He looked at me surprised, puzzled.
“What are you trying to say?” He lowered his gun on the shooting bar. I still held mine.
“When you took that call I listened on the extension,” I said simply.
He drew back, the shock clear as sunlight on his face.
“What did you hear? You understand Spanish?”
“Everything, your contributions.” I went into the details.
He fumbled for words then straightened up, the smile still on.
“You know,” I said, my anger under complete control. “I was in the front when we were fired upon.”
“More will be killed,” he said finally. “What did you think it would be, a picnic?”
I repeated the cliché: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
“You may make the omelet but you won’t eat it,” he said patronizingly. He had regained his composure.
“Who will?”
“We will,” he said, the grin plastered on his face again. “Not only because we have the money. More important, with money, we have been able to develop the brains. And if we can’t have brains, we buy them.”
“Like you are trying to buy me now?”
He laughed in spite of himself. “Pepito, you are very sharp,” he said brightly. “Of course! This is why I brought you here. To convince you. Living in that dump, working for that priest—that is not your future, hijo. Your future is much brighter. The gates of Pobres Park are open to everyone, you know that. You are welcome—as long as you abide by the rules. Let the scum fight for the crumbs. Ours is the cake. And we are not going to give this cake away. No, hijo. We cannot lose. Can you not see? If anarchy comes, do you know what will happen? We are in the movement, too, as you already know. We are promoting it, with friends like you. As for the genuine rebels, like Ka Lucio, we will see to it that they are either discredited or destroyed. We have no room for them. And if the government—meaning the president—decides to put an end to the anarchy and declare a dictatorship, excellent!”
“I do not follow,” I said, although everything was falling neatly into place; Juan Puneta was not really telling me anything new.
“Have you forgotten that we have money? We send our children to the best schools—Paris, London, Boston—well, some of them may have flirted with communism, with socialism, that is the privilege of youth. But they are ours, they know where their interests lie. They are not going to be traitors to their class. They are everywhere—in business, in government, in politics. They know what is happening. They know what is going to happen. With brains, you are always one step ahead.”
“I still do not understand,” I said, urging him on.
He was now the epitome of eloquence: “We—” he said with a flourish of hands, “we are going to be here for a long time. As a matter of fact, for always. We know how to change, and that is why we will always be on top. But the change comes from us, dictated by us. And as for the president, his interests are with us; he is one of us! Not with the masses—ha, the masses! That’s wonderful for speeches. They could not care less for the class struggle, for ideology. Do you know, Pepito, that all they want is a roof over their heads? And three bowls of rice a day? You yourself said that. And most of all, they want a sense of order, of security. It is really that simple. Their perception of the world, of society, is dictated by their needs, and we will give them what they want, slowly, slowly. Never the pie. Just the crumbs. It has to be that way. In trade, our labor must be cheap so that we can compete. Yes, we will talk about social justice, land reform, but we will not give these in cash or in kind. We have to keep them nailed to the plow, to the machine—and we will do it deliberately because cheap labor is one of our real assets. And we will not give it up. The president— Any leader will understand it, approve of it. The president is with us. He likes to be surrounded by people who understand the impulses of power. Only the powerful know what these are. And the powerful are the rich. We will flock around him—pamper him, kowtow to him, and then suffocate him! And he won’t even realize it, for this is what dictators have always been—partial to panderers. How dictators love them! Study your history books, Pepito. Have they really abolished the elite in Moscow? In Peking? They will always be with us, like death and taxes.”
“Like death,” I said quietly. “But why are you telling me all this?”
“Because I want you to know. So that you will work for us.”
“And what will I get?”
“Anything you need. The future is not with the poor, you know that. It is always with the rich.”
“How did you get that way?”
“By exploiting the poor. I love exploiting the poor.” He laughed quickly, but his laughter sounded hollow.
“It was more than that.” I remembered his ancestry. “You are very proud of your ancestry. But your grandfather sold out the revolution and went over to the Spaniards. Then it was the Americans, and the Japanese. Now you will subvert the revolution again and claim it as yours.”
“That is the way it has always been,” he grinned. “The elite always wins in the end, Pepito. How can you ever get rid of it? How can you ever run the country without the elite? And the masses don’t make revolution, you know that, too.”
“Have you read Antonio Samson’s book?”
He nodded. “A lot of meaningless phrases strung together with hypocrisy. He married into the Villa family, you know that.”
“He committed suicide,” I said.
“That’s a joke,” he laughed again. “Not after marrying into the Villas. Why should he kill himself?”
“Some people are convinced he committed suicide,” I insisted.
“Suicide, accident, does it matter? The important thing is that he married into the Villa family. And Don Manuel never tires of talking about him, particularly now in his senility! As if Samson was some genius, merely because he had a Harvard Ph.D. The doors are wide open to those who are bright, Pepito. And one of the shortcuts is marriage—if you have what it takes. You can marry Betsy—” he shook a finger at me, insinuating that he knew.
“She has left; she is in New York,” I said.
“You can follow her, hijo,” he said. “You can easily go there. Scholarships—there are so many of them floating around. Or I can send you—if you would consider the price.”
“What do I have to do?” I was curious.
He clapped with enthusiasm, “Now you are really talking! First, hijo, there’s me, my personal needs—that’s not difficult for you. I am easy to please. Then help us, Pepito. We will control the Brotherhood. We’ll control Malacañang, the army, surround power centers with our people, who are more pliable, more understanding of our aspirations.”
The nationalist bourgeoisie—Professor Hortenso had warned us against them.
“Knowing all these now”—his chest thrust out, his eyes gleamed, and his thick lips pursed in satisfaction—“I hope you will not bargain too hard. After all, it is only money. It can easily be settled.”
“Why are you so sure about my price?”
He drew away, appraised me as if I were a hunk of meat, then said in that half-mocking, half-serious tone he always affected when he wanted to stress a point, “I still cannot understand how you did it … well, she is very pretty, but Nick said you knew there were a dozen of us behind that mirror.”
“Money,” I said, not bothering to explain or deny my performance with Kuya Nick’s mistress. “That is what made me do it.”
He came to me, gripped my shoulder. “I meant no offense, Pepito. This is what I like about you. You know what you want. Some time soon you should consider having a male partner like me. It could be more interesting. And pleasurable. I pay much, much more. I am glad it is so easy to talk with you. Still, I couldn’t understand how you could do it.”
“Or how any other toro can do it?”
“Yes!”
I wanted to tell him of the great difference between body and spirit, that this separate
ness was always clear to those who knew. Puneta may have traveled widely, traversed diverse regions of the mind and wallowed in the pleasures of the body, but he had never made that crossing that would deem him more than an effete bundle of nerves; he would never understand why prostitutes would heave and moan and have their bodies possessed but would never allow their mouths to be kissed. He would never understand, and I would not now explain it to him.
“It is all a matter of will,” I said.
“Will, determination, single-mindedness. You have it, Pepito. This is the single most important factor in any enterprise, whether it is playing toro or modernizing a country. Only those with will can achieve. And we will modernize this country,” he exalted, “the way only we can do it. Go back to your Asian history. It was not the peasants who changed Japan; it was the elite—the shoguns, the samurai. And that is what we are.”
So then, this is how it will be; they talk about modernization, about increases in the gross national product, and they want the bright young minds—honed in the best universities in America—to work and raise this country and these people from the garbage dump of history up to the dizzying heights of air-conditioned bedrooms, flush toilets, and paved streets. They can do this and they will do it because that is the iron compulsion of the times, and the rationale behind it is nationalism. They will use Rizal and all the bones of the illustrious dead to be the foundation of their dreams, and they will be self-righteous and self-satisfied, for they are convinced theirs is the true light, that they are acting on behalf of the people, and they know what is best for the clod, the toilers—the dumb carabaos that plow the fields. But who will talk about the dignity of men, about the living wage, the education of children, the care of the sick? Manila’s hospitals are abattoirs; the districts of the poor are nightmare swamplands. The highest officials go abroad on shopping sprees with the people’s money; why should their subalterns do less when the most powerful have secret bank accounts and the other accoutrements of luxury for which they have robbed the people? And we are asked to support them, to believe them—they who have drained us of our blood, who have tortured us and raped us. More than these, we are supposed to love our bondage because it is the mark of our allegiance to nation and, therefore, to God. If in the past we had done it, it was because we did not know; we had been bound to them by a mistaken sense of loyalty, by gratitude, because we felt then that we would not survive without their kindness, their patronage. But it is different now. Our eyes have been opened. Certainly not by them, but by the fact that we cannot be deceived forever. Now we will fling back to them the very sop with which they have tried to drown our protests. Nationalism means us, for we are the nation and the vengeance we seek will never be sated till we have gotten measure for measure all that was stolen from us. I live in Tondo, I came from Cabugawan. I want not just the irrevocable end to my poverty but justice as well.
I raised the magnum; the despair commingled with surprise on Juan Puneta’s face was appalling, but it did not deter me. I fired and the impact was so strong, it seemed as if he was lifted off his feet then flung down. My earmuffs were not on. The explosion crashed in my ears, and for some time I could not hear.
He had died instantly and the red on his shirtfront now spread. I took my handkerchief, wiped my gun carefully and placed it in his right hand. His hand would have powder marks, too, I’ve read about that. I took his gun and put it in my pocket. I had difficulty moving him and removing his wallet. It had a thousand pesos, mostly in fifties. I took five hundred.
I opened the cabinets—all were without locks—and took another magnum. Boxes of the ammo were in the same cabinet as the guns; eight were enough. I went up to the ground floor and was briefly apprehensive, for the door of the shooting range was locked. I pushed and it opened.
In the master bedroom most of the rosewood cabinets were open—a hundred suits, the finery of Pobres Park, but there was really nothing of value there. I remembered his keychain. I returned to the range and removed it from his pocket. I was careful not to leave fingerprints on the cabinets as I opened them. In one was his wife’s jewels lined up neatly in ivory-inlaid boxes. I did not know much about jewelry, but I did get a couple of diamond rings, a brooch—nothing more; I did not want them missed. On his writing table was a steel cash box. It contained stacks of dollar and peso bills, all in denominations of fifty and one hundred. I took half of its contents.
I returned to the range, put the keys in his pocket. Back in the kitchen, I washed the cups and saucers, placed them in the wall cabinet. The kitchen was as spotless as when I got there. When I walked out of the house, there was no one in the quiet mango-lined street. All the neighboring houses had high walls and all their massive iron gates were closed.
The paper bag I was carrying was heavy. On top of the guns and the ammo was the day’s papers. I walked down the street leisurely. At the gate of the Park I had a moment of fright; the private guards were examining a taxicab and opening its trunk.
But they did not bother with me—just another houseboy going to market.
* Misa de Gallo: Midnight mass held between December 16 and Christmas Eve.
Filipinos, Wake Up!
I boarded the bus for Quiapo at EDSA. I must see Professor Hortenso, tell him what I had done, then leave Manila for wherever he would send me. I brought to mind our talks, the small confidences he had shared with me, and it was then that I realized with some sadness that he did not really tell me much. Perhaps because I was not trusted; perhaps because my actions were determined by animal needs and not by some unswerving ideal. This should have been clear to me when I was being tortured—and it was just as well, for I would have told my torturers everything. I had skills, I had helped, but the compulsions of my stomach and my gonads, and not the dictates of a committed mind, determined my waking hours. I was an instrument to be manipulated, and though I had the right credentials, I was naive, I was an “adventurist,” not “intellectual” enough to understand and accept the ideological basis for revolution.
It all came to me, the discussions with Ka Lucio about the morality of violence. I was surprised that there was not a single qualm in me when it was my turn to do the ultimate. I had acted in passion, and now that my mind was calmer, I realized that what I had done really was nothing more than an extension of my desire to live, and that I had simply given back the violence that was inflicted on me, not so much by Puneta himself but by the instruments he created and supported. I may have acted in anger and vengeance, but also in righteousness. It is we or they, Ka Lucio had said. It was I or him, and my knowledge and acceptance of this made everything clear. The gods who manipulated the Brotherhood may mistrust me, may not include me in their councils—my friends and mentors like Professor Hortenso—but now I trusted myself, my instincts. And this, after all, was what really mattered.
But more than this new self-confidence was this feeling I could not quite describe because it was something that had never suffused me before. When I fashioned my first toy gun out of wood, I never thought I would aim and fire a real one at a man and do it without rancor or regret. I should be filled with remorse, but I was not. Instead, this overwhelming, edifying sense of freedom lifted me from the mundane. It had seemed that all my life I was imprisoned and could not break away until I had snuffed my enemy’s life. Now I was being lifted to the skies. A joy that had always eluded me filled me to overflowing, bursting in my heart, gushing in my arteries, drenching me with light. I could soar and touch the clouds!
I did not have time to count the money, the thousands I would bring to my brothers. It was rightfully ours. But I was frightened when I got to Dapitan. On the door of the Hortenso apartment was a handwritten sign: FOR RENT. I knocked on the next door. Oh yes, they moved only the other day, but they did not leave a forwarding address. The other occupants had the same reply. I tried to recall what he had told me, that he would get in touch with me at the kumbento, but there was no message for me in Tondo. Tia Nena asked if I was hungry, for i
t was past one, but I was not. There would be no one in Puneta’s house till five and they would not miss him till late evening, when they would start looking. I transferred the guns and the money to my tattered canvas bag; it did not look as if it could contain jewelry and all that cash.
Then I went to see Father Jess. Though it was almost Christmas, it was unusually warm. He was in his underwear and his paunch, big as a drum, drooped on his lap. He looked up from his typewriter, sweat glistening on his brow. His face, as with all those who are in deep thought when interrupted, was blank.
“Yes, Pepe,” he said finally. “It must be very important for you to interrupt me like this.”
“I want to confess, Father,” I said.
“You know I am not dogmatic about it.”
“I killed a man,” I said.
Father Jess drew back and stood his full height, all six feet of him, all fat and paunch and greasy face and yellow buckteeth. The eyes that were always filled with laughter suddenly grew reptilian cold.
“You are not making up another story,” he asked, half-expecting perhaps that what I told him was not true.
“I am speaking the truth,” I said, unwavering before the eyes that were probing into me. “I killed a man. I drew the gun and pointed it, straight at his chest, then fired. He looked very surprised as he fell in front of me—you know, like a drunk. There was not much blood. I thought it would splatter all over the place.”
“He is dead then?”
“As dead as anyone in the cemetery.”
“Do I know him?”
“Yes, of course.”
“God, do not make it difficult. Do not tell me things like this.”
“It was difficult for me, too,” I said. “But now that it is over, I knew it had to be done. From the very beginning, although I was not so sure then.”
“And who—”
I did not let him finish. “Who else but Juan Puneta?”
The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) Page 59