her the moment I returned from Rosales.”
“How did she take it?” Charlie asked.
“Civilized,” Tony said. “Carmen is always like that. It’s her passion to have people act civilized.”
Silence again, then Charlie tried to salvage what little exuberant mood was left. He called a waitress who was seated on one of the stools near the bar and asked her to join them.
She was pert and young and talkative, a Cebuana, according to her, who had finished home economics in one of the exclusive convent schools in the city and would have gone places had she not become too trusting with men. Now, look where she was, talking with slobs who did not care about her feelings, who considered her no more than someone who could be pawed all over in one evening and forgotten the next.
Tony ignored her prattle. The night was suddenly a senseless void. What he had hidden in his private consciousness had finally been exposed. The long skein had been unraveled and in the end was this: people knew, and no amount of protestation could prove how sincerely he had loved Carmen, that he would have willingly hied back to the university, to the hopeless drudgery of it all if only to show that he did not care for her money but only for her.
He did not care for Carmen’s money?
He lingered on the thought and found that it was not as absolute as he had wanted it. All his life he had known that dead end called Antipolo, he had known hunger—and not just the spiritual kind but also that merciless and embarrassing physical hunger, not just for food but also for all the things he could not possess.
After trying to caress the obstinate waitress, Godo suggested that they go find someplace where the women were more reasonable if not cooperative. But the brief encounter could not be forgotten, and shortly before midnight, after more senseless palaver in an Ermita bar called Surrender, Tony stood up. Holding his wallet, he said, “I feel guilty. You know how it is. It’s my in-laws’ big day. Carmen’s father—you understand, don’t you, Charlie?”
Charlie nodded. Tony motioned to the waiter, but Godo stopped him. “You don’t have to pick up the tab every time you are with us just because you are an ersatz Villa now,” he said with a boisterous laugh. “We still have some money and self-respect.”
He could not hold his contempt for Godo any longer. He had always been nice to him, particularly after his marriage, because Godo could be useful to the Villas and to himself, but tonight the insult must not pass.
“Don’t talk to me about self-respect,” he said with quiet fury. “You haven’t got any. You accept bribes just like the people you condemn—and don’t say that you didn’t get two thousand from Don Manuel for that lousy story you wrote about him. I have the canceled check and I can hang it on your neck anytime I want.”
He had said what he wanted most to say for the last few days, and a great and solemn peace filled him.
Godo jabbed a finger at him. Charlie’s glass of beer in the middle of the table toppled, but no one moved to escape the spreading blot.
“Is that your view of corruption?” Godo asked with a sneer. “You really have come a long way, Tony. You identify yourself with the Villas now. I’m sorry for you, I’m sorry for your children, and I’m sorry for this goddam country that permits people like you to go to college and then go about speaking as you do. Hell, you haven’t been educated at all. Nor have you grown up. I pity you.”
“The truth hurts,” Tony said quietly.
“The truth! Listen to my part of the truth. I am poor. There are thousands of poor jerks like me. Big men like Don Manuel, Dangmount, Lee, your nationalist Senator Reyes—this pack has robbed me of my rightful share in life. These sons of bitches band together. They have one thing in common: greed. And that’s what you have now. And the thousands like me? We scrounge around, we don’t live. Our children starve, our wives get sick and die. My wife is dying—and that’s where the two thousand went, you damn fool!” There were tears in Godo’s eyes and his voice trembled. “And you call me immoral? What right have you to make such a judgment? I was only getting back a little of what I could from the thieves and scum who call themselves nationalists and philanthropists. Two thousand lousy pesos. That is not even a fraction of what your father-in-law has stolen from the settlers in Mindanao. Want me to tell you how he got that steel mill set up? The dollars salted away in Switzerland? No, you don’t want to hear what I have to say because the truth hurts—just as you said. Me and my kind, I don’t owe you any favor. It’s you who owe us your comforts, your very lives.”
“I—We don’t owe you anything. You have been paid, Godo. You are now answerable only to your conscience and to God.”
“Look, I believed in God once.” Godo paused and his voice, which had been rimmed with venom, was now calm and soft. “I once thought that there was goodness and virtue, and nice wonderful presents awaited those who were virtuous. But not anymore. I see around me nothing but the work of an unjust and merciless God. There is too much suffering in my world not because men have caused it but because God has created men like the vultures of Pobres Park. And so I don’t believe in God anymore.” Godo’s voice became a whisper. “Someday, Tony … you know how it was when we were in college. You know how some of our friends disappeared and how they went to the hills to join the Huks. Wasn’t it wonderful then?” A smile played briefly on his face as he reminisced. “Oh, how we talked in those grubby restaurants about the meaning of life, about being committed to duty, creating a new order for the future, for our children … not for us—I’m moving on to forty, Tony, and I’m not as healthy as I was then. I get rheumatic pains. I have poor vision. But if I get called again, I will join them. I shall not hesitate as I did before. I do not care anymore who they will be. Colorums, Huks, anarchists—Satan himself—whoever they are who believe that only with violence and blood can we wipe out the terrible injustice around us. Yes,” Godo raised his voice, “I will go with them and may God have mercy on you, for one of the first things I will do when I have the power to do so will be to tear down your high walls and set afire that garbage dump you call Pobres Park! And I will not be sorry for you, I will not have one single regret. You have deserted us, Tony. You are a traitor now to your class and to your past. You have become one of them!”
For an instant Tony felt like picking up the table and smashing it on Godo’s corpulent face, but he smiled tolerantly instead, then rose and walked out into the night.
On the way back to Santa Mesa, Tony vowed never again to have anything to do with Godo and Charlie. He loathed himself for having let them trample on him—Godo, in particular, who had taken him for granted.
The big house came into view. Cars were parked all over the road and the traffic barely moved. As his cab neared the entrance, Carmen’s red Thunderbird was slipping out. She was at the wheel and beside her sat Ben, composed and grinning. Tony saw nothing wrong. Carmen and Ben were good friends. In a moment, however, the old suspicion, never completely banished, returned. There was something in Carmen’s face as the headlight of his cab struck it.
To the cabdriver he said, “Back out and follow that car with the girl driving. Don’t lose them.”
He trailed them down Santa Mesa Boulevard, then to Highway 54, Carmen drove leisurely. Once, as they neared the intersection in Cubao, he saw them kiss and his first impulse was to tell the driver to go alongside them. But his anger quickly subsided and gave way to a perverted curiosity. He brimmed with anxiety to find out what they would do, although in his mind there had already formed an inexorable image. The driver slowed beyond Cubao and asked in a rather apologetic tone who were the two they were following.
Tony had no immediate
answer, for he had presumed all along that the driver knew. In spite of the tightening in his chest, he replied, “The man is a very good friend of mine. I just want to know how successful he is this time.”
The driver seemed satisfied with the explanation and all the way, past Makati and the approaches to Pasay, he did not speak.
At the junction in Pasay, Carmen turned right and headed toward Taft Avenue. She turned at a corner into an open gate. Tony felt faint. He glanced up at the sign spelled in neon—the shining name of the motel—and in that one glance all the sordid things that the name implied mocked him. It happened so quickly, as if everything had been planned. Now a hundred visions flashed in the tortured cavities of his mind. Nothing else mattered but this discovery, and above the growing din of his anger, the driver’s voice came clear. “Do you want to follow them in?”
“Drive on,” Tony said in a voice that was not his. “Drive on,” and his voice trembled. The cab picked up speed, and in Vito Cruz, Tony said he would like to go to Surrender, the bar where he had left Godo and Charlie.
He stumbled out of the cab and did not wait for his change. He peeked inside each cubicle, even went to the men’s room, but Godo and Charlie had gone and the bartender did not know where. The anger was no longer just the anger of a man betrayed. It was compounded with an engulfing, nameless loathing for his wife.
Betrayal—but had he really lost anything except his pride? That was it, his pride. It had been afflicted before and he had outgrown the pain, because he was mature and sensible, because he was “civilized”—Carmen’s hateful word.
Why should he complain? He had known the good life and its beneficence could continue. He could go on making believe that Carmen still esteemed him and that this abominable thing that he had witnessed could be scraped off the mind as one would wipe the mess off a festive table.
He could still make-believe—another obnoxious word, an evil word—and he hastily repudiated the thought. Had he become so callous, so drained of self-respect that he would now think of disillusionment and the withering away of a once impregnable trust as nothing more than an inconsequential variation of living? Had he been so naive or so blind as not to see that around him worms had worked fast, eating away at the strong buttress which the past and all that was true and good had built? Or did he not see early enough that below him, underneath his very feet and pushing him up, was a dark force that no one could reckon—the greed and folly all men want to cast aside but cannot, because all this greed and folly are woven into the finest threads of their minds and their flesh, inseparable and eternal as original sin?
He prayed for an inner voice to redeem him, to tell him that he had done no wrong, but what he heard did not relieve him. It was the swish of a knife that sliced his heart, struck the finest tissues, and exposed their tender nerves to the faintest breeze. He had sinned, not against any single, identifiable man but against someone much more important—himself.
CHAPTER
16
After the fourth bar Tony gave up looking for Godo and Charlie, and simply raced away from the shadows of Mabini.
It was almost three o’clock when he returned to Santa Mesa. On the lawn of the big house the orchestra still played languorously. Most of the cars that lined the street leading to the house were still there, a formidable phalanx of shiny machines, their drivers gathered in groups, talking and waiting for their plate numbers to be called by a loudspeaker at the gate.
He avoided the lawn and the people. He hurried to the driveway, past the terrace to the rear entrance, and up the main stairway to the room where he and Carmen had lived the past year. The air conditioner hummed, and through the closed windows the music from the garden below stole into the room. He flicked the switch by the door and the chandelier exploded into dazzling pink.
From the closet in the adjoining room he brought out his old suitcase of battered leather, well-scuffed at the corners, its tattered stickers stubbornly clinging—Hotel Colon, Barcelona. He laid the suitcase on the bed and opened the cabinet at the foot of the bed. Most of his things were there. He had never acquired a collection of either clothes or knickknacks—just five suits, half a dozen barong Tagalogs, photographs of college life, and an assortment of paper-weights. He took these to the suitcase, then he went to his books, to the typewriter he had bought in Rome, now rusty with disuse. Near it were the manuscripts he had been working on, his own thesis and his grandfather’s Philosophia Vitae.
Should he take these, too? These materials that marked his beginning and his perdition? He viewed them, these fragments of the past whereon he stood. And in this cool, quiet room lavished with comfort, the futility, the smallness, and the terrifying finality of his failure reached out to him, clutched at him. It was of no more use, it was of no importance now for him to go on working with this sham—he who had been corrupt from the start, when he did not believe in what his father and even his grandfather had believed in. He was heaping blasphemy on the past and on what his grandfather had done. If he were honorable (to this question he steeled himself)… but there was nothing firm left to prop him up. What remained was this corroded frame that could not stand up to this one fearful gust of discovery: he had defeated himself.
He looked at what he had hoped to finish, at his grandfather’s work, and the meaningless sorrow that swept over him became a strength that surged to his hands. There were no tears in his eyes. He felt his breath strangling him as he bent down. With a firm hand he grabbed his manuscript and tore it apart. He did not hear the sound of paper being rent. Inside him was only emptiness. His heart began to be torn to shreds when he finally took hold of his grandfather’s Philosophia Vitae. It was so fragile, so easy to destroy that he did not even have to try.
When he was through, the papers were all about him, the meaningless scraps, the work, the heritage that had lasted a hundred years and had lain undisturbed in an Ilocos convent until he had stumbled upon it. A weariness came over him. It seemed as if he had been meandering in a desert or a swamp only to find that there was no bearing, no end to the wandering. The desert was sand without horizon, and the swamp was muck and slime forever. He had journeyed far, he had learned much, but he needed to go still farther, to the mountains of Bontoc, to the ulogs and eyries that were almost forgotten, only to be recalled again now. He would not find them in the desert or swamp of Santa Mesa. The beginning of knowledge, after all, lay not in the land that he had traveled but in the dark and anonymous folds of his own mind. He must hurry now, he must hurry. But where?
Carmen came in then, looking fresh and sinless. Seeing his things on the floor, the manuscripts and the old book for which she had paid good money now nothing but torn scraps, she stepped back and asked, “You did this? You must be out of your mind!”
Before he could speak she saw the suitcase and confronted him. “Are you going somewhere without even telling me?”
That was all the interest she showed. She was not eager to know his answer and she walked across the room, stepped on the litter covering the floor and sat at her dresser. She studied her makeup. She was not going to change her clothes. She merely primped, then stood up.
The weariness still clotted his mind, but he watched her attentively.
“I asked if you are going anywhere,” she said, turning around, satisfied with the reflection in the mirror. “My God, Tony, you don’t expect me to clean up this mess, do you?” She glared at him, her eyes lovely as ever.
“I don’t expect you to do anything,” he said. How strange. No anger welled within him and neither the curiosity nor the grief that had gripped him earlier returned. He turned his back on her, went to the suitcase, and brought the lid down. But the suitcase would not close. “And as for my going away,” he said, almost mumbling, “I don’t think it matters to you, so there’s no need for you to know where I’m going or what I’m going to do.”
Casually, she asked, “Where are you going?”
He removed one of his summer dacron suits, then pushed t
he lid again. This time it clicked shut.
“I’m leaving. It’s best for both of us.”
His mind was clear, as clear as on those mornings when the sunlight was pure. But the words, tainted with hatred, took shape: “You should take a bath and change your clothes. That way you’ll be cleaner. I’m sure you must be full of dirt—lying on a strange bed. God knows who was there before you.” He spoke evenly, as if he were stating a simple fact.
Carmen did not speak.
“I hope you understood what I just said,” Tony said. “I just said: you are a whore.”
Carmen did not move. “Tony, you don’t know what you are saying,” she said, aghast.
Tony turned to her and smiled grimly. “I know,” he said. He studied her face. God, she was pretty—the nose, the questioning eyes, the lips, those full, red lips. “Tonight,” he went on, measuring every word, “I followed you to the motel. I waited for a while, but it took you so long. Ben must be losing his virility.”
“It’s not true,” Carmen said desperately, backing away from him.
Tony followed her to her dresser where she slumped down. “I told you once that I’d kill you if you ever did this, remember? It was in Washington. It was freezing and there was no coffee in the pot, remember? And after I had gotten up and made you a cup I said, ‘I’ll do anything for you, be your servant, as long as you are true.’ Remember?”
In the quiet glare of the chandelier above them, her face was frightened and pale.
“You’re scared,” Tony said, enjoying himself, standing before her.
“Tony, don’t hurt me.”
Tony smiled in spite of himself. “How can I do that? Haven’t you always said that I should be civilized like you? Well, I’ll be civilized. If I touched you I’d soil my hands.”
“What can I say?” Carmen choked on the words.
The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) Page 24