My career as a politician is assured if I so decide to become one, that is what Father Jess had said, shaking his ponderous head at the prospect. But I will never be a politician. Though interested in people, I detest being friendly to those I feel no vibes with, not because I am not hypocritical, which I easily can be, but because it takes so much effort, so much violence to one’s self to attempt friendliness where there is nothing but indifference or contempt. Sagittarius—I am friendly—this is my nature; I am open to anything. I have a mind like a sponge that absorbs oil, water, muck, and dirt, a cast-iron stomach; I eat anything. They also say I am an achiever, that I can do what I set my mind to; in the two years I have been in Manila, what wonders have I done to my mind, to my body, to me? Two years—how many light years is it to the nearest galaxy, and even if we got there, in the end, will the trip be worth it? How long did it take the pterodactyl to disappear from the swamp, for the diamond to be? A baby feeds on its mother’s womb for nine months and is strangled slowly after birth because it does not have milk or proteins. Does it make any difference if it dies in nine months or before the age of nine? I have long known that time is an enemy rather than a friend, a deceiver, because it lulls us into thinking it can solve everything and, therefore, nothing. So it has been two years here in Manila, and what can I show for those years? Calloused knuckles of a novice karatista, the muddled brain of an aspiring politician?
If I deprecate myself too much, then this is also my nature, for I really cannot understand myself sometimes. For instance, why was I glad to leave Cabugawan where I was born, where I knew people and where people had been good to me? I don’t know why I had been unkind to Auntie Bettina and to Mother most of all, for it had never been my intention to hurt them, but that was what I did when I left.
Home. But where is home to this free mind, to this heart that throbs and expands beyond its prison of flesh? I could very well forget this home, this blob of black upon the green side of the earth; here, where dreams are slaughtered, and having buried them, I could strike out to other reaches and lift myself away from this Cabugawan, this enclave to which I was doomed as were those before me—those stunted people from the North who first came to this village and are now but memories, their presence ever with us when we talk before our meager meals, when we unfold the buri mats and prepare for the night. They hover around us, their remembered images blurred by years—uncles and aunts and grandfathers and great-grandfathers, their names, their lineage, their ghosts drifting up the grass roof with the soot and smoke of the kerosene lamp, and out into the night. Who are they but names of old men who fought with bolos, whose blood washed this land and whose bones are now embedded in the soil, their hatreds forgotten and unresolved, their ambitions unresurrected by those they left behind, certainly not by me, least of all, who could fancy an armalite spraying the sky not in anger but in wonderment that I could ever possess a two-thousand-peso toy and, with it, perhaps rob some bank so that once and for all I would finally be away from this blob of black, this home.…
Cabugawan is a village not really far from town, so I cannot say I am a farm boy, for I did spend a lot of my time in town, in the marketplace and around the movie house. Follow the dirt road from the main street, head south, cross a wooden bridge, and you are in Cabugawan, a huddle of thatch-roofed houses, though a few are roofed with galvanized iron now, for some of our neighbors have pensions from the government and a few families have relatives on the West Coast. Mother told me once that all who lived here were tenant farmers, and the bright ones were those who left.
The village street is just wide enough for bull-carts and an occasional jeepney. During the rainy season it is churned into mud by carabaos plodding through. In some places, the village street is lined with madre de cacao* bloom. On both sides are our homes, mostly walled with buri palm leaves, surrounded by fences of split bamboo that rot and fall apart. The yards are swept clean. Fruit trees—tamarind, papaya, pomelo, caimito†—surround the houses.
I know all the houses and their interiors—the cheap wooden furniture, the low eating tables, the kitchens sooty with years, the calendar frames and covers of Bannawag pasted on the walls, a cracked mirror, yellowed photographs of weddings and funerals, and on one side, the crude wooden chests where starched clothes and trinkets are stored. The village road dips down an arbor of bamboo, green and cool in the sunlight, and beyond it, the open fields. I have wandered here, swam in the irrigation ditches, gathered snails, and helped in the rice harvest.
It is difficult to explain my restlessness. I have not been hungry, as some of our neighbors had been during the planting season when they ate only twice a day. Thank God, Mother had good customers who paid her for her sewing, and Auntie Bettina is a schoolteacher. I cannot take pride in being Ilocano; I am not industrious, frugal, or serious, but I do have this desire to rush into the unknown, and I did that through books passed down to me by Mother and Auntie Bettina. I have meandered into the recesses of the imagination, wondered how it was when they first came to Rosales—those ancestors who had named the villages after the towns they came from. But I am not eager to know about them or why they came, by what means and with what infernal motivations. Perhaps it is just as well that I was born in Pangasinan, where, somehow, the Ilocano mystique has been diluted and where there is little affinity with the Ilocos, no real ties with the venerable towns that our forefathers had left; perhaps it was best that I was thrown into this cauldron called Tondo, for here, though we were still Warays, Maykenis, and etceteras, the distinctions have been muted and we are what we are, and the great equalizer is the fact that we all live here, and we live here because we cannot live in Santa Cruz or Quezon City or Makati. Still, there was no denying it, the Iglesia ni Kristo had more followers than Father Jess’s Church.
As for home, I see Cabugawan as the end, a monotonous prison where people grow old yet remain the same. When the time finally came for me to leave, I could not face Mother. So what if I did steal at school, from Auntie, from her? I just could not help myself. The last time Mother whipped me was when I was in grade six; it was also the year I flunked again. She did not have change for the five pesos of Mrs. Sison, one of her regular customers, so when she got home, she gave me a peso to return to Mrs. Sison. I never had money; I did go to town, but not to the house of Mrs. Sison. I went straight to the panciteria and ordered a peso’s worth of noodles. I would not have been found out, but Mrs. Sison ordered another dress in a week’s time, and when Mother came home, I knew at once that she knew. How could I tell her I spent the money on noodles? I told her I lost it—not a likely excuse. She grabbed her measuring stick and lashed at me. The pain in my thigh was sharp, stinging; she was about to swing again when she paused, the bamboo stick in midair, then crumpled to the floor, gasping. I went to her, frightened. “Mother! Mother!” but if she heard, she did not turn to me; her hand clutched at her chest, and after a while she got up and sat on the stool. Her face was livid and her breathing came slowly. When she spoke again, her voice trembled, almost inaudible: “Pepe,” she said, “what have I done wrong? I have raised you as well as I could.”
But there was only one thing in my mind: she was ill and I had made it worse by making her angry. And since then, every time she was hard of breath, I would worry that it was my doing. I am a bastard born to do wrong and could not help myself.
When I finally left, it was without recriminations. Mother had always wanted me to go and had prepared for it for so many years. She had set her mind on my going to college, perhaps to compensate for never having finished her degree. She had to stop in her second year, the year I was born.
You will be somebody, she used to say. And even after I failed thrice in grade school, she did not lose faith.
I love Mother. I only resented her wanting me catapulted to the stars when what I really wanted was just to be on solid, sordid ground, reading what I liked, eating pancit‡ and bread if I could have it every day—not vegetable stew with salted fish, rice fried with
out lard, and coffee brewed from corn. I wanted more, but how could I tell her this when she worked so hard and yet made so little?
Auntie Bettina had cooked some rice cakes for me to take to Antipolo Street. All through the week, Mother had told me how to behave, to be obedient to Uncle Bert and Auntie Betty, to help in their house and do my own washing and ironing.
Unknown to Mother, Auntie and I had an argument. It was May, a month after my graduation from high school. Four years of it took me six years; and before that, nine years of grade school instead of six, so I was older and more mature than my classmates. It is not that I was dumb, as my Auntie used to say. Through it all, Mother had veiled her disappointment each time my grades were very low; her reproachful silence was enough. Auntie Bettina was right, of course. I did not try hard enough even to just pass. Arithmetic, for instance, bored me, and I was absent so many times my teachers had no alternative but to flunk me. In one particular year, Mother got to know of these absences and she followed me one afternoon to the creek where I had gone to swim. She caught me there and lashed at me with a strip of bamboo so hard, the welts were on my legs for several days. This and other forms of punishment did not deter me. In high school, it was geometry, physics, algebra, or Pilipino—that senile euphemism for Tagalog—in which I could orate but whose grammar I could never learn although there was nothing grammatically wrong with the way I spoke. I have, since then, come to believe that the real enemies of the development of the national language were the grammarians, and the sooner they were banished the better for Tagalog.
But while I loathed science and math, I loved literature and was happiest when absorbed in a novel. I saw an ever-widening world ennobled by the possibilities of eternity. I was visiting lands I would never actually see, also the bleakest and grimmest of lives, the convolutions of the libido and the subconscious. I trembled with the angst of the psychological storytellers and was chilled to the bone with spy and detective fiction. Indeed, I grew up rich with books, and they made our house different from all the houses in Cabugawan or all of Rosales even.
This interest in books was shared by Mother and my auntie. The library, one big glass-encased cabinet, was essentially their making. Though the selection was predominantly fiction and the classics, there were also cheap paperbacks on the origins of man, history, and Asian philosophy. Ortega y Gasset and Marx were side by side with Confucius and Shakespeare, whom I did not like though I had read all of him. Most of the books were secondhand or hand-me-downs from Uncle Tony when he was in the United States. I scaled the Himalayas, dined at Maxim’s, savored the new wines of Australia, safari’d in Africa; indeed, I had thrilled to the excursions of James Morris, V. S. Pritchett, Santha Rama Rau, and others. I also followed the latest shows on Broadway, the winners in international film festivals, delved deep into the human spirit with Hesse and Boll, and agreed completely with Negritude and the struggle for an African identity.
A few times each year, Auntie Bettina went to Manila, and she always returned with tattered paperbacks and copies of Esquire, Look, The New Yorker, Encounter, and Harper’s or Atlantic Monthly, for she always forayed into the secondhand magazine and bookstands in Recto and Avenida. I kept them all in reading condition by taping or pasting them when they started falling apart.
But the life of books was plastic; it mesmerized me with the triumph of virtue, the goodness of man, the plenitude of rewards awaiting the kind and the honest when they ascend heaven, nirvana, or some such Shangri-la. Yet all around us, even in this village, it was the rapacious landlord and the omnipotent politician who amassed rewards, not in some unreachable netherland but here, where I, too, could see how far, far away from this planet was the world of the imagination where I had thrived.
This wretched geography to which I was shackled was made livable only in the mind, and to it I went all the time, so it was a full six years of high school instead of four—or three—if I tried. And I would not have passed in my senior year if Auntie Bettina had not talked with my teacher so he would not press charges against me.
I was a thief.
It started way back in grade school. I used to envy my classmates who, during recess, would go to the stores in front of the school and buy rice cakes, ice cream, or halo-halo§ while all I would have at times would be a cold ear of corn or boiled sweet potatoes, which Mother had me bring. During recess I’d steal back into the classroom and ransack the bags of my classmates and sometimes pilfer a few coins. Through all those years I was never caught—till I was a high school senior. My teacher left his Parker pen on his table, and as we were filing out I simply swiped it; he had asked us the following day if any of us had seen it. I did not want the pen for myself. I wanted to go to Dagupan early in the morning, have a good meal, a movie, and come back in the evening, and I made the mistake of peddling it in the bus station to someone who knew my teacher.
There was a confrontation in the house, Mother crying at the dishonor I had brought her; Auntie Bettina asking why I did it. What could I tell them?
My teacher was kind; he said he would not press charges after Auntie Bettina had talked with him, that he would pass me, too, in spite of my low grades, and he even had a few kind words—yes, I was poor in many subjects, but was tops in literature and composition, and that if only I listened, was not absent most of the time, and studied … studied … But what was there to study? At twenty-two I felt I knew enough of the world, that Cabugawan was its asshole, the repository of all its grief and agony, that I must flee it, even if only for a day in Dagupan.
Dust was thick on the street. It had already rained but not enough to bring a touch of green to the dying grass. Though it was only mid-morning, with the heat it seemed as if it was already high noon. I had stripped to my shorts, but it did not help. I wanted ice cream or halo-halo or just iced water, but we did not have a refrigerator. Auntie was cleaning in the kitchen; Mother had gone to town to deliver a dress. She supported me with her sewing; the sounds that I grew up with were the snip of scissors and the whirring of the infernal sewing machine late into the night.
I had read everything in the house, even Auntie’s technical teaching books, and I could not go to the library anymore, nor face any of my teachers. I had even read the scrapbook on Tio Tony that Mother kept under lock as if it were some heirloom. I had wondered why, so I asked her once and it was then that her voice trembled and she showed it to me—articles mostly, on nationalism, on the uses of the past—and I sometimes thought about what Tio Tony had written and concluded it was a waste of time. Although he had long been dead, his memory lingered tenaciously. Of all the Samsons, he had traveled farthest and reached the very top; I sometimes wished I were like him, if only for his travels, and when I told Mother this, she smiled wistfully as if I had made her happy.
It was Don Quixote that really fascinated me. I read it when I was in grade school. We were having difficult times; Mother was working very hard to help send Auntie Bettina to college. We could not afford electricity although the line had already reached our village and many of our neighbors had it. I was so fascinated by that crazy old man; the kerosene lamp I fashioned out of an old pop bottle was often empty so I used to walk to the far corner and there, under the streetlamp, with all the moths and mosquitoes about me, I would follow Don Quixote’s meanderings.
I would often wander to Calanutan, too, follow the railroad tracks, wondering how long it would take if I followed them and walked to Manila, although the trains no longer came to Rosales.
In the mornings, pretending that I was going to school, I went to Carmen and watched the buses as they sped on to Manila. And when I was tired of walking, I would lie in the shade of trees and watch the clouds turn into boats and planes, palaces and faraway snow-capped mountains—all the compass points that I would someday explore.
It was all those books, their sweet poison, their untruths that beguiled me. But I could not go far. Although I was already twenty-two and earned a little polishing shoes and selling newspapers
on holidays or gathering firewood and delivering it to regular customers in town, what I earned went to noodles and excursions to Dagupan.
On this particular morning I was just listless and saying again and again, “Life of a shrimp, life of a shrimp …”
Tia Bettina came into the living room, her printed dress quite wet as she had been washing the earthen pots. A few years back she had looked lovely, just like in her photographs, but she had become a teacher and had been assigned to a barrio in the next town. Though there were some suitors, she never paid them any attention, and now she was past forty, an old maid—but without the sour rancour of spinsters.
“What are you saying, Pepe?” she asked. “Why are you like this?”
“Why? Why? Because of this place! Everyone!”
“What wrong have I done?” she said, smiling, trying to humor me.
“You are contented,” I said. “You are a teacher, you are Miss Samson, and you are happy.”
“And you are young, talented. The world is before you. And next month you will go to college. You should be happy,” she said.
She, too, had worked hard and saved to send me to college—no, not in Dagupan, in Manila. In another month I would leave to be the lawyer, doctor, or whatever they fancied me to be. I can understand Mother saving for my education, but Auntie Bettina need not have saved for me even out of gratitude to Mother. It seemed as if there was no meaning to all they did. I never wanted to be a lawyer or a doctor; what I really wanted was to go see a movie, devour a good meal, or tarry in Dagupan just looking at the shops, the new shoes and clothes and denims for men, and go to the dance hall, drink a little beer and hold the girls, then dinner, not the vegetable stew we had at home, but plenty of pork or fried chicken.
“Why do I have to go to college?” I asked.
The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) Page 29