“Yes, I hear they feed you papayas in the seminary morning, noon, and night till you are as limp as a squid.”
“Still, it is not sex,” he said. “I will tell you what is the most difficult about the priesthood. Obedience, that’s what. Damn, blind obedience. We have to obey, and if we cannot, we have to learn how to obey; we have to force ourselves to obey until in our conscience we have been conditioned to do so.”
“Like the army?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’d like you to go into retreat this year. Not so much to study your conscience as to be alone with yourself.”
“You can be alone in a crowd, Father.”
“Not that. But a chance to look at what you do. Do you think you have a conscience, Pepe?”
I fumbled; the question pushed me to the wall. “Doesn’t every man have one?” I asked instead.
“You are very clever,” he grinned. “What you are trying to say is, as a priest, perhaps, I don’t even have to bother with it. In the end, Pepe, we are all victims of circumstance. A world without injustice is not here; if it were, there would be no policemen, no courts—and yes, no priests. But there are things we do that give us happiness. That is one measure of a man.” He thrust a finger at me. “What gives you happiness?”
Without hesitation, “Food.”
He stood his full height, puckered his lips in mock anger, and pointed to the door.
So we aspired, we sweated to build a church here in Tondo, sought to bring light to its chicken-intestine alleys strewn with aborted hopes, slimy with crime; where no heavenly music floats above its rusting tin, and its flotsam soul drifts to the sea—not a sea of shining surf but muck and driftwood marsh awash with the turds of corruption. Look down here, those of you whose antiseptic residences will never be touched by our filthy hands, because it is not far off when the stench we breathe will give us the strength to surge beyond this dungheap into your perfumed enclaves, and with us the volcanic fires of vengeance; we will seep into each crack of your high and solid walls, flood over them like destiny, and you will not be able to hide, you will be transfixed.
Speed dreams, they have no place in my compass. I am here to survive and Tondo is just a way station, another rung in my climb from one garbage pile to another garbage pile. But we build from the past, and be it damned forever. We can never escape it so how can I now flee the old thatched house of Cabugawan, the scent of newly harvested grain, of fresh-cut grass; how can I flee the browned fields of May stirring at last to the touch of rain, the weeds thrusting up, the river finally alive, and the croak of frogs at night?
Toward the end of the schoolyear my past, which I had not told to anyone except Father Jess, finally hounded me in school; I don’t know how it came about—perhaps there were those in the Brotherhood who did not like me and the attention Professor Hortenso was giving me. The national election of the Brotherhood was going to be held and I was now being groomed by him for a seat in the National Directorate.
“You are one of the most popular student leaders,” he said, “and as you very well know, there will be candidates from UP who will try to get all the positions.”
I balked at the prospects. In the first place, I would not have tried to run for any of the posts in school were it not for the proddings of people. But looking back, it had not been completely without benefits. There was this job that paid, the invitations to seminars—all expenses paid—and, of course, the free dinners and parties to which I was invited. Without admitting it, I had always felt inferior to those people at UP, not because they could afford to study there, but simply because they had always seemed brighter than most; they always seemed to top the board exams, in law, in medicine.
After supper that evening, I strolled onto the empty basketball court and lay on one of the cement benches we had installed. It was oppressively hot in the kumbento and Father Jess would be in his shorts, the electric fan on high speed. He could have had his bedroom air-conditioned but had rejected it; there was not one air conditioner in the entire Barrio, and he was not going to be the first to have one.
Above, the sky arched luminous and was dusted with stars, and the sounds of the Barrio had started to peter out. Some time back, on an equally warm evening like this, I had come here and had dozed off, then woke up with a chill. It was past midnight and I rushed back to the kumbento, rattling the tin siding so that Toto would let me in. I was not sleepy; I was thinking of Lucy. I had had a busy year politicking, writing essays, going over asinine manuscripts and mushy poetry. I had now very little time for myself. I did not even go home for Christmas, and I wondered how it would be with Mother now. I remembered our house, the living room and its clutter of cloth, the sewing machine in one corner, the potted begonias on the windowsill, the polished bamboo floor, shiny even in the dark; Auntie Bettina working over her lesson plan far into the night. I wondered how it would be when they were old and could no longer earn their keep. Would I still be around to care for them, to return a bit of their love? I did not even write as often as I should have, and I only sent Mother and Auntie Christmas cards—as an afterthought.
I was depressed, recalling my callousness, when footsteps crunched on the gravel and, turning, I saw that Toto was there. “I thought you were asleep,” he said.
I rose and he sat beside me. “I have been wanting to tell you something since yesterday.”
“Now, Toto,” I said lightly, “has there been a time that you could not tell me anything?”
“This … this is very personal. You may not like to hear it.”
“Shit,” I said.
“Well, you know, the campaign for the Brotherhood Directorate is very … very keen, and the candidates, they are behaving like old politicians.”
“Like father, like son,” I said.
He was quiet again.
“Well, aren’t you going to tell me?” I prodded him.
“You will not … you will not get angry with me?”
“Hell, Toto. Tell me!”
“It will not make any difference—no difference at all,” he said, his voice lifting. “Why are people like this? They think it is dirty so they pass it around. They do not say it … they do not say it in the open … like … like men. They talk about it like … like girls.…”
“What are you talking about?”
“About … about you, Pepe. Someone does not like you … in the Brotherhood—he must have started it. But … but I want you to know … you have nothing to worry about. In fact … in fact, it is to your … your advantage.”
“Tell me!” My chest tightened.
“Dirty politics … very dirty,” he said. “The gossip is that you … you …” He paused and could not go on.
“Say it!” I shouted.
“A bastard …” almost in a whisper, then he turned away.
A great sense of relief filled me, and I laughed at the irony of it.
He turned back to me and asked, “You are not angry?”
I placed an arm on his shoulder. “It is no secret, Toto,” I said. “Everyone in my village knows about it. But do I have to go around shouting it? Telling everyone?”
He did not reply.
“Of course, it was difficult to bear, particularly when I was young and I asked questions, and my classmates—you know how kids are—often joked about it. There were times I wished I was not born … and my father, I know him now, all those years, I never knew him. He wronged my mother—” the words came easily, “and I hate him.”
“Do not say that.”
“I hate him,” I repeated flatly.
He turned away. “It is enough that we are here. Life is good; it has problems, but it is wonderful to be here, even in this Barrio.…”
“This hellhole?”
“We make it the way it is.”
“You are so full of hope,” I said.
“What else must we have? Revolutions are not made by pessimists, and even pessimists have hope. There is no sense in their being pessimists otherwise
.”
“Still,” I said, “there are times I wish I was not born.”
It was then that Toto raised his voice. “Who do you think you are? God’s loneliest man? Job? Look around you, there are hundreds of talented young people who do not go to college. They have no way of doing it. Look around us, here, in the Barrio. How many sick people do you know? With tuberculosis? Look at the children. Still, life goes on.”
He was not stammering anymore because he was angry. “Look at yourself. At least you know your mother and father and you have relatives. Look at me, Pepe, look at me! Do you know where I came from? I don’t know my father or my mother. No relatives! The children I grew up with were all orphans. At least my mother did not flush me down the toilet or strangle me and put me in the garbage can! They do that, you know. And you are sorry for yourself, sorry for being a bastard!”
Again, I put my arm on his shoulder, but he brushed it away brusquely. “The world is ahead of us, Pepe. We make it. Not our parents. And there is no past, just the future!”
I put an arm on his shoulder again and this time he did not push it away. “I am sorry,” I said. “I am too self-centered. Everything I do I do for myself, for a reason. I have never done anything for anyone—not for my mother, for my Auntie … for you. Forgive me, Toto.”
We went back to the kumbento in silence, lay in our beds and continued talking quietly. “I feel better, Toto,” I said. “Thank you for talking to me.”
After some time he asked: “Do you … do you know now what you want to be?”
“To be happy,” I said simply.
He laughed softly. “No, that is not what I meant. What will you be? A writer?”
“Hell, no,” I said.
“You have talent.”
“But I will not be one. Maybe I will be a politician.”
“The different kind,” he said. “You are too honest. And when you are older …”
“I will not grow old. And you? Will you be a scientist with your skills in math?”
“No, no,” Toto was emphatic. “I have known what I would like to be for a long time now. But it is very difficult and very expensive. I only hope Father Jess can help.”
“He will help,” I said. “He likes you very much.”
“He has many responsibilities. And besides, he is not really healthy. He has a heart problem.”
“He will not die very soon,” I said. “What do you want to be really? A revolutionary like Ka Lucio? You will not get anywhere. Look at him.”
Toto laughed again. “I will do it differently,” he said. “I will be a doctor.”
I did not campaign very hard for the National Directorate at the convention in Diliman. There was not much for me to do except distribute the mimeographed handbills that Toto and I had prepared. The delegates from Mindanao were mostly Ilocanos, and I think that my being one helped. Professor Hortenso saw to it that in both the bulletin and program my “Memo to Youth,” which got me the literary editorship of my college paper, was reprinted. The two-day convention was filled with blustery speeches that left me numb and reeling. I was glad when the end came, and would have been even if I had lost. That did not seem likely, and my victory—membership in the National Directorate—was not the chest-thumping kind of achievement I would have been proud of. There was something shadowy and stage-managed about the whole election, but certainly I was not one to question its outcome. Perhaps I was a bit naive to expect that young politicians were going to be different from their elders, that they would display more candor and be less concerned with meaningless argot. The first meetings of the National Directorate showed that this was not so. We would argue out the minutest point when the Brotherhood Constitution was invoked; everyone seemed anxious to show that only he saw or possessed the true light. Diliman was no longer my territory; we were not in Professor Hortenso’s cramped apartment, drinking stale coffee and devouring musty cookies. Now we were meeting in a conference room while outside the musclemen of the Brotherhood kept intruders out, although I couldn’t see anything secret or conspiratorial about the discussions. They were really just bloated repetitions of what was discussed in the seminars. I did not remind them of this; I did not know the members of the Directorate well, least of all the chairman—an ascetic-looking Ph.D. who certainly was not a student. I did not want to lose the privileges that came with my new post. I also wanted to feel them out, to learn what drove them and to remember, most of all, how they could be useful later.
The chairman intrigued me at first, but soon I found him quite transparent. He talked very little; instead, he was listening and guiding the discussions to where he wanted them to go: to a consensus that supported his views, some of which I did not agree with. For example, his emphasis on creating the atmosphere that would bring about armed violence, revolution, before its scheduled time—if there was even a schedule for it as evolved by social forces and events. Then, there was his fanatical hatred of the Americans. I wondered if he really knew the poor whom he wanted to be his revolutionary fodder, if he was not indulging in book-learned fantasies. Whatever thoughts I had I kept to myself for the time being. I did not want to antagonize him, to be labeled afterward as a deviationist—his usual retort to anyone who disagreed with him.
Of all the decisions we made, what I looked forward to was the demonstration we were to mount immediately, before the schools closed. The convention was actually a preparation for it. The Brotherhood was not poor, although our dues were minimal. We had a good finance committee raising money for publications, posters, and this demonstration. I was given three hundred pesos to spend, no accounting.
The first thing I did was bring Roger and the officers of the Barrio chapter to Panciteria Asia where we had pancit canton, fried chicken, chop suey, and all the beer they could drink.
We also bought cartulina,† ink and paint at a Chinese wholesale store in Divisoria. A sign painter in the Barrio, Ka Enteng, who painted the prow of the fishing bancas† that plied the bay, did the posters. The slogans prepared at the convention were clichés, of course. Ibagsak ang Imperialismo, Yankee Go Home, Close the US Bases … etc. I never felt strongly about them, but Toto did, and he even improved on them, adding words like Now!
They were all lined up for everyone to see, and Ka Lucio saw them when he returned from that small export-import office in the Escolta where he clerked.
Toto and I were viewing our handiwork with satisfaction, but Ka Lucio just glanced at them, then shook his head.
“They will not do, Ka Lucio?” I asked.
“You want advice?”
Toto said eagerly, “Yes, you know so many things.”
“Come and visit me in an hour,” he said.
Ka Lucio lived in a two-room house with two nieces whom he managed to send to college. An assortment of relatives, province-mates, and old friends were constant visitors. He tried to help them find jobs or, at the very least, offer them a roof and a meal while they were in the city. He managed to look like someone’s city uncle, well-bred and wise to the ways of the rich. A soft lilt to his voice camouflaged an iron will and a hardness of spirit that enabled him to endure not just years in the forest but more than a decade in army jails. Here, in the Barrio, he had not only been emasculated; here, too, was the final ignominy—to be poor and be with the poor, while many of the guerrillas of the war he had fought had become wealthy and gross and inhabited the perfumed enclaves of Makati. There is no adulation for a failed revolutionary, only a sympathy akin to pity or even contempt, not so much because he has failed but because he has lived so long.
Like most of the two-story houses in the Barrio, his was badly constructed. The living room had a cracked cement floor and a couple of sagging rattan sofas; beyond was the dingy kitchen, with its rusty kerosene stove. A transistor radio, a black-and-white TV, and a case full of books, mostly on politics, occupied a corner.
He bade us sit down while one of his nieces, who studied in the mornings, opened two bottles of Coke. They were not cold
and the cookies, exposed to the air for some time, were limp.
“So, you are going to be revolutionaries,” he said, a grin lighting up his face.
Neither Toto nor I replied; he sounded very patronizing.
“It is not easy,” he added quickly. “But if you have set your mind to it then give it everything you have, but more than anything, give it intelligence—something I did not give. I was more passion than reason. I know otherwise now.”
“What do you think of the posters, Ka Lucio?” I asked impatiently.
He stood up. Ka Lucio was tall for a Filipino. His thin lips gave him an ascetic look but his eyes, always wrinkled in laughter or a smile, put us at ease. He had surrendered, but that had not helped; he was jailed just the same and had served out his sentence without parole or lenient treatment. He walked to the shelf of books. “You are welcome to these,” he said. “My library, or what is left of it.”
“What is wrong with the posters, Ka Lucio?” Toto asked.
“You are engaged in propaganda,” he said. “It is just as important as being out there, in the forest. No, I see nothing wrong with the posters—they are well made. Too well made, as a matter of fact. But will they be believed? To whom are you addressing yourselves?”
“They will be believed,” Toto said, “because they speak the truth.”
Ka Lucio shook his head. Though he was sixty-five, there was not a single gray hair on his head, and he did not wear glasses. Everything about him belied years with the Huks, the guerrilla war against the Japanese. He had lost his wife after the war in an ambush and had not remarried. Now, in his eyes, this certitude. “What is truth?” he asked. “This is not a philosophical question. It is a matter of perception. What is the truth that you know about the American bases, Toto?”
“Instruments of American imperialism, the enslavement of the Filipino people,” Toto said quickly, almost by rote.
“They provide jobs for more than twenty thousand Filipinos,” Ka Lucio said. “They bring millions of dollars to this country. Can you do the same, you and your revolution?”
The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) Page 43