The Samsons: Two Novels

CHORAGUS

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.

In her own room she pondered these, for she now understood them. But there was something that never quite got itself spelled out clearly, and this was how she had given herself to him. She had always valued chastity not so much as a prize to be won but as a gift of love to be given in complete abandon to him whom she could trust, to a man with whom she would not mind a life of captivity.

This was the sole mystery that she could not solve. Maybe it was his fluent conversation — she always admired men who could express themselves clearly, who could argue themselves out of nooses, and Tony seemed capable of that without being boorish or pedantic. Maybe, as he had told her once too often, it was the tedium of being alone in a foreign land, unable to draw the cloying attention that she had always been used to.

Or maybe she was drawn to him as evil is drawn to virtue and all that is good — as Tony was. What he had told her was true, after all — that she was hopeless, and her family, too, and all of them, her father’s friends, her friends who vacationed in Spain to polish their accents and, perhaps, to bring home some peasant they could afterward pass off as an impoverished member of the aristocracy.

Was it also true that they were all beyond redemption? She had laughed when he first told her this; it had seemed so funny then, for she had understood corruption to mean committing malfeasances in public office, in pocketing government money, accepting bribes, and that sort of thing. Even if she did commit an indiscretion, it was not really that bad; she had not, after all, left him the way Conchita Reyes, the daughter of Senator Reyes, had left her husband and gone to Italy chasing a bogus count. She had returned to Pobres Park and to her husband, who took her back as if nothing had happened, and they had rejoined the same cocktail-cum-dinner circuit as impeccably gracious as ever. In her own way, Mrs. Antonio Samson considered herself faithful. While most of the women in the Park, particularly those in her circle, changed husbands more often than their monthly visitations, she had done no such thing. She had played around only with Ben de Jesus, who, after all, had proposed marriage to her earlier. She had acceded, yes, but with a feeling of guilt not only toward her husband but toward Ben’s wife, who was her best friend.

She could, of course, justify what she had done with her modern, “liberated” background. Besides, her husband was the sporting kind; in bed, when they were going through the habits of conjugal love, he would often think aloud about how it would be if he went to bed with any of her friends, and she would egg him on and tell him what her friends thought of their own husbands, how they told her of their extramarital experiences, and he had been delighted, of course, listening to her stories. It took some time, but she did realize later that he was really no more than a provinciano, charming in his own barrio way, who must be protected from his own simplicity.

She visited her husband’s office the day after the funeral; she had become curious about what he might have left there, the mementos that were to be recovered and permanently treasured. Tony had a way of putting down on paper his ideas and all the minutiae that he came across; this was part of his training as a scholar, and the habit had been deeply ingrained. If she had not bothered herself before with knowing about what he wrote or the thoughts that often went unsaid between them, now she wanted to know all that she could about him, the wellsprings of his strengths and weaknesses, the visions he had of himself and the future. Perhaps, in the process of learning and even discovery, she would stumble upon the primordial reasons for life and death.

Her husband’s secretary had been most efficient; she had filed all his papers with skill and precision and told her where everything was, even the bills that had to be paid. She was stunned by the tragedy, and she told the widow that she had never worked for a man as dedicated to his job and as understanding of people as Tony. She was handsome in an antiseptic sort of way, and Carmen wondered momentarily if her husband had ever flirted with her or had appreciated the fact that she had broad hips.

“I want to be alone,” the widow said. “I would like to go over all his things, so please do not let anyone disturb me.”

The secretary delivered to her all the keys to the drawers and the filing cabinets and Carmen riffled through them. She examined the expense vouchers and the receipts that Tony had assiduously kept and smiled, remembering again how Tony had lived as honestly and as frugally as always, within the limitations her father had mentioned, although such limitations had never been defined.

Then, at the bottom drawer of his desk, she found them — the ledgers in which he had written in his clear, precise longhand a sort of diary. Five of them, and four were filled up; the fifth was half full, and the last entry was three months ago. He had not written anything for a long time, although in the others he had something — a paragraph, or even just a line — every day. The entries in the last ledger were about things she knew very well — her family, her husband’s work, his impressions of people he met. Here was Antonio Samson at last — raw, honest, and without pretensions. And yet, he could have told her everything he had written down, if she had just shown an interest, even the slightest. He had even brought his journal home — she remembered this clearly now — and had started to write one evening, but she told him to attend to her rather than to his memoirs. And now that he was gone, these ideas, these thoughts were suddenly alive; she could hear his voice as she read what he had written about himself; his most secret thoughts. The last entry, however, was what interested Carmen most, for it pertained to her, and in a way, it was prophetic.

Antonio Samson wrote:

I must now ask myself the purpose, the meaning of my life. Once, long ago, this was never clear to me. If I thought about life’s purpose at all, I did not think of it as something beyond crassness, of which I was terribly ashamed. I did not have the means to think otherwise; I did not enjoy the luxury of contemplation, although I must admit that even in my youth I could be capable of questioning, for instance, the presence of God and the grand design wherein some are exploiters and the rest are the exploited. In those days, my only thoughts were of survival — the stern, physical kind that occupies the soldier when he is on the battlefield. Then, all that occupied me were how to finish school, get a job so that I could earn something to keep myself alive; and keeping alive meant three meals a day, a roof over my head that did not leak, a pair of shoes, clean clothes. It is all changed now and these objectives to which I addressed myself in the past are no longer my objectives. Does this mean then that I have gone very far? Economically, yes. My earliest desires were all economic, the most elementary of needs. Now, I have raised my objectives a little higher. This again is natural. No one really needs six meals a day, or two dozen pairs of shoes; to be crude about it, a man can eat only so much, wear so much. To be dross about it, a man — unless he is a superman or a sex maniac — can have only one sexual intercourse a day, or at the most, two. So what do I want out of life? I want to be justified. Whatever I do, in my heart, I want it to be right, I want to say I did it because it had to be done. I may be proved wrong, but it does not matter; at least, to my own self, I must be true. No Hamlet here, just the simple fact of a human being wanting for himself the integrity that everyone desires in his deepest thoughts, in his fondest dreams. This should be clearest to her who is my wife, who knows me now as no mortal has ever known me, for it is to her that I have voiced my understanding and, most of all, respect. God knows how much I have tried to earn her respect, to have her see that I am a person and not a thing, to have her feel the importance of the ideas, the ends that I have set for myself in the past; they are still valid even if no longer within my grasp. I have tried to define for myself what honor should be, but now it has become vague and formless. I clutch at the air, hoping to hold on to something real, but there is nothing there. And every day seems to be pushing me farther and farther away from what I want, which is not my wife’s body, which is not her family’s regard for me, but the justification that I am doing what should be done in this wretched and despicable land. I see the estrangement although I will not say that it is inevitable. I will not say it is written in the stars, for fate is not as constricted, as unswerving, as all that. I only wish that someday I will be capable of doing something heroic, a deed that would ennoble me not only to myself but, most of all, to her who has accepted me for what I am. If I could be sure, however, even just for one instant, that she chose me because she loved and respected me, then I would know that there is at least one human being to whom I have some value. Otherwise, it is a bleak world indeed where I have paused, and the sooner I leave it, the better.

She went over the last journal as avidly as she did the first dirty book Conchita Reyes gave her, and when she was through it seemed as if some heavy burden had been lifted from her shoulders. It was as if she knew not only her husband but the whole mystery of life; she was alive, she could pass her palms over tabletops and feel the smoothness; she could feel a dry martini scorch her throat, smell the fumes of traffic, hear the minutest tick of the clock, the scampering of some lonely cockroach across the bedroom floor. She was alive, she could explain herself, her father and mother, all her friends; she could understand why they breathed the same foul air every day, but she could not understand why Tony was dead.

Then she remembered the torn manuscripts that she had packed in the shoe boxes, and she fell to sorting them out, arranging them page by page. For days, she worked at it feverishly, barely eating anything while she was at it, not accepting condolences or telephone calls. But when everything was ready, taped, and arranged, she was as much in the dark as ever.

One evening, during a dinner at which she had not spoken a word, her father asked if she was feeling well. Her mother had been concerned about how little she had been eating and had ordered the cook to stock her room with fruits so that she could nibble on something if she were hungry.

“I am all right, Papa,” she said, turning to her father. She noticed at once that he looked tired, that there were deepening lines in his lean, handsome face.

“I just don’t have the appetite I used to have.”

“We were all under strain, hija,” Manuel Villa said languidly. “I hope you realize that. Oh, it’s not money problems — how wonderful it would be if all our problems were about money! They wouldn’t be difficult to solve, you know. But you and I, we understand each other clearly.”

She smiled at him and continued toying with the broiled tuna before her.

Don Manuel Villa brightened up. “I am tired of fish. The sauce is not good, and tonight I feel like having a good piece of steak.” He turned to his wife for approval. “I have a suggestion. Let us go to Alba’s. I hear there’s a new flamenco singer, too.”

She did not really want to go out; she would have preferred to go up to her room and reread the ledgers her husband had left, to know him better now that it was impossible to know him in the flesh; but there was a hint of pleading in her father’s voice, and her mother, too, had looked at her as if her very life depended on going out. She stood up and went to her room to dress.

They had, as usual, the best table in the supper club. The floor show had already started, a mimic from Europe who did imitations of Charlie Chaplin, Charles Boyer, and Humphrey Bogart. Their drinks came when the Spanish singer appeared on the stage — a short, olive-skinned woman accompanied by a lean, dark guitarist. She did not start with the flamencos for which she was famous, as spelled out in neon on the marquee. Her voice was metallic and yet there was a polish and mellowness to it, particularly when she lingered on the upper notes. She was not a trouper; she did not play with the microphone or emote with her hands; she just stood upright and pronounced the words clear as parchment. Her first number was inconsequential — unrequited love, death without end, God’s reward to those who have suffered. Applause was polite, but even then, Carmen knew she was listening to an artist, perhaps not a showman and an egoist, but one who could carry a message of love or grief straight to the heart. The guitar spoke again, and this time the singer’s words were meant only for her and for no other; these were the words Tony had uttered to her, the only Spanish song he had known and sung to her long, long ago, and it all came back — the memories of summer, the quiet walks under the elms, the unspoken acquiescence, the almost sacred tenderness, and all the love that now seemed wasted. There is no time, there is only eternity and the implacable reality that even life can be ephemeral, nothing more than a season, another summer grown cold. And with the sunlight gone, night is here.

Yo sin su amor no soy nada

Deten el tiempo en tus manos

Haz esta noche perpetua

Para que nunca se vaya de mi …

The words were like the ringing of a bell, then they faded, slowly, very slowly; the singer’s lips moved but no sound came forth; the guitar was muted although the fingers still strummed; there came this silence, vast and sepulchral and so frightening, she could feel her arms and legs become clammy, her whole body taut. She strained her ears. This is not true, this is not real, she told herself, but the club was dead, and the whole world, too. She opened her mouth and she knew she was speaking but she could not hear herself. She turned to her father, shouted “Papa!” and her father bolted up. But there was no sound. She screamed again, twice, but nothing, nothing but this silence. Her father rushed to her and slapped her hard across the face and she fell into his arms, sobbing, while her mother went to her and they took her out.

At home her father gave her a couple of pills and warm milk to drink. She fell asleep shortly after. She woke up in the morning, afraid and cold: the world, for the first time, was deathly quiet and still. The room had suddenly become alien; the clutter of magazines on the writing desk, the line of cosmetics at her table, her open cabinets and her clothes spilling out assured her she was indeed in her room, but she missed the old, familiar feeling of security, of being safe, as in the past when her husband was here, padding around in his shorts or snoring in bed. No living sound came from the life beyond the glass windows or the locked door.

The maid came in with a glass of warm milk and, shortly after, her parents, as solicitous as ever, came inquiring about how she felt. She cupped her ears and shook her head. She was not hearing anything, not a whisper, not a stir in this big and empty room.

Her mother helped her dress while her father made some hurried telephone calls. They drove to Ermita, to Dr. Clavecilla, an EENT specialist who was a friend of the family. He was very charming; he had traveled extensively in Europe and he greeted them affably, even made a joke as was his style, for her father and mother, as she could see, were laughing. She must now learn how to read lips if she wanted to understand or, at least, be part of the human race. But the effort that she must make would be great, and as she dwelled on the thought, it repelled her. The doctor led them all to his clinic — a room with all sorts of impressive-looking equipment — and in the background two nurses stood at ease ever ready to jump at the doctor’s bidding. She was led to a chair, much like a dentist’s, and the doctor probed into her ears, poked something cool and smooth into them. He talked desultorily with her parents and they shook their heads at each question. Then the doctor wrote on a pad and showed it to her: Have you had streptomycin injections recently, in huge quantities?

She smiled and shook her head.

The doctor called in the receptionist, who took down notes in shorthand, and after a short while the receptionist returned with the note neatly typed.

She read it slowly: “Deafness can be caused by a hundred reasons, almost all of them having to do with the eardrum and the auditory nerve, which relays sound to the brain. Sound that is received by the external ear and relayed via the middle ear to the internal ear may be blocked by wax. Many who complain that they are deaf usually have too much wax in their ear canal. The eardrum may be perforated and, therefore, can no longer record sound. Perforation may be remedied. There may be infection, too. Neither of these affects both your ears. The auditory nerve may be destroyed by an overdose of streptomycin or a severe disease. This is not so with your case. I can have X-rays made but I do not think this is necessary. I am quite convinced that your sense of hearing is normal but that there is something — perhaps in your mind, I am not sure — that is blocking your sense of hearing. People can be deaf because, in their subconscious, they do not want to hear.”

She read the note twice, then she asked for a pen and a pad. The nurse took her to the doctor’s table and she sat down and wrote with deliberation: “I know now why this happened and I also know what else will happen soon. I will lose my sense of smell, and after that, my sense of touch. Then I will lose my sight, I will be alive but only because I will still be breathing. I realize there is no cure for what ails me.”

She paused and wondered if she should put down the monstrous thought: I wish I were dead! But it was better not to state it. She turned to her dear father, who waited patiently before her, and the bleary eyes that met her gaze were beseeching. She could see the same troubled expression on her mother’s face and she wondered how deeply worried she was about her. Her mother had always seemed too detached from human travail; her tragedies were parties that did not turn out dazzling enough, the extra folds of fat on her stomach, thighs, and arms that she could not get rid of. Once, Carmen herself was nagged by the thought that she, too, would develop into the tub of lard that her mother was. Now, both her parents seemed like two ordinary people — familiar, yes, but without any special attachment to her, without any niche in her heart.

She handed the note to Dr. Clavecilla, and as the three started to read it, she wondered what they would do now that they knew what had truly ailed her all these years. If only — the thought crossed her mind briefly — if only they, too, could realize what was wrong with them!

CHAPTER 1

It was not the visit that bothered Tony, because it was as inevitable as the genuflection of the faithful and was the first thing to do once he was home. The visit was more than a duty. But he also knew that it was just a gesture; he had been honest with himself and what he was going to see was an old man who had been given up, forgotten, and denied. It appalled him, of course, to think of his father this way, yet there was no denying the reality; the past was, after all, not a pool of total darkness but a clear spring. In it he often saw his reflection, and what he saw sometimes frightened him. To recall those incidents that had battered the soul was like flagellating oneself and yielding to phantoms. There was, after all, warmth and friendship in this world, and all the niggling sins committed against him and his father might now be ignored. There were alternatives open to those who recognized them. A man could still fashion his life to his specifications. As for the poor, there would always be a lot of them, in varying degrees of destitution and corruption.

The stone highway to the penitentiary was flanked by flat, brown fields with huge blobs of black, for at this time of year the straw from last year’s harvest that had been left in the fields was burned, and the patches of black were thickest where grain had been most abundant the previous year. It was much easier to plow the soil when there was no straw to obstruct the plowshare. Also, the farmer considered the ashes fertilizer. In the distance, from the speeding bus, he could make out the dried water holes near the irrigation ditches. The fields were no different from those in Rosales, where he had hunted for frogs in the fissures of the earth, baked and cracked by the sun. In the late afternoons he brought home a string of frogs, and his mother always said he would not starve anywhere in the world because he knew how to look for food. But Rosales and its fields and Cabugawan where he was born were but a memory now, he had left the town forever, and the old house and the farm were no longer there.

And yet, the thought of going back was always in his mind; it stirred the old aches, brought back to the inner eye the images of dew-washed mornings and fields lavished with green after the first rain of May; now came a loneliness that gnawed at the heart and made Antipolo and all the remembered places — Cambridge and Barcelona — alien and spiritless. He loved his beginnings, but the boy was no more, for he had been vanquished by the man.

It was this same man who felt superior to his father; it was a sinful thought, but Tony felt he could live contentedly, even smugly, with his limitations. He knew, however, that his father was his moral superior, and as a son, he could never aspire to the heroism the old man had shown.

He had regarded his father with awe and even fear in his younger days — a fear that pushed between them a silence that was torn away only after his father went to prison. He recoiled with dread and self-pity every time he remembered how he had gone to the Rich Man’s house for the first time. One of his grade school classmates was the Rich Man’s son. There was no school that afternoon, for it was the start of the Christmas season, and they had spent the whole morning cleaning their classroom and setting up a Christmas tree of agoho pine that they had cut from the Rich Man’s yard. They were friends — the Rich Man’s son and he. They ate in the Rich Man’s kitchen and, after lunch, played in the dark caverns of the bodega where sacks of grain were stored, piled high to the very rafters. He had never before seen so much grain all in one place, and the abundance had overwhelmed him. When he returned home late that afternoon, he gushed about what he had seen, and then mentioned that he had eaten in the Rich Man’s kitchen. He had never seen his father angry before; the old man did not talk much but neither did he seem to be remiss in his affection. But now his father dragged him down the house to the yard and shoved him to the sled. He lay still, his feet dangling on one end, his stomach pressed to the bamboo floor of the sled. The first lash of the horsewhip cut across his back with a sharp, cruel pain, followed by another and still another until it didn’t hurt any more. His mother had cried helplessly, “Kill him, kill him, your own flesh and blood, kill him if you cannot kill your mortal enemy.”

It took more than a month for the wounds to heal, and during all this time that he could not lie on his back, he learned to sleep lying on his stomach. When the wounds finally healed, his mother often looked at them and broke into tears again and again.

Not once, however, did he see a sign that the old man was sorry; not once — and it was only years afterward that he realized why his father had whipped him. Then he understood the tortured emotions that had propelled his father to anger and violence. Then, too, were all his suspicions about his father’s incapacity for warmth and understanding dispelled.

The last time he saw the old man seemed ages ago, but the pain that past meetings evoked always seemed raw. When he and his sister first moved to Manila from Rosales after his mother had died, he visited his father frequently — once a week, if he had fare money. Those occasions were planned, and because of the poor provisions of the inmates he always brought something — a new handkerchief, a cake of soap, a piece of fried fish or pie — anything that would improve his life and cheer him up. It was Tony who talked then, recounting freely what was happening to him, his scholarship and the future spread out at his feet, waiting to be reaped. If the conversation turned to Rosales at all, it was with some proprietary feeling and nostalgia that he spoke of home; they would all go back someday and live again among friends and relatives. But soon his visits to Muntinlupa became less frequent, and each had to be prefaced with embarrassed explanations that were, of course, true. After all, Muntinlupa was far from Manila. There was work in the university and a scholarship that had to be maintained by diligence; he was tired, and when Sunday came he usually slept the whole day and rested for the grind that followed week after week. And then, between the uneasy silences, it was the old man who talked, not about life in prison but about what Rosales could have been, what things they could have possessed.

Tony had always avoided talking about his father. To friends, he had vaguely indicated that his father was dead. He had been greatly troubled that morning filling out his application for the university, but after a pause, he wrote that both parents were dead. He should have been proud to admit that his father was in Muntinlupa; he should have worn his old man’s life sentence like a decoration on his breast: my father did what was right; he killed in righteous anger. How many people could do the same? But the time for heroism had passed; they are no more — the brave men who courted stigma, privation, and even death for their beliefs. In the end, his father did not get what he wanted and it was this, perhaps, that riled the old man most.

There were instances when he was tempted to argue with his father, to tell him that the weapons the old man had chosen were obsolete, but it embarrassed him to do so, for his father spoke from the swirling depths of passion. Perhaps it would have turned out differently if his father had acted with restraint and held back the angry hand. But then the family would not have left Rosales; it would have sunk into the implacable destiny of small towns and he would never have known the colors of autumn, the refreshing mental exercises in the apartment on Maple Street, and, most of all, he would never have met Carmen Villa.

His old man’s sacrifice was not wasted then; it had exiled the family to the sullen warren of Antipolo, and from there, the vision was without limit, and for all this, Tony had his father to thank, an old man tortured with years and blinded with rage, a man who was brave when bravery was not the need, but intelligence — and cleverness.

The street to the penitentiary from the main highway had not changed in the years since he had last visited — the same fruit stalls, dilapidated shops and houses, the same bleak uniformity of small towns. His sister had not told the old man that his scholarship was over, that Tony would soon be home. There were a host of things he would talk about: the job at the university, that was the first, and then Carmen.

The fortress-like facade of the prison’s main building had been whitewashed, and the hedges and well-trimmed grass that fronted the gate shone in the harsh May sun. The prison’s surroundings were green compared to the dead fields below the high, whitewashed walls. The parked jeepneys and carretelas^* near the gate, the brothers and sons and daughters in their Sunday best crowded around the waiting benches in reception — the day was a fiesta even to him.

He did not wait very long. Shortly after he had filled out the visitor’s form, and given it to the guard at one of the several reception desks, the iron door leading beyond the cement hall opened with a clang.

In the bright light inside the huge visiting pavilion he recognized his father at once, a short man with white hair, past sixty now, with an almost imperceptible stoop. Tony bolted up from the wooden bench and went to his father, who had walked into the airy center of the hall, scanning the faces around him, his face anxious and drawn. How he had changed! Now there was a yellowish pallor in his skin and he no longer held his head high. His orange uniform was not only faded, it was patched and needed washing, and when he moved, he dragged his wooden shoes noisily across the rough cement floor.

He went to his father, whispered hoarsely, “Father,” then he grasped the horned hand and brought it to his lips. I’m back, Father,” he said thickly. “I’m back and I’m glad to see that you are healthy.…”

The old man turned to him; he did not speak at first, but his lips quivered and a mistiness gathered in the hollow, blinking eyes. Holding his father’s hand, Tony led him to the bench at one end of the hall and they sat together. The old man was still wordless but on his face a smile started.

“I thought I would never see you again,” he finally said.

“You knew I would come back.”

The old man nodded. “I know — that I know. But I thought you would come back to claim a corpse.” The old man shook his head. “I do not want to speak like this … but it is the truth. I am glad you came before I died. I am dying, son.” He was stating a fact that did not need to be glossed over. “But it has been a good life. I see you tall and straight, grown up and able to stand alone. Your sister is well — how I would like to see my grandchildren! It has been a good life, and that takes out some of the sting of death.”

It was the first time the old man had spoken about dying; his father had always talked of past angers or delighted in describing the truck garden he was tending, the milking cow he was pasturing. He had not expected to hear this in his first meeting with his father in six years. “You’ll live to be a hundred,” he said lightly, not wanting to be morbid.

The old man shook his head. “I’m not sad, my son,” he said, his voice grown brittle. Soon he was coughing, a deep raspy cough. When it was over, “And your sister? And her children? She has never brought them to me. Tell her to bring the children, even just once so I can see them before I die.”

“I’ll do that, Father.”

“You have changed.” The old man drew away and looked at his son. “You have grown more stout, and your hands … how soft they have become. Well, what did you bring home from America? What did you do there?” The small, wrinkled eyes seemed serious.

“I studied to be a teacher, just as you said I should,” Tony said.

“I have always been proud of you and your sister,” the old man said, looking away, a new smile lighting up his face. “Many times I’ve been sorry I haven’t shared your life more. I know that you are not proud of me. No one is proud of us—” he paused and swept the hall with a glance; the other inmates in orange uniforms were receiving visitors, too. “But someday you and your sister will understand.”

“Please, Father,” Tony said in feeble protest.

The old man sighed. He leaned against the rough adobe wall and lifted his eyes to the asbestos ceiling. Around them was the noise of people, the happy talk of relatives and children.

“I brought something for you,” Tony said. He took out of his pocket the cigarette lighter he had bought in Hong Kong.

The old man fondled the lighter. “I can’t use it,” he said quickly. “It’s much too good for me. But Bastian — one of the guards, a nice young man who calls me Ama—I’ll give it to him and he will be grateful.”

Tony wanted to say no but he nodded instead. “Is there anything I can do, Father? I’ve made some friends in America who might be able to help us. It is not too late to hope that someday you will be out and …”

The old man reached for his son’s hand and pressed it. “What is there for me to do outside? I won’t live another year, son. And sometimes, if you and your Manang^† Betty have time, do come and see me. If you ever go to Rosales again, don’t forget to visit your mother’s grave. And when you get married, try to get one who will stand by you.”

Tony stood up. He had thought about this reunion, had tried to shape the words, all the proper things to say, even if his father was this sorry shadow of a man; this old, withered man who had soaked suffering into his bones and numbness from his years in this prison. “I also came to tell you something very important,” Tony said. “I ask your permission that I may get married soon.”

For awhile they just looked at each other. Then the old man stood up and placed an arm around his son’s waist. “You know very well you don’t have to ask my permission about anything you do. But thank you for honoring me still. Is she like you? Where did you meet her?”

No, she is not like us. She is a Villa and all that the name implies. I met her in Washington; I was lonely and she was kind. It may be a mistake because she is not one of us, but I’m bound to her now and not only by love.

He could not say these words, so he said instead, “She is Tagalog, Father. I met her in the United States and we took the same boat home.”

The old man moved to one of the windows and Tony followed him. Beyond the iron bars, a portion of the penitentiary grounds lay before them, the well-tended grass and the whitewashed walls and, to their right, the rows and rows of pechay^‡ and beans — deep green in the sunlight. Prisoners tended the truck garden, and even on this Sunday, which was a visiting day, prisoners in yellow uniforms worked the vegetable plots.

“When will the wedding be?” the old man asked.

“I don’t know, Father,” Tony said. “Maybe in a year, when I have saved enough. I just wanted you to be the first to know. I haven’t told Manang Betty yet.”

The old man looked thoughtful. Again, a smile turned the corners of his mouth. “Of course, you don’t know how much I’d like to be present when you get married. And when you have children, I hope you will be able to understand that I’m not sorry for what I did. If I were given the chance, I’d do it again. There is no other way.”

Tony did not want to argue with his father again, but the old man had started on the ancient recitation that must be listened to, to the end. “I know that you are learned, but some day I hope you can go to Cabugaw. Find your root and my root. I did not start with myself. I had a father, too, and he was a brave man.”

“I know, Father,” Tony said fervently. “Someday I’ll go there.”

“You will find,” the old man continued quietly, “how even your grandfather changed his mind.”

They sat on the bench again. The old man shook his head. “I’ll die soon and that is why you must know what to do in case I die. This is what will happen, son. They will sell my body to a medical school in Manila and students will cut me up. They will learn all about me. But not what is in my heart — they will never find out about that. They will not know what I did in Rosales. No one will know now, no one except you and your mother in heaven and your Manang Betty and those who are in Rosales still. Are you angry that I did what had to be done?”

Tony shook his head. “It is not for me to judge, Father.”

The old man leaned on the cement wall and sighed. He clasped his gnarled hands and spoke almost in a whisper: “That night, I remember. But you were very small then.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Tony said.

“Would you have done what I did?” the old man asked, but he didn’t really care for an answer; he stared at the cement floor, at his handmade wooden clogs with rubber thongs.

Tony did not speak; he had been asked this question many times and the next would fall neatly into place.

“Yes, all those years— All those years that your grandfather and I cleaned the land, all those years …” the voice trembled and Tony thought it would break into a sob. But the old man steadied himself. “We found that the land we cleared and planted was not ours. The wilderness we tamed was not ours. Nor yours. It was the Rich Man’s, and after all those years … we were his tenants.”

The strong over the weak, intelligence subverting ignorance. “There was nothing you could do, Father,” he said.

The old man said placidly, “Your grandfather’s sweat, my sweat, my blood were mixed with every particle of soil in that land. But they were not satisfied with getting it. They emptied our granaries, too.”

“It’s different now, Father.”

The old man smiled again, then coughed — a deep, thin cough that seemed to wrench life from within him, and he doubled up as one in pain. Tony sidled close to him and hugged the shoulders, the wasted body, until the old man straightened up again. He looked at his son and his eyes were misty.

“Let us not talk like this again, Father,” Tony said.

“All right,” the old man said weakly. “But grant me one last request, son. Don’t let them cut me up. Just promise me that.”

“I’ll do all I can,” Tony said with feeling.

“Take me back to Rosales when I die. Bury me beside your mother.”

“I’ll do that, Father,” Tony said.

“I’m not working in the fields anymore. They have transferred me to the offices and I clean desks and books. My legs and arms feel numb. Pain shoots up my spine. But now that I’ve told you what I want most, I’m glad. And when you get married, bring her to see me. And I hope I’ll see my grandchildren before I die.”

“You will, Father.”

The old man ran a nervous hand across his white hair. The bell above the iron door to the barracks rang. The visiting hour was over. Tony held the horned hand to his lips again. “I’ll come and see you again, Father,” he said as the old man turned away.

On the way back to the city, it was the heat that made his homecoming absolute. The boat had left San Francisco in April and the air was fresh and sweet with spring. After that, Hawaii and balmy weather, the informality, the white beaches, the palm trees, and the people in shorts; then Japan and Fujiyama capped with snow, Hong Kong — Victoria Peak and its houses and many-storied buildings gleaming in the sun. And finally, Manila, in early May simply unbearable. The heat claimed him back the moment they sailed into Philippine waters. The city hadn’t changed really, not its dusty streets, not its Antipolo. Its houses were still unpainted and falling apart, and the children who played in the dirt had the forsaken look he had always remembered. This was the dead end, the street where dreams vanished, and this fact was stamped on the faces of the people, the jeepney drivers, the anemic government clerks, the jobless, the petty racketeers, and the con men. This despondency was etched on the face of Antipolo, and there was no escaping it unless by some miracle one happened to have gone to college, gotten a fellowship, and set his course on distant sights.

In May the body tires quickly, the brow is damp, and the mind is sluggish. The day commingles with the smell of sweat and the fumes of a thousand jeepneys; then dusk descends, and with the coolness that it brings, the fret and drudgery of the day is banished at last. The neon lights sparkle along Rizal Avenue, spewing greens, yellows, and reds at the darkening sky.

Tony felt a kinship with twilight, for it brought him an inner peace no matter how brief, and a reminder, too, that day must end and that, extending this vision, there was a terminus to all the good things that were shaping before him.

Tony got off the jeepney in Blumentritt. The sky was washed with indigo and with a lingering dye of red in the direction of Manila Bay. The walk home would be cool — a healthy excursion down a side street that was muddy during the rainy season but scraggly now with dying weeds.

Home was his sister Betty’s accesoria.^§ She taught grade school in Sampaloc and her husband clerked for a Chinese flour importer in Binondo. They had three boys who slept in the living room with the maid now that Tony was back and was occupying his old room. The house stood near a narrow dirt road that seemed to have been totally forgotten by the politicians because it was choked with garbage piles, and farther down the street it was pocked by those small sweet potato patches that squatters with untidy lean-tos tended. There were two ways by which one might reach the house: the railroad tracks or the narrow alley that curved from the road. The alley was seldom empty of children and housewives and drunks with heavy talk and desperate joys, their lives made more viable and secure by steady doses of devil gin that they bought from the store at the far end of the road.

Tony followed the railroad tracks, stepping away from the little mounds of human waste that those in the vicinity had left, being too lazy to go to the public midden shed down the line.

His sister was busy in the kitchen — a small, dark corner at the other end of the living room. His nephews met him and they were all hands at the comics section of the afternoon paper and a bag of peanuts that he had bought.

“I’ve prepared something special for you,” Betty called out from the kitchen. She turned away from the kerosene stove. She was a short, anemic-looking woman with deep-set eyes and thin lips. She had always been frail, and motherhood, as it had happened with many women, should have endowed her with more flesh, but she was thinner than ever. Her voice, however, had a certain warmth and fullness that somehow made up for her meager frame. “I remember your letters and how you used to crave for pinakbet^‖ with broiled mudfish. Well, the mudfish — I stopped by the market this afternoon—”

“Thank you, Manang,” he said. He stood beside her, opened the earthen pot, and the heady smell of eggplants, bitter melons, onions, tomatoes, and mudfish in stew whorled up to him. For a while he let the luxurious aroma engulf him, then he placed the lid back on the bubbling pot.

“I do wish you’d eat more,” Tony said, looking at his sister. She was indeed thin, and now, in the yellow light, she seemed even thinner. But Betty was not pallid in body or spirit, for each muscle in her taut frame was toughened by hard physical work — washing and housecleaning — and by the work in the fields when she was younger.

“How is Father?” Betty asked after a while.

“He is all right, but he thinks he hasn’t long to live,” Tony said. “When was it that you saw him last? He wants to see the children.”

“The children,” Betty sighed. “Tony, you know the children can’t know about their grandfather — it is for the best.”

“Yes,” Tony said quietly.

“They will not understand. No one in this street will understand.”

Tony didn’t speak.

“I wish Father would understand,” Betty was saying, “but he seems unchangeable. I can’t do much for him. I never did much for him. Six years you were away, maybe I saw him only twice a year.”

Tony quickly veered away from the nettlesome subject. “Where is Manong?” he asked.

“Upstairs. Go ask him to come down,” Betty said, laying the chipped china on the table beyond the stove. “He likes pinakbet, too.”

Tony climbed the narrow stairs dusty with afternoon, to the room that faced the street. Bert, his brother-in-law, was there, plucking hair from his armpits and grimacing properly before the cracked glass of the aparador.^a

“We are having pinakbet this evening,” Tony said.

Bert grunted. He was short like his wife, but massively built, and his short-cropped hair accentuated the shortness of his neck and the squareness of his chin. He was Ilocano, too, with thick lips and deep brown skin. While he clerked for a Chinese flour importer in Binondo district, he studied law at night. He followed Tony down the darkened stairway, his steps heavy.

Betty’s boys were already at the table, noisy as pigs, and the maid darted about, attending to their every whim.

Tony had never discussed the subject of marriage before with his sister, although they had touched on its fringes in the past, bantering about the girls in Rosales who had shown him inordinate attention. And remembering Rosales, thoughts of his cousin Emy thrust themselves once more on his consciousness. She had been with him in this very house, studying to be a teacher because that seemed to be the cheapest course for her to take, although it was not the limit of her talent.

He wondered how his sister would react to what he had to say. No, he was not shirking his responsibility of sending her children to school in gratitude for the assistance she had given him. There would be no shirking — the duty was his, he being a younger brother, and it was as natural as birth itself.

“Manang,” he started, searching Betty’s face for a sign of reproach or approval, but Betty was attending to the food. “I’m getting married.”

Even the boys stopped eating and turned to him.

“To whom?” Betty asked, leaning forward, her spoon motionless in her hand.

It was Bert’s turn. “Carmen Villa? The girl in the pictures you sent us from Washington?”

Tony nodded.

“This is wonderful!” Bert was enthusiastic. “Isn’t she the daughter of the Villas? Do they already know and have they accepted you?”

“Carmen has. As for her parents, I don’t think there will be any trouble.”

“When will you get married?” Betty asked.

“In a year — maybe even less.”

Bert stirred in his chair. “There has to be more time. Preparations. After all, the Villas … you know what I mean.”

“That’s why I’m telling you now.”

“This is foolish,” Betty said, aghast and overjoyed at the same time. “Tony, what can we do?”

“You don’t have to do anything. Don’t worry.”

“How easy it is for you to say that!” Betty said. “You know we have to think of the sponsors.”

Tony had never given the embellishments of the wedding serious thought, and to his sister he said simply, “You’ll be one, Manang.”

“Me? Me?” Betty objected shrilly. “Let’s get the governor. After all, he is from our town and he knows you. We have to show we know someone important, have influential acquaintances. I’m not saying that we can ever equal the Villas, but we can put on an appearance.”

Tony laughed hollowly. “There is no sense in that,” he said. “Carmen knows everything about me. My income. I’ve told her everything.”

“So what if she knows.” Betty was insistent. “There are her parents, her relatives — people who don’t know. It’s for them that we will put on an appearance.”

“There will be no people. Just us — and the members of her family. It’s already settled. It’s going to be very quiet. Besides, I don’t want us to spend. You know I have no money.”

“But we can get the investment back. Oh yes, Tony, we can,” Betty said. “Just don’t forget us when you are there. The Villas … I haven’t really stopped hoping. Maybe, someday, I’ll go back to college and get a master’s degree or something, and then I’ll be able to get a better job. But so much will have to depend on you.”

“Even I, someday, may come to you for assistance,” Bert said. “But this does not have to be said. I will — particularly when I’m through with law. It’s so hard to get a position these days, even when you are a lawyer. You know what I mean.”

“But how can I be of help?” Tony asked. “I am not even sure if I’ll be able to live on my salary. Certainly I’m not going to live on Carmen’s money. Oh no.”

“Throw delicadeza^b out of the window,” Betty said. “Maybe I will yet be able to leave that public school. Ten years — can you imagine that? Ten years and not a single raise.”

Tony ate in silence.

“Well, you can do something,” Betty insisted.

“I don’t know,” Tony said sullenly. “It all seems confusing now.”

“The Villas are rich, aren’t they? I’m not saying that you should be grasping, but look at how we have suffered. Don’t you remember any more?”

“I don’t want to sound ungrateful,” Tony said, his appetite gone.

“It’s not your fault that she is rich,” Betty was determined. “After all, not every girl can have a prize like you. Do you remember how those girls back home vied for your attention? You can write to Emy and she’ll tell you about all those who are there waiting. She knows, and here you are worrying about what people, particularly the Villas, would say. They wouldn’t ask questions, my dear.”

Emy — and the caverns of the past were lighted up again; memories, sharp and shining as if they were minted only yesterday, lingered in his mind, and briefly he wondered where his cousin was, what she was doing, and if she still cared. But the wondering was quickly pushed aside by his sister’s insistent, “The Villas are rich … rich …”

“I just want to show them that we don’t need their money,” Tony said. “We have to keep a little of what face we have.”

“Face? Face?” Betty was grim. “Do the poor have any face or the right to it? It’s too late now to think of that. A hundred years ago maybe — then it would have been different. There were opportunities then for people to succeed with industry, honesty, and pride. Not anymore, Tony. In school I repeat all these things, but I know I’m lying to those children, and they themselves see what’s happening. The poor cannot be proud.”

“They can at least have self-respect. They don’t have to be so ingratiating,” Tony said faintly. He saw how useless it was to argue. His nephews, too, had lost all interest in the squabble, and they now tackled their food with happy noises.

“It would be different,” Betty continued, “if we didn’t lose everything — and most of it went to you.”

“It’s not for you to say that,” Bert came to Tony’s defense.

“It’s true,” Betty glared at her husband. “When he was in college he never had to worry about his fees. I helped.”

Betty turned to Tony. “I’m not saying that you didn’t deserve to be helped. You have always been bright. That’s why it’s up to you to help us.” The edge was gone from her voice, but she impressed upon him now the fact that he was no longer a part of the family, that he had grown far beyond their conception of him. Now he was salvation, a symbol of the elusive dream they never could attain.

“Do not forget,” Betty measured her words. “The land — it was precious, but your career was more important.”

“You went to college, too, Manang,” he said sullenly. “And Mother slaved for you, too.”

“But I’m a woman, Tony, and I’m not as bright as you. Don’t think of repaying me. Think of Mother. Think of how we all came to Manila because there was nothing left in the province for us. Nothing but old people and tenant relatives who couldn’t help us.”

“I know, I know,” he said dully. “But it’s still wrong.”

“Go ahead then,” Betty said, “be righteous, because you have never suffered. Can’t you see that you are our only hope?”

Tony shook his head. “What you are trying to tell me is probably the same thing that bothers Carmen’s parents. Where’s your pride?”

“Talk to me about pride,” Betty raised her voice again. “You didn’t talk to me about it when I was giving you my pay.”

“That’s not the way to talk,” Bert said.

“Now you accuse me of ingratitude,” Tony said bitterly. “You know I’m aware of my debts and that I’ll pay — not all of them, but I’ll pay.”

He could have said more, but he was the younger. A silence laden with remonstrances descended upon them, broken only by the boys slurping their food. There was no sense in staying at the table longer. “I’m full,” Tony said, not turning to his sister, and rose.

He went up to his room. It was stuffy. Its wooden sidings were bare but for a calendar with the picture of a man happily guzzling a bottle of beer. His iron cot was on one side along with the writing table, which was piled with books and his old typewriter.

Tony went to the only window that opened on the railroad tracks, four bands shining in the afterglow.

Now loneliness welled within him and magnified the words he had just heard. Pride, poverty — they trashed at the chest and emptied it of other feelings; they dulled the mind after one had heard them over and over again. Yet in this ugly room they seemed to belong like beckonings he could not ignore. It was as if the words evoked an ancient world where he had gotten lost, and now he must go and find the place where he had started, the small town, the rain-washed field, and the muddied river; find the locusts on the wing, the farmer boy calling the stray calf home, the brass bands in the early morning, and the acacia leaves closing.

Tony left the window and sat on his cot. The sounds of evening were around him, and he could hear from downstairs his sister’s continued arguing with her husband. Why did they have to be so craven in their needs? If only they could see the hopeless limits of this street and accept this as the fate they must endure and not moan over.

The door opened and Bert stepped in. “You have to stuff your ears with cotton every time your sister speaks,” he said in an affected, jovial tone. “It’s the heat, and she’s tired. What’s more, there’s the summer vacation and no teaching, therefore no money. You know, the kids are already going to school.” He laughed lightly. “You know what I mean.”

“I understand, Manong,” Tony said.

Bert continued, “You shouldn’t think badly of her. As Betty said, when you are poor, you can’t have pride. Only the rich have pride. And we … we are stubborn, that’s all.”

“I know, I know,” Tony said, but his words were drowned as a freight train thundered by. For an instant, a yellow glare flooded the room and everything in it shook.

Bert moved to the chair and sat like an impassive Buddha. As the train moved on and its noise died away, he spoke again: “There is no sense troubling you, particularly now that you are about to be married. It’s just that your sister worries so much. You know what I mean?”

Tony nodded. “I am not angry with her. She will always be Manang Betty.”

“Yes,” Bert said with another shaky laugh. “And I’ll always be your Manong Bert.”

Tony nodded again.

Folding his stubby hands, Bert said, “I hope you have made the proper choice. Still, I always feel that a man should know women. Your sister— I’m not being unfaithful to her, remember this,” he spoke with some hesitation, and Tony felt uncomfortable because his brother-in-law was about to confide in him, and he never liked confidences. They served like heavy fetters that drew the confidant and the confessor cumbersomely together. There was no common ground between him and this fat, bumbling man who knew nothing better than clerking and dreaming of being a lawyer. But there was no way out; he couldn’t run away from this room; he must listen now to the drab tale. “There were three others before Betty came,” a slight, nervous laugh. “I had to make a decision. So here I am.”

“And here I am,” Tony said without emotion.

“You are making the right choice,” Bert said, “marrying into that family. But I hope just the same that you got some experience in the United States. Not just book learning and that sort of thing. Experience with women, you know what I mean.”

“Yes,” Tony said.

The older man’s eyes gleamed lecherously. “American girls are really hot, aren’t they, Tony?”

Tony could almost anticipate the next question, and watching his brother-in-law working up to it, watching the smile broadening on his rotund face, Tony felt uneasy and almost angry at having to answer such asinine questions.

“Everyone says that,” Bert went on, making sounds with his tongue. “Do tell me about them … not now, I know you are tired, but some afternoon when you aren’t too tired and when your sister isn’t around. You know what I mean.”

Tony smiled. “Yes, when she is not around.” Relief came over him; he didn’t have to talk about American women now. It wasn’t that they were unpleasant to talk about, but talking about them involved deception. He had always found it difficult to talk about sex. He had never, for instance, talked about Emy. And now, even while he faced this inquisitive man, his mind wandered to thoughts of Emy — Emy as he had known her, chiding him, telling him he would be someone to look up to, and when one is respected, said Emy, can one possibly hope for more?

The sentiment was pedestrian and tritely put, but it had seemed so meaningful — the whole world was in it — when she had expressed it to him, in this very room, the evening before he was to leave. And now, if Emy knew what was going to happen to him, would she approve? What she thought of him meant so much, even now, and within him he could feel a flickering tenderness, tenderness for the girl who was the first, an indefinable feeling that was both sorrow and joy, for Emy now belonged to the past. This was not final — it could never be final. He was faithful to her — if not to her person at least to her memory. He had long wanted to ask Bert how she was. He couldn’t tell Bert that he had written to her and she had never answered; he just wanted to find out what she was doing, if she was well and happy or if she had married.

But the question as he would have worded it wouldn’t take shape, and the guilt that he had felt about her fed his anxiety instead. “I wonder how Rosales is. And Emy, too. Is she already teaching?” Just like that, matter-of-factly, as if she were someone who had merely touched the edges of his life.

“Well, not much has happened to Rosales,” Bert said. “I’ve never been there — you know that. And as for Emy …”

“I hope she has already found a job.”

“She is not teaching.” Bert spoke with some difficulty, as if he did not want to talk about her.

“Why not? She should have approached some politician—”

“It’s not that way,” Bert said. “That girl — Your Manang and I, we were disappointed with her. Something … something happened to her. Well, she had it coming, and you wouldn’t think it possible. She was such an intelligent girl. She has a child and she’s not married. You know what I mean.”

Fear, sadness, and a hundred other feelings engulfed him. Not this, not the magnitude of this tragedy could befall Emy.

“She wouldn’t say who he was,” Bert continued. “But that girl did change a lot. You wouldn’t recognize her afterward. Remember how she used to be very well mannered? Well, she often went out alone. At night, too. After school, God knows where she went. This was after you had gone. We tried to talk to her, and we told her that nothing good would come out of her habits, but she refused to listen. There must have been a man she had been meeting some place all those nights that she stayed out late — sometimes past midnight. We warned her. But that girl— Why didn’t she have the man come to the house? Your Manang Betty said we would like to meet him. A wild one she turned out to be.”

Tony couldn’t believe what he was hearing, but somehow the truth of it seeped slowly in, and the pity that he felt for her vanished and in its place was something akin to loathing, not only for what had happened but for this city, which had destroyed her. In his heart there rose a helpless hatred for the street and all that it was — the repository of everything ugly and dark.

“She went home that Christmas for the vacation,” Bert continued, “and she never returned. She didn’t even write to your manang. We just learned afterward that she had this baby.”

“What’s she doing now?” Tony asked.

“Nothing. Tending the house and looking after her son and Bettina, the younger sister. Remember her? I hope nothing similar will happen to her. Since their father died …”

“Yes,” Tony said, “Manang Betty wrote to me about it.”

“Didn’t Emy write to you about it?”

“No,” he said. “I did write to her, then … I stopped.”

“I came upon her reading your letter,” Bert said with a smile. “She seemed absorbed in it. I tried to ask her what was in it, but she didn’t even answer. Well, fate is fate. Nothing can be done now.” Bert stood up and idled at the door, his bulk filling the frame. “I overestimated Emy. I always thought she was smarter than most girls. But when a woman is titillated, her mind becomes useless. You know what I mean?”

“Yes,” Tony said, walking to the window. Across the tracks the night was pocked with the lights of shabby wooden accesorias. Farther beyond, where the city blazed with neon, the night was pale orange. The four lines of black steel below him shone in the uncertain night.

Bert went on in a sonorous voice: “Tell me, Tony. As I said, you don’t have to be ashamed. I’m your brother-in-law. Are American girls really different? You know what I mean.”

Tony did not speak; the revulsion had always lain fallow in his mind and now it burgeoned fully, a disgust for this talkative slob whose only interest in America centered around its women.

He had a mind to lie, to tell him of satisfied hungers and nymphomaniacs ravishing the campuses, but Tony said instead, “They are the most incomprehensible and frigid women I’ve ever seen.”

“You must be fooling,” Bert laughed.

“I’m not,” Tony said, his words rimmed with sarcasm.

“I don’t believe you,” Bert said. “You are trying to fool me.”

“Maybe I am.”

“But you’ll tell me? You know what I mean?”

“Maybe I will.”

Bert left him, making clucking noises with his tongue as he went down.

Alone again, Tony despaired at the thought of having to be confronted with the same question, by other people in other places. And what could he say? It would perhaps be simple if Emy were still here and he could tell her the truth; she would then tell him how to go about elaborating on his American experience and saying the right things, the true things, because, as Emy said, the truth always mattered. Emy — she would make a good wife for any man.

They had shared this room, this single window, too. Between them, as a halfhearted concession to privacy, they had hung a curtain, an old Igorot-woven blanket, blue with stripes of black and red. He had gotten the blanket in the mountain province of Bontoc during an excursion there to do research on indigenous Igorot culture. It was slung across the room, and it shielded her from him when she was asleep or when she was dressing. There were times, however, when the blanket was ignored because it was warm or because they had something interesting to talk or argue about, and they would face each other without shame. No one would have suspected that what happened would ever have happened, because they were first cousins. But it did, and remembering it, a twinge of pleasure compounded with sadness touched him. The first possession is bound to wedge deep in the mind — this seed, this wisdom, and this hurt that would never be blown away and be lost to the wandering wind.

It was the month before he left for America. It had rained that evening — one of those brief but heavy August showers — and he had tried to avoid the soggy ruts in the street. He had stepped into one instead and suddenly had wet his shoes, his only pair. Emy was asleep, and in the dark he took off his clothes silently, hoping not to make a sound, but he sneezed. Knowing that he would soon catch cold, he groped for the blanket on his cot. As he wrapped it about him, Emy stirred. She asked if he was drenched. Go on and sleep, he had told her, but she ignored him. As she lifted the blanket that hung between them, he could make her out standing before him in her nightgown. It must have been quite a despedida,^c she had said; what time is it? Past midnight, he had told her. He sneezed again, and without another word she went downstairs and made him some tea.

When she returned she switched on the small lamp on the table they shared when they studied their lessons, and she looked at him, her eyes aglow, and told him to lie on his stomach so she could rub his back with Mentholatum. He didn’t object because she was full of maternal solicitude. No, she had told him clearly, he had no business catching pneumonia, particularly now that he was leaving, and then she asked how the despedida turned out, who was there, which girls. What he said was incoherent, for he was aware only of her soft hands on his back spreading the ointment, patting it, pressing it below his shoulder blades. How delightful, how soft her hands felt, and as she bent lower, her breath murmured in his ear and warmed his neck, her thighs pressed close to him, he turned on his side and saw her young face, traces of sleep still on it, her eyes gazing down on him, full of care. Then it was all blurred, Emy in his arms uncomplaining, the stumbling to the table to switch off the lamp, the quiet remonstrations, the final surrender. It had happened without prelude, as if the moment was something inevitable and expected. The following morning he woke while the dawn was not yet alive upon the city to find a delicious ache in his bones, and Emy cuddled close to him in his narrow bed, still asleep; the fragrance of her hair and her breath swirled all around him.

He had kissed her, tasted her mouth, and she had wakened with a start, stared at him, frightened and confused. Then she had turned away from him when realization came to her in all its happy, terrifying completeness, and she sobbed quietly. It was the first time a woman had cried before him and he didn’t know what to do except fumble and stammer and clasp her hand and tell her he loved her. And he said it with a thickness in his voice, for his cold had developed quickly and “I love you” sounded like a rusty whisper: “I love you, I love you.” And he kissed her again, telling her that she would catch his cold, too, and she stopped crying then and kissed him in that shy, wary manner of women who had finally discovered this first but lasting knowledge.

Love? Was it really love, and if it was, was he old enough to have understood its consequences? Emy had always been more firm, more sure of herself, and before he left, on the last hour that they were alone, she had told him: “Tony, you have to be sure. You have to be sure.”

It had sounded so dramatic and mushy afterward, and how often had he relived it, seen himself in that frustrating mirror called conscience. He was sure he loved her; he was sure that he would return to her, claim her, and take her away from the intractable damnation of Antipolo. He was so sure of all this, but time and distance conspired against him, and in the end he was no longer sure. He developed this sense of frustration about her, and in time the frustration turned to indifference. He had done what was expected of him — written to her religiously, avoiding those endearments that lovers shared, dropping but a few stray insinuations, fond recollections of the Mentholatum rub, the lamp on the table, the Igorot blanket. But to all his letters she had given but one reply, then all was silence.

He had once asked Betty where Emy was. Betty wrote briefly, told him that Emy was all right and back in the province, that her father had died. Emy was alive and she did not care.

Now he knew why Emy had not written.

Still, how could one escape the past? It had dogged him before and he had fled it only because there were other consuming interests — America and its neuroses and its preoccupation with order and new and gleaming things — and then there was Carmen, who by herself had meant all that was unattainable. Her very name created visions of the gracious life, the air-conditioning, the air-foam mattresses, the automatic refrigerators and Florsheim shoes — all that he was alien to, even now. Now all these things and the bountiful life were his for the picking. The past be damned then, for what really mattered was now. He asked himself to what infinite reaches had he staked his claims? From the depths of him he heard his own voice saying: Accept, accept! The words ticked in his head like the strikings of a pendulum, measured, persistent, confirming loudly the fact that he was still possessed of a conscience and a capacity to study himself, a capacity for humility, too, and with the humility, a readiness to search the wild, unending landscape of his vision for that single and vivid spark that would tell him he was a success. In all ways he was, and there was more coming. America had not been miserly after all with its benevolence, nor had it spoiled him. No, America had not defiled his perspective and his innocence.

How was it then? How had it been in the old boardinghouse on Maple Street, the four years he spent in it with his roommate, Bitfogel? Larry Bitfogel — and he rose quickly and started a letter. Larry, who majored in agricultural economics, was now in South America as a consultant with the International Cooperation Agency.

“My dear Larry,” he wrote in his slow, careful hand, “I am now back home and safely under the yoke at the university.

I hope you will soon be able to visit Asia, where your services are urgently needed. If you come, please let me know so I can show you around.

I haven’t gone around very much as yet. I don’t know how I’ll be thinking in a few more days, but at the moment, while the impressions are still sharp and clear, let me tell you that I’m pleased as well as disappointed by the things I see.

There are new buildings, a lot of traffic on the streets, but this progress, as you know, is deceptive. The slums are still here, the poverty, the filth. I told you once that poverty is a way of life with us.

Remember how we used to work in the summers — you in the construction gang where there was always more money and I in those greasy restaurants? That was honorable and we saved a lot. It’s not so here. It’s still a disgrace to be poor and to work with one’s hands. But the situation seems to be improving. The waiters look neater now — they wear white and they even have caps. Poverty now wears a starched uniform.

I do hope you’ll come to Manila soon. Of course, only third-rate Americans come to the Philippines to make a living exploiting us yokels. The first-rate Americans stay home to reap the milk and the honey. And you, my dear Larry [he paused and beamed at his patronizing attitude], you are first-rate.…

I miss the old room, the bull sessions, and your coffeepot. [He cast his eyes about his room.] I miss your electric typewriter, too.

You used to insist — after I had told you of our problems and our history — that only a revolution could change the stink in our social order. I still disagree with you and that is why I do hope I can have a revolution against revolution. Do come so that we can start livening up this place.

He closed the letter with that little nicety, then lay on his hard, old cot, deaf to the noises of the world and finally immune to the heat of the early May night. He was home; a very secure position at the university awaited him, and there was, as a bonus, Carmen Villa. So this was Antipolo — and this was not the end. It was the beginning, and before him the opportunities were limitless. He could no longer be bothered by nightmares, for a man sure of himself, sure of his achievements and of what the morrow would bring could not be shaken by such trifles as the omnipresent past, or social responsibility. Knowledge always brings comfort, and before he went to sleep, Tony Samson felt like the most comfortable man on earth.

* Carretela: A two-wheeled horse-drawn cart.

† Manang: An affectionate, respectful form of address for an older sister or woman. Ilocanos do not call older relatives by their given names alone. Masculine form: Manong.

‡ Pechay: A variety of cabbage, like bok choy.

§ Accesoria: An apartment; literally an “outbuilding.” A word widely used until the 1950s.

‖ Pinakbet: A vegetable dish made with fermented fish.

a Aparador: A wooden cabinet for clothing.

b Delicadeza: Delicacy, refinement, scrupulousness (Sp.).

c Despedida: A going-away party; a farewell.

CHAPTER 2

When Tony awoke the sunlight had already splashed the room, a dazzling white on the mosquito net and on the starched doily that adorned his reading table. It was not the sun that woke him, though; it was the freight train that thundered by and shook the wooden house as if it were a flimsy packing crate. The train was the final reminder that he was in Antipolo. Another train had passed in the night, but after its clangor had gone he drifted quickly back to sleep. He remembered the times he looked out of the window right into the coaches as the trains sang by. The pleasure of being home was intense, and could have been more so if he had returned not to Antipolo but to Rosales, whose images lingered longest in the years that he was away. But home was Antipolo now, and it would only be by the sheerest of accidents that he would ever return to Rosales.

Tony stood up. Beyond the iron grill of the window lay the city — a jumble of wooden houses and rooftops, of rusty tin and gleaming aluminum. No breeze stirred on this muggy morning, but nevertheless the warm odor of dried fish frying in the kitchen below wafted up to him. And he heard his sister shushing her boys because their uncle was still asleep.

Listening to these domestic sounds, Tony felt at peace. He looked around him at his luggage, at the bookcase with its paint peeled off, at the lightbulb that hung above him, and, finally, at the bent, rusty nail that stuck out from the post at the other end of the room. The nail that had held an Igorot blanket a long time ago — the thought came languidly. I must not think of Emy now, he told himself, it’s enough that I’m back in this room and it is not as forlorn or as empty as I expected it to be.

After breakfast he went to the corner drugstore to make a call. The number Carmen had given him rang at once and he was pleased to hear her voice, vibrant and clear, at the other end of the line. A tingling sensation raced through him at the sound of her laughter. Yes, she missed him terribly and she wasn’t able to sleep at all. Yes, what a horrible night it had been, even with the air-conditioning. Oye, she was thinking of him always and the night reminded her of Washington, too, and that August when it was practically suffocating and, remember (another happy gurgling sound), they both went to sleep with nothing on (a peal of laughter). But that wasn’t important really; it was her missing him, his nearness, that mattered. And he tried to tell her, you shouldn’t be saying these things over the phone, darling. Isn’t anyone within earshot? And remember, all Manila phones are party lines.

But she wouldn’t stop teasing him. Then: Damnit, her anger came over the line like a jolt. Damnit, so what if the whole world is listening in. Tony, darn you, I miss you very much, your arms, your lips, the way you kissed me. I miss you and you should be glad to hear that.…

In the bus, on his way to the university, Tony beheld the completeness with which the dry season made its conquest. It had licked each blade of grass until the greenness was wiped clean from the landscape and what was once living patches as he remembered them had become huge brown scars. The season seemed to have infected the air, and from this infection it had moved on, crept into the pores and under the cranium until it lodged itself in the folds of the mind.

It was on a season like this that he had met Carmen, and deftly he brought to mind that August in Washington when he lived in a dingy room on Massachusetts Avenue near the Philippine embassy. No breeze could drift even accidentally to his room, even after he had moved his bed next to the window that opened onto the street lined with elms. He had gone that morning to the embassy to talk with the cultural officer — an old acquaintance — about some of his research problems, and he had chanced upon her asking for the latest Manila papers because she did not know what was happening to her friends and she had not read a Filipino paper in days.

Yes, she was studying in the area, public relations and interior decoration, and tomorrow (she had gotten the paper she was looking for and she was headed for the door) she said she hoped she would see him again at the ambassador’s cocktail party. He was leaving, too, and was walking out with her, and he had said, “I really want to see you again, but tomorrow, I don’t think I’ll be there.…” It could have ended on the spot and he would not have known anything more about her, but he saw her again, because in Washington, Filipino students often saw one another. He had no time for parties — he did not have the money — because he was busy finishing his doctoral thesis on the ilustrados^* and the Philippine Revolution; yes, he would like to show her the town if she would care to have him for company. And one afternoon she even went to his boardinghouse, because he knew people at the International Center and she wanted to visit the place, and some day the Library of Congress, too — if he would take her there. It had seemed as if love could not sprout from such a prosaic beginning, and thinking now of all this, Tony Samson wished that his conquest had encountered more difficulties and was not as easy as it turned out to be.

He was glad to find Dean Lopez in. His office was still on the ground floor of the main building and its frosted-glass windows were open to a faint breeze. The ceiling fans were unchanged and squeaky. When he was a graduate assistant he used to work in this office, and he remembered, with a sense of lightness, bringing the dean his lunch in an aluminum fiambrera† when the dean worked overtime. He ate his lunch here, too, after all the doors were closed and he was alone. His lunch often consisted of nothing but three pieces of pan de sal^‡ with Spanish sardines or a slice of native cheese, and these he downed with a bottle of Coke that he got from the vending machine down the hall. After lunch he often stole a nap on the bench reserved for visitors until the one o’clock bell jarred him back to his chores.

The old man seemed genuinely pleased to see him. “Tony, you don’t look like an Ilocano anymore!” The dean leaned back in his swivel chair and looked at him. “Your complexion has become fairer. And you have been overfed — look at your waistline!”

The old man’s tone, his fraternal remarks, touched Tony. He had finally established rapport with the dean.

“I brought something for you, sir,” he said. “I bought it in Frankfurt over a year ago on my way back to Boston and kept it so that I could give it to you personally.”

It was a meerschaum pipe. Dean Lopez, stout and past sixty, stood up and held it in the light, his eyes crinkling. “It must have cost you a fortune.… How much did you pay for it?”

Tony felt uneasy; he had saved the money scrimping on meals in Madrid and taking buses instead of planes on his return from Madrid to Hamburg, where he took a freighter back to Boston. “It isn’t really expensive, sir. But I knew you smoked pipes, so I thought I’d get you one.”

“Come on, I want to know how much,” the dean sounded stern.

“Well, it was only eight dollars, sir.…”

“Eight dollars, ha! Listen, Tony,” he took him by the arm. “I’m grateful for this. But don’t mention it to anyone, ha? I’ll go around showing it to other pipe-smokers and I’ll say it cost me a hundred and fifty pesos. That’s how much it costs at the Escolta. Here’s one Ilocano smoking a meerschaum pipe. We’ll play a joke on everyone, ha?”

Tony smiled. “Yes, sir, we will play a joke on everyone.”

Tony wanted to leave, but Lopez kept him. He was again talking to himself and Tony listened to the old, familiar tune. “Everything in this school is going to the dogs. I’ll never get to be university president as long as the politicians interfere. They are even trying to appoint protégés as professors. But not in my college; I’ll not permit that sort of thing. So be at my side, Tony, and you will go places. We will teach these interlopers what we Ilocanos can do. Remember that.”

Tony smiled politely. In a while the other professors started filtering in — Dr. Santos, who taught Oriental history; Dr. Gomez, who taught government — and after more amenities, they started talking spiritedly about what Dean Lopez had started. The summer session was almost over. A new board of regents would soon take over the university administration and new promotions were being contemplated. Sometimes, almost in condescension, they directed a word or two in his direction. The full professors, his seniors by twenty years, had about them an aura of intellectual impregnability.

“Well, what we lack is national discipline and nothing else,” Dean Lopez said. “We are apt to blame our leaders for the mess we are in, but if we had discipline as a people such a mess would never have happened.”

“I think we don’t really know how to make democracy work,” Dr. Gomez said. He wore his gray hair long and he took pride in having served as technical assistant to no less than the president of the republic. “We are all fond of elections, but we don’t put the result of the ballot to work once elections are over.”

“You are thinking like an American adviser,” Dean Lopez said. “The American definition of democracy cannot work in benighted areas of Asia. Why, that’s a fact. Now listen, when I was in Germany …”

Tony knew what would come next. Listen now to Lopez bluff and bully his colleagues around, listen to him boast that only he, because he happened to have taken one summer course in a German university, could have the final word.

Now the talk became unbearable as the old men spewed big words about the mess at the university and in the whole country. They ranted about the challenges to the academic life that the school could not meet because the young teachers were cowardly or were not imbued with enough wisdom — ah, how they took liberties with words like academic freedom. And truth. And obligation. Tony knew all along, of course, that what they were trying to say with their abominable half-truths was that they were important, that age mattered because it meant wisdom and experience. They did not say that they were frustrated and embittered with their small pay, their bleak future, and the fact that, in the university, with no other strength to boast of, they were prisoners of their own meager talents. What he heard now was not different from what he remembered about them six years ago.

“Am I not right, Dr. Samson”—he was being addressed as “doctor” by no less than the dean himself—“when I say that we are debased in spirit because we have not yet properly exorcised our colonial past?”

“Of course, sir,” he was saying, not quite sure that he was in pious agreement. He would have said more but Lopez had already returned to the other professors.

He must get used to that title, doctor, professor — associate professor, which the dean had conferred on him. After the other professors had left, the blustery voice was once more directed to him. “Hell, Tony, you’ll be a full professor before you are forty, and if you play your cards right you’ll be president of the university before you know it. And as a starter, you should be a member of the Socrates Club — I’ll see to that. Hell, not every Ph.D. can be a member of the club, but you are an exception. You are Ilocano.…” He roared good-naturedly.

Dean Lopez was short, but he made up for his lack of stature with a brusqueness in manner and speech. He was supposed to be an authority on English literature, too, but his diction was coarse and his speech full of clichés. In the two years that Tony had served him before going abroad, he knew that the dean was displeased with his writing popular articles for the magazines. Now the subject came up again: “You’ve got to make up your mind now, whether you want to be a pulp writer or a scholar.”

He had wanted to disagree, but he did not want to fall into the rut of an argument or antagonize his true benefactor. They were both Ilocanos — that was the finality to consider. The dean had, in fact, filled his faculty with Ilocanos so he would perhaps be assured of obedience and the comforting sense that none of his hirelings would ever revolt or intrigue against him.

Tony appreciated Dean Lopez’s interests in his welfare, but he knew that someday the dean would want to collect. The old man would not ask for a case of beer, as he often did with the graduate students, nor would he ask for something as vulgar as a loan. It would have to be in kind, in loyalty — unquestioning fealty.

And loyalty, gratitude could take on many subtle forms in the university. It would mean speaking in favor of Lopez when the dean was discussed, as he always was in the faculty coffee sessions. It would mean putting in a good word for him when he was lampooned by the graduate students who had grown too big for the dean’s bullying. It would mean a line or two of flattery in articles on the university or on the disciplines or research projects the dean championed or sponsored. Wasn’t he an expert in linguistics? Wasn’t he the only authority on Ilocano culture and the Ilocano migration? There could be no work on these subjects without mentioning him in the introduction, without having him copiously represented in the bibliography and footnotes. He must now help sustain the myth that Dean Lopez was the scholar who had studied the Ilocanos more than any other man, a myth that had disintegrated before his very eyes long ago but which he had no choice but to recognize, to nurture. This myth was one of those mysterious and inexplicable assertions that made the university a vast riddle. He came upon the myth in Boston, when he went to the Widener Library looking for materials on the Ilocano migration and the Philippine Revolution. Sure enough, he came upon Dean Lopez’s “immortal book,” An Examination of the Symbolic Pattern of the Ilocano Language. But beside the book was an American scholar’s manuscript, ten years older than Dean Lopez’s. He took them both and started reading. The discovery was complete; the myth was built on sordid plagiarism.

He recalled how the graduate assistants in Dean Lopez’s department had grumbled when the dean collated their papers and affixed his name to their collective work. That was it — that was scholarship at the university. But while he loathed it, he couldn’t quite bring himself to hate the old man; it was he, after all, who had sent him to America and the beginning of wisdom.

America — and again there flashed in his mind that continent laved by ozone and smog; in his mind’s eye flashed the vast reaches of its green timberlands and frothy oceans, its still vaster space where the soul could wander and search. And so it happened in that wide and tumultuous land, to him who was lonely — this one honest moment of self-scrutiny and self-seeking. Sometimes you look at yourself in the mirror and wonder why that nose looks as it does, or those eyes — what is behind them, what depths can they reach? Your flesh, your skin, your lips — you know the face you behold is not yours alone but is already something that belongs to those who love it, to your family and all those who esteem you. But a person is more than a face or a bundle of nerves and a spigot of blood; a person is more than talking and feeling and being sensitive to the changes in the weather, to the opinions of people. A person is part of a clan, a race. And knowing this, you wonder where you came from and who preceded you; you wonder if you are strong, as you know those who lived before you were strong, and then you realize that there is a durable thread that ties you to a past you did not create but which created you. Then you know you have to be sure who you are, and if you are not sure or if you do not know, you have to go back to those who hold the secret to your past. And the search may not be fruitful. From this moment of awareness there is nothing more frustrating than the belief that you have been meaningless. A man who knows himself can live with his imperfections; he knows instinctively that he is part of a wave that started from great, unnavigable expanses.

There was such a wave and a man who was a part of that wave. And this man, this grandfather who was part of that wave, was the personification of courage and intellect, because it was he who brought all of the Samsons from the ravaged hills of the Ilocos to the new land — to Pangasinan. Someday he would go to the old country to find out more about him. To Carmen he had confided: I’ll come across my grandfather’s name in the things he did. She had, in turn, told him bluntly, this Carmen who was a rich man’s daughter, this Carmen who squandered dollars on a sports car, clothes, and beauty aids that had all grown scarce in Manila: “Esto, you’ll end up thinking you are so good you can do no wrong. There are no supermen in this world, Tony, except in comic books. Look at what they did to the supermen in Germany. The Americans transformed them into peddlers and shopkeepers. And the Ilocanos — you think they can be supermen? Wait till you see Papa — there’s the superman for you. He can influence almost everyone — labor leaders, politicians, good-for-nothing daughters, and, I have a feeling, even errant teachers.”

• • •

He went out of the college cafeteria, the senseless palaver still in his head: Who are these tyrant regents dictating who shall get promotions this year? Politicians were hounding the deans who did not pass out appointments to their protégés — all the damnation that had long been embedded in the matrix of the university was out in the open again. And he was glad that he leaned on no less a personage than Dean Lopez; that blustery old man had given him a full load in the coming school year, plus that imposing title, associate professor, and the invitation to join the Socrates Club.

From the bus Tony surveyed the scene fondly, the white antiseptic buildings, the grass grown mangy and tan under the sun. In the afternoon the campus slept. Now the conductress, a short plump girl with flat-heeled shoes, screeched again: Quiapo derecho!^§ The driver idled the motor, and as the bus stood in the sun, Tony could feel waves of heat lapping the interior of the vehicle. Only a handful of summer students were in the bus, and when the conductress saw no more prospective passengers coming, she thumped on the side of the vehicle and shouted, “Roll!”

Beyond the campus, suburbia bloomed: the new California bungalows, the well-tended gardens, the bougainvillea, the TV antennas; then the city flowed by: the wooden buildings, the gasoline stations, the atrocious billboards — how depressing they all were! And yet, one must accept these cheapnesses that America had inflicted upon his hapless country. Hapless — he had to define his country as such and insinuate, too, the gutlessness of his people and of himself.

In a while, Quiapo — the mass of jeepneys, the burning asphalt, and the smell of the living city. The heat coagulated again like an elemental fluid that submerged all — the nondescript crowds, Quiapo Church impiously painted cream against the pale, smoky sky.

He hurried across the plaza to the shaded sidewalk, where the sun was not as raw. It would be hot anywhere and it would be hottest now in the newspaper office where he was going. Godo’s last letter cursed this heat and at the same time lyrically reminisced about the New England he had known in his brief visit to America.

Godo Solar and Charlie worked on a magazine. They were his friends, members of that undefined fraternity he had been drawn to when he was in college. The two had chosen newspapering and had lavish hopes, both of them, of writing the Great Filipino Novel, while he elected to be a history teacher because teaching was far more creative and challenging than newspaper journalism.

You could see at once — Tony had explained — the effect of your ideas upon young, pliable minds. It isn’t so with newspapering; you cannot know if your message gets across. The only praise you might receive would be from crazy letter-writers or from friends who won’t hurt your feelings. You have no way of finding out whether or not you are understood.

It was, however, Dean Lopez who made up his mind for him. To be in the periphery of newsmakers, to be hounded by deadlines, the dean had said, is to acquire some dubious glamour. Maybe Tony would have enjoyed the work, but he had had a taste of newspapers in college and he could not stomach the merciless dictation of deadlines and the very act of writing, which, though it meant a liberal education, was drudgery in itself.

The choice had not bothered him, and once or twice he had speculated on what would have happened if he had heeded the beckonings of Newspaper Row. He could turn to Charlie and Godo now for the answer, but it had been six years since he saw them last. How well off were they? Had marriage sobered Godo? Did they own their houses or cars now? Such questions were shallow and yet there seemed to be no other way by which success could be measured.

He had never done this before, measure success in such gross, material terms, not in those years when he had little to eat and but one pair of shoes, when the three of them were in college and bound together by a friendship that seemed enduring. And now that he remembered, this knowledge disturbed him.

They all contributed to the university paper, for which Godo also wrote an angry column that always damned the equal rights granted to Americans, the disparity between the rich and the poor, the corruption of high government officials, and the abdication of responsibility by the middle class — the little there was of it. The highest accolade they could hope for then was a word of approval from Miss Josephine Tinio, that fabulous woman, the epitome of understanding and tutorial genius, who conducted a class in creative writing. Under her wing they had found sympathy and knowledge for more than two semesters after they went on to higher grades and could only wedge into their schedules a course or two in the humanities under her. She had understood their problems and had inspired them, and they often visited her at her home in Pandacan, the three of them, or as it sometimes happened with two other student-writers who were drawn to them. One was Angel, a soft-spoken engineering student from Iloilo who wrote poetry, the other was Jacinto, a sturdy peasant from Nueva Ecija whose one obsession in life was to get back the five hectares his father had pawned so that he might go on to college.

After a visit to Miss Tinio, and a merienda of tea and galletas,^‖ they often walked to Quiapo, and while waiting for a ride to their homes, they would talk on and on about Jefferson, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Del Pilar.^a If it was at the university where they met, it was usually in the dimly lighted cafeteria in one of the old World War II Quonset huts; they would sit there toying with their empty ten-centavo cups of coffee till the owner closed for the night. If the weather was good and their stomachs could hold, they would go on talking at the bus stop, or sprawl on the grass, and they would agree always on the bleakness of the future, of the terrible challenge that was handed down to them by their fathers who were either betrayed or beguiled by destiny. They felt deeply about duty and responsibility and were convinced that the salvation of the race could only be earned by sacrifice. Then, toward the end of their junior year, Jacinto came with a proposal that tested their conscience as well as their dedication. He had stated it simply one evening in March: he was leaving school, he was going to the hills to join the Huks^b because he was convinced there was no other way. Did they want to join him? They need not bring anything except the clothes on their backs.…

Tony had balked at the idea because in the back of his mind he had always held in reserve the final acquiescence to revolt. He knew what it meant; his father was ever in his thoughts as the final and painful proof of that failure.

When Angel and Jacinto did not show up the following school year, he knew what had happened, and much later, the three who had remained received identical letters written “in the field.” The letters were not hortatory; they were, as a matter of fact, even apologetic. They asked for help, and if this was not possible, “then we ask that you do not lose hope.” He never heard from them again and he was quite sure, after all these years, that they were dead, or if they were alive, they could not now return to the life they had left.

Remembering all this afterward, Tony sometimes loathed himself for having been such a coward. But then, Charlie and Godo did not flee to the hills, either; like him, they had elected to conform, to glean the ravaged land of whatever token of grace and beneficence was left in it after the dinosaurs had trampled everything.

At Rizal Avenue he turned away from the crowds to a narrow asphalted side street dusty with horse manure, its sidewalks reminiscent of the Walled City and composed of the ballast stones of galleons that returned centuries ago from Acapulco in Mexico.

The newspaper office was in a bleak, gray building, a gothic edifice that had somehow escaped destruction during the war. He went up three oily flights to the sanctum, a room alive with the whirr of electric fans and the racket of typewriters and teletypes.

The magazine section had not changed — it was still the same dusty corner with drab, unpainted walls, mahogany-varnished tables, and antique typewriters. His friends were at their desks. Charlie saw him first and yelled, “Tony! How’s the Oriental American?” Then it was all noise, Godo standing and slapping him on the back, the usual greetings and the handshakes and ribald remarks about American girls and the inevitable invitation to the squalid Chinese coffee shop downstairs.

They hustled down the cracked stairway, Tony in the middle, Godo — fat, wobbly with flesh and talk — at his right, and at his left Charlie, lean and quiet. The coffee shop had not changed, either. Its red-tile floor was as dirty as ever, and the corners reeked with the implacable smell of cockroaches and ammonia and were as dark as secrets. The shop was called Newsmen’s Corner and it lived up to its name, a nook as greasy-looking as some of the characters who frequented it.

They found an empty table still sodden with spilled Coke and cigarette ash. A waitress, short and dowdy, her lips flaring red, took their orders (soda for Godo, who said coffee made him nervous).

“You are going back to the university?” Godo asked. The exuberance of greeting had subsided and they spoke in even tones. They seemed to soak in impressions, alert, taking in all words as if they were truths to live by.

“There’s no place like home,” Tony said.

“The profound comment of the afternoon,” Charlie said. It was his favorite joke—“profound comment”—and Godo, jocular and looking more like a landlord than a writer, laughed loudly.

“Well, the university is an easy life,” Godo said.

“It is a rat race,” Tony said lightly, but he meant every word.

“Doing any writing?” Charlie asked.

“I never stopped,” Tony said. “Right now I’m on a very ambitious project. A cultural history of the Ilocos. It’s something that has never been attempted before. Someday I’m going there to trace my ancestry. Find out things about my grandfather. The great Ilocano migration, you know. Saw a lot of my people in California, Chicago, New York.”

“Wonderful project,” Godo said. “Show us some chapters when you are through. We may run them in a series.”

Then the talk turned to a familiar theme. “Now, about American women,” Charlie said, a leer spreading across his dark, pimply face. “I haven’t been abroad so I’d like to listen to your wonderful lies.” Nudging Godo, Charlie said, “Tell him about your pickups in that staid, puritan city of Boston. Compare notes.”

Godo had gone to Boston two years back on a fellowship of sorts and had not stopped talking about the trip. But this afternoon he seemed rather reticent. “It’s not necessary,” Godo said. “I’d rather Tony tell us of his experiences. As for America, I still have hopes for its people. Otherwise I feel they are wrong, trying to buy friendship with dollars and scholarships. But we shouldn’t object too much — beggars can’t be choosers, you know. Cliché, but hell, it’s true.”

Tony wanted to steer the talk away from the forthrightness of Godo, which had always exasperated him. “If I only knew you were coming to Boston,” he said, “I could have entertained you.”

“Did you get my card?” Godo asked. “I left one, you know. You were out in Vermont, enjoying the New England scenery no doubt”—another gale of laughter.

“It was a summer job really and I had no choice,” Tony said. “My fellowship was never enough.”

“Be on the lookout now,” Godo said. “Anyone who was in the United States as a freeloader is suspect or is an apologist for American policy.”

“And that includes you,” Charlie said, grinning at his colleague.

“Of course!” Godo said. “Have I ever said I don’t like freeloading? But I’m an ingrate and you know that I accept all that I can and I suffer no compunctions about being ungrateful afterward. I wasn’t born yesterday.”

“I can’t understand,” Tony said gravely, “this new nationalism. Haven’t we always been Filipinos? In the university the talk is confusing. And I am suspicious of anything that’s worn on the sleeve.”

“There you go again, mouthing platitudes,” Godo said with a hint of irritation. “When will you and your kind — the bright boys who loudly proclaim themselves intellectuals — stop talking and start working?”

“I have written articles for you,” Tony said. “That’s action within my limitations.”

“Oh yes,” Godo said. He loved speeches and in his formalistic style was ready to perorate again. “I appreciated your last one — the uses of the past. The writers in the universities, the teachers — I am bowled over by their nationalistic talk. You have everything tagged and placed in a compartment. Go ahead, and while you write facetiously about high and ghostly matters, I go out and meet the people. Ah, the people! And what do I find? Something you never knew and will never understand because you have never been a part of them. Here you are, cooped up in Manila, in your sewing circles, in your coffee clubs, while the people seethe. I know because it’s my job to know. And some day the whole country will blow up before your eyes. It won’t be nationalism and you won’t even realize it, because you have lost touch.”

Godo had not changed, nor had his speeches. Tony felt a touch of superiority not only because of his new doctorate but because he could look at things more dispassionately now than either of them. And so the talk dropped again to the hoary and angry themes that he had long discarded. Oh yes, they tried to be trivial about it, but the distinction between sarcasm and wit became thin and, hearing them talk about culture, the economic chaos, and their insecurity, he couldn’t help pitying them. Look at them, grasping at ideals long outdated because these were what they understood, because it was with such ideals that they could justify their lives. They held on to beliefs that were bigger than they: once it was the Common Man, pervasive and purposeful because the Common Man was salvation. Then it was the Barrios, and now Nationalism, because they had finally gotten down to essentials, groping for identities they all had lost.

“But damnit,” Tony said, “I’ve never doubted my identity. I’ve never lost sight of the fact that I’m Asiatic.”

“Filthy word. It’s Asian, not Asiatic,” Godo reprimanded him.

“Semantics — that’s for gutless aesthetes,” Charlie said. He spoke seldom, but when he did his opinions were strong and his words had a sure, unrelenting sharpness.

“I do hope all this noise will die down,” Tony said. “Then maybe we will be less conscious about being Filipinos. I wish I could write on that. Could you use it if I did?”

“You are always welcome to our pages,” Charlie said. “And more so now that we can attach a Ph.D. to your byline. It’s good for the magazine. Gives us snob appeal.”

“I liked your last piece,” Godo said, “about the uses of the past. But I doubt if you believe all you said. You are always trying to pull someone’s leg, and sometimes it is your own. I gather that the piece constituted your doctoral thesis.”

“Yes,” Tony said proudly. “The ilustrados had much to contribute to the Revolution of 1896, you know. They knew the past and its meaning.”

“It’s not the complete truth,” Godo said firmly. “I disagree with you when you say it’s the whole truth. The ilustrados were not the heroes, nor were they brave. It was the masses who were brave. They were the heroes. Not your Rizal,^c who wanted to help the Spaniards frustrate the Cuban revolutionists. Not your Rizal, who loathed revolution. He and his kind — they were not the real heroes. It’s always the small men who are. Bonifacio^d and the farmers at Balintawak. The people — you call them contemptible, don’t you.”

“That is not true,” Tony said. “I’m poor, too.”

“Yeah, but you have the attitudes of the rich. Well, the people, the ones you suggest are the rabble, they are the ones who rise to great heights when the time comes. Revolutions for a better life are never made by the rich or the intellectuals. They have everything to lose. Revolutions are made by small men, poor men — they are the ones who suffer most. They care the least about the status quo.”

“But revolution is so outmoded now,” Tony Samson said, thinking of his father and his grandfather. He was thinking, too, of Lawrence Bitfogel, his roommate for four years in Cambridge, who had told him bluntly the very things Godo was saying. “The ilustrados,” Tony tried to defend his thesis, “you must remember, had the minds to plan, the money, and, most important, the capacity to administer government.”

“Yes,” Godo said, “they also had the mind and the capacity to accept the bribes the Spaniards gave them at the Pact of Biak-na-bato. Paterno — all the merchants and shopkeepers you worship now — they were all bribed.… I’m sorry you wasted so much time on that thesis. Yes, it’s interesting, it’s well done — your article on the past — but it’s not the whole truth. Slash away at the myths. That America gave us democracy, that MacArthur ordered us to fight the Japs as guerrillas. Our job is to destroy myth, not build them.”

It was useless arguing — they would not understand, they did not have his training and his background. “I’ll try to do that,” Tony said, affecting a tone of humility; then he changed the subject abruptly: “But I’ll not be able to write for you in the near future. As a matter of fact, I’m getting married.”

The maneuver worked and Godo turned to him: “To whom?”

“Don’t ask because I won’t tell. It’s a surprise. But don’t worry, I’ll invite you to the wedding. Next week or next year.”

“Charlie has to get married soon, too,” Godo said. “It is a wonderful institution, but never marry for any reason except love. Then you won’t have regrets. Somehow every problem seems easy to solve. Money, I’ve come to realize, is one of the easiest problems to overcome. It’s when something happens to your inner self — that’s something money can’t solve.”

“Another profound comment of the afternoon,” Charlie said lightly.

But Godo was dead serious. “That’s the truth and you better think about it.”

“How is your wife?” Tony asked solicitously, recalling the frail and lovely freshman whom Godo had met when they were in their senior year and with whom Godo had eloped. Tony still had a clear image of Linda — her quiet, soft features and her long, flowing hair, which she wore in a tight bun.

“That’s what I mean,” Godo’s bluster was gone. “When you marry for love, every problem seems easy to solve. Well, she has not been doing very well. After two children— It would have been easier for her if she were healthy, but you remember Linda, Tony, she was always sickly. She has to have an operation soon. I don’t worry about that. You can always steal or sell your soul to the devil and rationalize such an act with a clear conscience.”

“I’m sorry,” Tony said.

“Thanks for the sentiment,” Godo said, smiling. “I really don’t ask for much. Just a chance to have my wife and children go through life with the least physical pain. That isn’t much to ask, is it? But in this bloody country, when a millionaire has a cold he goes right away to a fancy clinic in New York. And me, I can’t even afford to have my head examined. Hell, there’s justification in the old class struggle — I don’t care what you call it — but does a rich man have more right to live simply because he has more money?”

“You could have married for money,” Charlie said.

A smile spread across Godo’s flabby face. “I like that,” he said. “But, as I have always said, I have no regrets.” He turned amiably to Tony. “So don’t commit that mistake, chum. Don’t marry for any reason other than love. And who is she? Your cousin? She is pretty, and I recall, too, that you were more than cousinly with her the last time I visited you in Antipolo.”

“No,” Tony said, a flush creeping over his face. He was instantly reminded of Emy, of how once she had been a part of his life. Godo and Charlie had met and had come to know her during the times they dropped by to borrow books or to talk, for it was she who usually prepared the coffee. Perhaps all along they had suspected.

“That’s too bad,” Charlie said. “Did you fall out of love or something?”

Tony smiled wryly. “It wasn’t that, really. But you know how it is; we are cousins.”

“Oh now, this isn’t the eighteenth century,” Godo laughed. He had fully regained his humor. “Don’t tell me you are still bothered by taboos. Write a letter to the pope and he will give you a quick dispensation.”

Tony tried to laugh the joke away, but the old hurt was back, and above his personal anguish he heard Godo cackle: “Well, if you are not interested in her you can give me her phone number. If she won’t object to a married man … or Charlie here, he may yet change his mind. Why, I was envying you, Tony boy, that setup you had in Antipolo.”

“I haven’t been in touch,” Tony said, “and she is not in Antipolo anymore.”

The talk glided on and Tony tried to be casual, tried to steer away from all reminiscences that gravitated to Antipolo and Emy, but no matter how hard he tried, his thoughts always swept back to her, to those precious bits of the past embedded in his mind. She was once more with him, the memory, the feel of her, and the day would never be the same again.

Strange how thoughts of her didn’t bother him very much anymore, particularly in the past few months. This might have been because of his involvement with Carmen — or could love wither like maple leaves in the fall? But the withering away was not complete; her name always brought an undefinable pain to his chest — a sharp, sweet pain that came quietly with all the silent urgings of that thing called conscience.

No, he could not forget Emy, not only because she was the first but because she was the past — his dear, dead past, without which he had no currency. No, he could not brush her memory away as he would dust from a book. Emy was in him, as real as his breathing and for as long as he lived.

* Ilustrados: The first Filipinos, usually of means, who studied in Europe (beginning in the 1880s) in order to become “enlightened”; literally, “learned” or “well informed” (Sp.).

† Fiambrera: A lunch basket or nest of pots use for keeping food hot.

‡ Pan de sal: A salted bun.

§ Derecho: Right (direction).

‖ Merienda: An afternoon snack; galletas: cookielike biscuits.

a Marcelo H. Del Pilar: Filipino writer in the 1880s.

b Huks: A Communist-led revolutionary group that fought for agrarian reform in the Philippines after World War II; it grew out of an anti-Japanese resistance movement in Luzon during the war.

c José Protasio Rizal (1861–1896): Filipino physician, poet, novelist, and national hero, considered to be a founder of Filipino nationalism.

d Andres Bonifacio (1863–1897): Philippine patriot and founder and leader of the nationalist Katipunan society; instigated the revolt against the Spanish in August 1896.

CHAPTER 3

The drugstore, Boie’s, was on the ground floor of a pink building, a refreshing pink in the dazzling heat. Tony hurried to the mezzanine coffee shop where Carmen was to meet him and scanned the crowd. Carmen would stand out in any gathering — fair skin, pretty face, shapely figure — she could easily draw all eyes once she walked into a room. Tony often wondered why she had accepted him at all. But Carmen was different from her sisters; she took up philosophy and letters instead of the usual liberal arts courses. She was open, too, in her preferences and outspoken in her views. She could be what she desired because she had money to shield her from all forms of noise, to enable her to damn all that did not agree with her.

She was not in the coffee shop, so Tony returned to the ground floor, to the stacks of paperbacks there, and was soon browsing.

How would it be if his mother were still alive and he took Carmen to her? How would his father have reacted — the stern, broken man who was incapable of repentance? It was in Washington that he told her about Rosales and his family. The student party they had attended had become a bore, and in the warm Washington dusk they had decided to walk home, loaded as they were with canapes and wine. Yes, that was it; it was the vermouth that had loosened their tongues, and under the elms, as they walked hand in hand, feeling alive, he told her why he was in Washington searching in the archives for papers on the revolution. Oh yes, his father had been so right about learning and college, but he, Antonio Samson, went to college not merely because the idea was propitious, but because he wanted to find out if he was made of the same stuff as his father. With wine in his head he had felt compelled: “Let me tell you about my father and about our town. It was never a haven for those who were weak. It was only for those who were strong. And my father was strong in his own, silent way. Do you know that he was not afraid to die?” But she didn’t want to hear about death and suffering, not then anyway, because she wanted perhaps to be noble or was in no mood to have the evening spoiled. “I’m afraid to die,” she had said plaintively, “and I’m a coward and I’m mean. I haven’t any virtue, and what’s more I think I am already drunk.” She had laughed gaily and so he would not tell her more about his old man, whom he loved and hated because he was so simple in a world that had grown terrible and complex. “Let me tell you then,” he had insisted, “about myself when I was young.” And under the elms, keeping in step with her, he spoke of the creek where he had bathed, of the old man who horsewhipped him. But he did not tell her, though he wanted to, of what his father had done — the hacendero^* he had killed, the municipal building he had burned; he did not tell her how he saw a squad of Pampango soldiers slap his father again and again until his mouth bled. His father no longer fought then, for his hands were cuffed; he merely spat the blood out at their faces and said, “You will not be masters forever.” That was the image he treasured most of his old man, bloodied but defiant. “I’ve known the vehemence of his anger,” Tony told Carmen, but there was no sorrow in his voice, only the placidity of remembrance. “I have long since known what I must do. No, I’m not going to fight another useless revolt as my father and my grandfather before him did. What happened to both of them? They lost all of their land to the thieves who called themselves leaders. No, I’ll do the fighting in my own way and live while I can. The weapons have changed.”

Their footfalls on the sidewalk were slow and soft, and in a while they were inside an apartment building and going up in an elevator. They paused before the door, still holding hands, and because this was Washington and not Manila, and because his head was still brimming with happiness and confession, he held her, and that was the funny part about it, the delicious part: she did not object one bit. He held her, felt the rustling of her dress, the softness of her body, her shoulders, and then he kissed her gently on the lips and murmured, “Thank you for a very pleasant evening,” and she laughed softly and said, “Thank you, too, and I hope we’ll get around to see each other again.”

When he was in the foyer and out in the street the traffic had suddenly become alive. Wonder of wonders, he had kissed Carmen Villa! Who the hell in Manila would believe him even if he shouted this news until his lungs burst? Fool, he had thought, smashing his fist into the trunk of an elm. And with feet that seemed to float on air, he had danced on aimlessly in the magic summer twilight, bubbling to himself: fool, fool, fool!

Fool — and the self-inflicted stigma was forgotten, for into this May afternoon, into this rendezvous, Carmen walked gracefully. He turned to her as she entered and forgot everything; he was intensely aware only of this girl who had come at his bidding. She came to him like a lissome goddess and a great happiness welled in his chest. She wore an apple-green dress that accentuated her freshness, and smiled that knowing smile of lovers, then sidled close to him, taking care, however, that their arms merely brushed, for she had said, in anticipation of times such as now, when, back in Manila, she would be seen with him: “I have many friends, Tony, and I don’t want them to talk too much.”

“I’m not late, darling,” she said breathlessly as he guided her up the flight of stairs to a table.

A waiter hovered and took their orders — two cups of coffee. Then the crowd disappeared and they were alone. It was just the other day that he last saw her, walking down the gangplank arm in arm with her father. The hunger for her, for the honeyed tang of her lips, her talk, had been whetted; they had taken the ship together and had tried their best to be strangers to each other (it was impossible, of course) because she did not want the Filipinos on the boat to be oversuspicious. Moreover, she had a cabin to herself while he had a tourist berth. The effort at distance had strained the voyage, more so when it ended and she did not even introduce her father to him at the pier when the boat finally docked.

Her cheeks were flushed and her dark eyes mirrored an inner anxiety as they sought his. She leaned forward and spoke softly as if in secret: “Tony, I hate to bring this up again. You forget many things. I’m supposed to have some pride. Tell me now, when are we going to get married?”

He smiled, “I’ve told you, baby. I have to save a little first.” She lowered her gaze and bit her lower lip. She did that every time she was distressed. He leaned forward, “Is something the matter?”

“We should get married now. This week. Tomorrow. Isn’t it important to you?”

“Of course, it is.”

“I don’t want to do this. It’s supposed to be blackmail, but you have to know.”

“A secret?”

“In a few weeks it won’t be. Tony, it’s that important. This month. It was due two weeks ago, but I wasn’t too sure. I thought I was just seasick. On the boat, remember? Well, this morning, I threw up again. And green mangoes …”

Tony reached out and held her hand and all of a sudden he had an urge to pick her up and fondle her. “Baby,” he said, his voice shaky, “I didn’t know. Yes, this month. Don’t worry. Don’t worry …”

He had expected something like this, but the thought that he would soon be a father had never occurred to him so bluntly as it did now. One riddle had resolved itself into something exhilarating and, at the same time, frightening, but he felt no twinge of guilt — only a feeling akin to joy. It was another summer in a place called Washington; it was another place — Carmen’s apartment, its sensual attractions and, most of all, her welcome. Yes, that was it, the lavish welcome — that was what he treasured most.

Bending forward, he whispered, “Baby, I love you”—meaning: Baby, I love your welcome, your warmth. And this was what he shared with her, for Carmen loved her body, too, she loved her skin and her patrician features, more than the ordinary woman. He had, at first, taken her beauty for granted, just as he had taken for granted the generous attributes of other girls. And certainly Carmen was not fairer than some Mediterranean types he had seen on the Boston campus and in his Spanish summer study tour later on. On their first night she brought to him the attention and pride that she lavished on herself. “Touch me gently,” she had told him while the lamp in the corner bathed her with a soft, even light. He had made a move to switch the light off, thinking she might be embarrassed. But she stopped him and said, “You can turn on all the lights if you want to.” The suggestion had pleased him and he did turn them on — the twin fluorescent lamps above flooded her bedroom, and in their cool, bluish scrutiny he marveled at the luster of her skin, the velvety yielding of her breast to his touch. She stood there, basking in the light and smiling.

His throat was parched and his voice, which he heard only dimly, rasped, “You are so beautiful!” And as he thought of this and lived it all over again, the welcome and the abandon, sin no longer was sin but fulfillment.

“We will get married soon,” he said. “Even if we have to elope. I can’t stand it — meeting you like this, missing you and unable to do anything.”

Creases appeared quickly on her brow as she pouted. “My folks, Tony, you have to meet them. I’ve told them about us.”

“Everything?”

“Don’t be a fool,” she said, smiling.

* Hacendero: A landlord or owner of a hacienda or big tract of land.

CHAPTER 4

They agreed to meet at Boie’s again at three. He toyed with a cup of coffee without cream and sugar — a sophistication he had acquired in Cambridge — and wished that the ordeal would soon be over. He knew he would meet Carmen’s parents someday, but in the past this expectation had not bothered him or filled him with foreboding as it did now, with the meeting so near.

It would have been vastly simpler if her parents were ordinary people and not mestizos. In the beginning, his awareness of this fact had been conveniently ignored, only to be resuscitated now that he was home. But before a host of equally depressing images could shape in his mind, Carmen arrived. She was prompt and Tony had not finished his cup.

She refused to sit down — no, they must leave right away. Her mother was home at the moment, and Don Manuel would be home before five — he was scheduled to play a round of golf before sunset. They sailed out, Carmen filled with banter, Tony uneasy and serious, into the sparkling sunlight.

Her Thunderbird, which had arrived with them on the ship, had been unloaded and serviced and was parked at the riverside lot. “The traffic is awful,” she said as they got into the low-slung thing, flaming red and a beauty among the old cars parked alongside it. “It’s like learning how to drive again.”

In a while they were free from the knot of traffic and the car hummed evenly on the asphalt. She had always been a careful driver and she was more so now because her car was new. There was no disconcerting shift of gears, no jerky stops. As the coupe hummed up the Santa Mesa incline, she placed a hand on his thigh.

“Oye, remember now,” she said with a slight, knowing pressure, “Mama always goes by first impressions. It’s not that what she thinks matters. But, you see, she is my mother and yours, too, now. You may just as well get used to that fact. My family isn’t so bad, Tony, not half as bad as some people may have already made you think.”

He had not been attentive to her chatter, for he had been engrossed in what was ahead, in the scene that would probably be created, and he did not realize that, at last, a cool wind had swooped down upon them, clean and fresh, now that they had risen above the level of Manila and ascended the hilly suburb.

“Yes,” Carmen repeated with emphasis. “We aren’t the monsters some people think.”

“Who said that?” Tony asked, moving closer to her. The drift of her talk caught up with him.

She said seriously, “We are always supposed to have more malice and wickedness simply because we have money. That’s the proletarian way of thinking, isn’t it?”

“Don’t be too free with such words,” he chided. “This isn’t Washington anymore.”

Her hand went back to the wheel and she turned onto a road that branched from the wide street. Both sides of it were flanked by tall and leafy acacias that curtained the sun from the houses. They were all surrounded with high stone fences, with gates of wrought iron, and some even boasted guard houses. No jeepneys blundered into this street.

“Here we are,” Carmen sighed. They had stopped before a massive iron gate that stood at the end of a high adobe wall. Carmen blew the horn once and a servant ran up the driveway and opened the gate.

It was the first time he would see her home and his future in-laws — if they would accept him as a son. They would subject him to scrutiny and ask, perhaps, who is this servant that Carmen brings home? Is he after the money of the Villas or is he simply a lonely student to whom Carmen took a fancy while in Washington?

It was neither; he was here because it was the honorable thing to do, and besides, there was no sense in arguing with Carmen, who always had her way. She got out of her car below the wide sweep of the creamy marquee. The stairway was black Italian marble. From there Carmen led him into the wide hall, with its parquet floor. The hugeness of the house was now evident. The lamps were all huge and the sunburst at one end of the hall was massive; the hall was amply stocked with heavy, cream-colored upholstered chairs, and it had none of the antique and bejuco^* furniture that many of the elegant houses he remembered had. In almost every panel, on every table or gleaming lattice, there was some memento of a country the Villas had visited: a Swiss cuckoo clock, Scandinavian earthenware, Venetian glass, African carvings, and even an Ifugao god from the Mountain Province — Tony recognized it immediately — in one corner of the room.

A maid in white appeared at one of the doors that opened to the hall and Carmen asked where her mother was. Holding Tony’s hand, she led him to the terrace and, cutting through a break in the hedge, they went down to the garden, an invigorating flood of Bermuda grass.

Tony took one of the iron garden chairs and gazed at the scene — the tile roof, the grand sweep of the rear wing of the house — while Carmen called, “Julia, Julia!” and when the maid appeared again ordered her to bring cold drinks and cookies.

“This damned heat,” Carmen said. “I can feel it again — the nausea. It’s back. The sooner I get over this, the better. For a full week now, ever since we arrived. Tony, I miss spring most. And here we are, in midsummer. We should have stayed in San Francisco until June.”

“Please,” Tony sounded a little peeved. “Let’s not go into that again. I’ve obligations, you know that. I have to be here before the school prospectus is made. My classes …”

“Esto, your classes,” Carmen said hotly. “And look at me. It’s been my death and God knows how long it will last.”

Tony was sympathetic. “It won’t be long, baby. My sister, when she had her first baby, she said the feeling lasted only until the third month.”

“My God,” Carmen said. “Just hope that I won’t feel this rotten at our wedding, Tony.”

He suppressed a desire to laugh at what was now a ridiculous situation. Here he was in her house to ask for her hand in marriage and he was already assured of fatherhood. Briefly, in his mind’s eye, he saw again her apartment in Washington, the tap that pelted like thunder in the dead of night, the wide handsome bed that squeaked.

With a sense of discovery, he also recalled the ulog of the Bontoc Igorots, which he had visited in one of his excursions to the north years before, remembered the smell of pine splinters burning in the chill dark, the young Igorot girls huddled around the flame and the frisky youths talking with them quietly. The ulog was not big; it was no more than a thatched granary sitting on a shelf overlooking a creek, and that evening it seemed even smaller. In the morning, when he revisited with his guide, he saw its dim interior — the cold ashes in the hearth at one end of the hut, the flat broad stones that were laid in some sort of mosaic as a floor, and the years of soot that clung to the walls and covered the floor, marking all those who visited it with a badge of black just as his khaki had already been marked. The ulog where the Bontoc youths met for trial marriage had one entrance and no window at all, but even in the dim light he could see it shorn of the exotic sensuality that had pervaded it the evening before.

And finally, sweetly, there was Washington again, and Carmen on that frozen Sunday morning preparing breakfast in the kitchenette, her lipstick all gone, her hair mussed, and her face oily and flat with the wash of sleep. She smelled more strongly than ever of woman and fulfillment, acutely so, and seeing her thus and smelling her thus, he dragged her back to the bedroom. What was the difference? This, this thing that had happened, was nothing but a sophisticated copy of the custom of those sturdy hill people in Bontoc, whose life he had tried to understand; the same, the same — they who practiced trial marriage and who made the union binding only when the woman was finally with child were no different from him and Carmen. Civilization simply had more refinements — the apartment on Massachusetts Avenue, this girl, twenty-four years old, with her Spanish ancestry glowing in her clear skin, her exquisite nose and imperious chin, the rich endowments in her limbs.

“This heat,” Carmen interrupted his thoughts again. She took the seat beside him. “I hope the air-conditioning in my room, our room, is doubled soon. That cannot wait, can it? Lovemaking in this heat. It’s just like being pigs, no?”

He leaned over, pressed her hand, and laughed at her little obscenity.

The maid returned with a tray of drinks. “Tell Mama and Papa we are here.”

“Your papa is not yet in, señorita.” The girl returned to the grilled door of the terrace.

“Mama is a character,” Carmen said. “You’ll adore her.”

His drink, relaxing and complete, sank down his burning throat.

“Should I worry about her?”

“No,” she whispered. “You have nothing to worry about now.”

It was not different — his being here was like the Igorot ritual a thousand years old. A young man expressing suit went to the house of the girl and cast his spear at her stairway. If the girl’s father came down and brought the spear up, he was welcome; if, however, the father grabbed the lance and hurled it away or, as sometimes happened, flung it at the young man himself, that meant his rejection. He was here now with a primeval want, to see if the spear would be picked up and brought into the house, or if he would feel its blade upon his flesh.

In a while the sliding door of the terrace opened again and a woman in a short red playsuit, pudgy-looking and in her early fifties, padded out, an ice bag on her head. She was swinging a palm fan languidly across her face.

“Carmen, this damned heat. Did you see the invitation to the fashion show this Sunday?”

“No, Mama.”

“You never are a help,” the older woman pouted and kept swinging the fan as she waddled down. She flopped into the chair opposite Tony, who had risen and said, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Villa.” The chair creaked and sagged under her weight. She was not really enormous, but she was solid and she struck a ridiculous picture in her briefs, her thighs bulging out in folds like those of a chubby child. Her eyes glanced off Tony and in that brief encounter he knew she had probed through him.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Villa,” he repeated.

She looked again at Tony indifferently.

“This is Tony, Mama,” Carmen said.

“Of course,” she said, swinging the fan. “Oh, it’s warm, really warm. Where do you stay?”

“In Antipolo, Mrs. Villa.”

“There?” incredulously. “Why, how can all those people ever live in that place. I remember passing that way last All Souls’ Day. It was warm then. It must be broiling there now.”

“One gets used to the heat.”

“Don’t tell me,” Carmen’s mother apparently did not brook dissent. “Our bedroom is air-conditioned and it’s still warm. Heaven knows how I can ever live without air-conditioning.”

“The old houses, Mrs. Villa,” Tony said, trying to make conversation, “were built to be cool. The old architects, they did something about the weather. The houses they made had wide windows and high ceilings …”

“Air-conditioning is unbeatable. I hope the air-conditioning in Mr. Villa’s car is repaired soon. Then he wouldn’t want the driver to drive fast. Come to think of it, don’t drive fast, young man. Simply because it’s hot is no reason for you to drive fast.”

Carmen threw an uneasy glance at Tony. Then, to her mother: “Tony doesn’t drive, Mama.”

“I don’t have a car,” Tony said flatly.

The older woman sat back. “What did you say your name was?”

Carmen answered for him. “Mama, I told you already. Tony Samson.”

“Ah, yes, I remember. You must be a relative of Dr. Alfonso Samson, no? That man! He certainly gets around. Remember, Carmen? Have I told you how we met him — your pa and I — in New York last summer? And then on the boat to France? There he was on the America—and I could have sworn he followed us. And did I delight in your father’s show of jealousy!” Turning to Tony, she went on with amazing lightness: “Do you know where he is now?”

Tony Samson looked at his shoes. “No, Mrs. Villa,” he said hopelessly. “He isn’t a relative. I just know him from what I read in the papers.”

“Aren’t you from Negros?”

Carmen’s voice was desperate. “No, Mama. From Pangasinan.”

“Oh well, names really mislead.”

Tony felt his mouth drying up again; one more question, he thought, and I’ll melt. Oh, this terrible heat.

Mrs. Villa rose. “What do you do, young man? I should know because, after all, Carmen is very keen about marrying you. I want to make sure you can support a wife.”

“Mama!”

“I’m through with college,” Tony said bravely.

“At Harvard, as you already know,” Carmen helped him.

“I am going to teach,” he said, turning to Carmen as if to say, I can take care of myself. “I’m also doing a little writing.”

“Writing? Now, that’s really good. I read in the papers about an American writer who sold a sexy book for a million dollars.”

“It’s different here, Mrs. Villa,” Tony said.

“You mean you don’t earn enough? Romulo is a writer, isn’t he?”

“Yes, Mama,” Carmen hurried to Tony’s defense again, “but—”

“I’ll make enough to live on, Mrs. Villa,” Tony said grimly.

“They all say that,” the older woman said with a hint of boredom.

“Carmen,” she faced her daughter, “if only Nena de Jesus didn’t grab Ben. He is back in your father’s office. You left on the same boat for Frisco, didn’t you?”

Carmen glared at her mother. “He is my best friend’s husband, Mama,” she said with striking stiffness. “He is dumb, no good,” she touched Tony’s hand. “I have made my choice.”

“You are insolent,” Mrs. Villa chided her. She dismissed her revolt with another languid swing of the fan. “I give up,” she said, rising, her flabby thighs and her chin quivering. Then she waddled back into the house.

They didn’t speak for a while. He looked at the white wall lined with bougainvillea. Beyond the garden wall, a piano tinkled. A car whined up the road and the afternoon steamed on.

Carmen spoke first: “I’m sorry, darling. But I told you Mama is a character.”

“She wasn’t a bother, really,” he lied.

“She was, too,” Carmen insisted. “But she’s always like that. Just like a child.” She laughed mirthlessly and her eyes as they slid to him were supplicating.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’m not from Negros and I’m not related to this Samson doctor. Damn it, America was fine on a scholarship, but life would be better if I were a hacendero from Negros, wouldn’t it? Maybe we should elope and then we would have nothing but ourselves—”

“That’s being impractical, darling, but I’ll give it a thought. Besides, it’s just Mama and she can’t do anything. And Papa …”

“He won’t like me, either.”

“He’s different,” she said. “He’s more understanding, less of a scatterbrain than Mama.”

She had barely finished her sentence when a car was heard crunching up the driveway. Carmen’s Thunderbird hogged the way and the new arrival had to park near the gate.

A man in white trousers and white barong Tagalog^† stepped out.

“Wait,” Carmen said, leaving Tony. She ran to the driveway, took the man by the arm and kissed him on the cheek. Don Manuel Villa was displeased with his daughter’s bad parking but she did not seem to mind him; she dragged him up the flagstone walk to the garden where Tony had risen and had come forward to meet them.

“Good afternoon, sir,” he greeted Carmen’s father politely.

“Go on, be seated,” Don Manuel grinned, the displeasure now banished from his face.

His skin, like Carmen’s, was fair and his nose was high and straight. His teeth were good and his hair was neatly combed. They shook hands. Don Manuel’s palm was soft and moist. He thrust his chin at his daughter. “Go get me my drink.” He spoke again with authority, but Carmen did not seem to mind the tone.

“Your favorite, Papa?”

“Yes.”

To Tony, before she departed, she gave one look, meaning this is it, be a good boy now because you are on your own.

Manuel Villa spoke lightly. “I hope Carmen didn’t wrap you completely around her little finger. She does that even to me.” He flung himself on the iron chair. “This time I know it’s going to be the last. You are going to be a part of the family.”

Before Tony could speak, Don Manuel droned on. “I know it’s going to be you. Not only because Carmen told me so but because she never acted this way before. I hope you don’t find her very stupid, as I sometimes do. I hear you are a professor.”

“Just an instructor, sir,” Tony said quietly.

“It’s always wise to start from somewhere. My grandfather, do you know how he started? I like telling this to everyone — how the old man went about repairing furniture in Intramuros. But he was a good businessman, mind you. And when the revolution came, the stakes became bigger. And my father … it’s a long story and someday I’m going to tell you.”

“I’ll be very happy to hear it, sir.”

Don Manuel did not seem to care about what Tony said, for he interrupted him. “Are you in love with her?”

Before Tony could answer, Don Manuel bent forward, placed a hand on Tony’s knee. “What a foolish question. I’m sure you are.”

An uneasy silence, then Carmen returned with a tray. She gave her father a glass of fresh orange juice.

“Thank you, my dear. Now go over to the car and sort out my mail in the briefcase while I talk things over with your young man.”

Carmen smiled, patted her father’s hand, and, before leaving, looked at Tony meaningfully again. Don Manuel turned to Tony. “I don’t like hard drinks. Never did.” He was expansive. “Of all my daughters, Carmen is the most practical. With a good business mind, I might say, if she will only put her heart to it. Before she left last year, for instance, she convinced me to invest in Philippine Oil. Just thirty thousand. She was visiting the daughter of the firm’s president and she came upon him excitedly answering a radiophone call about a strike in Palawan. The following day the stocks shot up and I made a hundred thousand.”

“I would say, sir,” Tony said affably, “that Carmen uses her ears properly.”

Don Manuel slapped the tabletop and laughed. “You have a sense of humor,” but somehow, his voice failed to relay his blitheness and he sounded hurt instead.

He sat back and sipped his drink. His nails were carefully manicured and on one finger was a simple wedding band. “Have you met her mother already?” he asked and when Tony said, “Yes,” Don Manuel had another question: “I have forgotten, but where do you come from.”

“From the North, sir.”

“Yes, you are Ilocano, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir. From Pangasinan. My grandfather migrated there about a hundred years ago. He came from Ilocos Sur, walked all the way. I’d like to follow his trail someday to see if I still have relatives in the North.”

“And what do you expect to find?”

“I’m not sure,” Tony said. “You see, my grandfather left with his whole clan. He was a teacher when teachers were few.”

“Some sort of aristocrat, eh?”

Tony measured his words. “Not in the sense that some people today are aristocrats, sir.”

“Why should you be doing such a thing?”

“A personal dream,” Tony said with a tinge of embarrassment. “I think the past is necessary, particularly to one like me who is rootless now.”

“Ah, yes, I’ve heard of that,” Manuel Villa became pensive. “Tradition — it’s another name for nationalism, isn’t it?”

“If you choose to call it that, sir.”

“Are you aware of my background?”

“Carmen has told me a little.”

“I’m not saying I’m proud of it,” he said, emptying his glass of orange juice. “Less than a hundred years ago my grandfather … I’ve told you he was poor.…”

Tony nodded.

“I might just as well admit it: he and all the rest, they were opportunists. They are called heroes now, but actually they sold their services to the highest bidder — to the revolutionists, to the Spaniards. It didn’t matter to whom, as long as they made money.”

“Sir, I don’t want to pry …”

“Now, don’t try to stop me. I don’t know what you young people are thinking of, although sometimes you amaze me. But this is one thing I know: all this rot about tradition — no, I don’t mean you, my boy, I mean the professional patriots — how can I believe them? I feel just as they feel. There’s too much hypocrisy around. Frankly, I know which side my bread is buttered on. Only two years ago, for instance, I was entertaining a Japanese contractor. He had his eyes on my construction facilities. We and some local boys, including Senator Reyes and Alfred Dangmount, were planning an integrated steel mill in Bataan. The Japanese approached me. Now he is in on the deal.”

“If it’s a business deal …”

“That’s what I mean! For us, where does patriotism begin and where does business end?”

Manuel Villa slapped the tabletop again as if to emphasize his point. Then, settling back in his chair, his aggressive and cynical tone changed and he spoke as if in a whisper: “I’m always a practical man.” He spoke without taking his eyes off Tony. “You must excuse me now if I am frank. I know Carmen has made up her mind.”

“I hope you don’t object.”

“And if I object, what can I do? Disown her? You have to admit it, we are not like those Negros hacenderos. Cousins marrying cousins. Incest! That’s what it is — and do you know why?”

Tony nodded.

“Because they don’t want their wealth to be shared by strangers. And look what has happened to their children. Nitwits — that’s what has become of them. Have you anything to say?”

Tony shook his head.

“Well, I have a lot to say. I’ve made inquiries. Tried to know as much as I could about you.”

Tony stammered senselessly.

“You are not a businessman yet, but I’ll make you one. I don’t know if you love Carmen for herself or for her money. Excuse the bluntness,” Don Manuel spoke blandly. “But if we are going to be friends we must have frankness. The less secrets in the family, the better.”

“I’m poor, sir,” Tony said, his temper starting to rise. “Perhaps you also know how much I’ll make. I intend to live on that. And Carmen, too, if she’s willing. And as for your money …”

Don Manuel stood up, a grin on his face, and placed an arm on Tony’s shoulder. “I like one who fights back,” he said, pleased with himself. “At least my son-in-law is going to stand up and fight.”

Before Tony could speak again, Don Manuel boomed: “You wonder why I can talk freely? I have influence and, more important, money. These give me a sense of true freedom. I see nothing wrong in appreciating money. Even priests appreciate money.”

Manuel Villa, the satisfied look still on his lean, handsome face, patted Tony paternally on the shoulder. “If the wedding will be next month — or any time you two decide — we can talk again. We may yet become very good friends.”

Speechless, Tony watched him disappear behind the sliding glass door of the terrace. A hundred things crowded his mind, a hundred important things that he could have said. The candor of Don Manuel both repelled and fascinated him, and yet the businessman had strength of conviction. Was Tony never interested in Carmen’s money, was he right in sounding so self-righteous and proud? The wedding, Don Manuel had said, would be next month and that was not far away.

Carmen appeared on the terrace, and when she drew near, her eyes were shining. “How did you like him, darling?” she asked, caressing the hair on the nape of his neck.

He stood up and smiled. They walked slowly to the driveway. He held her hand, squeezed it at the gate, and replying to her insistent “Oye, tell me,” he gazed at her radiant face, and because he loved her and because she would be the mother of his child, he replied, “An admirable man. A most unusual father, too.

“Of course I like him, baby.”

* Bejuco: Rattan.

† Barong Tagalog: A loose-fitting, long-sleeved shirt — the national dress of the Philippines for men — made from gauzy pineapple-fiber fabric, often embroidered on the collar and facing.

CHAPTER 5

Tony came to know what a headstrong girl Carmen was the afternoon she picked him up at the university. She had parked under the acacias that fronted the main building and had apparently waited there, watching those coming out of the hall. The moment he stepped down the main stairway she drove up to him, opened the door of her car, and beckoned him to get in. A student had impudently whistled; blood spread warmly over his face and she was flippant about it: “At your age, darling, you shouldn’t blush when a wicked female like me picks you up.”

She shifted into first gear and they were off.

“You should have told me you were coming,” Tony objected weakly.

“It wouldn’t have been fun,” she said. They were slipping out of the campus into the broad avenue lined with acacia saplings. “I wanted to surprise you.”

They drove quietly. After having known each other for so long, there did not seem to be much to talk about.

In a while the ancient obsession returned. “I wish I really could take a breather from school,” he said. “Not a long breather, just a month or so, so I could go to the Ilocos. You with your excellent Spanish — you know how poor I am in the language.…”

“Oh, no, not again,” she said in mock disappointment. “No more of that crazy old man who walked to Pangasinan.”

He placed an arm on her shoulder. “Yes, that old man,” he said.

She turned to him briefly and he saw the cool, laughing eyes, the patrician nose, and the full lips parted in a smile.

“I wish you’d believe me when I say it’s important,” he said softly.

But she was Carmen Villa, self-centered and secure; she would never understand his inner tumult, and there was no way by which he could impress upon her the tenacity of his dream.

The afternoon shed a pleasant warmth and a light that was spread like tinfoil on the bay. At the right, etched white against the blue waters, was the naval base of Cavite. She had stopped talking and he saw a secret smile crinkling her eyes. Then she laughed — that quiet, contented laughter of women used to having their way, as if she did not have a care, although she had told him there was one, the life embedded in her belly that would someday betray her sin.

She turned at a corner to a church and stopped on the asphalt churchyard before the entrance to the sacristy. She pressed his hand: “Darling, you won’t run away, will you? You wanted to elope — you said so — and I have shanghaied you.”

He had, at first, thought of the whole thing as a joke; he had already given his word that they would be married in a month’s time at the most, after routine had settled in at the university and he had found them a house.

A flush colored her cheeks; her white pumps, her white lace dress, the happiness written all over her face — all these marked her, indeed, as a bride. “You are all roped and branded, darling,” she said.

As they stepped out of the car, a matronly mestiza was upon them, gushing: “Carmen, how really romantic! I was talking with Mr. Soler in the sacristy, and with Father Brown. I’ve never seen anything like this. Darling, you have imagination.”

The introductions were hurried; the stout woman was Nena de Jesus, a friend of Carmen’s from convent school, who was married to one of Don Manuel’s junior partners. She was of Carmen’s age, but the leisurely life or a surfeit of sweets had spoiled her and she was now twice Carmen’s weight. “You look the pretty bride — slim and fair. Oh, Carmen, keep your figure that way. Look at me.” And then there was Godo, too, shaking a finger at Tony and grinning, and Carmen telling him, “I’m glad you are on time,” but he was not listening for he was pumping Tony’s hand and exclaiming, “Tony, I didn’t know you would do it, but boy, you are doing it.”

“Who brought you here?” Tony asked and Godo turned to Carmen. “I couldn’t say no to her.”

They all fell to laughing. “I wanted Charlie to come, too, but only Godo was in the office when I went there,” Carmen said. The two women left them in the churchyard and went to the parochial office where the priest was waiting.

Godo was pleased. Everything had been taken care of. Carmen had been very thoughtful and precise, and had polished off the smallest detail. “I had to take this barong Tagalog out of mothballs,” Godo said, explaining his clothes. “I never thought I’d see a wedding like this. She is some girl, Tony. A lot of spunk — that’s what she has. She came to the office five days ago and swore me to secrecy. How can you say no to a girl like her? Boy, you sure got yourself a classy female.”

Tony laughed inwardly and slapped his friend on the belly. “I’m glad you like her,” he said. I like her, too, he reassured himself. But the surprise had waned and for a moment he had a chance to think soberly. How would his sister take the news? She would surely be disappointed; she had long ago taken on the role of guardian angel, and now she was being left out of this most significant event in his life. She would not understand what Carmen did; in spite of her having stayed in the city for a long time she was provincial and still had all the peasant attitudes of Rosales. She would never believe that a woman like Carmen Villa would literally drag a man to church. But he could take care of his sister — they were blood relations and, in the end, he would appeal to this infrangible fact. But where would they go after the wedding? He could not take Carmen to Antipolo to share that narrow, unpainted room and to awaken in the night when the trains roared by. They could not possibly live in a hotel, not on his meager savings of one hundred and fifty dollars (that would bring more than five hundred pesos in the black market — the thought was of little solace). And her parents, particularly her mother, they would never let him step into their house, and worse, Don Manuel might yet disown her. But Don Manuel seemed to be a reasonable man and, besides, this was Carmen’s doing, not his. You silly girl, you unpredictable, impulsive woman, look at what you have done to me, but I love every hair, every single pore of you. Carmen, I worship you.…

“You happy?”

The question caught him off-guard. Even when he said warmly “Of course,” he was already wondering if he really was happy, if this was the zenith he had sought, for there was no overflowing joy in his heart, no strange warmth spreading to his fingertips, to the roots of his hair, no pleasure as that which suffused him on that drizzly evening when he finally found out how it was to have Emy cuddling up to him, to feel her body melt with his own feverish being because communion was complete.

But time changes so many things in a man — his attitudes and even his ideas about this strange amalgam called happiness. What has happened to me? Have I no longer the sensitivity and perception to understand the significance of this hour? This was what he had always wanted — this marriage, this belonging to an ethereal world that would forever be untouched by the damning frustrations he had known.

Godo gave the last word, a gentle nudge and that raspy, ingratiating voice: “A real catch, Tony. Remember what we proletarians used to say about licking the hacenderos? If you cannot destroy them, marry their daughters.”

Tony laughed good-naturedly, but afterward, Godo’s remark angered him, and the decent thing for him to have done was to shove the filthy words down Godo’s throat. He loved Carmen, and that made all the difference.

In a while the girls called them to the church office. Father Brown was there waiting, his big frame shaking with mirth as he said, “I can’t imagine Carmen doing this.” He had been Carmen’s father confessor since she was in grade school and he knew the Villas very well. He had been in the Philippines too long and had acquired a taste for Filipino food, he said jokingly, which also explained his girth and his broad, ruddy looks. They talked some more about San Francisco, his native city, about the ocean fog and Tony’s trip to Sacramento Valley, where he had met many Filipinos and the writers and artists in Carmel-by-the-Sea, whom Tony visited one summer while he washed dishes there. Then it was time for the priest to perform his duties and he beckoned Tony to go to the confessional.

He knelt, feeling warm in the collar; gone was his belligerence against the act of confessing. Now he was just another penitent, desirous to get the ritual and the penance over with. The strangely intimate questions that were asked did not sink into his consciousness, and he answered them with mechanical swiftness: Yes, I have done It with her — don’t you know there’s a baby coming? And It wasn’t once or twice but many times. I did not seduce her. In a way it was by common consent. Sure, there were other times. In Barcelona there was this girl who clerked in a photography store. And in Boston there was this coed from Radcliffe. I did not marry them, mind you. It’s this girl I’m marrying, so let there be no argument about that. Of course I’m in love with her. And it’s not her money, either, because I can support her with what I make. Nothing fancy, but I can support her. Yes, we will have as many children as God pleases. A dozen maybe, because I like children.…

One should get married in church for the experience. It all seemed hazy — the ordeal before the altar, the coins and the holy water, Godo smiling through it all and this Nena de Jesus, whom he had not met until now, misty-eyed and actually crying when it was all over. Just like that they were man and wife, and they held hands and looked into each other’s eyes, a brief kiss, then the hugs and the handshakes and Father Brown smiling benignly at them.

They could not all fit in Carmen’s car, so Carmen left it at the churchyard. Taking, instead, Nena’s car, they drove off to one of the Chinese restaurants near Pasay.

By eight they had finished dining and, for the occasion, Carmen asked the headwaiter to bring some brandy. Tony objected. “Let’s have that some other time,” he said. But Godo nudged him: “Can’t you think of a better time than now? I have brandy very rarely. Don’t be Ilocano. Not on your wedding day, anyway.”

He had learned long ago that gallantry and poverty did not go together — this lesson had long been etched in his mind. He turned to Godo in that meaningful way only friends understood and said simply, “I’m picking up the tab, Godo.”

“And the Villa millions?” Godo had always been brash.

“It’s not the Villa millions,” Tony said firmly, unmoving in his chair. “It’s the Samson centavos and there aren’t many of those around.”

Carmen laughed gaily. “I admire this smart talk. You really can jump at each other’s throats. But I doubt, darling,” she turned coyly to Tony, “if you have heard of conjugal property.” She thrust her silver-lined handbag to him.

She had flaunted her wealth, but he must be civilized, he must now show his displeasure; he must be able to live with grace and equanimity in this new and glittering circle. He smiled wanly.

“That’s a blessing I didn’t know about,” he said and went back to his coffee.

Nena must have noticed his discomfiture; she came to his aid. “How many children do you intend to have, Carmen?” she asked, her gaze shifting to the newly weds.

Carmen laughed. “Well, now that I’m a respectable woman I would like to have a dozen.”

Nena seemed appalled. “You are not serious, are you?”

“Ask my husband,” Carmen said.

“If a dozen she wants, she’ll have them,” Tony said. His good humor had returned.

“You don’t know what you are talking about,” Nena said, pouting. “That’s all wrong”—and the words poured out. “Look at me: in five years I had six children. I look like a tub of lard now, don’t I? I don’t think it is fair at all. I was once slim like you, and full of grace — no, Carmen? I don’t walk anymore. I roll. And six kids. I’m going to have my fallopian tubes tied this year. No more children for me. I’m going to enjoy life while I’m young. God, I’m only twenty-five and everyone calls me ‘Missus.’ There are some married women who are forty years old and they are called ‘Miss’ in beauty parlors and department stores. With me no one ever makes that mistake. It’s all over my figure.”

Her truthfulness was pathetic, and Carmen tried to dismiss the topic, to assuage Nena’s grief over her lost youth: “But six darling children, isn’t that enough compensation? You should be happy, Nena. Alice, you know her, poor Alice, married ten years and not even one miscarriage!”

Tony could see Nena de Jesus at home, her six children tended by a dozen yayas, the rearing of her children rendered an impersonal chore. Wealth does this — removes the warmth and the closeness that parents can have with their children — and he felt sorry for her misery and for her lost youth.

“No matter what you say,” Nena insisted. “Six is too much. And in the meantime, what happens? You know my dear, dear husband of course, my darling Ben.”

“They are both friends,” Carmen said, turning to Tony.

“Well, he is now gallivanting around. He takes off for Nueva Ecija to visit the tenants. Ha!” Nena apparently relished her story. “Do you know where he really goes? I wish he knew something other than real estate. You should tell your papa to shift him to another department.”

“He works in the office — top man,” Carmen explained to Tony again.

“Perhaps if he worked in the plywood factory, or in Mindanao, that would diminish his libido somewhat,” Nena rattled on.

Godo leaned forward, grinning. The story had piqued his interest and the brandy glass before him was empty.

“Nena, that’s what a man’s for,” Carmen said lightly.

“I know, dear,” Nena tapped Carmen’s hand patronizingly. “But there can be too much of it, you know. And what happens? Six children! And where has that taken me? Of course I love him, dear. But does he love me still in this condition? I want to apologize to Tony,” and she nodded to Godo, “but most men can’t differentiate love from sex. I feel that I repel Ben now. I can feel it — this sagging bust, these flabby arms, this tub of lard. I’m not one to arouse the romantic instincts anymore. This year I’m going to have my fallopian tubes tied. That’s final … and I’ve already seen a doctor. A good one. If I’d only seen him earlier then I wouldn’t be looking like this today. I was very slim, remember, Carmen?”

Carmen nodded.

“You still want a dozen children?” Nena asked.

“Well, we are off to a good start,” she said, winking at Tony.

They had finished their coffee and the waiter started clearing their table.

“What do we do now?” Tony asked after their table was cleared.

“What do newlyweds do?” Godo asked. They all laughed.

Carmen turned to Godo. “I hope you won’t mind if I ask you to take Nena home. Her husband might beat her up—”

“It’s all right, darling,” Nena said, rising. Her flabby face was sad. “Ben never gets jealous. Not with a figure like mine.”

“Please, it’s a pleasure,” Godo said gallantly. “I may yet prove that your husband has no right taking you for granted.”

Nena de Jesus smiled and Tony knew that she had not been flattered in a long, long time. The restaurant foyer was lighted by a soft flow of capiz^* lamps that dangled from the mahogany ceiling. Godo turned to the couple behind him. “I’m sure you are in a hurry to be left alone.”

“Of course,” Carmen said gaily.

They drove to the church where Carmen’s car was parked, and before Tony got out, Godo held his arm. “Be good to her, old boy. You will not find another girl like Carmen. Not in a million. And that goes for her millions, too.”

Laughter again, but this time Tony didn’t laugh.

Alone at last, they drove quietly to the boulevard.

Carmen parked on the sandy shoulder just behind the seawall, and night rushed about them, alive with the shudder of waves against the rocks, the swish of cars speeding on the boulevard behind them. Above, through the windshield, the stars shone, and before them was the seawall, the sea flat and quiet. Beyond the dark expanse the lights of Cavite gleamed and a beacon flashed green and red above the lights.

“I wish Godo had more sense than that. As if your money meant everything to me,” he said after a while. “He makes me feel so cheap, the way he talks. He had never learned refinement.”

“You are sore,” she said with alarm. She moved closer to him. “Not all our money is filthy, honey. And those crooked deals — they can’t be helped nowadays. Besides, have you forgotten that money isn’t corrupt, that it’s the people who are?”

“You don’t know what you are saying,” he said glumly. “I don’t think anyone in your family ever knows what money really means — the immense responsibility that goes with it. That includes your father.

“Esto, there is one important thing you don’t know,” she said hotly. “This quiet, simple wedding about which you had second thoughts — I didn’t want to go ahead with it at first. But Papa, he was thinking of you, your pride, and he said it was best this way. You should at least give him credit for thinking of you. And don’t let anyone know I’ve told you.”

He couldn’t believe what he heard. “The wedding, everything … everything was your father’s idea?”

“Yes,” she snorted.

Now that he had drawn from her this confession, he did not know whether he should be angry or grateful. Above the confusion in his own mind he realized that, henceforth, none of his waking hours would be spared the businessman’s attention. He should be grateful for having been relieved of considerable expense and embarrassment, but gratitude to Don Manuel Villa would now take the form of soft, comfortable chains that would never be shattered.

“He must think a lot of you to have consented to this,” he said.

She moved away from him and sat back. On the rocks below the seawall the waves were a whisper, and in the night, somewhere among the grass and in the stunted palms, cicadas found their voice. She spoke softly, as though talking only to herself: “Yes, Papa thinks he loves me, but I know he doesn’t really care. And if I got pregnant and had an illegitimate child, he couldn’t care less. He would simply ask that I be well taken care of and the child, too. That goes for Mama and all my dear brothers and sisters. And they’d worry about me only because what I might have done would give the family a bad name. I’ve known that and money has nothing to do with it. Do you know Papa has three mistresses and I’ve never heard Mama complain? Papa once brought one of them to a party at the house. Everyone knew, even Mother, and we all acted as if nothing was unusual. So you see, I’m really alone — just like you. And that’s why I want something I can call my own.”

“It is not true,” he said, feeling sorry for having been so direct. “You are dramatizing things again.”

“It’s true,” Carmen insisted. “So don’t think I’m being nasty this way. If I had told Papa that I’d already gotten married to you, he couldn’t have cared less.”

She sidled closer to him, her face beseeching. He touched her cheek and kissed her gently. “We shouldn’t be mad at each other on this day — of all days,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t tell you these things; they are what I should keep to myself.”

“And I … I have no pride when I am with you.”

“Listen, so you think you know what my father did when I was young? I told you, he bound me to a sled and horsewhipped me. Do you know what a horsewhip is? Well, my old man was careful not to strike my eyes. Just my back. You saw the scars.”

“It’s just a few marks — not really scars, just white marks,” Carmen said. “Mama, well, you know who she is, how her tongue works. She was poor until Father met her.”

He had wanted then to tell her how he had lied, that his father was in prison, not dead.

But his courage did not come. So tonight he decided that the problem would never surface again; he must live the lie now and talk of his father as belonging to the past, irrevocably there and pertinent only as a memory. He caressed her hair and told her how his mother had always been an angel, how she had slaved without a word of complaint.

“Perhaps you will be like her,” he said.

And she kissed him. “That’s the best compliment you’ve given me, darling.”

A balut^† vendor approached them. After refusing, Carmen started the car and they slid back to the boulevard.

She wanted to drive him to Antipolo, but it was late and they parted instead at her gate. He waited until she was safely within the high, white-washed walls, then he walked to the corner and got a cab.

Tony did not wake his sister, choosing, instead, to go to bed immediately. But sleep was a long time coming, maybe because of the coffee and the brandy. It was long past midnight and he wondered if Carmen was awake, too. She always had an agile mind; in Washington they would sit up talking, cozily snuggled together. But he could not recall anything searing that they had talked about, nothing that had bared her soul, although he had told her much about himself. All that he could remember was the coffeepot bubbling somewhere in the kitchen, the late-night TV shows they watched together, her eagerness. Why had it been that way? Was it true after all that Carmen never knew how it was to be really loved, and that because she did not know, she had tried to find the meaning of surrender? There would be no secret meetings anymore; her most important problem was solved.

Below the house, in the slimy ditch half-covered with grass, the frogs started to croak, for the rains had finally come.

* Capiz: Translucent, squarish inner shell of small marine bivalve common in Philippine coastal waters; used to make lamps and decorative objects.

† Balut: A snack made from fertilized duck eggs incubated almost to the point of hatching and then boiled.

CHAPTER 6

Don Manuel went to the railroad station at noon to see them off. Just as Carmen had said, he did not seem ruffled at all. “Your mama is angry,” he told Tony as they stepped out of the car.

Tony had not expected him to come, and in Don Manuel’s presence his composure left him. “Thank you, sir,” he stammered. “I knew you wouldn’t approve of what we had done.” He tried to sound sincere. “But Carmen and I … we thought there was no other way.”

“You should have seen the rumpus at the breakfast table this morning when I broke the news,” Carmen said gaily. “You should have seen Mother cry. She was just putting on an act, of course. Mother was glad, too, that I’m already married. Now she won’t have to worry about me being seduced.”

“I had other plans, of course. I thought we would get to know more of each other,” Don Manuel said evenly.

Carmen sidled to her father. “Thanks, Papa,” she said. “But I’m sure you’ll like Tony just the same.”

“Now, Tony,” Don Manuel turned to him. “When you get back you proceed directly to the house. No ‘buts’ about it. It’s so wide and empty, what with all the children already married and living on their own.….”

Tony looked at Carmen. He had hoped that when they returned, Carmen would stay with her folks until he found a small place to rent. But now that Don Manuel had spoken, his predicament seemed solved. He could not think of bringing Carmen to Antipolo — no, that was farthest from his mind. He turned to Carmen, and by the look in her eyes he knew that this, too, was what she desired.

“I thank you for your offer, sir,” he said humbly, “but—”

Don Manuel leaned back on the couch: “I know what you are thinking — of Mama and her displeasure. You don’t know her well enough. I’ll take care of her, you’ll see.”

Don Manuel stood up, and because they were the only people in the waiting room, he spoke freely: “I believe that you should live independently, but that should be when you really have settled a few important details — after you have found a place. Give us a chance. We won’t keep you forever.”

Don Manuel’s driver entered the room with their tickets.

“I wired the Pines Hotel this morning and have already arranged the bridal suite for you,” Don Manuel said at the door. “It’s a wedding present to my favorite daughter and to you.”

But for the scenery the trip was uneventful. The city’s fringes marched by — the same ugly houses huddled along the tracks, the muddied water and filth was a moat between him and the houses and their squalid yards. Then the train broke out into the open country, into sodden fields that were now starting to be tinged with green. The houses were no different in their smallness from those on the edges of the city. Why had the country not changed at all? Why were people like Don Manuel hoarding their money in Manila and cutting themselves off from the land that was the beginning and the repository of all wealth?

The sun poured down in a steady stream, saturating the landscape and burnishing the fields and the mountains with dusty blue and streaks of gold. The thatched houses bobbed out of the brown earth and the singing grass. But in this air-conditioned coach Tony could not drink in the air, could not listen to the wind, could only be aware of the nearness of his wife and her domestic talk, her reminiscences of New England and Washington, of the changing colors of autumn, and the reds and golds of the maples and the sycamores.

“Have you ever tried swimming naked in a muddy brook?” he asked as the train sang over a creek, rich brown with mud. “In that dirt?” she exclaimed, a little aghast, and he explained to her that there was a world of difference between the mud in the fields and the mud in the esteros^* in Manila. There is, he told her impatiently and with conviction, such a thing as clean mud. “Yes, yes, darling,” she said, “there is clean mud.” And she nudged him in that insinuating manner with which he had become familiar. She was referring to him as clean, wholesome mud, and for a moment anger crossed his mind — but only for a moment, for he had looked out the window then, into the flood of late afternoon, and rising on the horizon was this hump of a mountain streaked with veins of gold, and beyond this familiar blue was Rosales and home. He could not imagine himself being born in another place or growing up in another town, and nostalgia lashed at him, whipped away the anger that had started and stirred that old and nameless longing to see the town again, its crooked and dusty streets, and the neighborhood — the cogon shanties, the bamboo trees creaking in the wind, the carabao dung on the narrow trail that led to the river, and the papayas blooming in the morning. But he was not going home now, just passing through, just winging and dreaming through — and there would be no way by which he could find how it was with Rosales, if it had changed, and Emy, too, if she was all right and healthy and not completely blighted by a past that had made her fair game to the devil. He himself could feel his voice sandpapery and hoarse: “Beyond that mountain is home.…”

She glanced out of the window and smiled that quick, meaningless smile which meant that she understood but was not particularly interested, then went back to the picture magazine she had bought at Tutuban. He sat back beside her, wondering at the way his life had changed, wondering how he ever got here, in this air-conditioned coach beside this fair-skinned and lovely woman. The great distances he had traveled, the bitter winters of New England, the summer in Spain, and the searching among the archives in Barcelona and Seville — all these now seemed shriveled into this hollow moment, this certitude of Carmen and the honeymoon. He sought her hand silently and held it, pressed it, his mind lazily meandering back to remembered images — not to those great distances he had crossed but to those places where he had seen the seed become a plant, to the house he had left, the home with its leaking roof, with plows and harrows rusting below the bamboo stairs, and the chicken roosting under the kitchen, the fence that had fallen apart. The house no longer stood, of course, for it had been dismantled long ago when his father went to jail and the family left Rosales for the uncertain beneficence of Manila. There was no Samson left in Rosales; there was nothing left for him to go back to or to claim but Emy, who lived on the other side of the broken-down fence. And if he did see her again, how would she take him? Would she loathe him for having left her or would she look up to him in wonder and say, Tony, you’ve gone so far, you’ve changed. And deep within his heart, he could feel that overwhelming sense of helplessness, that awful incapacity to hold back what had already happened. If he had stayed behind, if he had not gone to America, perhaps things would have been different for Emy, and that ignominy that had overcome her might not have touched her at all. The coolness of this coach, the softness of the girl beside him, and the racing of this train toward its destination were the realities he could not now ignore. They were the solid shackles around his ankles and his wrists, reminding him of what could no longer be changed.

It was when they had already arrived in Baguio that he recalled that they had not acted like newly weds at all, that they had gone through the trip as if they were an old married couple.

They arrived at the hotel at dusk and were immediately taken to their room. Now that they were alone an awkwardness commingled with relief came over Tony. It was a strange feeling, both pleasant and unreal, for it was something new. Not that he had never been alone with Carmen before this union was sanctified, but now the pleasure of being together was no longer the delirious thrill that he had expected it to be, for all that he expected of it was the possession and not the discovery of that possession. For a while he lingered by the door, holding her hand, and he would have asked her what she was thinking had not the bellhop come at that moment with their luggage and switched on the fluorescent lamp in the ceiling.

Tony surveyed the suite, the well-ordered sofa and chairs done in rich, red upholstery, the fresh calla lilies and the dahlias as big as saucers in the slim, metallic vases. The paneling of red dao shone in the cold, blue light. No trace of pine scent lingered in the room, which, in fact, smelled faintly of floor wax. Then they were alone again. Night was falling swiftly outside, a phone jangled somewhere in the quiet corridors, and the cold of Baguio finally touched them, told them that the time to make love had come.

Carmen sat on the wide, cream-colored bed and watched him open the lock of the suitcase.

“I think we should do it as we have planned,” Tony said. “About entering this room, I mean.” She shrugged. “You can keep the illusion at least, baby,” he said, grinning. “You shouldn’t wear a Good Friday look — my God, not on your wedding day!”

He went to her, lifted her, and kissed her. The lips on which his mouth fell were warm but unresponsive, and Tony quickly attributed this to Baguio, to the slivers of cold that stole into this rich, intimate room. Or could it be more than the cold? Remembering her condition and the life that was developing within her, he felt an abiding warmth for this girl who had accepted him.

“Esto, we should not have bothered coming here,” she said with an air of boredom. “I didn’t like the look of that bellhop when we came in — and the clerk at the desk. They were practically undressing me. Me, of all people! Now, if we had gone to the summer house, as Papa had suggested earlier, we would be alone just the same.”

“Honeymoons are meant to be spent in hotels, baby,” he said, trying to humor her.

She sighed and placed her clothes on the bed. “It seems foolish, doesn’t it?” she asked but expected no answer. “A two-day honeymoon. A weekend actually, then you rush back to that miserable university for the good of this country’s future, for the benefit of the downtrodden Ilocano race.”

It was her way of showing displeasure and he brushed aside her sarcasm. “You married a teacher,” he said.

“An associate professor,” she corrected him. Her blitheness had returned with a quickness that pleased him.

She rose and hugged him. “If we were now living in that hick town of yours I would be called Maestra, wouldn’t I? Or is it Profesora?”

She laughed and he was glad that he did not have to bend backward again and try to please her, play up to her whims, humor her, because she was this way and women were supposed to be pampered and cuddled until the uneasy days of conception were over.

Outside, beyond the polished glass windows, the pines were already shrouded with the oncoming night, and mist wrapped the darkening trees and the whole landscape in white motionless suds. She moved away from him and idled at the window. She was every inch a bride, lissome and beautiful as he once dreamed his wife should appear to him on his wedding night. Then she turned to him and demanded, almost shrilly, “But must we return so soon? You need a vacation. All the past days you did nothing but work and prepare your papers and your program. You need a vacation. Look at yourself — all bones, and you want to get back to that salt mine.”

“It’s Monday and classes,” Tony said, “and more than that, baby, I’ve already told you — the Socrates Club. Not every teacher in the university …”

“… is a member of this club,” she said coyly. “And all the members are brilliant minds who have gone to Harvard and Oxford.”

She had found her nightgown in the suitcase — a shimmering black, which contrasted with her light, rosy skin. She held it to her bosom, preened before him and, smiling again, said, “Now, will I qualify?” Before he could answer, she dropped the negligee on the bed and continued: “The things that interest men are so trite. God, they bore me. Let’s throw the university out of the window and concentrate on sex.”

He cupped her chin and kissed her. “I’m sorry if I am such a bore,” he said, burying his face in the fragrant curve of her neck.

She detached herself from his embrace and, turning around, asked him to undo the zipper at the back of her dress. He did this carefully, remembering how once, in his haste to undress her, he had brought the zipper down quickly and it had bitten into her skin. Having finished with the zipper, he kissed her nape.

“I love you,” he whispered.

Matter-of-factly she asked, “Even when I get fat and dowdy like Mama?”

He bit her ear again and whispered, “Yes, even when you are as fat as a circus freak.”

She opened her eyes and looked reproachfully at him. “When the children start coming my breasts will sag. My belly, too. Will you still love me then?”

He laughed and hugged her.

She drew away and started undressing in that casual manner that often amazed him, for it seemed as if she were on a stage, showing off to an admiring audience. She had done it before, undressed before him, and the act had almost become a ritual. She walked to the bed and picked up the negligee again, then stood before him, her fair skin gleaming, the smooth, white flanks shining in the cool blue light; her legs tawny and clean.

“Have I changed, darling?” she asked, letting his gaze caress her.

“No,” he said, holding his head a little backward. “You are beautiful.” And his blood singing, he went to her.

Tony woke up with the sun in his eyes. It was chalky white on everything in the room. Carmen was still asleep, bundled against the Baguio cold in the pale blue woolen blanket they had shared. He watched her for a while — her easy, rhythmic breathing — then kissed her, pressing his tongue through her lips to her teeth and tasting the honey saltiness of her mouth. She stirred, opened her eyes, and embraced him, making happy gurgling sounds.

“I just wish we never had to return to Manila,” she said, yawning. It was their weekend honeymoon all right, and though the thrill of first possession had waned, she had acted like the perfect bride, demanding love.

It was Sunday, and in the afternoon they would have to go back to Manila. The phone rang and Carmen reached for it, muttering in her breath, “Who is it?” The pleasantness was gone and she sounded sulky and injured. Then her face brightened. “It’s Papa,” she said. “He is at the golf club with friends. He came in this morning in Dangmount’s plane and we will have supper with him. What do you say, honey? We can go back to Manila with him in the plane.”

“Yes, Papa,” she said without waiting for Tony’s reply. She gave the phone to her husband.

Tony sat up: “Good morning, sir.”

“Don’t ‘sir’ me now. It’s Papa, Tony.” Don Manuel sounded a bit displeased at the other end of the line.

“I’m sorry, Papa,” Tony repeated, trying out the word with little confidence, and he was pleased to find that “Papa” was not awkward at all.

“That’s better,” Don Manuel chuckled. “The course at Wack Wack was a bit crowded so Dangmount and I decided to fly in just now.” After the hurried explanation for his presence in Baguio he went on: “You don’t have to take the train this afternoon. We can all go home tomorrow by plane.”

“My classes start at nine, Papa,” Tony said, “and it’s rather important that I be there.”

“There’s a lot of time. We fly at daybreak.”

It was pointless to argue. “If you say so, Papa,” Tony said. “And thank you very much.”

“Now, may I have that daughter of mine again?”

Tony handed the phone to Carmen.

“Yes, Papa,” she said. “Yes, right here at the Pines.”

She placed the phone on its hook, turned complacently to Tony, and, as if she were speaking to a secretary, said, “Don’t forget to remind me, darling, I’ll call Manila tonight, so that my car will be at the airport and I’ll drive you straight to the university. That will make you happy?”

“There’s a lot of time,” Tony said.

“I’m glad you accepted Papa’s invitation. He will come here tonight and have dinner with us.”

Tony Samson, unable to say anything that might spoil Carmen’s plans, lay on the bed. But sleep had left him. Even Carmen, soft to the touch, now appeared to him as no more than any other woman. It would have been vastly different if this were Washington, although Washington was now a year past. He recalled again the apartment Carmen had in Massachusetts Avenue, its comforts. Her family — did they really accept him as Carmen had wanted him to be accepted? Why did her father now come to Baguio? Was it to play golf as he had told her or could there be a more significant reason?

“Get up, darling,” Carmen said, pulling the woolen blanket away from him. In another instant she was over him, all arms and kisses and warmth and woman scent.

“Food is what I need,” he said, biting her ear.

* * *

The boy who brought in their breakfast was silently efficient and he left as quickly as he could. Sipping her coffee and still in her negligee, Carmen became thoughtful as she returned to the clear glass window. The pines outside were covered with mist. “Once, I dreamed of this day. In college we read a lot of books, most of them things you wouldn’t think colegialas^† would be capable of taking a glimpse of. But there we were, reading and looking at pictures when the nuns weren’t looking. You know, the kind of stuff that gets discreetly shown under false covers in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower …”

“Monsieur, feelthy pictures,” Tony blandly imitated the French vendor.

Carmen laughed heartily. “Oye, do you know that in the last week of our high school the nuns asked a priest to lecture to us about the facts of life? It was funny. We were all giggling in the rear. Here was this priest, fat and kindly looking — a German or a Belgian, I don’t remember — rattling off the facts about the sperm meeting the ovum. It was funny, I tell you.”

“What I want to know …” Tony stretched his hand across the table and held her hands, “is it someone other than me who made you really aware of these basic facts?”

She pouted: “You know damn well that you were the first. Esto, what more proof do you need?”

“I’m satisfied,” Tony said. “But then I was away for a summer in Europe and I heard when I was away that you were dating this fellow who works for your father — Nena’s husband, this Ben—”

He wasn’t able to finish. A piece of bread struck him in the face, and before he could recover, Carmen had rushed to their bedroom and slammed the door after her. Only after some mushy explanations did Carmen open the door.

Thinking about the incident later, Tony was vaguely amused, yet at the same time surprised that he had asked the question at all. Through those years when he was exposed to the morality of the American campus, he no longer attached value to chastity, and he believed that he would not care about a woman’s past as long as he loved her. He brought to mind that dilapidated room in Antipolo and again, that sharp, sweet pain of remembrance stabbed at him. He had changed; yes, he had changed so much that now he could afford to say, Carmen, I don’t care how many men you have had. I love you, that is all that matters.

At eight Don Manuel was in the lobby. In the crackling glow of the fireplace where a pine log burned, he looked young, almost like an older brother to Carmen. He smiled. “Just the three of us,” he said. “I have so many things to tell you and I can hardly wait.” Explanations: how the summer house where the newly weds should have stayed needed a greenhouse, how badly he fared in golf the whole day. They walked with Carmen in the middle, holding their arms, to the dining room, where they were seated at a corner table. Carmen bantered about Tony learning golf, and just before the coffee and the dessert came, Don Manuel dropped the amiable air and became serious.

“I’m not satisfied with the service we are getting from our advertising agency,” he said with a hint of impatience. “Look, we give them more than fifteen percent commission on the ads they prepare. They also charge us a retainer — five thousand a month — and that is not peanuts. And you know what they do? They can’t even cook up a sensible reply to all the accusations against this steel mill we are putting up. It will be the only one of its kind in the country. So what if the Japanese get a sizable chunk of the profit? After all, they are helping put it up. And what difference does that make? If it isn’t the Japanese who make the killing, it’s the Americans — as if we have no surfeit of Americans here telling us what to do. They just want us to be hewers of wood and drawers of water for as long as they can manage.”

“What do you want me to do, Papa?” Tony asked. He already sensed that Don Manuel did not come to dinner to talk about golf.

“Nothing much as far as your talents are concerned. I’ve read some of the stuff you have written, Tony. That article on the uses of the past, for instance, your thesis on the Philippine Revolution — I’ve glanced through them. I know how you teachers regard businessmen as nothing more than money-mad people. You’d be surprised if you went around more with some of my friends. I’m money-mad, all right, but that doesn’t stop me from honing on new ideas. And you have many bright ideas, Tony, brilliant ideas.…”

“Thank you, Papa,” Tony said. Under the table Carmen pressed his hand.

“It will not be difficult. I want you to work for me, to be in places where I need you, to talk in places where I want you, to talk and write what I want you to write. My interest is Carmen’s interest and her interest is yours — and your children’s.…”

A pause, then Don Manuel turned to Carmen and then to Tony again: “Isn’t that logical, son?”

This was the trap with all its embellishments, but Tony nodded nevertheless.

“Don’t think of it as inevitable. When a man marries, the decisions he makes are not for him alone but for his wife and his family. I want you to leave the university. Start working for yourself, for Carmen.”

In the early morning Tony knew that he would never be able to visit Baguio again and wander through its emerald hills with a sense of freedom. As they drove to the airport on this chilly morning, an undefinable feeling almost akin to sorrow riled him. There could be no rationalization now of his defeat — for what else could it be but a defeat? — and yet, if he must look for one, he could always say, as did Don Manuel, that he must think of Carmen and the child she bore.

The landscape was sun-washed, white with the mist that floated down the hills, engulfed the city, and then drifted away. The drive to the airport was smooth, and as they looped down the hills, the wind singing and the cold biting, Tony wished that he had stayed longer, savored the illusion longer, before going down to the lowlands. And yet he could not hate his father-in-law, for Don Manuel was a gentleman. The businessman saw to it that his feelings were spared. Dale Carnegie — he must have been Don Manuel’s favorite author. Not Malraux, or Mabini,^‡ or Ortega y Gasset — these men exuded not light and goodwill but depressing truths. Tony must know how to parry with words, to hide under the clean, happy jargon of public relations. Don Manuel had been very kind: “I’m not hurrying you up. If you think you have a future at the university, by all means stick it out there. Give yourself two months to think it over, then let’s talk shop. Two months is no water under the bridge. That was how long it took me to decide on the steel mill — just passing it around among friends. Then it came clearly: we had to start somewhere; if we didn’t, someone else would — the Japanese or the Americans or, in some future time, the Chinese. And where would that leave us? It’s always best to be out there first. You may not know it, but if you are first you will not fail. The first zipper maker, the first rubber shoe manufacturer — they can afford to retire. They were the first and that was how they made a profit. And if you don’t make a success out of it, there’s still the distinction of being first. No one can take that from you.”

* Esteros: Land adjoining an estuary inundated by the tide; estuary; pool or pond; marshy land.

† Colegialas: Female college students.

‡ Apolinario Mabini (1864–1903): Theoretician and spokesman of the Philippine Revolution.

CHAPTER 7

When he walked into the department, most of his colleagues were already waiting for the first bell.

“You old dog, we never knew you’d marry — and so soon. And the Villas. Now there’s another man gone wrong correctly. You should have told us so we could have given you a despedida.” The words sang in his ears and they sounded sincere. He let the ribbing go on until the bell rang and he had to hurry off to his first class.

His students were but a handful — only twenty-two — and he always had a notion that they could have been brighter if they only tried. He was prepared as usual for an interesting Monday morning and was greeted by smiling faces. Then a girl out front, who was majoring in political science, stood up, “Congratulations, sir. It is all over the campus.”

In the afternoon the ribald jokes became less frequent and he accepted the fact that his marriage was public knowledge. It gave him peace of mind to know that the marriage had been viewed matter-of-factly and was even something he could be proud of. There was none of the knowing looks and the sharp double talk at which his colleagues were agile, none of the little thrusts that would tell him that they suspected he married Carmen Villa only for her money.

The dean’s office was on the ground floor and he was halfway there when this awful sense of having been remiss came to him: he hadn’t told the old man at all about his wedding. He could easily rationalize that now by explaining that it was a surprise even to himself. But that was not easy to believe and, besides, the first decent thing he should have done this Monday was to go to the dean.

The dean was a small, dark man, and sitting behind his huge narra-wood desk with its small Filipino flag and his name carved in gothic on black hardwood, he looked more like a schoolboy, with his chubby cheeks and pugnacious chin.

He acknowledged Tony’s presence with a quick smile, then he went back to the stapled sheaf of papers he was reading.

It went on like this for about three minutes. Tony started shuffling in his seat. He was now growing aware of the Lopez “treatment.” In the past the old man had used it to put his subordinates and the professors under him in their proper places. Dean Lopez, however, exercised the utmost care in inflicting this kind of punishment. He meted it out only to those he could officially order around, or those who stood to gain from him some benevolence, those tokens of official largesse that he passed out — a good word at the faculty meeting, the promise of a raise or a promotion, an invitation to his house for merienda. I’ll give him two minutes, Tony thought, glancing at his watch. Beyond the open window the afternoon was bright. Students idled under the leafy acacias. In a soft, firm voice he said, “I still have to prepare some papers, Dean, and since you seem very busy, I’ll return and see you after five.”

Dean Lopez slowly lowered the sheaf he was holding and looked at him. “My time is important, too, Samson,” he said. The old man had always called him by his first name, but now he was calling him by his family name. “So,” the dean continued, “I hope you don’t mind while I finish this. It won’t take but another five minutes.”

Dean Lopez finally dropped the sheaf.

“Yes,” he said, standing up and, without looking at the young man, turning to the window. “I want to talk to you about your paper on the Ilocos. It is a waste of time and you should not continue it. Work on something more useful, something that has never been touched before. You know I have already done some work on the subject. Do you think you can dredge up something on it on which I haven’t already dwelt? That’s presumptuous of you, you know.…”

Tony Samson studied the stout, motionless figure and tried to surmise what had come upon him.

“I’m sorry that you should think of it that way, sir,” he said. “You see, I’m doing it on my own. On my own time, too.”

Dean Lopez wheeled and his mouth curled. “You are wrong, Samson,” he said. “Your time is not your own. It’s the university’s. Or didn’t you know that?” His voice was sheathed with bluster.

“I didn’t think it was like that, sir,” Tony said.

“Well, you had better start thinking now the way I want you to think,” Dean Lopez said. “Do you want to be a full professor in five years or do you want to be a mere associate all your life? I decide on that, too, or have you forgotten?”

“No, sir,” Tony said simply. The old man was bared to him in all his rawness. “Is that all you wanted to tell me, sir?”

“No, that’s not all. I will talk to you for as long as I please. About the Socrates Club — you are not qualified for it. Simply because you have a doctorate doesn’t mean you are in. I drafted the rules of the club, you know. And don’t think that I don’t know— There’s such a thing as a Chinese B in Harvard.”

“I don’t know what you are driving at, sir,” Tony said sullenly.

“Well, if you don’t know, let me tell you that Orientals in Harvard get a passing grade as a charitable gesture. After all, they won’t degrade Harvard by staying in the States. It’s that simple, Samson. In other words, we don’t want Chinese B’s in the Socrates Club.”

“I hadn’t expected it to be this way, sir,” Tony said icily. “I don’t think I deserve to be crucified for something I did not really aspire to.”

“Don’t be coy with me and say you didn’t aspire for membership in the club. That’s a lie, Samson, and you know it.”

The blood left Tony’s face and a clamminess came over him.

“That’s the trouble with you,” Dean Lopez said serenely. He went back to his desk. The afternoon sun stole in from the glass windows and fell on its glass top, reflecting onto his ruddy face, his peasant hands, and his shock of white hair. “You presume too many things. Look, I’ve been here for more than two decades and that’s why I am the dean. And look at you, you have just started and you already want to be a regent or the dean. Over my dead body, Samson. Understand that? Over my dead body. You cannot be dean of this college, not while I am alive. You may have married well and you may have political influence, but you cannot be the dean while I am alive. And all the politicians you know can go to hell for all I care.”

“Whoever gave you the idea I wanted to be dean and that I’m taking over your post?” he stammered.

Dean Lopez was smiling now. “I know, I know,” he said sarcastically. “That’s just the problem with people who get too big for their breeches and who want to go up fast. Did America do these things to you? And you can’t even qualify for the Socrates Club.”

Tony Samson felt like slapping the old man’s face. “I don’t like to disagree with you, sir,” he said faintly, “but you said you submitted my name. And I didn’t even know it until you told me before I left for Baguio.”

“Now, now,” Dean Lopez said. “Let us not be like women. Everyone knows of the honor that goes with joining the club. Think of it: in the country there are only forty members and in the university there are only ten. Do not tell me that you aren’t interested.…”

“I am, sir,” Tony said. “I’d be a hypocrite if I said I was not. It’s just that I did not apply.”

Dean Lopez exploded. “Damn you!” he said, his eyes darting fire. “If the club does not want you, you should take it with grace.”

He had never expected that a moment as rife with anger as now would come, for he had never made an allowance for the time when he would glare back at his benefactor and damn him. But in a voice that was hoarse and almost a whisper: “Don’t ever talk to me about grace. Or scholarship! You have no right — you plagiarist!” And trembling with unspoken rage, he wheeled out of the dean’s office into the raw, sun-flooded afternoon.

That evening Tony wrote to Lawrence Bitfogel again. He did not say, however, that he had quit the university. That would have been too painful to relate and Larry would never understand. He had worked so hard for the chance to be a teacher, and now all the anguish, all the privation, six years, six long years of starving, of wandering and despairing — all this had gone to waste.

Dear Larry, he started, I would have invited you to my wedding, but it caught even me by surprise. We eloped and up to now I’m still in a daze. No, it’s not someone you know or someone I’ve told you about. I met her in Washington and, of course, she’s Filipina. You know very well my views on mixed marriages and you know I’m too much of a coward to attempt something as radical as a mixed marriage. But at least you can grant me some imagination — I eloped, didn’t I? This isn’t the only reason I’m writing this letter, though. I must tell you, too, that I have acquired new interests. Perhaps these interests have to go with marriage and my new status. I do wish very much that you were here now, so that we could talk things over. It’s not the marriage that has me all dazed and confused, far from it. It’s the university and the host of problems that it has dumped upon my lap. At any rate, I am doing all right, and don’t … don’t ever loathe me if someday I mellow or change into an arch-conservative. Come to Manila soon.

The letter was the last he mailed to Lawrence Bitfogel.

There were other letters, of course, wherein he expressed his thoughts candidly, and this he could do easily, objectively, because he had always been analytical and even ruthless with himself when he sought the bedrock of truth, the soft shale of emotion, of egoism having been eroded by his own relentless questioning. But when all these letters were written, he could not mail them and he placed them all in that folder where he had compiled personal notes — not to be read by anyone, he told himself wryly, until I am dead.

CHAPTER 8

It was Carmen who announced it a week afterward at the breakfast table. “Well, Papa,” she said airily. “Tony has quit the university. I think we should celebrate.”

Tony raised a hand to stop her, but she ignored him. “Papa, don’t you think it’s about time Tony started learning how you operate, too?”

“I don’t think my quitting the university is something to be taken lightly,” Tony said petulantly. “You must understand, Papa,” he turned to Don Manuel, who had set his glass of orange juice down and was now looking at him, “that the university was what I had prepared for. Teaching is in my system. It wasn’t an easy decision.”

“We all have to make decisions.” Don Manuel sounded sympathetic. He picked up his glass. “The decisions are sometimes difficult, but it’s better that we choose to make them rather than be forced to make them. A good soldier, I always say, selects his fights.”

“I wish I could say that, Papa,” Tony said. “I was forced and that’s what I hate.”

“Well,” Carmen said, “there’s always a silver lining even in the darkest cloud. Or at least silver-plated.”

“Of course, of course,” Don Manuel said equably. “And I must tell you that this development pleases me. One man’s loss, after all, is another man’s gain. I’ve told you, Tony. I need someone I can trust, someone with perception and talent.”

The flattery was pleasant to his ears. How pat, how neatly everything was falling into place.

After breakfast Don Manuel beckoned Tony to the terrace. In the shade of the green canvas awning, looking down on the rain-drenched city, Tony listened to his father-in-law speak with almost childlike simplicity. “Today, Tony, I’d like you to see the office, get the feel of the place.” He discoursed further on such mundane topics as knowing how to get along with people, praising them when praise was needed, and showing a firm hand when this, too, was necessary. They parted on such platitudes. It was too late to retrace his steps; he was trapped in a maze where the Villas were the minotaurs, and somehow, though he should have detested the entrapment, it was not as distasteful as he once thought it would be.

The morning wore on in a drizzle. Beyond the patio glazed with rain the bougainvillea drooped and a murkiness cloaked the acacias, the garden, and, in fact, the whole world. Somewhere in the caverns of the house Tony could hear Mrs. Villa ordering someone in her brisk manner to do the marketing early. The very sound of her voice, the thought of having to sit with her at lunch again, riled him. And yet Tony did not really hate her. He was aware of this the first time he met her and the incapacity to loathe her came about not because she was Carmen’s mother but because Mrs. Villa, in spite of her grossness, was herself.

He went to their room, where Carmen was reading the papers in bed, and he sat down beside her. He kissed her lightly on the cheek. “Baby,” he said, “when I start working for Papa, don’t you think we should start living alone? Not that I don’t like it here, but we should be able to live our own lives.”

She looked up. “All right, darling. Promise me we will not talk about this subject anymore, because if you do I’m going to say yes.”

He bent over and bit her ear.

“Papa is going to build a cottage at the end of the lot beyond the pool. It will be for us.”

He shook his head. “I mean, if we leave this house we should live away from here.”

“You give me a good reason, darling. If it’s mother you don’t want to see, well, you don’t have to see her at all once the cottage is finished. Esto, the entrance will be from the rear, from the other side of the street …”

It was still raining when he reached the boulevard, and the asphalt glistened like a mirror through the dreary, slanting rain. The Villa Building stood alone on a wide lot planted to grass and aroma trees. Its five stories were shielded from the sun, for the building was one of the first in Manila to use horizontal sun-breakers. It was painted in soft cream, was fully air-conditioned, and could have easily passed for a box — well-proportioned and neat — if it did not have an unusual facade that featured a long, sweeping cantilever marquee flanked by two columns of gray Romblon marble. The foyer, too, with its floor and walls of marble, was quietly elegant.

Don Manuel’s office was on the fifth floor or “executive country,” and there was an express elevator to it. Tony was quickly ushered in by the efficient matronly secretary, who often came to the house with Don Manuel’s homework.

A Japanese, whom Don Manuel introduced as a steel expert, and Senator Reyes were getting ready to leave when he went in; they were already at the door, engaged in parting niceties. The senator and his Japanese companion had one thing in common: the porcine face of a man well-fed and contented. The senator’s cheeks were white with talc and he grinned meaninglessly when Don Manuel introduced Tony.

“Ah—” Senator Reyes sighed. His eyes were pouched and flinty. “It’s a pleasure meeting you, Dr. Samson. I respect Ph.D.’s, you know. Well,” he turned to Don Manuel and slapped the entrepreneur on the back, “I hope everything at the university turns out fine. I was there last Monday as you requested. Dr. Samson will surely be a regent next month. Two regents will vacate their posts. Their terms have expired.”

Senator Reyes faced Tony with an expansive mien. “You’ll be big there, son. You have the qualifications and, most important, the best connections …” His laughter was like the crack of splitting bamboo. “And you can even be the dean of your college if you like, let me see to that. And if you have complaints …”

Don Manuel shook hands with the Japanese and then with Senator Reyes. The door was open. “My son, Compadre, I’m sorry to tell you, has already left the university. He will start working with me.”

Senator Reyes paused. He looked disappointed. After a pause, “Well, that’s a lot better. At any rate,” he turned to Don Manuel again, “don’t tell me I didn’t try.”

“Thank you, sir,” Tony said automatically. Now it was all clear why Dean Lopez hated him. But it was beyond explaining now and no thought could shape in his mind, no thought, only revulsion.

He followed Don Manuel, who had returned to his wide steel desk. “I didn’t know, Papa,” Tony said, “that you had asked Senator Reyes to intercede for me.”

Don Manuel avoided him. “Wouldn’t you like being a regent? Or dean? Don’t you like the fact that I’m interested in your welfare?”

“I appreciate it, Papa,” he said, the fight ebbing out of him. “But I wish you would understand. I can go up on my own … it may take longer, but I can go up.”

Don Manuel stopped arranging the papers on his desk and faced Tony. “That’s what I like about you,” he said paternally. “You have pride. But remember, you are now in the family. And if I can help you get ahead I’ll do it.”

Then Don Manuel drifted back to the visitors who had gone and his tone became jovial again. “Politicians,” he said, “are a species you have to understand. No, they aren’t difficult at all. All that you must remember is that they are after one thing — money. Once you know that, you can’t be wrong. They are very brassy about it. Gentleman’s language — don’t waste this on politicians. They name their price and it’s up to you to haggle.”

Tony did not speak.

“That’s distasteful to you, isn’t it?” Don Manuel laughed slightly. “Well, that’s how it is. These are the realities. Maybe when this country has become industrialized these politicians will give jobs to their constituents. And if they can’t give jobs, they must help in another way. That’s where a little of their money goes.”

“Just like one big happy family,” Tony said.

“Don’t be so sarcastic about the family,” Don Manuel said. “In this organization, for instance, all the employees are related to one another. The family system — oh yes, I’ve heard young punks in the business underrating it. And they are right, too. I am all for efficiency. That’s why I’m going all out for this mill. But as long as there’s no substitute for the family, it stays. Besides, what substitute have you for loyalty? You can’t expect loyalty from the politicians. Not even at the price you pay them.”

“So money isn’t everything then,” Tony said happily, as if one last pinnacle of his own beliefs had stood up to the rich man’s battering reason.

“Of course money isn’t everything.” Don Manuel leaned back on his chair and beamed. “The price is not always money. But if you want to know what the price of a man is, or his services, you must be wise.” Don Manuel brought his forefinger to his right temple and tapped twice. “It’s all a matter of understanding what a man wants most. If you can give him that, then he is yours to command. Don’t expect that he will be eternally grateful, because all men hate to be indebted. Every man wants to be independent. As for the price, some men want friendship. If you can give them that, well and good. Money cannot buy friendship but it can create friendship. See? It can create the atmosphere. It can create the conditions for all the reasons you need. But, as I said, don’t expect gratitude. You’ll be terribly disappointed. All men act in self-interest. Even the conduct of nations is guided by this unerring rule. It was George Washington who said that, no?”

Tony nodded.

Don Manuel went back to his monologue. “It’s the truth. Everyone has a price. Christ had a price — the Cross and the salvation of mankind. I have a price — the future of the Villas and of everyone in the family. You have a price — and don’t feel that I’m insulting you. Your self-respect. I’m just stating a fact. You are vulnerable where you are most sincere. And I think that is why Carmen likes you. You have self-respect. As long as you know these vulnerable points you will know also how to deal with people. Even our highly touted press has its price. I know. I get my way around business editors. Everyone in this racket can be bought. I have yet to see one who cannot be bought.”

Tony looked at the ceiling and a thought crossed his mind. Godo — he had always been insufferable, but Godo was someone who would not bend to something as crass as money. He had gotten into trouble because of this single virtue — integrity — and he brimmed with it. He was cynical and brassy, vulgar, loud-mouthed. He was a peasant in manners and attitudes, but he was an aristocrat when it came to honor. Tony shook his head.

“You don’t agree, huh?” Don Manuel asked.

Tony nodded. Godo would yet be his redeemer, the one who could prove to Don Manuel that the price tag does not apply to all human beings. Godo would be his final proof that a man’s reward is in heaven. “I’m not very sure, Papa,” Tony said. “But if there’s anyone I can trust it’s Godo Soler, an editor and an old friend. He may have faults, but one thing I know, you can’t buy him.”

Don Manuel became silent. “Godo,” he said, twiddling his thumbs. “Well, I’ll remember that. Bring him to me someday. Next time there’s a party in the house, ask him to come. No, bring him to lunch — or dinner. I’ll yet find his price, and because he is your friend, I’ll be extra generous with him. It’s not that I want to prove you wrong, Tony. It’s simply I’ve never been wrong.”

One of the office boys came in apparently at the ring of a buzzer, and Don Manuel said, “Bring me a Coke — and Tony, is it coffee?”

Tony nodded. As the boy disappeared at the other end of the room, Don Manuel continued in the same serious vein: “I cannot find it in me to dispute the usefulness of the family system. For the moment it’s doing wonders. You get loyalty because of it — and efficiency. I have heard it said that with industrialization the family system will have to go.”

“I think that’s true, Papa,” Tony Samson said. “In the United States family corporations are a thing of the past.”

“In the United States,” Don Manuel repeated in an annoyed tone. “Must you always bring the United States into the conversation? The conditions in this country are different — that is the first thing you should know, Tony. This isn’t America; this is Asia.”

“I know, Papa,” Tony said, “but the family has to go if there must be industrialization. I remember in college we had a discussion along this line …”

“This isn’t college anymore, son,” Don Manuel said softly.

“I know that, too, Papa.”

“I hope I am not being a bore,” Don Manuel said apologetically. “No, I don’t think it’s wrong for people to be idealistic. I just ask that people like you be realistic enough to know that the real world is full of compromise.”

Tony loved Don Manuel’s clichés. His father-in-law was being emphatic.

“What I’m trying to say,” Don Manuel said, “is that poverty has its place, but what would happen if poverty were to become a symbol of the elite? Then there would be no more reason for people to want to work harder.”

“I know, Papa,” Tony said. “Poverty is degrading.”

Don Manuel stood up and paced the floor. “I knew poverty. I’ll tell you how it was when my father was just starting to build his furniture factory. He had to wake up at dawn to count the lumber that came in. We had to walk to school, all the way from Ermita to Intramuros. That’s a good long walk, even now. I’ve known how it is to be hungry, to be broke, and to be unhappy. Father would give us no more than five centavos a day. Five centavos! And one pair of shoes until they were worn out and our toes and soles stuck out.”

The rich man cracked his knuckles. “He was a tyrant, but he taught us well.” A long pause, then the talk veered quietly to what Tony had to do. The simplicity of his job amazed him; he was to be the official spokesman of the Villas. Henceforth, there would be no business negotiations unless he had spoken on the plausibility of having these negotiations exploited for the good name of the Villas. He was to be a troubleshooter and a member of the brain trust. He was to be a public relations man, he was to be a facade-builder.

“I don’t want to sound ungrateful, Papa,” Tony said, latching on to every word, “but there must be some other thing I can do.”

“That’s honest of you,” Don Manuel said kindly. “Not many people can say that, Tony. Well, there aren’t many like you. But you are different. We are all crude moneymakers, but you, you are different. And you can start making yourself useful right now by telling me if there’s anything wrong with teaming up with the Chinese, Japanese, and Americans. I want an honest opinion, Tony. You can give me the answer next week.”

Don Manuel led Tony to the door at the left side of the room. It led to a room with cream-colored drapes and a thick rug. The businessman tugged at a line and the draperies opened to a rain-shrouded view of the bay and the boulevard.

The desk was not as modern as Don Manuel’s, but it was huge. One side of the room was lined with empty, glass-fronted shelves. And on a low table beside the desk was the latest electric typewriter — its soft red color glowing handsomely in the light.

“You’ll love working here,” Don Manuel stated proudly. “All this is yours. Your secretary will be outside. Look for one right away — that’s your decision. When I need you I’ll just buzz you, and son, do please jump when I do.”

“Yes, Papa,” Tony said.

Alone in this comfortable room, Tony felt lost for a moment. He sat in his upholstered swivel chair and turned around. Those shelves — they would soon be filled with his books. His hand caressed the electric machine. It did not seem real, his being in a place as comfortable, as conducive to easeful thinking as this. How supremely convenient it was for him simply to accept the fact that now he was no longer a Samson but someone drawn into the magnetic circle of the Villas and therefore a nonentity without a mind all his own.

He could see his personal landscape and in it there was nothing extraneous. Everything fitted handsomely. He would probably build a house in Pobres Park like Ben de Jesus, Senator Reyes, Alfred Dangmount, and all the rest, and see how well Carmen had learned interior decorating in the United States. He would not interfere with her plans; all he would require would be a small room, a study where he would be able to work. And someday he would grow a paunch in his job and learn to play golf. He would have money stashed away somewhere — that was most certain because he had married Carmen Villa. He would have an affair, too, probably a dozen at that, not because such affairs were necessary but because they were inevitable concomitants of his status. A beautiful secretary, perhaps? Or one of Carmen’s close friends? Or the wife of one of his associates in the office? These were the handsome possibilities. As for children, there would be at least five — and several more who would naturally be illegitimate. Carmen would send the girls to the Assumption Convent, where they would learn French — or to Madrid, where they would polish their Spanish and acquire a European accent. As for the boys, they would go to La Salle, of course, or to the American School, or to San Beda. Not Ateneo — my God! That school had become too common and too crowded with plebeian characters. And after La Salle there would be trips to Europe, not America. Going to America — that was also now too common. Everyone, absolutely everyone, had gone there. And then when the children had grown up they would have to take their pick from the Villa crowd. That was the only way to perpetuate the system that he had joined. There was no fighting against it because the system, which afforded him such delicious comforts as he had never known before, was bigger and more formidable than Antonio Samson.

He stood up and went to the window. The sea again, the rain, memories rushing in and stirring up and about, inchoate and yet alive. When he was in Antipolo, or when he was in the States, wandering in the gilded wilderness of that continent, he seldom looked at the sea. And at night, if there was no rain, there would be stars. How long had it been since he last looked at the stars? He knew them when he was in Rosales, going home in the dark or playing in the dusty street where the lamps were not strong enough to banish the vast attraction of the sky. How was Rosales now? And Emy?

A dull ache passed through him and he assured himself that this was what he had always wanted — this progress, this change. The world was changing and if in the process he was changed, too, well, he could not stop the inevitable any more than he could stop time. I’ll be all right. Tony Samson repeated the words carefully in his mind. I’ll be all right — and he wished to God that he would be.

CHAPTER 9

When Senator Reyes invited Tony to lunch, it had never occurred to Tony that there would be a measure of rapport between him and the politician who had made a career of nationalism.

Don Manuel bantered with them in the foyer. “Be careful, Tony. He might take you to one of those joints where they serve nothing but peasant food.”

“I’ll take him to a place where they sprinkle cyanide on those who don’t know what Filipinism means,” Senator Reyes chortled.

“Ahhh …” grunted Alfred Dangmount. He was on his way to his car, too; the board meeting had just ended and the directors were filing out of the elevator. “Take him to that place where they spike the drinks with cantaritas,” the American said, grunting again.

The American’s sally raised more remarks, but Tony didn’t catch them; by this time he had already gotten into Senator Reyes’s air-conditioned Cadillac. Within, the scent of cologne was a refreshing change from the antiseptic smell of his office.

Senator Reyes was a master politician. “It is seldom that I have a scholar, a Ph.D., with me. So don’t be alarmed if I ask too many questions and pick your brains,” he said, flashing what seemed to be a genuine smile. The senator’s eyes crinkled. His teeth were yellowish from cigar-smoking.

“The pleasure is all mine, Senator,” Tony said.

They went to one of the new Spanish restaurants on the boulevard — a low, adobe building that was air-conditioned. Its interior was dim, and although it was high noon, the cartwheel lamp that dangled from the low ceiling was lit. Senator Reyes guided his guest to a corner table, but before reaching the place he had to stop at a table to slap an anonymous back.

They sat down without ceremony, and as the headwaiter rushed to them, Senator Reyes ordered two dry sherries. “I shouldn’t have any complaints,” he turned to Tony, shaking his head. “And I don’t want to sound hypocritical, but I do have troubles and I sometimes wish I could earn a living without having to pay too heavy a price.”

“Whatever the price,” Tony said, “I am sure that you can afford it.”

Senator Reyes became somber and again he shook his head. “I suppose that I should be envied then? People are blaming us for the mess in this country, but people should blame themselves occasionally. Who is to blame? Politicians for giving the people what they want? They expect us to do the impossible, to cast aside all morals, all concepts of justice. And when we do, we are pounced upon. A man comes to me and says, Senator, please see to it that my boy gets accommodated in the Foreign Service. That’s where I want him, because there his views will be broadened and he will be able to travel free. I want someone in my family to be an ambassador someday! I ask this man if his son is qualified, if he has passed the Foreign Service examinations. And this man — one of my trusted friends and leaders — says to me angrily: Senator, if my son were qualified, I would not have to come to you for assistance!”

Tony knew the rest and he could have told the senator why the road to power was often covered with slime. But the owner of the restaurant came to their table; he was a swarthy, pot-bellied Spaniard, and he greeted the senator effusively in Spanish, then started talking about his difficulty in getting dollar licenses that would enable him to import the senator’s favorite sherry. To this, Senator Reyes said, also in Spanish, “You can save the sherry for me; as for your other customers, you can serve them goat urine — they wouldn’t know the difference.”

Tony Samson laughed and was joined heartily by the Spaniard, who, after more pleasantries, moved away from his most important customer of the day.

“You speak Spanish?” Senator Reyes turned to his guest.

“Not really, sir,” Tony said. “Crammed for three months, that’s all — and then, of course, there’s the two years in the university, which no one can escape.”

“Tell me about the cram course,” the senator said. “I am interested about attitudes toward the Spanish language.”

“It was a matter of urgent necessity,” Tony said. “Before I left the country on this scholarship, I knew that the basic documents I would have to go through would be in Spanish. I taught myself. Then, at Harvard, well, the three-month cramming did help. But I have to think first when I speak, although I can say without being immodest that I do read Spanish very well and, perhaps, write a little, too. Of course, I cannot hope to approximate your skills.”

The senator thrust his hands at Tony in protest. “No flatteries, no flatteries, please, or else it’s you who will have to pay for this lunch!”

While they sipped their sherry, Senator Reyes reminisced. “I am supposed to be a Spanish scholar — that is to say one of my interests is Spanish literature. Did a little writing in the language. Were you ever in Spain?”

“Yes, Senator,” Tony said. Now there drifted to his mind the remembered places: Barcelona and its Gothic quarter, the narrow streets and the bars of Barrio Chino, the painted tiles in the doorways.

“Wonderful country,” Senator Reyes said. “And Sevilla — were you ever there?”

“Yes, sir,” Tony said. “I did some research in the Sevilla archives.”

The waiter came and took their orders — paella for both — and Senator Reyes made desultory remarks about the bad paella in Barcelona. From there the politician guided the talk to where he deemed it should go. “Politicians have no time to think,” he said, and Tony could sense real regret in the senator’s voice. “What I’m trying to say is that I have ideas, but I have no time to thresh them out. For instance,” the senator leaned over and tried to sound like a conspirator, “how I would like to make a speech on nationalism as a cultural instrument, as an ideology creating a oneness in this country. But what materials can I cite? What antecedents will support me? It’s easy to speak, but I must have historical authority. Even one in my position must have that.”

Tony Samson sat back and above the clatter of silver at the next table, above the sensuous guitar-strumming near the bar, he could make out the sound of the flute, the wide ring of young Catalans dancing the saldana before the cathedral in Barcelona.

After a long pause, he said he had come across the problem many times and had found partial answers in Barcelona when he was there tracing the footsteps of Rizal, Del Pilar, Lopez-Jaena, and all the ilustrados who propagandized for reforms. “There must be some merit in the Spanish people,” he said with feeling. He almost said, there must be some merit in tyrants. “After all, Rizal and his friends worked for reforms not in Manila but in Barcelona and Madrid.”

“Yes,” Senator Reyes said excitedly; “this is an aspect of our history that is not quite understood. And what else did you find? Did Rizal and Del Pilar have anything special to say about what I’m thinking of?”

“The ilustrados,” Tony Samson brightened up. “I think I can speak about them with authority. I studied them — what they did, what they wrote. They created a national unity, Senator. Without them, there would perhaps be no Filipinas as we know it today. But they made errors, of course — and it was a matter of attitude, more than anything. Let me tell you how they tried to define the limits of freedom, how desperately they tried to prove that there was a true and indigenous Filipino culture so they could claim equality with the Spaniards. That was it — all they wanted was equality. Oh no, I’m not saying that they were not sincere, that they did not love their country, but you must realize that in those days they were second-class citizens even though they had studied in the best schools in Europe. You see, they were not Spaniards, their skins were not white, their noses were not high, and because of these shortcomings, they could never be rulers.”

“But you could be barking up the wrong tree,” Senator Reyes said. “My dear fellow, look at my skin. It is as dark as the bottom of a pot, my nose is like that of a prizefighter.” He laughed raucously.

“You are missing the whole point, Senator,” Tony said. “Equality could be won on paper. But once it was won, that was the end of it. Freedom and the fight for it must be constant. It must never cease. And do not forget that men can be enslaved by their own people, by their own prejudices, by their own rulers.… What I am saying is that the ilustrados were not the real patriots. They wanted nothing more than equality. They didn’t want freedom. It was enough that they could dine with their rulers, could argue with them. But it is another thing to be free. And that is why I do not consider Rizal a hero. He was great in his way, but Marcelo H. del Pilar was a greater man. He died a pauper in Spain. In the end, none of the ilustrados could approximate the stature, the heroism of Bonifacio. There was a man — he was far more heroic than Rizal. He was a laborer, he was illiterate compared to Rizal. But he fought for freedom. Rizal merely wanted equality. Perhaps the new nationalism can address itself to this, create a new sense of values.”

Senator Reyes was pensive and, for a while, an expression of seriousness came over his flabby face. “I do not want to be old-fashioned,” he finally said. “Revolutionaries are a dime a dozen now. You get them everywhere. And what happens — revolutionists do not live; they are eaten up, just as Bonifacio was eaten up.”

“How right you are!” Tony exclaimed. “But that is what I have always said. A revolution does not have to eat its children. In fact, it is those who are in power who could very well initiate revolutions — oh, let us not be old-fashioned and think only of armed uprisings of minorities as revolutions. Any movement that seeks to overhaul established attitudes is, I think, revolutionary. I’d hate to listen to another address extolling Rizal’s virtues; I’d hate to read the inanities written about how many women he had, how he frequented this bar or this toilet.”

They laughed. “I see, I see,” Senator Reyes said, grinning.

“Now, when we escalate Bonifacio’s greatness — after all, he really started the revolution against Spain — that is revolutionary. People think of Rizal always as the greatest merely because he was martyred and Bonifacio was killed by his own people,” Tony said. He remembered again the protracted discussions on Maple Street, Larry Bitfogel’s intellectual argot and his own deft reasoning piercing the maze of contradictions. He continued: “How can one be a revolutionary in an age when revolutions have become commonplace? There is only one way, and that’s by creating an entirely new definition of revolution itself and knowing your position once you have made your definition. If we talked about cultural revolution, we would be giving both culture and revolution an entirely new emphasis.”

“Good!” Senator Reyes exclaimed. He sat back and rubbed his stomach with his chubby hand. Supreme contentment spread over his dark, corpulent face. “You are the man, then, who can help me — the only man, Tony.” It was the first time the senator called him by his nickname. “This will be a favor, something I can never repay. Write me a speech for next Sunday. I am going to speak before the Socrates Club at the university. Nationalism is going haywire and I want its proper cultural definition. Only you can do that.”

They parted on that nicety.

Back at his office Tony sat before his typewriter, pondered his quarrel with Dean Lopez and how he would have been a member of the Socrates Club. It was ironic that he should now be writing Senator Reyes’s speech before the club. He felt no regret, no gnawing feeling of being left out; he did not really care about being a member of the club now that he was here in the comfortable confines of the Villa Building. He dwelt again on the old theme, the bedraggled subject that he had not quite really resolved: Were the ilustrados really patriots? Or was the real hero of the revolution that almost illiterate laborer, Andres Bonifacio, who grew up in Tondo?

His own past reached out to him in this uncluttered room and it seemed as if his father were beside him again, saying that courage was not enough. There was no way by which they could rise from the dung heap. It was easy to sharpen a bolo until its blade could split a hair, but without a mind sharper than a blade.… And so, when his father went to jail, his mother slaved and sent him and his sister to school and college. She took in laundry and worked herself to a hopeless case of consumption and a slow, sure death. This was the sacrifice she had made, and in Barcelona, recalling what she had done, he had wept that morning when he went to the bleak, gloomy cathedral to place a candle at the altar of the Virgin on the anniversary of her death. From the cathedral he had meandered to the Ramblas and sat on one of the wooden benches there, watching the people pass. He had mused about the young Filipinos in Barcelona in another time, and he envied them for the good they had done, although he did not see the monuments of tyranny against which they had flung their young bodies. And then he saw the impossibility of it all: the revolution the young men in Spain had inspired did not end as a true revolution should.

He finished Senator Reyes’s speech on time and it was printed in full in the newspapers and even editorialized for giving new proportions to nationalism. And when Don Manuel learned that it was his son-in-law who wrote the speech, he did not hide his pleasure from his wife and Carmen.

“Today,” Don Manuel said that morning at breakfast, “you will be with us during the board meeting. Everyone must profit from what you know.”

On the way to the office Don Manuel became more open and he impressed upon Tony how the Villa fortune was not built overnight. Don Manuel’s grandfather had a furniture shop in Intramuros and it started everything. Don Manuel’s grandfather was, of course, Spanish; and in the last days of the Spanish regime and the early days of the American occupation, the narra aparadors, the sala sets embossed with mother-of-pearl, and the ornate kamagong chests of the Villa furniture shop acquired an appeal with the ilustrados. No aristocratic home was complete without Villa furniture. After the illustrious grandfather died, Don Manuel’s father built up the business. In time it expanded to include lumber. Then the Villas branched out into construction and were soon building magnificent residences in Malate and Ermita and in the new posh suburb of Santa Mesa. And as they built and decorated these homes they also moved into a wider and more affluent circle.

When Don Manuel was old enough to help his father, the Santa Mesa residence of the Villas was already finished, but the family did not move into it. The Villas still lived in Intramuros and kept the new Villa house as a showcase. By then, too, the business had already spread out to include transportation and shipping. It was only when Don Manuel’s father died of a heart attack while in the bedroom of his mistress in Malate that the whole family decided to move over to Santa Mesa — a change from their antique and cramped appointments in the Walled City — and discovered the handsome refinements of suburban living. This was, of course, when Santa Mesa was still considered a suburb and the fast-growing city had not encroached upon its rusticity yet. As the eldest, Don Manuel became manager of the bigger and more profitable branches of the Villa interests. The business was not damaged much by the war. In fact, the war was a blessing to the Villas and to Don Manuel in particular. He had readily foreseen the construction needs of the country and the shortages that would be difficult to fill. He did not slip in his planning nor did he fail to see the importance of developing the friendship and the loyalty of political leaders like professed nationalists of the caliber of Senator Reyes. Now Don Manuel’s eldest son managed a new plywood factory and lumber concessions in Mindanao. Another son became interested in textiles and Don Manuel set up a mill in Marikina. The mill produced fishing nets, cotton fabrics, and upholstery material for the furniture factory that had expanded and was attended to by Don Manuel himself, since it was the progenitor of the Villa fortune. The husbands of two daughters managed the construction branch of the Villa Development Corporation. As for Carmen, she had gone to the United States to study interior decoration, public relations, and advertising, so that she would be able to assist in the family business.

All the Villa children had married according to their choices, and Don Manuel took immense pride in this fact. There were enough executive jobs for his sons-in-law and there was nothing he asked from them except loyalty.

The board met on Wednesdays from nine in the morning until lunchtime. The boardroom was on the fifth floor, in the executive country — a handsome dao-paneled hall with a long table made of one solid piece of narra and surrounded by high-backed swivel chairs upholstered in genuine cowhide. All the furniture in the Villa Building and in the homes of most of the Villa employees and executives was, of course, produced by the Villa furniture factory. At one end of the boardroom was a special panel that included, among other things, a well-stocked bar, a kitchenette, a high-fidelity set, and several tape-recording machines. Don Manuel did not have extraneous interests other than golf and high-fidelity record-changers, and the electronic equipment of the conference room was his idea. On his desk in the boardroom was a series of switches that enabled him to pipe high-fidelity music to the room or to record what was said — to the consternation and delight of the other members when the recording was played. He did not drink — he didn’t even touch beer, and during social functions he always asked for ginger ale because it looked like Scotch. The bar in the boardroom was his concession to his brothers and to Senator Reyes, in particular, for the senator was an excessive drinker.

The directors started arriving at nine-thirty. The first was Johnny Lee, an ascetic-looking, fiftyish Chinese who spoke pidgin English. He was born in Amoy, China, and talk had it that he started as a junk peddler. He had built up his business well, and during the Occupation he collaborated with the Japanese by providing them with gasoline and diesel engines. He had been a most astute businessman. So well did he manage that after the war his junkyard became a huge automotive shop. He bought American surplus equipment, particularly heavy machinery, by the thousands and then resold these to the government and raked in huge profits by being friendly with government officials. Now his hands were in every kind of moneymaking enterprise. He kept a respectable front, of course, by managing an automotive assembly plant and a chemical factory in Mandaluyong. It was also said that he owned a chain of motels in Pasay City, and these motels were actually classy prostitution dens that catered to politicians, newspapermen, and visiting firemen. Lee knew that he would live and die in the Philippines, and even before World War II he had himself naturalized. He had married his former help — an unlettered Cebuana — and raised a dozen children. His wife was never seen in public and that was to his advantage, because she was reportedly homely and no one would understand why a millionaire like Lee had an ugly wife. She served him more than a wife should serve her husband. Lee registered many of his properties in her name. The fact that Lee was naturalized and had a Cebuana wife and a dozen children rendered him immune to the deportation laws. When the Manila nationalists became vehement with their nationalism, Lee provided them with money. The ads he placed in the newspapers sold not only his automobiles and chemicals, but also decried how aliens were exploiting Filipinos.

The last director to arrive was Senator Reyes. He explained his breathless entrance: there was an important bill on tobacco, which would affect the businesses of Johnny Lee and Alfred Dangmount, and he did not want to be absent from the deliberations of his special committee until he had the bill safely pigeonholed to oblivion for “further study.”

All eight of the board members were present. Lee was complaining about the surveillance that the Bureau of Internal Revenue was placing on his cigarette factory in Pasay. It was simply unthinkable. Did he not contribute more than three hundred thousand pesos to the party so that Senator Reyes and all their friends would win?

“I’ll look into that,” Senator Reyes said, making notes on the pad before him. Johnny Lee settled back on his swivel chair, a grin spreading across his boyish face. “Thank you, Senador,” he said. That was the only English he spoke during the meeting and “thank you” seemed to be the only words he spoke with a smile. Always, when he spoke, an inscrutable expression clouded his face and his even tone somehow gave the impression that beneath his blandness was cunning and determination.

“Include me, too,” Dangmount groaned from the other end of the table. A southerner, he had come to the Philippines during the Liberation and married into a wealthy family from Negros. With the initial capital he thus acquired and some financial sleight of hand, he built an octopuslike business.

“I’m having a helluva lot of trouble with the bank,” Dangmount snapped at Senator Reyes. “Look, Compadre,” he turned to Don Manuel with a knowing wink, “I’m getting a lot of questions about that plywood machinery we’re buying for increased operations in Mindanao. Now, if we don’t get that license soon …”

It became clear to Tony that the interests of each were enmeshed in those of the others. The distinction between government, business, and politics was demolished. The controls on dollar exchange were meaningless; Dangmount had worked out a convenient system. The machinery, for instance, was highly overpriced through collusion with the American supplier, in this way the dollars saved from the transaction could be stashed away in Switzerland. It was the same with Johnny Lee and the other board members. The brilliant senator and nationalist was their legal counsel.

Tony tried to justify himself; the capitalists were creating many new jobs. Dangmount, for instance, had started another tile factory and Lee had gone into the manufacture of electronics equipment with transistors imported from Japan and Hong Kong. And there was no one in Congress, of course, more vociferous in his nationalist protestations than Senator Reyes. “I’m doing this for my country and people” was his favorite battle cry.

* * *

“How did you like the members of the board?” Don Manuel asked Tony that same gloomy afternoon in July. “Come on, be honest with me.”

Inside the cool sterility of executive country, inside Don Manuel’s regal office, the mind could be free. The fluorescent lamp burned like liquid silver and the new rug of abaca gleamed like soft gold. Tony said, “Dinosaurs, prehistoric monsters feeding on the weak.”

Don Manuel’s lean, handsome face was emotionless, but his voice was rimmed with disdain: “Well, you should have spoken up at the meeting, Tony. You were free, no one was holding you back.”

“I did not mean to be impolite, Papa,” he said with apprehension for having spoken thus. “But you asked me what I thought.”

Don Manuel shook his head. “Should I be glad now that you kept your trap shut? Just the same, let me remind you, Tony, that you are part of the family now. Don’t you ever, ever forget that.”

“I won’t, Papa,” Tony said solemnly. “I knew that on the day you first talked with me.”

“We understand each other then,” Don Manuel said, smiling. “But when there’s something on your mind, tell me. You know I like discussions …” He was about to say more, but the phone jangled. When Tony left the room Don Manuel was still busy at the phone, emphatically telling Saito San at the other end of the line that the installation of the machinery for the mill should be speeded up even if bottoms had to be chartered to dispatch the machinery from Japan.

Back in his own office Tony gazed through the glass window. Yes, the rainy season had finally come.

The rain was no longer just a brief afternoon shower but part of the seasonal downpour. It would last nine days. The bay churned with white caps and waves leaped up and sprayed the seawall. The boulevard was no longer the ebony black it was when the sun drenched the city. The rain had washed the oil away and the asphalt had lost its sheen. The grass on the boulevard islands, on the hotel fronts, no longer had a bedraggled look. It had turned green. The banaba trees bloomed and their clusters of purple brought throbbing color to the green. His first rainy season after six years evoked many images and odors, the smell of grass, of carabao dung, and of the earth being broken for the seed. These came to him in remembered whiffs whenever he strolled along the boulevard and the scent of the new grass under the feet of other strollers reached his nostrils. But the rain and the seed were no longer within his vision; in this land of dinosaurs nothing would grow.

The job Don Manuel gave Tony did not require technical training or an exemplary business sense. It was, as the entrepreneur had said, public relations. He bought a dozen books on the subject to augment Carmen’s books and he went through them earnestly. The books were all loaded with unblushing seriousness on the necessity of not telling everything and of practicing Dale Carnegie’s approach to life.

He had hired a secretary, too — a pretty Ilocana his sister Betty had recommended. She was twenty-one and was taking political science at the university but had to stop schooling because her parents in La Union could no longer pay her tuition.

Tony visited Antipolo almost every week but was not quite successful at reconciliation with his sister. He usually went there in a cab, and on the way, he would stop at a supermarket and buy groceries — sugar, rice, vegetable oil, candy for the boys, and a lot of canned goods because his sister could not afford a refrigerator. His income was, of course, more than what he thought his father-in-law would give him. In addition, he had a representation allowance and could obtain even more cash from the cashier anytime he needed some. His signature on the voucher was as good as cash, and the feeling that he had ready money brought to with it a higher sense of responsibility. He did not want his father-in-law to think that he was taking advantage of the Villa coffers. He meticulously kept the receipts of his expenses until the auditor told him that it was absolutely unnecessary. One of the office cars was also assigned to him, but he used it sparingly, taking a cab when he was on his own. Carmen did not bother him for money, for she had her own bank account plus a generous monthly allowance from her father. To this Tony added his monthly pay, which he gave to her with the simple statement that this was a matter of custom and Carmen accepted it with good humor.

The first public relations survey that Don Manuel assigned to Tony was not difficult. Tony had had experience in public-opinion sampling. In his undergraduate days he had worked on a paper on the non-Christian tribes of Mountain Province. He used the same technique and gathered a fairly representative sample of opinions from varying levels; he talked with taxi drivers, business acquaintances of Don Manuel, students and professors, and salesgirls. He was amazed at what he found. The pervasive resentment against the Japanese had dwindled. Only a few — those with extremely bitter memories of the Occupation — were pathologically opposed to more business contact with the Japanese. As for the steel mill, it hardly mattered that the Japanese had a big hand in it. As Don Manuel had said, if the Japanese were not in it, the Chinese or the Americans would be there and the result, the economic tentacles with which these aliens would encompass the country, would be just as stringent.

It was this observation that Tony wrote in his report and handed to the board. It seemed that the last war was relegated to some forgotten eon. The men around him brimmed with goodwill. His report was actually no more than a confirmation of what Don Manuel and the other directors expected.

Don Manuel was kind, even gallant. He did not gloat over what he had expected all along. But even if Don Manuel did not do this, Tony began to feel that there was little justification for his presence in the Villa organization. He often brooded, and this uneasy feeling disturbed his placid routine. He would then ask Fely, his secretary, to bring out his press releases, measure the clippings, and calculate how much they would have cost Don Manuel if the clippings were paid advertisements. To make his job important, he had an order relayed to all the departments that there would be no press story released — not even a story on a marriage or a baptism of anyone connected with the Villa organization — unless he had put his imprimatur on it.

Mrs. Villa took advantage of Tony’s new function and she always had a story about her in the society pages. Neither writing Mrs. Villa’s press releases nor ghosting occasionally for Senator Reyes, however, gave Tony the justification he sought. Somehow he had to achieve something dramatic and spectacular, to make not only Don Manuel but everyone in the organization look up to him and say: That’s Antonio Samson, and he is earning his money as Antonio Samson and not as Manuel Villa’s son-in-law.

To do this he would have to ask his close friends to assist him. Someday he would have a good story not only on Don Manuel but on his operations as well, and he would have this story featured in Godo’s magazine. He weighed the possibility, the arguments to buttress the soundness of his proposition. Name any five leading entrepreneurs in the country today and you will have Don Manuel among them. Isn’t that enough reason?

Maybe Godo would write the story himself, but if Godo would do that the credit would be Godo’s, and he hesitated, for he remembered that Godo had a set of values that could not be easily eroded. In the end, Godo might even loathe him for having broached the idea at all. Godo had not camouflaged his loathing for the Villas and all those “filthy merchants” who were not creating new industries for the country. An approach to Godo was, indeed, compounded with the subtlest of problems. Still, Tony would have to make the pitch sooner or later, and he would naturally lean on the good old college days and all that mushy sentimentalism as the basis for the favor. He justified the strategy with Don Manuel’s definition of friends: they were not friends if they could not help.

To Tony, a friend was someone who could offer sanctuary. To Don Manuel, a friend was someone useful. But values change as the social stratum rises. Now Tony must look at friends, too, in this utilitarian fashion. They must no longer be the ones to whom he was emotionally tied by youthful references, by common problems, and, perhaps, a common past.

There was Ben de Jesus, for instance, who could be useful to him. He seemed likable enough, maybe because he was in the employ of Don Manuel. He seemed to be a regular fellow and not the stuffed shirt Tony had presumed him to be. And this afternoon Ben had tried to be amiable.

He was, of course, a mestizo like Don Manuel, but his skin was darker and his arms were hirsute. His thick eyebrows gave him a rugged look, but his cleft chin, which needed a shave twice a day, imparted to his very masculine face a certain softness.

Ben had sounded patronizing: “I’ve been married longer than you, so that makes me an authority. Let Carmen come home late once in a while. Like tonight. My wife called up — she is with Carmen. They are in a beauty parlor or clinic or something and they will have supper together. If I were you, Tony, I’d step out occasionally, too, and vary the menu. Carmen wouldn’t mind — if she doesn’t know.”

Ben had laughed, but in his attempt at casualness Tony noticed a tinge of nervousness. Ben’s comment was an attempt to ingratiate himself into Tony’s personal domain, and Tony understood that; understood, too, the gamble Ben had taken. If his wife was a good friend of Ben’s wife, did that mean he must develop Ben’s personal friendship, too? Quickly he decided that it would not be bad to know Ben better, to appear friendly. He was a part of the organization; this was now the primary consideration.

“That’s a good idea,” Tony had said, smiling. “I’m sure Carmen wouldn’t, but I’m so out of touch that I need someone like you to show me around, to help me with the window-shopping.”

“That shouldn’t be difficult for someone who has lived for some time abroad.” Ben flattered him. “You have taste and there’s a lot of class around this establishment or down the boulevard.”

“Having taste can be different from having an acquisitive talent,” he said.

“You tell me that after you got Carmen?” Ben had laughed. “You should be teaching me tricks.”

They parted on this light note and Tony, feeling kind of wonderful, told Fely, his secretary, to finish typing the article on steel and have the clean copy ready on his desk the following morning.

It was almost midnight when Carmen came home. Tony was still at work when her car stopped in the driveway below their room, and he paused at the desk and rearranged the research materials he had been collating.

The moment she came in she started to gripe about her busy day. “Sometimes I envy you,” she said in a strained voice. “You just sit in the office and never worry about tomorrow.” She planted a dutiful peck on his forehead and went straight to the bathroom.

Tony went on with his work. His notes were voluminous and Fely had not been very good in her transcription. The Ilocano communities on the west coast, the areas where they converged — Salinas Valley, Stockton, and Lodi — and the cycle of their movement from California to Oregon and then to Alaska during the canning season … the notes were not properly arranged. The shower in the bathroom sounded and in a few more moments Carmen would begin her evening ritual, the cream on her face, the ointment on her skin. It was, as usual, half an hour, and when she came out she went straight to bed.

“I’m very tired, darling,” she said.

“After the beauty parlor?” Tony asked, closing the folder on the Salinas community. “You were supposed to relax there.”

She grumbled something inaudible. He was growing sleepy, too, and in a while he quietly slipped into the bed with her. It was late and he was not particularly stimulated tonight, but out of habit he cuddled close to her and ran an inquisitive hand quickly up her satiny thighs. He had expected the familiar tuft of pubic hair, soft and furry under her silken underwear.

He drew back, amazed and incredulous all at once. She had suddenly come to life and the answer she gave to his unspoken question was an angry push and a retort: “You think of nothing but that. You are getting to be a shameful bore.”

“Baby,” he sat up and was looking at her face, at the frown. “So, you aren’t going to have a baby after all. Why didn’t you tell me right away? When did it come?”

“Do I have to tell you everything?”

“Yes,” he said, “you must tell me everything.” He stood up and held her hands and he was surprised to find them cold. “When did it happen? Don’t tell me it was delayed three months. Is that possible? Has this happened to you before? No, you said it never happened before. I remember it — that afternoon we were at the Boie and you were so worried …”

“Of course it’s possible,” she said, shaking away his hold. “Accidents can happen and they do happen. You have to be a woman to understand these things. Esto, there was a time Nena de Jesus didn’t have it for three months — and then it came. Well, you have to understand these things. Do I have to be so goddam clinical about it?” She had raised her voice, but even in her anger Tony could sense something wrong, something missing, and he knew it at once: there was not enough conviction, enough sincerity, in what she was saying.

But he was not sure of himself, either. Tolerantly, “I’d be happier, honey, if you tell me the truth. Come on, I want the truth. Nena was with you the whole afternoon … was there an accident or something.”

“Oh, stop acting like a policeman,” she said coldly. “I just had an abortion, that’s all. Nena took me to her doctor. There’s nothing to worry about. It was all very sterile and efficiently done. He gave me some pills, just in case …”

The truth clawed at him. “Did you have to do it?”

“It was necessary,” she said peevishly. “I’m young. I can have children when I’m past thirty.”

“And you don’t think of me at all? Don’t you think you should have told me before you did this?” He had never been angry with her before, but now this rage coiled within him quickly and sprang up and he cried out, “You are a murderer, that’s what you are!”

A clamminess came over his hands and in his stomach was a sickening turn, a nausea. When he spoke again his voice was hoarse and there seemed to be a rock in his throat: “You are rotten, you are no good. I can expect this from a tramp, but not from you … of all people, you!”

The suddenness of his fury must have shocked her, for she backed away from him. “I didn’t know this would upset you, really, darling,” she said supplicatingly. “I thought I was the only one responsible, since it was in my belly anyway!”

“It was mine, too,” he said.

“It was more mine than yours,” she said, almost casually. “Oye, I’m not trying to say that we should have no children. But I’m not thirty yet, darling. There are many years still ahead of us. We can have them afterward — a dozen if that’s what you want.”

But it was too late now and not all the honeyed words could bring back the life that was lost. What was marriage without children? There came briefly to his mind the mist-shrouded mountains of Bontoc, the ulog, and the girls who lived in it. They loved by another code and they did not have this preoccupation with creams and diets. They worked hard in the fields, half-naked. To them a marriage was not sanctioned, it was not real, until the woman became pregnant. And only then did the marriage become sanctified, only then.

“You love yourself too much, you really don’t care for children. You shouldn’t have gotten married at all — that would have made you happier. Are you thinking now that we’ve made a mistake?” he asked, his voice rimmed with hate.

She evaded him with amazing agility. “Do you or don’t you love me?” she asked.

Tony walked to his desk.

“Oye, I asked you a question.” She was behind him.

“The time is rather late for that kind of talk, isn’t it?” he asked.

“I want to know.”

“I love you — and you know that,” he said, facing her.

She kissed him blandly, then went back to bed. Tony sat down, leafing through all that he had written. It was useless. He could not concentrate. He took a paperback book from the shelf above the desk, a detective story, but after a few minutes he gave that up, too. He lay beside her, watched the rhythmic rise and fall of her belly and the almost childlike smile on her face as she slept. She was lovely and at this moment pure, like an angel, beyond the reproach of a constant and damning conscience. Yet it was to her own self that she had sinned, not so much to him.

She is a murderess — the thought ate at him, but it did not persist. She was his wife — this was the finality to consider. She was his wife, the key to the good life that was proffered to him and which he had gladly accepted.

CHAPTER 10

Some unscholarly notes

I have never felt the need to unburden myself as I do now. I could easily go to Godo, but I must be prudent and should not jump to conclusions. I miss my classes. They had given me pleasure, for the classroom was my forum. There I could speak freely of the history that to me is self-evident; there I could narrate my hopes and, most of all, my fears. I looked upon my students in the light of my own experience; I did not hesitate to tell them that I not only had the authority of facts, but that it was my conviction that our worst enemy was ourselves, our vanity, our pride, and our desire for honor.

I marvel at my own resilience sometimes, and I am beginning to understand why it is possible for me to get along with D. I know why he is a success; he told me the other day that he follows all the Commandments, particularly the eleventh: Never get caught! But he is a peasant and a loudmouth, and these shortcomings may one day prove to be his undoing. There is no doubt about it: he gets things done, perhaps because he is a Kano, and maybe, because he knows power and he traces its very origin. From him, at least, I have learned never to trust clerks.

I sometimes tell myself that if I were only someone like R I wouldn’t be opening my mouth too much, particularly if I am not too seriously involved with my own statements and speeches. The final draft of the speech on steel appealed to him because I now see his vision of himself in Philippine history. More than anything, he sees himself as the champion of the new class, the entrepreneurs, although he himself belongs to the old import-export elite. It is because of his desire to be on top of the wave, on the frontline of innovation, in the phalanx of progress, that he now champions this steel mill. Of course, there is money in it for him. I will not be surprised if he cuts not a single line from the speech introducing his bill that will make the new steel industry not only tax-exempt but also the recipient of government subsidy until that time when it will be able to rise on its own feet.

And because I helped prepare it, I am both flattered and angry at myself for having been in this situation, where I no longer know how to define my own independence. And yet I find myself agreeing with what R publicly declares. Steel is the basis of industrialization. It is a part of our life, it is all around us, in the very air we breathe. We cannot move without steel; it is the basis of our transport system. The clothes we wear were woven, tailored on things made of steel. The can opener with which we open tinned goods, everything we touch has been processed by steel.

But in the end, and this I now say to myself: steel rusts.

I do not know if I did right today when I faced the settlers from Cotabato; I suppose there was nothing I could have done even if I wanted to help them, for they came with nothing on their side save brave words, and an appeal to the sentiments of men like D. It is true, after all, that they were dispossessed by the Villa Development Corporation when the corporation set up its cotton plantation. They had this small-town lawyer and, if I must now recall my own experience in Pangasinan, this lawyer must have milked them dry. There was something in his manner, in the ingratiating way he talked with me, that made me sure he had taken those poor people for a ride, feeding them false hopes. What could I tell them? It is true I speak their language; it is true that my origins are no different from theirs, but I cannot dissuade Papa to act on their behalf, for I already know what he would say if I tried. He was not, after all, breaking any law. He has always been that smart. He did everything properly — the application for the land rights, the declaration of the property as public land; if he bribed his way through some government bureau in Manila or in Cotabato, that is his business. I did not want to see the entire delegation, because to do so would have been most painful. I suppose Papa did right in having me see the leaders not only because I could speak Ilocano but, perhaps, because he knew that I could explain to them in careful terms what the problems were. It is not easy to undo what has been done. Papa does not usually go around attending to details. If he had to do this, he certainly would have no time. His men out there certainly must have told him everything was going fine, that the land for expansion was taken from public lands.

Papa had read my thoughts and he has spoken: You think I am the enemy? Think again, because I am not. I do not belong to the old export-import class that did nothing but live off the fat of the land. I am more than this, and you should at least credit me for some vision and, if you please, a dynamism that the old class never had. You may say, however, that perhaps I am more dangerous precisely because I have vision and I am dynamic. But it is people like us who will build the country, not the importers and exporters, not the intellectuals who mope in the universities. We are what you may call the action people. Do you want to know who your real enemies are? The vested groups, the sugar bloc. They are tightly organized, they have no dreams about creating more jobs for people, about using human energy. All they want is to export sugar to the United States, and if that market were to disappear, they would export the same sugar to China. Do you think they care about the people they do business with as long as they can sell their sugar and get their millions? They do not develop the country industrially the way we are doing. They have government leaders in their palms, and scores of American congressmen, too. How else can you explain how they get those quotas in the United States? Every ambassador we send to Washington sooner or later is enslaved by them.

There are those among us who spend their days moaning about the past, as if the past were good. The past be damned! It was never good. It meant degradation and all the dastardly things that we associate with poverty. Some look back to the past as the source of all the good that ever happened to this country. This is not so. It was after the war that a lot of good came about. After the war we broke the old bastions of power. Opportunities were made more democratic; they went to more people other than those who were already entrenched. They call us the nouveau riche. What is so bad about that? And what about the Old Rich? They don’t like us; they are jealous of us. Yes, particularly the mestizos. Oh yes, I am mestizo, too, but we were poor. And the Old Rich? They are no better; they are scum. How do you explain their wealth today? How come they still own vast tracts of land in Quezon City, in Makati? They were smugglers turned shipping magnates, illegitimate children of friars who licked the asses of the Spanish archbishops and American governors. They do that all the time. We don’t do such degrading things, now. All we do is contribute to the ruling party, or see to it that our friends stay in power!

Plain mathematics. Two oxygen converters (better than both the electric arc and open hearth converters) overpriced at five million dollars each. At the going rate, that’s about forty million pesos. Stashed away in a Swiss bank, this could mean a vacation for life in the Alps. I could go skiing every winter at nearby Innsbruck, and in the summer, I could drive down to San Sebastian where I would also have a villa tucked somewhere in a cove. I will at least be self-sufficient (and comfortable) if and when the Communists come, as G has often foretold. And I will only be doing what some of the people in the Park are already doing, which is providing for their family’s future. Only problem here: the forty million is not mine.

I saw G again today, and sometimes I cannot help but envy the man for the steadfastness of his views, for his capacity to compartmentalize all things and then explain why they have fallen neatly into place. Here is G’s explanation of the origin of sin:

We all crave recognition, acceptance, entry into the restricted territory of the elite, not quite realizing that we who think, we who write, we who are artists are also members of the elite, except, perhaps, that the only difference between us and the social and economic elite is that we are immobilized. Does joining them mobilize us? Does this mean we are finally accepted by them? It is not so, because these people always will have contempt for us, just as we should have nothing but contempt for them. This is the world and only in one fell swoop can it be changed.

G tells me about Ching Valdez, who was society editor till she resigned three years ago when she got married. She got the most Christmas presents, and her table was one big pile during the Christmas season. She got invited to the most lavish parties in Pobres Park. And then, when she left, you know what happened? They no longer knew her.

G also relates stories of President Quirino’s retirement in No-valiches. He went there shortly before Quirino died, and who do you think was there? Ma Mon Luk, the noodle king, and he brought with him a basket of pears and, of course, his famous siopao. Quirino said, What a wonderful thing to have a man like Ma Mon Luk visit you whether you are a president or not!

G says it’s the same with all of them up there, but the most pathetic is this woman, this big politician’s wife, who goes around the Park lapping it up, thinking that because she is with the mestizas and the wives of millionaires she has become a member of their exclusive circle, too. Ah, the tragedy of it! They are laughing at her behind her back; they are amused by her, by her trying to be one of them, aping their mannerisms, when she is actually, insofar as her manners are concerned, nothing but a barrio woman.

I have tried to understand self-delusion and I must be honest with myself in saying that I do not want to be poor. No one wants to be poor. The poor are not respectable simply because they are poor. When I have basic desires that cannot be satisfied, I am this earth’s most frustrated human being. I’d like to think I have brains and, therefore, I am superior to those who have more money than I. But how can I call myself really smart? As D often tells off those bright boys in his advertising agency, If you are smart, why aren’t you rich?

I cannot but agree with G that I have already lost a bit of myself, I don’t know where — maybe in the United States, maybe right here in this city of dinosaurs. I would have wanted very much to speak out loud, to be heard, because I have something to say about the young who are being pawned away. But my voice is no longer strong and firm. I have aged, not with years but with the sullen wisdom of experience. I have seen how the innocents have been slaughtered and how the hapless victims were herded to their final ignominy with praises ringing in their ears. Thus we are destroyed, not with hate but with kindness. And the foul deed is never realized for what it is. We suffer most who are blind to it, who do not recognize it or who justify it as part of the social fabric, as part of living itself. We give legitimacy to a crime and are, in turn, the worst of criminals for this act. But prisons can be wonderful if they are air-conditioned, if they are mansions in the Park!

CHAPTER 11

In November the first unit of the mill was ready to operate and the new pier was completed. The tracks from the pier for the diesel trolleys that would carry the ore and the scrap iron to the furnaces had also been laid, and in the scrap yard, mountains of junk were ready for cutting before they were fed to the furnaces.

A covey of newspapermen including Godo and Charlie had visited the mill and the visit itself had climaxed Tony’s work of a month, preparing background materials, photographs, and related data on the country’s steel needs.

The first cool winds of the Christmas season were already upon the city. The air was electric and the sun lay pure on the wooden panels and on the marble floor, glinted on the glass windows, and danced on the grass beyond.

Don Manuel had suggested a vacation for him, and the opportunity to visit the Ilocos had come. Carmen had some reservations about the trip; for her, there were only two places to go to for the weekend: Baguio and Hong Kong. The idea of slumming in some benighted village did not appeal to her, and she would not have gone if her father had not prodded her to go along.

And so, on this cool, wind-washed Saturday in November, Tony and Carmen were in the Ilocos, marveling at the well-preserved houses of brick and stone in the old capital of Vigan. They had gotten out of the car several times to take photographs of the old stone churches with their impressive baroque facades. The sturdy houses, the well-tended farms, the sunburned women, and the fruit trees in the yards — all these impressed upon him the kind of people his ancestors were.

They had started from Manila in the early morning and passed fields of ripening grain and small towns that were immobile in their lethargy and impersonal in their destitution. Now they were at the source of the pioneers who had settled in the towns they had passed. This was where they had started — the praetorian guard, the brave men who uprooted the old posts of their homes and transported them to the plains and the new towns of Central Luzon and Cagayan Valley and across the sea to Mindanao.

They reached Po-on in the late afternoon. The day still washed the squat, thatched houses, embossed them all faint gray against the massive deep blue of the nearby foothills. The dirt road, just wide enough to admit the Thunderbird, had broadened — disappeared, rather — into what seemed to be the village plaza, which was actually a wide yard in disarray, cluttered with half-naked children playing marbles and ill-clothed women nursing babies and chatting beneath the grass marquee of the barrio store at the far end.

Tony breathed deeply. The earth smelled rich, its aroma compounded with the sun’s rage upon the ripe November fields and the dung of work animals. The air was brilliant, and a cool wind that came from the direction of the sea creaked in the small grove of bamboo that formed a natural arbor, a gateway to the village.

Carmen had taken over the wheel since they passed the town of Cabugaw, because she did not trust his judgment on the quality of the road. She had driven so slowly that he was at first unaware that she had stopped. His eyes roamed about — to the huddle of houses, to the children who paused in their raucous game and were now looking at them with awe.

So this is Po-on, he mused. So this is where my grandfather, the illustrious Eustaquio, lived. What did he look like? If he was a learned man, as the old people said he was, could he have left here a few sprouts of his wisdom for me to glean?

“Well, aren’t you going to get out?” his wife asked. “Now, I hope you’ll find that you have not descended from an ape.”

Some of the women at the store approached them, as did two men who were spinning cotton spindles, which they held at arm’s length. The women were dark-skinned and the men, like most Ilocano men, were heavy-jowled. Their narrow foreheads and flat, broad noses conformed with the common anthropological concept of the Ilocano.

They stepped out of the car, and to the crowd Tony extended a greeting. They answered as one and without hesitation.

Carmen held on to his arm as if afraid she would melt away and become a part of the mass. She had told him at the start of the trip that there was no sense in it, in looking up members of his family two generations back, because they couldn’t matter anymore or alter the present.

“Why don’t you ask them if we are in the right place?” Carmen asked.

“This is Po-on?” he asked the nearest woman, who was smoking a black cigarette with the lighted end imprisoned in her mouth.

“Ay, it is so, Apo,”^* the woman answered. “What can we do for you?”

“We came from Manila,” he spoke to no one in particular in their own tongue, which was also his. He turned briefly to his wife, who was contemplating the crowd. “My wife and I …” he paused. “You see, it may surprise you, but I am here to seek my relatives. Our root, my grandfather — he was from here.”

In the many peasant faces he could immediately discern the bright, new kinship that he had established and he knew that they had accepted him.

“Samson — that was his family name, and mine.”

The crowd murmured and the woman with the cigarette spoke again: “But there’s no Samson here, Apo. I don’t remember a Samson here at all and I’m now thirty-five.”

“I was thinking,” he tried again, “if you could point to me the oldest man here. Maybe he knows.”

The crowd started a discussion.

“What are they talking about now?” Carmen nudged him.

“They are deciding who the oldest man is,” he explained, catching their every word.

The woman with the cigarette stepped forward. “My grandfather, Apo,” she said brightly, “he can help you find your root.”

The man they sought, it turned out, was not in the village but in a sitio across the fields. “It’s not a long walk,” the woman explained. “And, besides, the sun can’t hurt you now.”

He was glad that his wife had worn comfortable pumps instead of high heels. Once, in Washington, during a humid and burning summer, they took a long walk. They had met barely a week before, and he remembered it now with the objectivity that marriage makes a mockery of. He was in the Library of Congress and she had gone there that afternoon to have him show her the efficiency with which the library operated. It was five when they left and the sun hung over the gleaming city in a gray haze, glinting in the elms and on the ebony pavement, empty of buses and streetcars because the city’s whole transportation system was on strike. He had told her earlier that they would walk home to Dupont Circle across the city to where she lived, and she had acceded. They had not gone ten blocks when she decided to rest in one of the city’s main parks. And there, while she watched the squirrels nibble at the crumbs an old lady had tossed, he realized that he had been unaware of her suffering. She had worn high heels, and there lay before them a long stretch of pavement yet. He was making every penny count, knowing as he did the bitterness of a niggardly winter the year past. He desisted from calling a cab. It was she, when they started out again, who hailed one, and inside, while his cheeks burned, he confessed that he did not have enough money for the fare. “It’s all right, Tony,” she had said. “I can pay the fare and, if you care, may I treat you to dinner, too?” He refused, of course, but he had never been able to live the incident down, and afterward, even though they were married, his inner self cringed in embarrassment every time he thought of her so calm and poised, listening to his stammered apology.

But she was walking beside him now doggedly as a wife should. He wondered if she still recalled Washington and he took her hand. “Remember our first hike?” he asked.

There was no humor in her answer. “Of course,” she said. “I just hope all this is well worth the trouble.”

He did not reply, for he himself was not yet sure. Why was he here among the new hay and what force was it that propelled him beyond the precious confines of the Villa executive country, that made him break out of the full life into this past that was anonymous and dead?

He could not recall when it all started. Maybe, when he was working on his research papers on the Philippine Revolution, or when he was young and his father told him of barren hills and wicked fields and the churning sea, carried him on his shoulder and told him in a pious whisper of still another man, his grandfather, who led them away from the wasteland to the plains, a learned man who could read Latin and speak it like a monastic scholar, who wrote about death and life and the suffering in between. Istak — that was what he was called — and Eustaquio was his Christian name. “Mark him,” his father had said, “for you are descended from a big root.”

“Look,” She said edgily, holding his hand as they went down the margin of the village with their guide ahead of them. “Will we really get something from this? I doubt if this old man has the qualities of a chronicler.”

He smiled inwardly at her prediction. “It’s a quality of the rich,” he said evenly, “to be skeptical, but not of us, we who were made to choose between the sea and the bald hills.” With his hand he made a sweep of the hills at their left — barren and dying. “We always expect the worst and still we are able to laugh.”

“You are talking in poetry again,” she said sourly. “Can’t you stop being so pretty about your tribe?”

The path dipped down a newly harvested field with the bundled grain spread out in the sun. It curved through the field and disappeared into a cluster of marunggay^† trees. Within the cluster stood a house.

The man they sought was perched on one of the rungs of the bamboo ladder. He, too, like many of the men they had seen in the region, was spinning cotton. He was barefoot and his trousers of blue Ilocano cloth were frayed at the knees. His toes, unused to shoes, were spread out. He was probably seventy, but his short, white hair made him appear too venerable to have something as trivial as age. He stopped spinning and peered at the faces of his three visitors.

“It’s I, Simang, Grandfather,” the woman who accompanied them said. She took the patriarch’s wrinkled hand and pressed it to her lips. “We have visitors from Manila and they would like to talk to you because you are the oldest here and you know many things.”

Tony greeted the old man amiably, but the eyes that regarded him were cold.

“Yes, I know many things,” the old fellow coughed. “And everything is here, stored in my mind.” He brought his forefinger to his temple and gestured. “Everything there is to know I know.” His beady eyes closed, the old man turned and climbed up.

Tony stood dumbly before the crude ladder, waiting for him to reappear, and when the old man did not return, Carmen nudged Tony. “Perhaps we’d better go.”

Their guide, aware of their discomfiture, mumbled an apology, then went up into the house. In a while she returned and behind her hobbled the old man, looking at them dourly.

“I hope I’m not a bother, Apo,” he started suavely again.

“Of course you are,” the old man said.

“Don’t mind him, please,” their guide told them and, to the old man, raised her voice. “They were from this place once, Grandfather, and they want to know if some of their relatives are still in our midst.”

The angry countenance vanished. “Who were they, my children?” he bent forward, eager to know. The arrogant chin had dropped and the cracked voice had become warm.

“They left about a hundred years ago,” Tony Samson said simply.

The old man picked up the talk. “A hundred years! I’m not that old, but I know there were many who left in search of better land. I was one of the few who stayed and now I’m alone. I could have gone, too, but my place was destined to be here.”

Tony groped for the proper words. “He was an acolyte, Apo,” he said, searching the crumpled face for a sign of recognition. “The family name was Samson. My grandfather … he migrated to Rosales. That’s in Pangasinan. He had wanted to go to Cagayan Valley but the land in Pangasinan tempted him. He couldn’t resist.”

“Yes, Pangasinan,” the old man eased his back against the rung. “All of them wanted to go there, where they said rice grew taller than a man. Fate shackled me to this land. Maybe I was not strong enough to cut the umbilical cord that tied me to this place. But there’s no cause for regret. God willing, this land still produces and its kindness still suffices.”

The talk was drifting away and Tony quickly salvaged it. “The family name was Samson, Apo. Surely you know of some people who bear it.”

The old man faced him again. “Samson?” His brow crinkled. “There’s not one Samson in all Cabugaw whom I know. So your grandfather went to Pangasinan, eh? The first trips were difficult, or so I was told, and some were killed by the Igorots. A few drowned in crossing the bloated rivers. I knew of their problems in the new land. I would have joined them, too, but I didn’t feel the need. It’s only now that my days are numbered that I do.”

“You never heard of him, Apo?” Tony leaned forward and smelled the old man’s sour breath. His voice was impatient, demanding. “He was a scholar, a teacher. All Cabugaw knew him. He started as an acolyte and wrote in Latin, too. That’s what my father remembers.”

“Oh yes,” the old farmer continued. “There were some learned men among those who left.”

“You didn’t know of a Samson among them? Or if there is a Samson left behind?”

The venerable head shook.

“We should have gone to the church first when we passed through the town,” Carmen said sharply as they drove out of the village. He nodded and gazed fondly at the scene once more, the yellow fields, the catuday trees with their edible white flowers, and Po-on itself unchanged and everlasting.

Dusk fell slowly as if it had lengthened the day for him to sum up all — the quiet trees, the blurred shapes of houses. I must find him, press my feet upon his footprints and feel the solid, permanent things his hands shaped. What am I? he had once asked Carmen in a moment of self-scrutiny. Impossible, that’s what you are, she had told him. They had gotten married after some misgivings, but she had always reassured him of his own competence. “Every time I introduce you to my friends I say, I’ve married a man whose wealth does not jingle.” What a condescending cliché! But she believed in it, even before she met him at that cocktail party. She had gone to America ostensibly to take up interior decoration and public relations, but actually, she admitted to him sheepishly later, “to hook a man, since the best hunting ground is no longer Manila or Hong Kong, but America. Look at all my friends or look at the men my sisters bagged — oafs and loafers,” she often told him, “that’s what they are. Why, they can’t even use the word eclectic; to them, all Marxists are people who should be lined up against a wall.”

She swung the car out of the gravel road and now, on the stone highway, the engine purred steadily. The landscape was flat again and to the right, in the direction of the sea, the sky was a purple ribbon stretched along the far horizon.

“Oye, just hope now,” she said above the steady thrum of the car, “that there’s a priest who knows what you are looking for. Records. They keep all sorts of papers there.”

He grunted in reply. The night covered the land completely and the yellow blobs of the headlights showed the white road, the edges of the fields, and some farmers trudging home with neat bundles of grain balanced with poles on their shoulders.

Cabugaw, like most Ilocano towns, was shabby, and it did not have the bold pretensions to progress, the profusion of soft-drink signs, and the brash architecture that the municipalities of Central Luzon had. The church was not difficult to locate. They had passed it earlier in the afternoon — a huge stone building with a tin roof, set on a green, weedy yard. In the darkness it loomed black and secret, with squares of yellow light framed in the windows of the adjoining convent.

She drove into the yard. Together they went to the door — an unwieldy mass of wood that towered above them, solid like the walls of the convent itself. He lifted the iron knocker and rapped twice.

“You’d better finish the interview as quickly as possible,” she said. “Remember, we still have a long drive to Vigan.”

He grunted more in displeasure than assent. Footsteps echoed within the convent and dispelled from his mind what he wanted to say. In a while the low second door opened and a beefy man in a white soutane stood before them, a candle in his hand.

“Good evening. We would like to see the parish priest,” Tony said.

The priest peered at the darkness behind them — to see the car perhaps. “Yes, yes,” he said. “I’m the parish priest. Come in and sit down.” He was past middle age. The candle flickered, but it was bright enough to show the priest’s features, his rimless glasses, the smudges on his soutane, and its frayed cuffs. He smelled faintly of tobacco.

“This is my wife, Padre,” Tony Samson said leading Carmen forward.

The priest raised the candle higher to get a better look at her. “Yes, yes,” he repeated. “Do come in and sit down.”

They entered what looked like a medieval cavern, a high-ceilinged room with a well-scuffed tile floor. The priest stood the candle on a circular table in the middle of the room and bade his guests sit on the wooden bench before it.

“I came here now,” Tony apologized, “because I may not find another convenient time.”

“Yes, yes?” the priest clasped his hands and nodded as if wanting to prod his visitors into talking more.

“The drive has been very difficult,” his wife said, contributing her bit. “And my car hasn’t been broken in really. The roads are not uniform — gravel here, asphalt there, and then cement …”

“Yes, yes,” the priest spoke mechanically.

“I was a teacher,” he said as if nettled into admitting it. “I taught history in the university and did some writing. But I’m now in business.”

“Where there’s definitely a lot more money,” Carmen added hastily.

“Ah yes, yes,” the priest agreed in his toneless manner. “But have you eaten supper?” He called out a name and a boy emerged from the shadows. “Prepare two more plates,” he shouted, and the boy disappeared beyond the door. “Now, what can I do for you?”

“It may seem foolish to you,” Tony said self-consciously. To his wife he turned for encouragement but she was not looking at him. She had turned away, her eyes on the walls and the narrow grilled windows.

“Why, why?” the priest asked, throwing his head back.

“I’m Ilocano,” he said, naturalness settling back in his voice. “And my grandfather came from here. I’ve come to see if I have relatives left.”

The priest rose. What he heard obviously impressed him. “I’ve never seen one like you, returning to where his ancestors were born — I mean, one going on a pilgrimage, sort of.” He spoke with enthusiasm. “Of course I know that Ilocanos—”

“They are all over the country,” Carmen joined him. “The country is crawling with Ilocanos.”

“Ah yes, yes,” the priest went on after a short, brittle laugh. He cracked his knuckles and peered at the woman. “Indeed you’ll find them saying that our root is in this or that town, but do they know what the Ilocos really looks like? I’ve been here all my life and I know that it hasn’t changed much. The houses are still small, the rice is still the same hard variety. They are planting Virginia tobacco now, too much of it — and that’s the only difference. And, of course, a few new houses with galvanized iron roofs …”

The boy who had set the table returned and told them supper was ready. They padded through a dimly lit corridor and up a wide stairway into another wide room as shabby as the first.

The boy hovered, a paper wand in his hand. As Tony had expected, the convent larder was well-stocked. They had fried rice, broiled pork, chicken broth, and an omelet.

The priest made the sign of the cross. “Eat, eat,” he said amiably.

Tony did not want to waste time. They had barely started with the soup when he spoke again: “You may have heard of my ancestor. You see, about a hundred years ago he used to be in this very church, serving as an acolyte.”

The priest dropped his spoon. “No, no,” he said. “I cannot really say. A hundred years ago? But I wasn’t even born then. And Samson? I have met none of your relatives. There’s not one Samson in the whole town — that’s what I know.”

“Surely, Padre,” Tony didn’t want to give up, “there must be something here that will be conclusive.” His appetite had dwindled. “Church records, baptismal notices. They could hold his name. You see, he migrated to Pangasinan with his whole clan. But this may not be true. And he was a scholar — that’s what my father always said. He wrote in Latin …” He felt proud.

When they finished the dessert of preserved nangca,^‡ the priest took them down again, explaining that they might find something among the records. They walked silently through corridors. The taper threw their shadows against the crumbling masonry and etched the thick, rotting posts and the red brick. They stopped before an appallingly large wooden cabinet, which seemed to sag into the very floor — an elaborately carved relic with iron handles rusty and immovable on their hinges.

“We might be able to see something here,” the priest said. “Most of the old records are here — from 1800 up.”

He gripped the rusty bar and, with a violent tug, opened it. “You’ll have to forgive the sorry state of the papers,” the priest said gravely. “I have no time to look after them.”

The layer of age that covered the rooms assailed them, and Carmen instinctively held her palm to her nose. The priest picked one of the ledgers at random. Its cover was clearly marked Registro de Defunciones, 1840. He leafed perfunctorily through the pages of the death registry. The line marks, which may have been straight and black once, were all smudged, and the pages themselves threatened to break apart like flakes if they were flipped. In the sallow light, however, Tony Samson could trace the fine scrawl, the elaborate crosses of the t’s and the flourishes at the beginning of all the capital letters. The priest read aloud some of the names and, after two pages, stopped.

The boy who had served upstairs at the table joined them with a Coleman lamp, and the shimmering light identified everything in the giant room — the old tile floor and the battered chairs. “Now we can see better,” the priest said. He reached for the top shelf and, at random again, got two ledgers and handed them to Tony.

Tony read the inscriptions on the covers of the registries of marriages and births. One was marked Registro de Casamientos, 1860–1865. The other bore the equally elaborately written title Registro de Nacimientos, 1865–1867.

“You’ll see that the names of the priest and his secretary who wrote these down are on the first page,” the priest told him, “What else do you know about your grandfather?”

“He was a learned man,” Tony repeated with emphasis, “and he wrote in Latin as if the language were his.”

“We will see,” the priest said, rubbing his hands. “There’s another batch of ledgers here.” He stopped and opened the lowest panel. “These are records of jobs, important decisions, some diaries.…” He held the ledger to his face, then turned thoughtfully to the young man. “What was his name again?”

“Eustaquio Samson.”

“I once saw a manuscript in Latin, a philosophical one, written by a Eustaquio. It should be somewhere here.” His pudgy fingers went through the ledgers, then he brought it out — a tattered black book. The priest glancing at the cover, read aloud: “Eustaquio Salvador.”

Tony knew the name vaguely. Salvador, Salvatero, Sabado — many family names in Cabugaw used to start with the letter S, a convenient arrangement initiated by the friars. By knowing a man’s family name it would be easy to deduce what town he came from.

Salvador!

Then it struck him with its full and magic force and he remembered how once his father had told him that their name was not really Samson. Clasping the battered book, his heart now a wildly pounding valve, Tony turned to his wife and cried, “This is it, baby! Written in his own hand!”

Carmen hedged closer: “It’s Salvador, not Samson.”

“But didn’t I tell you once that his real name was Salvador and that he had to change it because of a fight with the Spaniards?”

She laughed. “It’s an alias then. I wonder what the Spaniards did when they found out.”

“I wouldn’t know,” the priest said, handing the manuscript to her husband.

Tony read the title again. It was legibly written in block letters: Philosophia Vitae, Ab Eustaquio Salvador. “A Philosophy of Life,” he translated aloud and turned questioningly to the priest for confirmation.

He nodded. “You know Latin?”

“I had a year of it in college,” Tony said, “but that wasn’t enough.” He handed the book back to the priest. “Please read to me some lines.”

The priest moved toward the light and opened the book to its first page. He mumbled the phrases and then recited haltingly: “Cum magna pretentione—it is with great pretension—est ut hunc librum scribere incipio — sed cum aliguis veginti unum annos tingit, est ilia temptatio desiderandi ad somnia ascribienda quae asperat …”

He paused and glanced at the author’s grandson. “Well, I must admit that his Latin was not bad.”

“What does it mean?” Carmen bent forward, trying to follow the reading.

The priest went back to the first phrase: “Cum magna pretentione— It is with great pretensions that I start this book, but when one is twenty-one there is that temptation of wanting to record the dreams to which he aspires …”

The priest stopped again.

“Dreams,” Tony mused aloud and quoted the Spanish poet: “All of life is a dream and all those dreams are dreams …”

“Yes, yes,” the priest intoned dully, “but, you see, he apologizes for that. He was but twenty-one.”

“Please,” Tony repeated. “Do go on — one paragraph more.”

The priest opened the book to the pages he had left. “… quia veginti anno annis majorem aetatem finaliter attingit … for at the age of twenty-one he finally comes of age.” His drab fleshy face brightened up. “Listen to this now,” he enthused. “Mundus viro no sperat. Eo tempus non habet— The world does not wait for a man. It has no time for him.” He returned the book to Tony and his voice was tinged with emotion: “He had the sensibility of a poet — and humility, too. This is the virtue of all those who create and who are great, no matter how obscure they may have been. Why, I believe that God, even in His greatness, was humble. Your forefather had this quality and more. He was restless, too, and now I know why he left Cabugaw.”

Tony flipped the pages of the book and his whole being flamed and the vacuity within him seemed suddenly filled with something burbling and glowing that lifted him beyond the common touch. “Now I leave you to your discovery,” the priest sounded remote behind him. “And, of course, you have to sleep here. I’ll have the cots prepared upstairs. Come up when you are sleepy.”

“Thank you, Padre,” he said happily without lifting his eyes from the engulfing maze, the fancy script, and the words he couldn’t read and understand. And, holding on to the ledger, he felt a kinship at last, tangible and alive, with this thing called the past. Maybe there is wisdom buried in this, or romance, or just a diurnal account of a young man’s fancy, his pride and his hurt. The transcription will not be important, he decided quickly. It was this solid memento that mattered, because it was the root on which he stood.

“You can ask him for it. It is but a scrap of paper that he has no use for anyway,” Carmen said.

He lifted the Coleman lamp, which had been left atop the wooden pedestal beside the cabinet. At the door the boy waited for them, his eyes heavy with sleep, and showed them to their room.

As they lay on two cots that had been brought together, they held hands — a soothing domestic habit — and were motionless but for their measured breathing. Beyond the heavy sill and sash shutters, which were flung to the remotest edge, the stars shone clear and tremulous in the cloudless sky. A silky breeze floated in, laden with the scent of the warm earth. A dog barked in the unknown recesses of the dark, and in the rotting eaves Tony heard the soft scurrying of mice and the snap of house lizards.

“It’s just like Washington,” she said after some time.

“Why Washington?” he asked, pressing her hand.

“The Library of Congress,” she said. “The first printed Bible. The American Constitution. They were all nicely framed and lighted in special containers, heated to keep out the frost and the humidity. It must have cost some money to install those devices …” He had taken her there because “when you are in Washington you just can’t miss the biggest library in the world,” and she had valiantly tried deciphering the scrawls.

“You are way off the track,” he said, divining her thoughts.

She turned on her cot and tweaked his nose. She smelled clean and, in the faint light of the other rooms, he could make out her face. “Oh, now, I’m not saying that we will have to go to so much expense trying to preserve your grandfather’s manuscripts.”

“What then?”

“But you can do it, maybe have an Augustinian friar in Manila transcribe it, and then, who knows, it may be an important document in literature — or ecclesiastical history.”

“That’s not funny,” he chided her.

“But I’m not trying to be funny,” Carmen said. “I’m merely carrying to a logical end what you have started. If you won’t have it translated, then at least we can bring it with us — not just the book, mind you, but all the other papers that were written in his hand: Oye, think what wonderful conversation pieces they will make!”

“Is that all you think of? Conversation pieces to show off to your illiterate friends and relatives?”

“Now it’s you who are being silly,” she reproached him. “We drove over horrible roads, ate in that filthy restaurant in Vigan, and now we are sleeping in this convent — on smelly cots. Five hundred kilometers — and the gas, I spent good money for it …”

The situation had suddenly become ridiculous and he did not know whether to laugh or to curse. But the feeling subsided quickly and gave way to his old understanding of the unchangeable dung heap that surrounded him. He brought to mind once more the American lady in her sixties on the boat crossing the Atlantic. He had met her on his way to Europe during his summer study tour. She was on an almost religious mission to a Sussex hamlet in England to seek the wellsprings of her ancestry, which were, she was told, still intact. A genealogical research agency had promised to do the job for a few dollars. “It’s dirt cheap,” she had said of the deal with the patent exuberance of an American who had accidentally stumbled upon a bargain. Tony recalled, too, the rapt crowds in the National Art Gallery in Washington, in the Louvre and the Prado, the hordes gaping at the old pictures, searching for beginnings in the cemeteries of art as if they were afraid to drift into the limbo of their own making, and these paintings, these revered pictures and stone images, were the anchors that would make them and the future secure. Their faces were all indistinct yet vaguely familiar, exuding as they did an enthusiasm and a longing. He had now struck an infallible identity with them, because he, too, had gone to great lengths to find but a book and a vanished name in a small town. And yet everything could have been simplified: a gilded museum, an efficient gravedigger with an encyclopedic memory — these were all that would have been necessary to find the clues to that unalterable pattern that he did not shape but which shaped him. And his wife was all this because she had the money and he … he had only the dream.

“You, your money …” he said.

She turned and pressed close to him. He could not see her face clearly, but he could define the glaring dark eyes.

“You have too much of it,” he said with conviction.

“All right,” she said, lying on her back again. “But remember, it’s what makes the world go — not an old, rotting book that may not even sell as a collector’s item. You know that very well. You’ve seen all those first editions in the secondhand-book stores, the one near Dupont Circle. In Greenwich Village …”

“Let’s not start this again,” he said hotly.

“You started it,” she said, her voice betraying a hurt. “You wear those big chips and dare everyone — even me — to knock them off.”

“Is that what you found here?”

“You could have asked me a long time ago and I would have told you.”

“And yet you married me?” Tony pressed on.

She did not speak.

“At least,” he said, “you can be kind and say that you made a mistake.”

She turned to him again. “I was in love with you. What is it that you want? Have you forgotten that I can always ask Papa?”

To her it all seemed so simple: I can always ask Papa — omnipresent, omnipotent.

“I want only one thing: to be myself,” he told her.

“Aren’t you?” she flung at him. “Really, now you are asking for blood. Esto, even coming here is asking too much. The past is past and no one can alter it.”

But the past still demanded attention, and that was not all — there was need for continuity, too, and belonging to a huge and primeval wave. He knew all this now and the knowing evoked transcendental joy. He was, after all, not a drifter in the vast ocean of want. Now, if he could only return to his teaching and once in a while write, maybe about the urgencies he believed in.… If he could only forsake the drudgery of his commerce, maybe he could do more for some future searcher to covet and, maybe, the self-justification that had eluded him for so long might yet take shape under his very hands. There flashed again, vivid and taunting, the face of the old man he had talked with in Po-on earlier in the day, and finally the faceless vision of the gentleman, the ancestor, who, perhaps, could have been in this very room with a pen in his hand. How did they in their listless youth face the chasms between fact and fancy? One refused to pioneer, to forsake the barren land, and the other wrote a book and then, on his puny legs, led a whole clan on a journey to a strange, new land.

But what happened to them? And what happened to his father, who had tried to be brave in his own, narrow way when the times demanded another form of courage? He could look back now to Cabugawan, his birthplace and his stigma, and he would find the answers there.

“Baby?” He spoke tentatively.

“Please,” she still sounded angry, “I’ve already told you that I’ll buy it. I will buy everything you need if the priest won’t give it for free.”

He stood up and walked to the window. Beyond the wide, vacant churchyard the whole town lay quiet and asleep. They would most probably leave in the morning and she would surely be glum. To her this was not a vacation — it was a meaningless jaunt into some benighted towns. But he would not mind. What was important now was getting back to the city to glean the small parts of himself that he had scattered to the shiftless wind. If he could only teach and write again — he must teach and write again.

Standing there, pondering the implications of Cabugaw, he wondered how soon morning would come sneaking into this musty room.

* Apo: A respectful form of address.

† Marunggay: A tree whose leaves and young fruit are cooked as vegetables.

‡ Nangca: The jackfruit tree or its fruit.

CHAPTER 12

It was too easy to be true, and looking at the lean, handsome face of Don Manuel on the cover of the Sunday Herald, Tony felt achievement glow all over him. Godo had been very thoughtful; he had sent this advance copy on a Wednesday when the board was to meet, so that Tony could show the magazine to everyone. Below the smooth, angular face of Don Manuel was the title in bold type: Man of Steel.

He immediately delved into the magazine and was even more amazed. Godo had given Don Manuel a six-page spread with the fewest ads, and the story included the latest photographs of the steel mill and statistical graphs on the steel needs of the country.

The article brimmed with authority and prestige because it sported Godo’s byline. Tony read it, tried to ferret out any of Godo’s barbed cynicisms that would easily nullify the story, but after going through the article twice he found not a single line in it that went sour. Don Manuel was right after all — friendships were important. He had invited Godo to the house only twice, and on the third visit he had made the pitch. Godo had not acted smart-alecky. He had said, I’ve done it for people less significant, and now, sell me Don Manuel. It had not been easy, of course, for by then Don Manuel’s many transactions, particularly the timber concessions in Mindanao, were under fire. But the mill was significant; it symbolized national aspirations and dignity. Steel was the foundation of modern society. The barrio could not rise from the dung heap unless it was energized by domestic steel mills that would cut down the huge imports of steel. That was it: steel was the bedrock of progress.

But it was not so simple. Tony had boned up on steel, and after the many board meetings he had attended and the conversations with Don Manuel, he had stored up a vast amount of knowledge. He had told Godo: we have limitless iron-ore deposits, and only the fringes of these deposits — in Mindanao, the Visayas, and Luzon — have been tapped. The figures are merely illustrative, but here they are: we export iron ore to Japan for processing at a mere thirty centavos a ton, and when we get this back in pig iron or elementary steel materials, do you know how much we have to pay? Three hundred pesos a ton. The opponents of Philippine steel are, of course, the American importers in Manila. Once a steel mill in this country is set up they will lose a very profitable market. And their arguments are downright silly. So what if our coal is bad and low grade and we don’t have coke! That is cheap and we can import it. Japan imports coke. And that is not all — hydroelectricity is becoming cheaper and our hydroelectric projects continue to be built. I’ve seen them in Mountain Province, and the Bontoc Igorots have been transferred from their ancestral homes because many new dams are being built there. Two are already finished. And there is this new Swiss process that is going to be very cheap. We can adopt it here. We don’t have to cling always to America’s apron strings. It’s not only being patriotic or nationalistic to ask that we support a local steel industry now, it’s also good business. It will absorb the surplus agricultural workers of the lethargic barrios. It’s nationalism — and Godo took the bait.

Don Manuel was in his office. Without a word Tony laid the magazine before the entrepreneur. The older man stood up, looked at the magazine, then went to his son-in-law and slapped him expansively on the shoulder. “I don’t have to tell you how happy I am about this, son.” His eyes were shining.

The board meeting that followed was short. Not much was discussed except the prospects of speeding up the work. Senator Reyes announced that the latest applications for dollar licenses by Dangmount and Johnny Lee were approved. Don Manuel had a word or two to give Dangmount — he should use his influence with the American community to get more contracts for the firm. The same appeal went to Johnny Lee, who took down notes in Chinese and bared his teeth in futile attempts to smile.

With the business for the day wrapped up, Tony hurried down to Newspaper Row to thank Godo and Charlie.

But the two refused to go out. They had work to do, so they went to the crummy shop below the newspaper office and sat in a sullen corner, smelling the accumulated mustiness of the years. They drank tasteless coffee and ate the same old siopao and mami.^*

They started lightly enough with Godo trying to match Charlie with one or another of Carmen’s friends.

“I’m not getting married,” Charlie said solemnly. “It’s too much of a risk and, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no future in it. I will not marry and bring to this world children who will be as insecure as I am.”

“But it’s so easy to live,” Godo said brightly. “All you have to do is breathe and slave your guts out. And when you die your body will be taken to the Press Club. Just think of it — those mountains of flowers and all those fine speeches. Even your employer will be there. And as for your widow …” the cheery note had left Godo’s voice, “she will go on living in the stale rooms you’ve never freed yourself from.”

Charlie nodded and did not speak.

“Do you understand, Tony?” Godo asked. “There’s nothing that can enliven me now. I’m aging and I have nothing for my children.”

“We are all insecure,” Tony said. “There’s no one who is secure in this life. We all die — and that is the root of our insecurity.”

“Yes,” Godo said, “but security for me does not mean immortality. All I want is for my wife and children to be healthy and well provided for. But you can’t have security in this bloody country anymore. The rich won’t let you have it. They wouldn’t even let me have a battered Ford.”

“In America,” Tony said evenly, “everyone has a car. It doesn’t mean a damn thing.”

“In America,” Godo sighed. “But here, what do your American friends do? They won’t permit us to industrialize. And what happens? You have the same old bastards at the top. A few years back, when they stole, they justified themselves by saying ‘What are we in power for?’ They have changed the tune. Now they say ‘What’s wrong with providing for your family’s future?’ Visit Congress. Listen to our good friend Senator Reyes. He commits everything now in the name of nationalism.”

“Scoundrels always use patriotism as a last resort.”

“But that’s not the point,” Godo said. “What is important is this. We are all committing suicide. And we can’t stop it because of the uncertainty that hovers above us all. Listen,” he leaned close to Tony. “There is a village in your native Pangasinan. It’s near the sea, and the people there earn a living diving for the bombs that were dumped at the bottom of the gulf in 1945 by the American navy. They extract the powder from these bombs and use it for dynamite fishing. Three months ago a bomb they were opening blew up. Thirty-seven were killed, including women and children. Last week I sent Charlie there for a story. Tell him, Charlie.”

His dark, thin face empty of emotion, Charlie leaned over and spoke softly: “I came across them, near the ruins made by the first blast. And they were opening another bomb. I asked why they were still at it after what happened to the others. And they said there was no other way. Life must go on.”

“I refuse to believe it,” Tony said. “No man, unless he is sick, takes his own life. There must be a sickness, an incurable one. And it must have been there since his birth, secretly growing until that time when it has consumed the love for life and then becomes nothing else but hate. Then the man takes his own life because he has been drained of love. Because there is nothing else in the body but that disease, that cancer of hate. I cannot think of any man wanting to die. Even in pain there is knowledge — and therefore joy.”

Godo was in his best form again. “But, you see, there is no alternative really. They have to live. We have to live. So we raze our forests, we dynamite our fishing grounds. We export all our ore and our best logs to Japan. And businessmen like your father-in-law say that life must go on. Or if Don Manuel sets up a steel mill he ends up being a dummy.”

Tony leaned back. “You don’t mean what you say; you’re pulling my leg again.”

Godo’s forehead knitted. “Do you mean to tell me that you weren’t able to read between the lines?”

“What do you mean?” Tony sounded incredulous.

“Tell him,” Godo nudged his assistant.

“Well, I did research on the cover story, you know,” Charlie said. “I even talked with some people from Mindanao — just to find out about your father-in-law’s investments there.”

“Well?”

Charlie leaned over. “Your grandfather, how was he dispossessed? How did he and all other Ilocano settlers in your town lose their farms?”

“I’ve told you,” Tony said wearily. “But it was different then. My grandfather … he was learned, but he was alone. The landmarks that they had — the mounds, the trees, the creeks — were swallowed up by the landlords when they had the land surveyed for Torrens titles. But I’m not bitter about that anymore.”

“You have a short memory,” Godo said bluntly, “and, of course, that’s understandable. You are living it up, you are a landlord now.”

“I resent that,” Tony said hotly.

“But it is true,” Charlie said evenly. “Why don’t you go to Mindanao as I have? There are hundreds of Ilocano settlers there now. And they are being dispossessed right and left. By learned men like Don Manuel Villa. Ask your father-in-law about his lumber concessions. Check up on the haciendas under his name. You want land reform, don’t you? You said in your thesis that the revolution had agrarian undercurrents, didn’t you?”

“I do not deny that.”

“Well, the beginnings of another revolution are around us again. The Huks may have failed, but there is another uprising coming clearly and surely, and this time there is one unmistakable ideology behind it. The poor against the rich. And it will be a revolution that may wipe out this stinking society from its false moorings. And with the cataclysm, you may have to go,” Godo said.

“You are not frightening me,” Tony said without emotion. “The circumstances do not support you. Besides, we know better now — all of us. Power does not reside in the poor and it takes more than anger to move the world.”

“Yes, it takes more than anger. But how did the revolution start? What makes you so sure that, right now, there aren’t poor men like me who are plotting, thinking, devising ways for the time when all this rottenness will explode?” Godo asked.

“I will be prepared when that time comes,” Tony said evenly.

“There will also come a time when we will be face-to-face with ourselves not as we want ourselves to be regarded by others but as we really are. When that time comes, I’d sympathize with you,” Godo said.

“I regret nothing,” Tony said.

“Stop being so smug,” Godo told him.

“Stop being angry.”

“We cannot stop being angry,” Charlie said calmly. “We go about our dull routine, we get drunk on a bottle of beer, we look forward to the pleasures of fornication. And when all this is over, we are angry again. We who are trying to write, Tony — you know this, we talked about it in the good old days. We are the real revolutionists not only because we hate this quagmire but because in essence we reject all reality.”

“We must start from there,” Tony said.

“Yes, but just the same, we reject it,” Charlie said. “No, we don’t reject life, we love it. But we do not love hunger and illness and the despair they breed all around us. Hunger is real, Tony. You can see it in the villages, in my own neighborhood. You do not see it in Pobres Park — it is an academic thing to be discussed in the Villa Building and you do not feel it there. It takes the poor to understand poverty, you said that yourself. And whatever you say now, your friends in the Park would not understand, for if they do, they wouldn’t have gone there.”

“They are our people, too,” Tony said. “You know that ours is an open society. You can go up and down, right or left, to any distance or height you may want to reach. Everyone has a chance …”

“You are wrong,” Charlie said. “Not everyone has a chance. We … we are lucky in a way. How many artists, how many geniuses, how many great minds are aborted in the nameless villages and slums of this country because children don’t go on to college? Do you know, ninety percent of our children don’t go past the fourth grade because they cannot afford to? Universal education — that is one of the biggest jokes.”

“Maybe so,” Tony said. “But still, there are millionaires today who didn’t have a centavo to their name after the war.”

“But what happened after they got to the top?” Charlie asked. “They forgot those at the bottom of the heap. Perhaps we shouldn’t ask them to have a conscience. Perhaps all we need ask of them is vision.”

“Manuel Villa has vision,” Tony said.

“He does not have it anymore than Dangmount and his friends,” Charlie said sadly. “A chicken in every pot, a Ford in every garage. These are meaningless slogans, but the men who fashioned them had vision. America had her share of robber barons, but these same robber barons dreamed big dreams, empires, progress.”

“Pax Filipina,” Tony said.

“No, I don’t mean that,” Charlie said. “I am for Filipino entrepreneurs who can think of progress for this country, and not just of vacations in Europe, marble swimming pools, and a dozen mistresses.”

“I assure you,” Tony said, “there are men in the Park who think of progress for this country, too, because it means progress for them first. The poor do not have a monopoly on virtue, you know.”

Godo picked up the talk in anger again. “Are you trying to be comfortable in a place where you will never have real peace of mind?”

“What do you want me to do?” Tony said desperately. “Go home and run amok? Bring a hand grenade to the next board meeting of the Villa Development Corporation? Is that what you want?”

“Now you are talking sense,” Godo said in mock seriousness. “No, Sonny Boy, I don’t expect such heroics from you. I just want you to know how things stand. I have no illusions. My publisher is no different. Like your Don Manuel, as long as the money keeps pouring in, that’s okay with him. And us? He doesn’t even know I have a dying wife, that I live in an accesoria that stinks to high heaven. That’s the social order, Sonny Boy, and don’t you ever forget it!”

“I have enough problems,” Tony said lamely. “I try to be useful in the best way I can.”

“That’s nice to know,” Godo snorted. “It’s nice to hear that you are comfortable being a dummy.”

Tony was in no mood to argue; Godo and Charlie could still be useful to him, and they could help to publicize the steel mill again in another year or two. He held his tongue and said simply, “You are being nasty again.”

Charlie smiled. “There are many things that were left out in that write-up, Tony. And you know just what I mean.”

“No, I don’t.” Tony tried to be vehement.

Godo grinned. “You mean to tell me that you don’t know that the Villa steel mill is owned by Japanese, Americans, and Chinese? Do you mean to tell me that you never knew the firms list Senator Reyes as their counsel? Or that Senator Reyes is a member of your board?”

“I know,” Tony said morosely.

Godo rattled off the names. “Dangmount, Saito, and the Chinese millionaire Johnny Lee.”

“They are on the board, but what difference does that make?” he asked, feigning ignorance, remembering what Don Manuel had said about his being in the family now.

“They control the stocks, son,” Godo leveled a finger at him. “And your father-in-law is a dummy in spite of his wealth. Don’t let Senator Reyes and his talk of nationalism fool you as he has fooled almost everyone else. He is in the employ of the monopolists and the sugar people — another vested group. Aside, of course, from working for your father-in-law.”

Tony sneered. “Why didn’t you print the story as you saw it, then?” He leaned over and spoke softly for a moment. “Look, I had thought that perhaps you would do just that. Deep inside I always believed you were brave, Godo, that you wouldn’t pull your punches.” Then, his voice rising, “I’m tired of polemics and excuses. And you’re just giving me one more lousy excuse.”

Charlie smiled laconically again. “Ah, Tony, the things we can’t print. The publisher has to make money and we have to live on the ads your father-in-law and his friends place in the magazine.”

“In other words, you are not pure.”

“I have never claimed purity,” Godo said, “but I’m honest with myself. I hope you can say the same, Tony.”

“Look,” Tony said solemnly. “What is it that you want? My skin? In college— Let me tell you about my old roommate, Lawrence Bitfogel. The three of you would make excellent bedfellows. He believed in revolution as an alternative. But it is too late for us to engage in that. You know what happened to my grandfather and my father? The Huks. The weapons have changed, but I don’t think you realize that.”

“Yeah,” Godo snickered. “Sex is the weapon. Marry the landlord’s daughter — or Don Manuel’s.”

The blood warmed in Tony’s temples.

“The Ilocano settlers in Mindanao … the pattern is clear,” Charlie repeated.

“I can’t comment on that,” Tony shot back. “Don Manuel has reasons, and everything — I’m sure of that — must be legal.”

“Legal!” Godo exploded. “Yes, corruption is now legal. And tyranny, too. And deception. Everything is legal.”

“I don’t care anymore,” Tony said wearily. “There’s no sense in going against the wave, against all of you. I want to run away.” He checked himself, for Godo was looking at him intently.

“Where will you go? Back to America and its comforts?”

“I just don’t know,” Tony said weakly. “But another revolution is so cheap, so commonplace. Perhaps if we killed ourselves instead …”

They parted on that note. It was not yet eleven and Tony decided to return to his office and try to shake off the malaise of the encounter. He did not want to remember what Charlie had said about Mindanao and the settlers. He tried to place the subject in a hidden corner of his mind and ignore it. He decided to return to his grandfather’s journal. The labor would dispel the anguish of the day and all the discomforts he felt from meeting with Godo and Charlie.

Before noon someone came to see him — a relative from Pangasinan, according to his secretary. No one had visited him in the past few days, no one from the old crowd at the university, least of all someone from home.

Bettina.

He remembered Bettina as a lanky kid with pigtails, climbing guava trees in the backyard of the old house in Rosales, and as a visitor to Manang Betty’s accesoria one dry season. An inquisitive youngster who had wanted to see all of the city during those two vacation months, she was always out the whole day visiting places like Tondo and San Nicolas, which he had never bothered to see, until her older sister Emy became concerned and put a stop to her wanderings.

Now Tony studied the neat, girlish scrawl on the visiting card. A pang of homesickness possessed him, and in this cool, anesthetized room, a host of remembered images bloomed in the recesses of his mind — the Cabugawan of yesteryears; the small, thatched houses; the broken-down fences; and beyond these the eternal fields of gold and green. He rose and strode out. She saw him first and she stood up, smiled shyly, and reminded him at once of his own youth, of the things that were, of Rosales. She was a young woman now in her early twenties or late teens. Somehow, the provinciana^† character was discernible in her, in her lips, which were not painted; her shoes, which were cheap pumps; her cheap printed dress; and her bare arms browned by the sun.

“Bettina, I’m so happy to see you,” was all he could say and he took her hand as he used to, then led her away from the curious gaze of the other visitors.

Alone in his office, Tony looked at her closely. “I never thought you’d come and see me,” he said. “You don’t know how nice it is to see someone from home.”

They sat together on the sofa. “Do you want anything to drink? Coffee? I know, stay for a while and I’ll treat you to lunch. We can eat in one of the restaurants near here and then you can tell me everything about what’s happening in Rosales. And Emy— I’m starved for news about her. How is she?”

For the first time she looked at him fully. “She’s well,” she said simply.

“I’m happy to know that,” he said, meaning every word. “Tell me, what can I do for you? I haven’t seen anyone from Rosales for a very long time. I miss the place, but I can’t seem to get away from here so I can have a breath of fresh air.”

Bettina clasped her hands. “I know you are always busy and that’s why I came here myself. Manang Betty said that I shouldn’t bother you like this. Am I bothering you, Manong?”

He laughed. “Of course not,” he said. “When could Bettina bother her cousin? Remember, it’s been years since I saw you. And look at you now, so grown-up. It’s about time you get married.”

“That’s not an easy thing to do,” she said, blushing. Then her eyes crinkled in a smile. “A man must first love you and be faithful to you, no matter what happens.”

“Don’t be too choosy,” Tony said, laughing. “You’ll end up being an old maid.”

Bettina turned away.

“If it’s a job you need,” Tony said, “I can help you get one.…”

“No,” she said hurriedly and faced him again. “It’s not a job, Manong. You can help me when I am ready. Now … now, I … I had to stop schooling — after Father died. There wasn’t enough money.…”

“I’m sorry,” Tony said softly. “I was in Europe when I learned about it. But still, if you want me to, I can help send you to school. I’m helping Manang Betty’s children now. I can really help,” he said eagerly.

“I know, but …”

He leaned over, the better to catch every word, for now he realized that she had come to tell him something important, much more important than a job or the need to go to school.

“Manang Emy— she will never forgive me for this,” she said. “Promise me that you won’t tell her that it was I who came and told you. She will kill me if she learns.”

Tony did not speak. He nodded dumbly.

“I’m returning home right away, this afternoon. I saved enough money for this trip. I told her I was going to Dagupan, not to Manila. I’m going home and what I will tell you, please, let this stay with you, only you.”

Tony leaned forward. A moistness was gathering in the girl’s eyes and in a while she was crying softly, the stifled sobs shaking her.

“She did not want you to know,” she said, “but she couldn’t hide it from me any longer. Six years she hid it from everyone. All your letters, all you wrote from America — she kept them all. She reads them and sometimes cries over them. And that’s how I found out. She couldn’t hide anything from me. We have grown so close to each other, particularly after Father died and there was no one in the house but us and her little son.”

“Yes?” he asked in a voice that was not his. “Do you mean to tell me that the boy is mine?” But even when Bettina had given him the answer he both expected and dreaded, he was being lifted away from this air-conditioned office to that drab, old room in Antipolo that he had shared with Emy. A wistfulness commingled with remorse, filled him.

“She should have told me. Why didn’t she tell me this?” he asked desperately. “If I had only known. Why didn’t she tell me?”

Bettina spoke huskily. “You know the answer to that.” After a brief silence: “I hope you don’t misunderstand. Emy did not send me here — that is something she would never do. It’s just that Rosales, well, you know what the town has always been. Things haven’t changed. If only there was work to do, Manong. You must understand.”

Tony did not speak.

“I’m not blaming Manang Emy,” Bettina said. “Nor am I blaming you. But the boy, it’s him I’m worried about. He often asks me now who his father is, because the children — his classmates and the kids in the neighborhood — you know how Cabugawan is. It is so small that you cannot hide anything. What will happen when the boy finds out?”

“And what am I expected to do?” Tony rose and spoke sharply. “It’s all her fault. She never told me. I wrote and wrote to her and she never answered — only once and she didn’t tell me.”

For the first time Bettina flared up. “You don’t understand. She was thinking of you. Can’t you see? If she had written, if she had told you … can you imagine what would have happened? You were studying. Here was your chance to make something of yourself. Here was your chance to get out of Rosales and get something more than what Rosales could offer. It is that clear, Manong, and you haven’t even realized it.”

It didn’t sink into his consciousness at once and when it finally did, Tony knew what a fool he had been. Her faith — how beautiful it was! It could not be anything else but that — and the beauty of it sustained him through the years. The memory of Emy had made it easy for him to stave off his shameful physical hunger in those days when his allowance did not come on time and he had nothing to eat but stale bread and tea. And in the evenings, after he was through with his lessons and his papers, he would lie awake thinking of her, of the narrow room in Antipolo and the bittersweet memories it evoked, of the Igorot blanket strung across the room, and Emy behind the blanket, the trains whistling and thundering by, shaking the room, the whole house, and rattling them both. He brought to mind the old hometown, and how he and Emy had grown up together as only cousins in small towns did, and with a great ache welling inside him, he remembered how he once told her that someday, if he would ever marry, he would look for someone rich, so that he wouldn’t have to slave anymore, skin his knuckles, have a premature ache in his bones. He was in a jovial mood when he told her this. They were in Rosales, and beyond the coconut trees, the moon sailed in a velvet sky and they could hear the shouts of children playing patintero^‡ down the dusty street. In two months they would both leave Rosales with his sister Betty. He was in a jovial and expectant mood, but Emy must have taken him seriously, for after he had spoken she became silent and sullen.

Now that his halfhearted wish had come true, what did Emy think of him? Did she loathe him for having married Carmen Villa? The doubt that assailed him, the feeling that somehow Emy did not approve of what he had done, hurt him deeply.

I am not to blame, he said to himself, and besides, I’m not in love with her anymore. Emy belongs to the past. It’s Carmen I married and it’s Carmen I love.

But somehow the reiteration seemed hollow. He could cheat anyone, all of the professors in the university, all his friends, and even Carmen, but there was someone he could never lie to successfully — and that was himself.

* Mami: Noodle soup.

† Provinciana: Provincial; masculine form: provinciano.

‡ Patintero: A game usually played in the moonlight.

CHAPTER 13

It was an ordinary town whose life was shaped by the seasons, the planting and the harvesting of rice, and the drudgery and the idleness between. Years ago, when it was a mere sitio of ten or a dozen cogon huts, a Spanish Dominican friar on his way to Cagayan Valley passed it. June — and he came upon those bushes crowned with white, fragrant flowers. The bush was called rosal, and the town, which had an abundance of them, was baptized Rosales.

Many of the bushes were still in the churchyard, in the cemetery, and along the streets when Tony left Rosales. Their flowering marked the coming of the rains, the advent of the planting season, and the town fiesta. Tony always associated the town fiesta with rain because it was held in June — on the feast day of San Antonio de Padua — and June was always a rainy month. He liked the fiesta, with its rice-planting and flooded paddies; it was the paddies, of all the things he had left behind, that he remembered best, the brown mud, the growing rice, the frogs and the freshwater crabs, and the smell of earth touched by rain. But the paddies also brought to mind things that had nothing to do with grain and growth — his father, an embittered rebel, and his grandfather, who took a whole clan from the wretched narrowness and persecution of the Ilocos to the broad plains of Rosales, who joined the revolution and fell in some nameless battlefield.

Homecoming could be pleasant if it did not stir, as it did now, an ancient sorrow and that sense of utter inability to undo what had been done. When he stepped down from the air-conditioned coach in Paniqui an urge to rush back to the train or catch the next bus to Manila took hold of him. The helplessness was now compounded with a sense of guilt.

The train connection was waiting on the tracks beyond the cement platform, a battered diesel trolley with peeling orange paint, the black hump of its exhaust shaking and spewing thin wisps of gray smoke.

Tony went to it. The day was unusually humid and the fumes from the engine stung his nostrils. The wooden benches were wobbly and decrepit. Bamboo baskets, most of them empty, a few still filled with greens and bars of soap, lay on the well-scuffed wooden floor. Farm women talked in quiet tones around him. Their faces were dark with sun and work, and he could tell at a glance that they were homely, with sagging breasts and horned hands. They smoked cheap, hand-rolled tobacco-leaf cigars, and the smoke from their constant puffing and their earthy smell were all around him.

In a while the train started. It quavered along the rails, and as its whistle blew, choked and discordant, a sense of urgency filled him. He was going to Rosales after seven years, years that seemed no longer than a week or a month. In that time he had established himself in a precinct much more comfortable and secure than he had ever dreamed of. There, in that new domain, the past could not reach out and claim him. But it did hound him. How could he ever escape the tenacious grasp of conscience? He glanced about him and saw again the tired, deathless face of endurance of the common people. Day as bright as glass lay on the fields. Years ago, when he left Rosales, he was on this train and beside him was a girl named Emy, barely eighteen. It was April and the sun was a brown flood upon the land. She was beside him, fragrant of skin and breath. Years ago … and now he was returning to Cabugawan, to Emy, and to an uncertainty.

The fields that slipped by were a shimmering monotony. The trolley picked up speed, slid noisily along the rails, and the wind that whipped into the coach blew the dust up from the wooden floor. Every so often he could predict the approach of a whistle stop, for the trolley would screech and the rhythm of its engine would diminish. Then they would be upon the small sheds marked by rusting steel posts with painted names.

They drew into the town of Nampicuan, and beyond it loomed a bald, cogon-covered hill. Cuyapo was next, and after the foothills through whose shallow valleys the trolley sang, he finally saw the plain. At right rose the hump of Balungao Mountain, and at left Rosales declared itself — a patchwork of tin rooftops, rice mills framed in the white heat, and the shapeless houses of all small towns.

The trip from Paniqui took barely an hour, but it seemed less. I’m going to my son — he turned the words over in his mind — my son, for it was really to his son he was going, and Emy, whose stoic silence he could not fully understand even now. My son — he savored the words again, hoping they would pry from him some new or unusual response, an identifying sentiment perhaps. But no such feeling was evoked, because he had not seen the boy, he had not watched him grow or smelled his sweet baby breath.

My son — and a huge wave of remorse swept over him again, a living sadness reminding him that, maybe, it was not too late to learn to love this child who was his very own. How would the boy receive him? Would the boy rush up to him to be swept up in his arms? Now it was no longer sadness that bridled him but a feeling that was almost fear. He did not want to be hated, not even by a boy who was, after all, no common lad — and who was Emy’s, too.

He went down to the broad cement platform. The station had not changed — it was the same old stone building with galvanized iron roof painted dirty cream. The chicken fence still enclosed a yard planted to rows of gumamela^* and papaya that never bore fruit. He went to the ticket window and asked the clerk when the train would start back for Manila. The clerk peered at him through cracked bifocals. The train would leave at three in the afternoon.

In the palisaded yard at the other end of the platform he boarded a carretela. The rig driver took him across the bridge and through the mounds of rice husks that the mills had spewed out. Then they were in the town, the old skinny mare jogging evenly.

How compact the town appeared — and how small. He saw it once more: the municipal building surrounded by banaba^† trees, the tin roof shining in the sun. It was, of course, not the building that he knew when he was a boy — not the wooden edifice his father and his friends had burned in an evening of senseless, futile fury. The ruins had been quickly cleared away, a new building of stone had been erected, and the saplings that were planted had become these trees, these banaba with their purple blossoms, these broad acacia, and these agoho that soared as gracefully as the cypress.

But beyond the municipio,^† in the wide vacant yard, the ruins of the Apo’s house still stood, the broken brick walls covered with cadena de armor.^‡ No one had cleared the wide yard, and it was completely shrouded with weeds. The Rich Man’s relatives had never visited Rosales, not after what had happened, and it was just as well that the old brick mansion was never rebuilt, for now these very ruins were here to speak a stern language, a warning and a vicious reminder of a past that could be conjured still. What an arrangement it was then — the municipal building, the Rich Man’s house, the whitewashed monument of Rizal, the stone schoolhouse, and the Catholic church. These were the ageless constructions that made up the Filipino plaza. Now the hacendero’s mansion was gone. What would disappear next and what unknown force would demolish the next marker in this ancient grouping?

He did not stay long. His destination was beyond — Cabugawan, the sitio his grandfather founded, the corner wherein his father had raised him and told him of other places, of the Ilocos and the frothy sea and of the town of Cabugaw where they all came from. It was after this town in the far-off Ilocos, this ancestral home, that Cabugawan was named. The first settlers had not intended to stop here. They had hoped to cross the Cordillera range to Cagayan Valley, but in Rosales they came across these cogon wastes and still-virgin forest, so they unhitched their bull-carts, unloaded the sagat^§ posts of the houses they had uprooted in the Ilocos, and decided to try their luck in Rosales. The land was kind and the creek that ran through Cabugawan seldom ran dry. In time more Ilocanos came to Rosales. At first they came to help in the cutting of the grain and to glean the already harvested fields, but there was plenty of room for those who wanted to work, and so they lingered to build their own homes and risk the future. Like his grandfather, they did not reckon with the greed of the ilustrados. In another generation the settlers had become tenants. The families broke up. Some continued the long march to Cagayan Valley, others dared to cross the sea to the malarial jungles of Mindanao, still others were herded like cattle into cargo ships that took them to the pineapple and sugar plantations of Hawaii and the orange groves of California. But wherever they went they brought with them their traditional industry, thrift, and perseverance, and wherever they sank their posts their communities grew, linking them all with that clannishness they themselves could not explain. Those who stayed behind in Cabugawan were the least fortunate. They were born as tenants and they would die as such, unless they managed to get a little schooling and, with this initial strength, escape the lethargy of Cabugawan, to strike out for the uncertainty of tedious jobs in Manila, to live in dingy accesorias, such as those that cluttered Antipolo.

Beyond the houses were clumps of bamboo, and beyond the bamboo were the fields his grandfather had cleared.

Cabugawan was the past and the present, never the future. The immensity of this fact was all around him — the cluster of thatched houses, the smell of slow decay under the kitchens, the manure of pigs and work animals, the broken-down fences.

The house where Emy lived was bigger than most of the houses in the sitio. It was roofed with cogon like the rest, but its posts were broad and solid parunapin;^a and the bamboo for the floor had been carefully selected and dried. Emy’s father, who was his father’s brother, had boasted once that not even termites as big as cockroaches could bite into it. Now, to him whose mind was inured to the broad, soaring dimensions of the city, the house appeared pathetically small, and smaller yet were the houses around it.

The lone dirt road of Cabugawan was quiet. A few pigs grunted and wallowed in a side ditch. The sun played on the marunggay trees and the gumamela hedges. Nearing Emy’s house at the far end of the road, his legs became wobbly and his heart thumped so loud he could hear it.

He pushed the bamboo gate and walked up the gravel path. The San Francisco hedge that lined it was taller now. Within the house a figure scurried to the door.

“Manong, come up,” Bettina said happily, going down two rungs of the ladder.

“It’s good to be here,” he said lightly.

He went up with her and at the top of the flight, his eyes still unused to the dimness of corners, he looked around him. At one end of the house, in the kitchen, were the earthen drinking jars, the sooty cubicle where the stoves slumped, and to his right was the living room, its door bright with cotton curtains. Across the shiny bamboo floor two wide sash windows framed dangling pots of begonia. The wall clock on the bare post was no longer ticking. Its pendulum was still. On the sawali^b wall that separated the living room from the single bedroom of the house hung Emy’s high school diploma. The whole house smelled clean and lived-in.

Bettina led him to the living room and bade him sit on the rattan sofa by the window. Before him was a glass-topped table with a crocheted doily, an album of pictures, and tattered magazines.

“And Emy?” he asked.

“She’s not at home right now, and I’m glad.” The girl sat beside him. “I’m sorry I ever went to Manila to see you. I shouldn’t have gone at all.”

“It was best that you did.”

Bettina drew away. “No,” she said. “I had to tell her that I saw you. It would change things, I hoped. I doubt it now.”

From the direction of the stairs: “Tina, did Mrs. Salcedo come for her dress? I’m so tired. I couldn’t finish it today.”

Bettina stood up. He followed her to the door but didn’t go beyond the curtains. Emy stood there, big as life, grown older now and slimmer, and on her face were the cares of motherhood that had come too soon.

“Tony, you haven’t changed at all,” she said almost in a whisper, the recognition in her voice dull and empty, as if she did not want to utter his name. She stood there, her hands limp at her sides, her fragile face a shadow of her youth. And in that instant, as the truth clawed at him, he wanted to hold her, to touch her face and trace the lines on it with his fingers, and tilt her chin to feel the warmth of her lips. But it would not be right anymore; he had become another man and was not who he had once been. He had come looking for what he had lost in another time and another land or, perhaps, in his own mind. He could not be sure now. He was sure only of this woman before him, not the girl he had known but a woman who had suffered alone. It was not my fault, it was not my fault, he thought, attempting to exculpate himself.

“Tony,” she repeated, “you didn’t have to come — or believe Bettina.” To her sister, who hovered wordless nearby, she said, serenely: “And you, what is cooking in the kitchen? Oh, you should prepare something, something …”

“I’m not staying for lunch.” Tony wanted to be polite, but Emy would have none of it. She did not even let him finish. She turned, saying, “I must go down and get something for you — a soft drink and, yes, you must have lunch with us.”

She ran down the stairs, her handkerchief pressed to her mouth.

Tony sat back amid the noiseless whirl of welcome. Bettina was enthusiastic again: “I have been reading the things you wrote and, of course, Manang Emy has clipped them all. You should see the scrapbook she made. Ask her when she returns. She locks it in there,” she said, pointing to the aparador with a glass door at one end of the living room. “But you haven’t written anything for a long time.”

“A year,” he told her.

“What’s the matter? You don’t have the time anymore?”

“It isn’t that,” he said. Gathering courage, he asked, “How is he?”

“Who?”

“The boy.”

“Pepe? He is fine. But he won’t be here until lunch time. School, you know.”

“What grade is he in?”

“First. A very smart boy. You are not going to teach again?”

“Not anymore,” he said dully.

She betrayed her disappointment. “Manong,” Bettina said, “you should keep on writing.” A hissing sound came from the kitchen and the girl stood up. “It’s the rice I’m cooking,” she said.

She did not join them when Emy returned with a bottle of Coca-Cola. It was warm and it was only out of politeness that he accepted the drink. She sat on the chair opposite him — dear Emy — and her eyes were lustrous.

She spoke naturally and with ease. “Tell me about yourself. What have you been doing? Bettina tells me that you are no longer at the university. And you worked so hard for that job. What are you doing now?” She piled the questions one on top of the other and did not give him much of a chance to talk.

“I’m working in an office,” he said, looking at her, thinking of her as he knew her, and his answers were too concise, but she did not seem to care.

“How long ago did you return? You’ve stopped writing, I heard. No, it’s not your fault. I understand. You said that you wanted to go to Spain. Tell me about Spain. Oh, Tony, you have so many things to tell me. And I’m so eager to hear. Remember all the plans you had, the places you wanted to visit? How you would go sailing up the Volga and the Yangtze if you had your way? How many great rivers did you cross?”

“Not many,” he said. “Yes, I remember all that I told you in Antipolo.”

Then silence came between them, a heavy and meaningful silence.

When she spoke again her voice was wistful. “I’m happy for you. Don’t feel sorry for me. Life is difficult — that’s to be expected. But you know how life in Rosales always is.”

“I had difficult times, too,” Tony said. “There was a winter I almost starved. I had to walk great distances. It was not easy living in America. The fellowship was not enough. I had to work in the summers. It was hard work.”

“I wish I could have helped you,” Emy said with sympathy. “But I couldn’t, Tony. I couldn’t …” and her voice trailed off into silence again.

“I thought of you a lot of times. Many times,” Tony said after a while, and, speaking thus, he could not look at this woman who had borne his child, who had loved him and cherished his memory. “I couldn’t understand why it turned out this way. I should have come to you right away when I got back. But Manong Bert … when I got home,” he paused and the words knotted in his throat, “he said many things. Manang Betty, too. That you had gone wild. You never wrote to me and it was so easy to believe all that I heard.…”

“Oh, Tony! How could you believe such things?” she said softly and tears filled her eyes. “How could you think of me that way?”

He turned away, unable to look at her. “Forgive me,” he stammered. “Emy, please forgive me.”

She was sobbing quietly now. “Those days,” she said after a while, “I was so alone. I couldn’t tell anyone — no one.” She turned to him, the tears glistening in her eyes. “At first I wanted to have the baby removed. I wanted that desperately. I thought about it. I stayed out late, even hoping that some accident would happen to me. Then I thought of you and how you would feel. And somehow it wasn’t so dark anymore. I knew that someday you would find out, someday you would return. That was why I went home, not caring anymore about what people would think.”

“Believe me,” he said tremulously, Tm sorry. I prayed for you. I thought of you. I was lonely and frightened many times. But when I thought of you …”

Her hand slid into his, but she did not clasp it. Her touch was not a caress. It was just a gesture that she understood. “I always knew that you’d be somebody and that you’d come back important, someone we could all look up to.”

This was Emy — the Emy he knew. She had not quite freed herself from the embrace of an old, banished dream.

“What do the neighbors say?” he asked after a while.

“About you? They all know that you have become important. But they … they are what they will always be, Tony. You can’t move away from this place. You have known that all along — you and I.”

That was it — both of them understood the great and staggering distance he had finally spanned. “Son,” his father had told him once, “it takes those who have suffered to understand and be kind to the suffering.” Those were the days his father had carried him on his shoulders and they had gone to the caving banks of the creek. There they had caught shrimps and, beyond the creek, in the delta, they had planted watermelons. It was there that his father had cleared the land and there, too, the sky was kind and the field bountiful. But the ilustrados came armed with cadastres and Torrens titles. The ilustrados dispossessed his father and his grandfather, and in time the land became anonymous and cramped. Beyond the plain even the infertile hills were plowed, the grass was burned, and at night the hills glowed as flames licked the skies. But even when the hills were bald at last, the grain that was planted there was not enough. False lawyers came to their house and promised aid. Flushed and happy, his mother had busted her bamboo bank open and handed the lawyers her savings — coins grown greenish with mold. The lawyers left and afterward he heard the hollow laughter of his father. They had all been cheated. And then there was more: the Rich Man came and demanded the grain in the granaries. This was when his father had said, “This time, it will be my way.” His father went away for days and when he returned he wore this red band across his chest. He had become a colorum, a rebel. It was that way with his father, it was that way with his grandfather, and it would be that way with all men who lose hope.

But it would be different with him. While the old rage was quiet now it still pulsed faintly within him — to remind him that here in Cabugawan was the beginning of perception, and here he should be true. But even Cabugawan had been conveniently forgotten. He did not want to dwell on empty phrases, but he could not bring himself to be blunt, not to Emy. “I could have come here last May when I arrived.…”

“You didn’t,” she said simply.

“There were many things I had to do. The university … well, I told you that education means so much nowadays. I had to make sure of my position there. And then I got into trouble with Dean Lopez. But I haven’t lost the interest I’ve always had. Remember how I used to tell you about going back to the Ilocos to trace our grandfather’s past?”

She leaned toward him, her face alight with expectation. “Yes — and what did you find?”

“A book written by him. He was a wise man, all right — and a brave man, just as Father said.”

He stood up and looked out the window, to the now vacant lot where their old house once stood. He could see it now — the pitched grass roof, the buri^c sidings, and the granary behind it. Where the well used to be was a shallow indention now. Beyond the vacant yard was the alley that dipped down to the banks of the creek where he and the children of Cabugawan used to swim.

“What is the book like?” she asked.

“It’s in Latin and I can’t understand all of it. I’ll show it to you when you come to Manila. Would you like to go to Cabugaw one of these days? It’s not a big town, Emy, but it is well-preserved.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I’d like to see places — visit Antipolo, too, and Manang Betty, but I can’t. I’m not like you, Tony. Here,” she became apologetic, “here, every centavo means much. You understand …”

He nodded and sat back. He picked up the glass of warm Coca-Cola and drank all of it.

“What have you been doing with yourself?” he asked.

“What else? Making a living,” she pointed to the sewing machine — an old Singer — by the window. Beside it was a glass case with a few folded dresses. “You don’t know how fortunate I have been. Almost all the important people here are my customers, even the mayor’s wife. I didn’t know that it was easy to sew.”

That was not what he wanted to know, so he told her, “I want to help. Please let me.”

“Help me? I don’t need any help.”

“Please don’t speak to me like this. I’ve suffered, it’s true.”

“And I? Father— Before he died he beat me as if I were a beast of burden. But I did not tell him. Or anyone. I kept it all to myself, until Bettina …”

“Oh, Emy …”

“There was no other way.”

“You could have written to me and told me and I would have hurried home. If you had only answered my letters!”

“Oh, God,” she said, her voice almost a moan. “We are cousins, have you forgotten that? How could I tell you? And besides—”

“It wouldn’t have mattered.”

She went on, not minding him: “Both of us— We are older now, we can look back. I would have been a weight on your shoulders.”

“And how did I feel?”

“That isn’t all,” she said, bending forward. “You were alone in America, and it was your studies that mattered most. Then I learned about you and Carmen Villa.…”

Even as she spoke, even as she sat beside him, who had now grown thin and ravaged by work, he could still trace the fine contour of her face and, hearing her, he sank back to another time.

“I did not want to stand in your way,” she said softly.

“How is the boy?” he asked, not caring to talk about his wife.

She was filled with pride. “He’s a fine boy — and think, he is in grade one now! He is bright. I don’t help him with his homework.”

“How does he look?”

“He has your eyes. And his family name is Samson.”

The old anguish lashed at him. “Emy, why didn’t you tell me? It would have been so simple and everything would have been all right.”

“What are you complaining about?” she asked. “You are doing well. And look at us, at Bettina — she can’t even go to college.”

“Emy …” his voice trailed of into silence. Then he straightened and faced her again. “There must be something I can do.”

“There’s always something you can do.”

“Let me take him with me. Let me bring him to the city.”

Her answer was quick. “And what will your wife say?”

“I’ll find a way.”

She smiled wryly. “And when you have children, what then?”

Tony spoke slowly, as if he was ashamed of what he had to say. “Carmen— She does not want a baby. She could have had one, but last July … she aborted.”

A complaint was stifled in her throat. “And it has to be my child. You can adopt one — it’s so easy nowadays.”

“I am thinking of the boy. It would mean a load off your back.” He swept the room with one knowing glance. “And besides, I can give him a better education, so many things in life you won’t be able to give. He will go to the best schools — even to the United States afterward. He will not know hunger and want. This is for the best, Emy, I’ll tell Carmen the boy is mine—”

She cut him off. “It’s all very clear.” Bitterness tinged her voice. “Now money is everything — everything. You came here not because you want to. Tony, what has happened to you? You did not talk like this before. You did not mention hunger and money before as if these were all that mattered.” Then she asked, “What has happened to you? What has changed you.”

He could not shut off from his ears the words that implied his destruction. “You don’t have to hurt me further,” he said humbly. “Isn’t it enough that I am here, unable to look after the boy and see him grow?”

“He will grow up properly,” she said.

“You are strong,” he said. “I would like to say that I’m weak, but I don’t want to make excuses.”

“Stop talking like that! Look at me, at my hands. What do you see? Years. What have I done? Look at him when he comes. I haven’t complained.”

“What do you want me to do then, for you and the boy?”

“Nothing,” she said, the pride shining again in her eyes like jewels. Her hands were on the windowsill. Beyond the window the sun dripped white. She wanted nothing and she was right. She had always been able to take care of herself anywhere, even here in Cabugawan, where dreaming had stopped and the only certitude was the bondage of the fields beyond.

“Be honest with me,” he asked her.

“I have never lied to you,” she said. “Have I ever? You were everything. I looked up to you. This place cannot produce another like you. It just won’t happen anymore. Father, before he died, said this, too. We all know this.”

“Tell me then where I have failed.”

“It’s too late,” she murmured, looking away.

“Do you still believe in me?”

“Yes … yes.” She was alive again. “Why shouldn’t I believe in you?”

“Will you do what I will ask of you?”

“Anything,” she said with alacrity. “I’ll do anything, but please, Tony, don’t ask me to give up the boy. He is all that I have. Please believe that.”

“Even if it would be for the best?”

“You are not the one to decide that,” she said. “Look at you, the years that you were away. I slaved for the boy. I want him to grow up like you, Tony. And someday he will leave Cabugawan, too. And when he does I’ll see to it that he doesn’t forget where he came from.”

“I haven’t forgotten anyone,” Tony said lamely.

“I’m sure of that,” she said, but there was no conviction in her voice.

Tony glanced at his watch. It was almost twelve and in a while the shrill blast of the rice-mill whistle near the railroad station came to them.

“He will be here soon,” Emy said. “It’s a short walk from the school — if he hasn’t stopped to play.”

His legs felt watery again and his heart thumped. “What will I tell him?” he asked, hoping that she would help him.

Emy did not answer. She clasped her hands and looked away.

“Tell me that I’m useless,” he stumbled on the words.

“You aren’t,” she said.

He got up and stood by the window, remembering the schoolhouse, the stone porch, and the gumamela hedges, the mango tree in the yard, Emy in pigtails when she was young and in bare feet, cleaning the schoolroom with coconut husk.

“There he is now,” Emy said behind him. He turned to see at the far end of the street the boy walking toward the house, a bundle of books under his arm. He asked in a strangled voice, “Tell me, what should I tell him?” He turned to her and her face was calm.

“The truth,” she said. “Someday he will find out, and when he does I want him to know it from you. He has asked me and I’ve told him what there is to tell.”

“And what is that?”

“I used to hope that when you returned you would remember. So I told him that his father was in some distant land. That was what I could honestly say. And then …” she stopped and looked away, her lips trembling, “and then I found out that you had gotten married. I wished you well, Tony. But the boy— When he asked me again I said that I did not know where his father was. I hadn’t heard and perhaps I would never hear from his father again. I told him to get used to that, growing up without having his father around.”

As the footsteps sounded on the gravel path, as the rungs of the bamboo ladder creaked under his puny weight, in Tony’s mind the words formed: I am your father. I am your father.…

But he did not speak aloud when the boy was finally before him, slender of build, with soft hair and eyes as dark and lustrous as his mother’s; any man would have been proud to have someone like this young thing, barefoot and brown from the sun, with a firm chin. Yes, anyone would have been proud to claim this boy as his son.

Tony was proud, but only for an instant, for his pride turned quickly into confusion and even despair as the boy turned to his mother and kissed her lightly on the cheek. To the boy Emy said quietly, “Go to him, Pepe, and kiss his hand.”

Their eyes met and there could have been recognition and that spark of genuine affinity that comes only between a father and his son, but when their eyes met he only felt that he was a stranger to this boy and that he no longer belonged to this small, stifling room.

To him the boy went, but Tony did not extend his right hand as Emy had wanted. Kneeling down, he held the boy instead, held him close to his chest, felt the boy’s quick breathing upon his face and smelled the sun upon his son’s skin. Much as he wanted to proclaim to this boy that he had found his father, the words in his mind would not take shape, and he could only say, in a voice filled with emotion and tenderness, “Son, son,” and this boy, this six-year-old innocent, escaped from his clumsy embrace and rushed back to his mother. Then, wordless, the young eyes still questioning. What is in his young mind now? What does he think of me? Is it time to tell him everything or must he find out the truth in his own time and in his own way?

The question was like thunder in the narrow room: “Is he my father, Mama?”

An eternity slipped by, and in this eternity Antonio Samson died. He did not speak, and when the silence was broken it was Emy who said, “No, Pepe. He is not your father. He is a dear, old friend, a relative, someone from this place who thinks he loves all of us.”

* Gumamela: Hibiscus.

† Banaba: A tree with medicinal leaves and flowers.

‡ Municipio: The town hall.

§ Cadena de amor: A climbing vine with small pink flowers (literally “chain of love,” Sp.).

‖ Sagat: The hardest Philippine wood; it is used for house posts and railroad ties.

a Parunapin: A type of hardwood tree.

b Sawali: A coarse twilled matting of flattened bamboo strips used in the Philippines for partitions, walls, and baskets.

c Buri: Talipot palm; a showy fan palm of the Philippines.

CHAPTER 14

It was early evening when Tony reached home. Carmen was out and the maid simply said that Ben had picked her up at sundown. He brought his manuscripts out and went through them again, but the urge to work escaped him. At suppertime, when Carmen was not yet back, he went down to dinner without her.

“Ah, Tony,” Don Manuel looked up from a batch of papers beside his soup. “I thought you wouldn’t return tonight. Remind me to show you something tomorrow.”

“There wasn’t much to do in the old hometown, Papa.” He had lied about the trip and said that he would stand as sponsor at a baptism. “I think I wasted my time. You know how baptisms are.”

Mrs. Villa, her hair done up in pins, her flabby face oily with cleansing cream, nudged her husband. “Better tell Tony that, with the factory almost finished, there’s got to be something social about it. A big party. I’ll think up one. And this means that there will be more work for him. And the opening celebration — that’s the most important thing. Let’s get the President and the First Lady.”

“I think that’s your department, Tony,” Don Manuel said. “Tomorrow we will have the last transformer installed and then in the afternoon we hope to have a trial run of all units. I leave it all to you — the plans for the opening, all the ballyhoo you can cook up.”

“The plans will be tentative, Papa …”

“It’s all yours as long as you show me your plans tomorrow and we can talk them over.”

Tony idled through the meal, and when it was over he rushed back to the room and took a warm shower. The shower should have relaxed him, but it didn’t. If Carmen were only here now, perhaps she would understand and be sympathetic, tell him to do what was right.

He tried once more to attend to the manuscripts on which he had been working, but the words would not take shape, and the cohesion that would string his thoughts in an orderly fashion just would not come. The notes on the migration to Mindanao, for instance, did not jell and he found himself repeating the same tired phrases about the courage of the Ilocanos, their adventurous nature and their capacity to retain their identity even when they were surrounded by a polyglot of Muslim and Visayan farmers.

He went to bed with a detective story, but that was useless, too. He was already asleep when Carmen switched on the chandelier, which flooded the room with its bright, pinkish glow.

“Where have you been?” he asked, blinking in the light. He glanced at the clock near the bed. It was two o’clock in the morning.

“Stop it,” she said hotly. “Do you have to know everything I do, examine everything I tell you to see if I’m lying? I’ve been with Ben. He had to take me to the rehearsal because you weren’t in — you were in that hick town of yours.”

He rose and found his slippers. He walked to her. “I’m not cross-examining you. I just want to know where you have been. I’m your husband, am I not?”

There was no belligerence in his voice and he laid a hand softly on her shoulders. She shook the hand off and faced him. “I have to be frank with you, Tony,” she said, frowning. “You know damn well I’ve a life to live, too, and I’m not to be cooped up here. I have to have interests. If they keep me out the whole night, you have to be understanding. I understood you enough to have gone with you to look up your crummy ancestors.”

Her manner defied explanation. It annoyed him but only for an instant, because he had something much more important to tell her.

He held her and looked into her eyes and said, “Baby, listen now. I meant to tell you this earlier, but I wasn’t sure. I’m sure now because … well, I have been there.”

“You are talking in riddles,” she said, unmindful of what he was saying. She took off her earrings and laid them on the dresser, then started undressing.

“This is important, baby.”

“All right,” she said, unbuttoning her dress with a hint of annoyance. “Is it something you have already done or something you are planning to do?”

“It has been done.…”

“Water under the bridge. Esto, if it’s done, then what’s the use telling me about it?”

“This is important — this thing I have to tell you. Listen, there was something in the past that I never told you. Seven years ago, before we met, when I was just a mere graduate assistant at the university, there was a girl …”

Carmen didn’t even look up. She had started brushing her hair.

“This doesn’t interest you?” he said.

“Of course it does, darling,” she said. “Everything you do interests me. Now go on with your delightful little story. Esto, I was beginning to think you had lived a puritanical life.”

“This girl, you must understand— I didn’t even know you then. And I didn’t expect it to happen, either.…”

“Those are famous last words.”

“It’s the truth. But that isn’t as bad as the fact that this girl is my cousin.”

Carmen turned to him and laughed merrily. “You need not feel so guilty about it, honey. It’s done all the time. Have you met Nora Lardizabal? Well, she’s married to her first cousin. Oye, you told me once about this being done by the hacenderos in your part of the country.… Well, it just happens that Nora’s parents are sugar planters. She isn’t a social outcast. She is very respectable.”

“You don’t understand, baby,” he said, shaking his head. “You don’t understand at all.”

“But I do, honey.”

“Would you still be smug if I told you there’s a child?”

She bolted up.

“There’s a boy,” he said, as if he were again at the confessional, and the confession was a growing flame in his throat. He waited for her to speak, but she did not. She merely looked at him, the beginning of a smirk playing on her face. Then she sat back and was silent.

“You don’t even want to know what happened? You don’t care about children and this particular child, my child?”

“Is there anything you want me to say — or do?”

“You can be angry with me, you can do something,” he said in quiet desperation. “After all, I had gone to Rosales to see for myself. It is true, honey. I saw Emy again and this child — this son of mine.”

“Well, can you change that?” she asked with hint of impatience. “If it’s your son, well, let him be your son. You are not going to turn away from him, are you?”

“No,” he said, amazed at her indifference.

“I’m not angry,” she said with a yawn, “and I’m sleepy now. Maybe we can talk more about it in the morning.”

He let it go at that, but, somehow, he could not quite banish the thought that Carmen did not care about his son, about children, or even about him. She had sounded so uninvolved and there was something about her attitude that now recalled to him the girl he had met in Washington, the young dreamy-eyed girl who was warm, not this woman who was now with him. Or had she simply camouflaged her feelings so well that he was unable to recognize them? Could there be some depth in her that he could not reach? He was telling her about his son; he was being truthful to her; he was conceding to her his fallibility, and all she did was say that she was sleepy. Her attitude baffled him. Still, Carmen was human — not a cold, unfeeling hunk of stone.

Much later, when she was quietly snoring, he watched her, the softness of her features, the easy peace upon her face.

Somewhere in the nameless reaches of the night a cock crowed. It would soon be morning and that morning would be unwanted. The sky would still be the same cerulean blue and the wind wandering among the agoho pines in the garden would still be the same wind that cooled Antipolo and all the ancient rooms he had stayed in. But one great change had, at last, caught up with him, and it was not the kind of change he wanted. During those bleak years that he was in college, during those days when he had but one pair of army boots, and pan de sal with margarine for lunch, he had nourished in the quiet core of his mind a dream of peace and abundance. The dream did not include a girl like Carmen or a job such as the one her father had given him, a job writing anemic press releases. Carmen’s aspirations were not his. If he had understood this before, the knowledge would have helped him and he would have been able to look at her, her father, and the whole Villa clan in a less opaque perspective. Almost his whole life he had lived in the gravest of want, amid the most vicious uncertainties. It was different with Carmen. Her aspirations were directed toward people and objects that could be possessed. How happy she had been to know that she could tell him to do things, that she was listened to and believed, that she was desired and loved. These were the measure of her needs.

What am I to do? He should have answered this upon meeting Carmen. But he had chosen to ignore this question, not because he did not want to find out if he were merely vacillating, but because in time, the question might resolve itself without much pain.

The next morning Tony rose before Carmen. He had many things to do. The stories he would write on the inauguration of the mill and on the party Mrs. Villa would give — these must be finished within the week. It was better that Carmen slept on. It would be torture to face her this morning and suffer the silent lash of her scorn.

Don Manuel was at the breakfast table very early, too, and on this particular morning seemed ebullient. “Tony, I have been waiting for you. I have something to tell you.”

He sat down before his father-in-law. The news must be good enough to warrant the glow on Don Manuel’s face.

Don Manuel’s portfolio was on the breakfast table. “I wanted to speak with you last night, but I didn’t want to spoil your sleep. You see, I like to think that I am a very considerate man. That is why I am starting the day right by making you think.”

Tony could not get the drift. “What is it, Papa?”

“Let me get this clear,” the older man said. The maid brought in his orange juice and he took a sip. “I am very glad for what you did in the Sunday Herald. I knew you tried your best and sometimes it’s really the intention that counts.”

“I’m glad you feel that way, Papa,” Tony said.

“What I am trying to say, Tony, is that I have my ways of persuasion, too. Now don’t get me wrong again, but, you see, I could have very well done that on my own.”

“What are you trying to say, Papa?”

“Am I being too abstract?” Don Manuel laughed. He unzippered the portfolio and brought out a canceled check. “Here,” he pushed the check across the glass top to him.

Tony looked at the check and read Godo’s signature on it. The sum was two thousand pesos.

“I thought you said this friend of yours could not be bought. Well, his price is two thousand,” Don Manuel said, smiling.

The coffee had no taste in Tony’s mouth. He laid the check back on the table.

“I don’t gloat, Tony,” the entrepreneur said. “But look—” he waved the check, “you see what my method can do.”

“It isn’t fair, Papa,” he cracked his knuckles. “You shouldn’t have drawn Godo into a situation like this in the first place.”

“That’s the point.” Don Manuel laughed with great triumph. “A man’s character comes out only in a crisis, when temptation is before him. We are all weaklings, son. No man is expected to be of steel — and even steel melts. There isn’t much choice for a man once he is born. There is no certainty except death. One has to live the best way he can. I believe that. Your friend apparently believes that, too. That’s why I don’t hold anything against him. I only wish he were made of sterner stuff.”

We are all weaklings. These words were now wedged deep in Tony’s mind. He was saddened yet at the same time angered that Godo had not been the heroic figure he had expected him to be. It was Godo alone who could have stood up to Don Manuel, it was he alone who could have shown that, at least, there was some essence of purity left in a country where filth overflowed not only in garbage dumps but also in the most aristocratic of appointments.

How long ago had it been when he had ceased thinking that, somehow, there must be an inner strength in himself? Now he looked back and wondered if it was not some miracle instead that had uprooted him from Rosales and blew him away to Antipolo, then across the ocean to America and Spain, and finally to Sta. Mesa.

Was it weakness? How pleasant even now was the memory of distant places, of Maple Street, the old brick house, the doorbell that had to be twisted so that it would ring, the screened door that kept out the summer flies, and good old Larry, wherever he was now.

Why did they stick together? Was it because they both had but a nominal faith in God, was it because he seldom went to church and Larry himself had never been inside a synagogue? It was Larry who helped to shape the dream, out there in that spartan room on Maple Street. Larry, with his ambition to go forth and wipe poverty and prejudice from the earth. But Tony had said: Let poverty be erased from my lot first. The dream had long since become real and he would never know the nagging damnation of insecurity again. But this newfound security was not what he wanted. It was self-justification that he had been chasing blindly. Was it not the flame that drew him, as flame draws a moth inexorably to that searing and most glorious death?

We are all weaklings, Don Manuel had said.

He was about to leave his office at noon when his secretary announced that his Manang Betty was waiting outside. He had not seen her for weeks and a twinge of guilt now bothered him. He had not visited her or brought her the usual things, canned food and a little money to help tide her over.

“You should come and see me more often, Manang,” he said, trying to be blithe when she came in, but he himself realized there was a lameness in his effort.

Her face was ashen and grave. “I have never come to you for help,” she said. “I’m not asking for help now, but this is something that we must share.”

She did not cry when she finally told him the news. She had long been beyond the rapacious reach of grief, and she told him what there was to tell with the casualness of a neighbor passing on the latest gossip. Only the tightness of her lips and the sorrow in her eyes showed the grief that she wanted to share.

The promise he had made to the old man flashed through his mind.

“He wanted to be buried beside Mother,” Tony said. “What did Manong Bert say?”

His brother-in-law did not know yet. A man had simply gone to the school where she taught and relayed the news to her. “What shall we do, Tony?” she asked in a squeaky, frightened voice. “I don’t know what I must do.”

“You must understand, Manang,” he said hesitantly. “Carmen — She never knew about Father. You know what I’m trying to say?”

Betty sat on the upholstered sofa beside his desk. How plain his sister looked, and now, in her grief, she wore that pinched, wasted mien of old maids. But she held her head up with dignity, this woman who had helped send him through college and to whom he would always be grateful. “I know, I know,” she said, almost in a moan. “You don’t have to tell me that. The children … the lies I had to tell. Will Father ever forgive us?”

He could not answer. After a while, he assured her that their father would be buried with proper Christian rites, and that someday, perhaps, the two of them would be able to go to the penitentiary and get the old man’s remains and transfer them to Rosales, to a plot beside their mother’s grave, just as the old man had desired.

Much later, after Betty had gone, he pondered the finality of what he had done, and in his mind intruded the specter of dissecting rooms, of his father’s body ready to be butchered by unfeeling, unknowing hands. He wanted to banish the thought, but it persisted. Henceforth, he would have to live with it for as long as he was Antonio Samson.

On his way home that evening he passed the church where Carmen and he were married. It was open and he went in. The scent of calla lilies on the altar wafted around him. He had visited scores of churches in Europe, particularly in Spain, and had planted candles in his mother’s memory in the cathedral in Barcelona, but he had never believed in the potency of prayer. Still, there were tears in his eyes when he whispered, “Father, please forgive me.”

CHAPTER 15

On the day Mrs. Villa was to give the most lavish party in her career as hostess, Tony had a problem. Charlie had gone to his hometown in Sorsogon — his first visit since he finished college — on a two-week vacation. He had returned to Manila with the startling news that he would end his gallivanting days and return to Sorsogon to get married.

Charlie was the last in Tony’s circle of college friends who had remained single. He had warded off the idea of marriage not because the thought was unattractive but simply because the very prospect of having to support a family on his meager pay as staff writer of the Sunday Herald discouraged him. He had found pleasure in a somewhat profligate life that took him to the Ermita bars, cabarets, and disreputable places in Pasay and Caloocan. Now he had found someone in his hometown, a charming girl whose morals and virginity — these he was most emphatic about — he was sure of. He had known the girl when she was still in high school and she had bloomed, according to Charlie, in those years that he had not been home. As for the bleakness with which Charlie always regarded the future, even this seemed to have been blown away. “There are clerks,” he said, “who make less than I do and they manage to live with honesty and with fortitude. Besides, if the worst comes, the hell with it; we can always return to Sorsogon, to her father’s little farm, and live on coconuts and camote.” The morning after Mrs. Villa’s party Charlie would take the Bicol Express to Sorsogon; his last night in Manila as a bachelor was to be spent with his closest friends, Godo and Tony.

“I’ll explain it to your mama,” Don Manuel had said when Tony informed his father-in-law of his inability to attend Mrs. Villa’s dinner party. He had gone to sleep wondering what useful gift he could give Charlie, who would live in Manila with his bride. Carmen had decided that for him. It would be a book on sexual hygiene and a matrimonial bed with a rubberfoam mattress.

When he woke up the sun was streaming through the blue voile curtains and was splashed on the cool beige of the panels and the polished parquet floor. Tony turned on his side. He was now wide awake. His wife lay on her stomach — her usual sleeping position, her pink nightgown flowing over the edge of the bed, exposing her thighs. She snored slightly — a domestic sound that assured him in the quietness of this air-conditioned room that all was well with Carmen Villa and, therefore, with the world. He stood up, shivered lightly, and, having groped for his slippers, padded to the bathroom and readied his shaving kit.

He thrust his chin at the mirror and looked at his face — a young face, the lips a trifle thin, the brow a bit wide. There was nothing impressive about the face. The nose, the cheeks were sallow now although once they were darker, almost like a peasant’s. Nothing impressive, nothing striking except the eyes. What did Carmen once say about them? Soulful? Meditative? Melancholy?

He passed the blade steadily across his jaw. It’s made of glass, he thought — and that’s another joke on me. With another arc he was through.

Back in the bedroom he let his wife sleep on. It was when he was dressing that the thought whittled at him again: Emy. He was not surprised anymore that he thought of her with more frequency now, particularly in this room, where he had known completeness — not the bootleg kind he had shared with Emy, but the completeness that was public, that sometimes had a touch of achievement.

He speculated about how his life would have turned out if it had been Emy he had married and not this lovely woman. He would perhaps still be at the university, taking breakfast that Emy herself would have prepared, or he would be in some anonymous corner of the city, escaping from the strictures of convention.

Tony opened the door and went down to the dining room. It was one of those days when the morning was dazzling and pure and the conspiracy of heat and dust had not yet started its insidious dominance over everything. Beyond the sliding doors and the marble terrace, the garlic vine and the calachuchi bloomed. The pool was filled and opaque blue in the crystal sunlight. Beyond the pool, four carpenters were busy setting up rough planks for the tables that would be covered with Mrs. Villa’s finest linen, then loaded with food only her fastidious mind could conjure. Across the wide lawn, near the rear entrance to the garden, bunches of rattan chairs were piled, ready to be set in place.

Tony sat alone at the breakfast table, drank coffee, and regarded the work that would transform the garden, the lawn, and even the terrace into another one of those gaudy “dreamlands” that Mrs. Villa always fashioned when she gave a party. “Gaudy” was the word — a bit unkind, perhaps, to his mother-in-law but the truth nonetheless. Inwardly Tony recoiled again at the prospect of having to be here tonight, to go from table to table with Carmen and live the happy notion that he was now a Villa.

Carmen would probably not awaken until noon. Tony wondered where she had been the evening before, perhaps with Ben de Jesus again, for he now seemed to be always around when Carmen was working on her favorite charity. Carmen’s relationship with Ben had been more than friendly once. She had explained Ben to him, and because he did not want to appear prudish or possessive, he accepted her explanation at face value and tried to forget all about Ben. Although, thinking of it now, Ben’s name drew a nagging thought of those brief, casual meetings with him in the office or at the parties he had to attend with Carmen.

It had been several weeks now since Carmen had started to come home late, and sometimes she would arrive after midnight while he was still at his desk. She would sidle up to him and plant a simple kiss on his cheek. Sometimes she smelled faintly of liquor. She always came home with someone, though. Sometimes it was Ben and Nena or Ben and her friend Carmita. He did not ask for explanations. They were not necessary. She would tell him, nevertheless, that she had been to Cora’s or Annie’s — friends who were still single and were doing a lot of charitable work.

Now their latest venture was a fashion show, and Carmen’s assistance, as she herself had told him, was indispensable because she had seen several fashion shows in New York and in Paris. Her attendance at these foreign shows was an achievement in itself. With such a background she could contribute some splendid suggestions about how the parade of models should be conducted.

What should happen tonight was no fashion show, although in this very house such a display had been held several times before; the last was called Oriental Night — a party given by Carmen’s mother on her birthday. He had mixed with the guests to please Carmen and for no other reason, and tonight he had to be here again, because this would mark one of the most important events in Don Manuel’s life.

The Villa Steel Mill was now fully established after years of skul-duggery and greasing palms.

Don Manuel came down in golfing shorts, which he preferred when he was at home because they were comfortable. His legs were lean and hairless and he walked briskly to the table. Tony greeted him.

Don Manuel smiled and sat down to his glass of orange juice and the morning papers, which were neatly arranged for him.

The scraping of slippers along the staircase that followed was familiar. Mrs. Villa was also up early. She wore her graying hair in curlers again and, like her husband, had on shorts.

She did not return Tony’s greeting. She plopped down beside her husband, then rang the small table bell before her. She pulled out a newspaper from those before Don Manuel; her eyes were alert. In a moment she turned to Tony. “I thought you knew the society editor of this paper. Look at this — look at it — just a tiny, tiny photograph. Do the society editors have anything against me? And to think that last Christmas I sent all of them Christmas gifts — Swiss lace. Do you know that you can’t get Swiss lace even at the Escolta?”

“I’m sorry, Mama,” Tony said. “I hope it will be better tomorrow. It’s good, though, that it came out.”

“Well, this is going to be an important party. The first mill of its kind in the country. Don’t you think that’s important? And look at the motif that I designed. Steel Party — don’t you think that’s novel enough?”

Don Manuel looked up from his paper. His tone was paternal: “The mill is important, hija, but its place is in the construction or industrial pages of the newspapers. You should thank Tony that he was able to do something about it.”

Mrs. Villa dropped the paper and said to Tony, “I don’t have to thank you. You know that I’m grateful — if what you do is right.”

Tony smiled. “I know, Mama,” he said.

Mrs. Villa stirred the cup of chocolate the maid had placed before her. “I wish you’d invite those friends of yours in the newspapers. And your sister in Antipolo, too. What’s her name again?”

“Betty, Mama.”

“Don’t forget now. I asked you to invite them. They may think you have forgotten them. And did you tell them that they are welcome in this house? I want you to know that your friends are welcome here.”

“I’ve told them that, too, Mama, but I don’t think they will come.”

Mrs. Villa lowered her cup and turned back to Tony severely. “Isn’t this house, isn’t this party good enough for them?”

Tony grinned. “One of them, Charlie — you remember him, I hope, the thin fellow — well, he is getting married and tonight we are giving him a party.”

“So you won’t come to the party, either?”

“I will, Mama, of course. But it will be later in the evening. I hope you understand …”

“No, I don’t,” Mrs. Villa said crisply. “Aren’t you proud of your papa’s work?”

Manuel Villa tapped his wife lightly on the hand. “Tony has already told me. And if it would make you feel better, he has taken no chances with the press photographers. They will be here, won’t they, Tony?”

He had given them fifty pesos each for “taxi fare.” “Yes, Papa,” he said simply.

“Well, bring your friends just the same. Even if it’s late. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Mama.”

Mrs. Villa sipped her chocolate gingerly. With the vitamin pill in a cup before her, the chocolate was her only breakfast. She had long been trying to lose weight. She even attended sessions in a reducing salon and consulted a hypnotist who had been, for a few months, the rage among the flabby women in her circle, but she did not seem capable of losing a single ounce, and she looked stouter now than she did when Tony first met her.

When she finished her cup she stood up. “Your friends, don’t forget, they may think we have forgotten them simply because this party is for your papa’s friends.” She turned and waddled out to the garden.

Don Manuel laid the papers aside and looked at Tony, who had finished breakfast and was reading the paper Mrs. Villa had not finished.

“Try to be here,” Don Manuel reminded him. “And the press release — I hope you’ll use real influence this time. You know how your mama is. The society page is her life. You must do something to make tonight memorable.”

“I’ll try my best, Papa,” he said.

The older man stood up and beckoned to him. They walked to the terrace and down the lawn. “I wonder if the kind of decor your mama has selected can be made.” Don Manuel paused and gave the balcony above the terrace and the massive rear of the house a careful look, followed by a little head shaking.

Two men were up on the tile roof, stringing lines of colored lightbulbs from there to a bough of the acacia tree, on which another worker had nimbly perched himself. The acacia would blaze tonight — like a foundry, as Mrs. Villa described it.

Apparently pleased with the work, Don Manuel sighed. Then, turning to Tony, he put an arm around his son-in-law’s shoulder: “I know,” he said in a jocund voice, “the mill never got your whole-hearted approval.” A slight laugh. “I know that for a fact although you never said it aloud.”

Tony felt embarrassed. “That is not fair, Papa,” he said.

“Don’t apologize. I know you are capable of swearing, and tonight — since there will be a lot of foreigners around — I hope you’ll stop being so educated and polite. I’d like to hear a few swear words for a change. Don’t think of them as people. Just think of them as business partners.”

“The term is rather misleading, Papa.”

“See what I mean? You don’t approve,” Don Manuel said with a hint of annoyance. “Didn’t we settle this long ago when I asked you to stop teaching? At the salary they were giving you, you were being exploited. I’m glad you changed your mind. I admit that with your connections with the papers and with your own capabilities as a writer …”

“A writer of press releases, Papa.”

“Hell,” the older man laughed, “you can call it what you wish, but I must thank you for the good that you have done. The opposition was terrific but, somehow, you helped allay all the misgivings. In the meantime, just think of tomorrow. The new factory will mean just that: more employment, cheaper goods.”

“Papa,” he said, realizing again how alien, how strange the word sounded every time he disagreed with Don Manuel, “there are other things you can do. Perhaps — this is just a suggestion …”

“Tony, you know very well that you can speak your mind. After all, once my mind is made up, no one — not even your mama — can change it.”

“Well, since you are already in a position to do as you please …”

“Correction, Tony. I’m not in a position to do as I please. A man cannot be a builder and be free. A builder always has to compromise. He has to be friendly with senators and banking officials. That is obvious. Even in America many builders have to depend on government contracts. And government means politicians.”

“There are other ways,” Tony insisted. “Compromise means slavery. If it is not the politicians — the bad ones, I mean — who will control this country, then it will be the Chinese or the Japanese. The Americans already do.”

“Can we escape that?” Don Manuel asked. “Talk to the others who are less fortunate than we. We would all like to be straight, Tony. Would you rather close shop and throw to the streets the many workers who remained loyal to you in the black years when you were not doing well?”

“Still, with courage …”

Don Manuel flopped down on one of the stone benches that stood on the side of the pathway that led away from the pool. He shook a manicured forefinger at Tony. “Listen to me,” he said sadly. “When you are in business you can’t borrow without collateral. Courage and a good heart — what are these when banks demand figures? Ask Dangmount and Johnny Lee. Why are we partners.”

“Life would be empty if there was no courage in it,” Tony said.

“Yes,” Don Manuel said. “Life and the world would be empty. But think, hasn’t it always been empty since the world began? And do not tell me, as Godo and some of your newspaper friends are insinuating, that our cold-bloodedness was brought here by the Americans and their materialism. Or by the last war and its wantonness. It’s been here since time began. The original sin is as menacing as ever. We are all beasts. There is no man who can claim he isn’t. He can’t have integrity for breakfast. Progress comes not because there are people who are free but because there are people who are happily enslaved by their desire to own Cadillacs.”

“After one has satisfied the baser instincts, one can try to be human,” Tony said with conviction. “But here you’ll be—” the words were difficult in coming, “a dummy.…”

“Is there anything wrong with that?” Don Manuel asked in a voice more surprised than hurt. “I’m after money, am I not?”

“Yes. And Senator Reyes and Lee?”

“They are after money, too, aren’t they? Although, of course, they won’t make as much as I will.”

“And what about Dangmount and the Japanese?”

“The Japanese must expand or die. Do you want another war? With us the losers?”

The older man smiled gravely, then turned and walked back to the terrace. The brief encounter, like others he had had with Don Manuel, was over.

“Is there anything you want in the press release about tonight, Papa?” Tony asked as they mounted the marble steps.

Don Manuel seemed lost in thought. “Just say it’s your mama’s party — and no one else’s. This is purely social.”

By mid-afternoon the whole lawn of the Villa mansion had changed. A minor miracle had transformed the terrace into a stage that was part forge and foundry. Beyond the swimming pool, gleaming posts of aluminum shone in the sunlight, and along the paths and at the base of the acacia trees were bundles of tinsel-covered lamps. The members of the household staff — all of them — were on the lawn, arranging the tables and the drinking glasses. In a shed, at the far end of the garden, coolers were stationed, and beside them were piled cases of Coca-Cola and San Miguel Beer.

Carmen was not in when he returned from the office. And, somehow, he did not miss her. Mrs. Villa was at home and she had lunch with him — a quiet lunch — then she went to her beauty shop where she would spend the whole afternoon until she was ready for the evening’s show.

Tony wanted a nap, but the air-conditioning would not let him. The coolness sharpened his mind, and he welcomed this sharp edge, which had long been denied him. It was here, in the solitude of this room, that he must recapture the discipline he had abjured. He strode to his desk and lifted the cover of the electric typewriter. He switched it on, then started to work on the manuscript he had left the night before.

On the paper he had already written: “There is something in the future of the Ilocano that renders him capable of sacrifice. Of all the ethnic groups in the country, he is endowed with the most protestant ethos. This has been superbly illustrated, of course, in the heroic figures of Isabelo de los Reyes and Gregorio Aglipay, who founded the Philippine Independent Church. With this capacity for sacrifice the Ilocano has thus given himself a vision of life, and it is generally a tragic vision.

“The Ilocano has two alternatives: survival or suicide. Almost always he chooses the former. The latter comes only after he has pondered all the constrictions that enfeeble him and learned that there is no other way. If, however, he finds a small hole — even though it is no bigger than the eye of the needle — he will still try …”

He sat back and turned the thought over in his mind: sacrifice, sacrifice. How did his grandfather come to live in Rosales, how did the family flee the barren land of the Ilocos after they were persecuted by the Spaniards? They ended up being enslaved by the very hungers and the oppressors they had sought to flee from — the mestizos, the ilustrados who knew the arts of government and deception.

This was what he had always wanted to write about — the fleeing, the struggling away from a beginning that somehow always caught up with the runaways in the end. These are the truths, but what can a man do? The limitations are everywhere and a man has but two puny hands and a brain that sometimes cannot function well because it has been fouled up by the excesses of the heart itself.

Tony did not add anything to what he had already written. He studied the page, then got up and lay down on the wide bed. The pink chandelier reflected bits of the afternoon sun. Above the low, steady hum of the air-conditioner the pounding of the carpenters still at work below came to him, reminded him that tonight would be the most important event in the life of Don Manuel. This was the beginning, “the dawn of a new era.” Tony dwelt on the cliché, but he knew, too, that as far as he was concerned, the new factory of the Villas was neither beginning nor end. It was a form of bondage, and the factory would continue to be such as long as he stayed in this wonderful prison cushioned with Carmen’s love.

Love — the thought rode on his mind. Was it really love? When they met in Washington, was it not loneliness for him and rebellion for her that had brought them together?

He finally dropped off to sleep, and when he woke up the room was already darkening and the sounds of working carpenters had ceased. He went to the washroom and freshened up, then changed into a gray polo shirt with red printed flowers.

Out in the hall the flowers had arrived — mountains of them — dahlias, gladioli, orchids, bunches of roses, and Benguet lilies in wicker baskets, all of them with ribbons and cards. A sickening fragrance, almost funereal, clogged his nose. He picked up one of the envelopes. It was from one of his father-in-law’s poker cronies, a former cabinet man, and it said, “Compadre, may the smelting be good.”

A maid came down and started hauling the flowers out to the tables, which were now draped with red linen. He asked if Carmen had already arrived. No, the señorita had not shown up yet.

“Well, when she comes,” Tony said, “tell her that I’m going downtown and that I’ll probably call her from there later. She knows where I’m going.”

* * *

The newspaper office pulsed with life. It was always in a state of frenzy at seven in the evening, for by this time the reporters had started filtering in with their stories. All the typewriters clacked and there was more alacrity and more tension in the movement of all the people at the desk. A few greetings, a few remarks about the heat of the office, then he shuffled out of the newsroom to an equally warm cubicle beyond it, where Godo and Charlie worked.

They were waiting for him and were apparently getting bored, for the moment he showed up, Godo greeted him in his usual boisterous manner. “Hell, how can we see the girls at their cleanest when you come in after every damned son-of-a-bitch with twenty bucks has visited them?”

He laughed Godo off: “I really don’t see why we have to go out when we can go to my in-laws’ place.” He always regarded home with guarded distance — my in-laws’ place.

“I know that the drinks there will be superior. No imitation Scotch. The food will be from the best caterer in town, too, and the women — why, they are also the best bitches in town. But I’m a snob, Tony, a reverse kind of a snob.” Godo was perorating again. “You can have all your Scotch and your rich, clutching women, but this is one time we have to pay for the fun. It’s more satisfying. It doesn’t make you feel obligated to anyone, be they society matrons or racketeering tycoons.”

“Cut the speech,” Charlie said, rising from his swivel chair. “This is my execution.”

The bantering continued for a while, then Tony remembered Carmen and he picked up the telephone and dialed the private line to their room. Carmen answered. She sounded matter-of-fact and wanted to know if he would return in time to catch the tail-end of the party.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “You know how it is. Charlie’s last night as a bachelor …”

She grumbled about his bad manners, then he said, feeling a little peeved himself, that he would be home as soon as his party was over.

He returned the telephone to its cradle. “Well, that’s that,” he turned to his friends with a look of triumph. “Now the evening is all ours.”

Godo looked at Tony thoughtfully. His balding head shone in the light and the creases on his brow deepened. “That’s the example you are setting before one who is about to join the herd? Sometimes I wonder if you are really happy, Tony. You get ordered around, writing releases for your in-laws. You don’t believe all that rot, do you.”

Tony turned away and the air suddenly felt watery. The words gouged at him until it seemed impossible for him to retain a secret thought, and his innermost cerebrations were in the open, raw and exposed. He balled his fists and under his breath he said, “Damn you and damn your pretensions! You’d give your right arm to be in my place.”

And then he regretted every word the moment all had tumbled out.

An uncomfortable silence, and Charlie, his small voice sharp as a blade, said, “Now, both of you, this is supposed to be my evening, so let’s get moving.”

They stood up and morosely went down the flight of stairs to the dusty street, where they got into a cab. Conversation was bare. In Ermita they entered the first bar they saw.

Godo, toying with his glass of beer, started it again. “You should have married your cousin Emy, Tony. That was your mistake. You should have carried her off, then lived — just the two of you.”

“You are dreaming,” Tony said curtly. “This country is so small that you can’t hide a needle in it.”

“I’m sure it would have turned out better for you,” Godo insisted.

“Don’t talk like that,” Tony said, shaking his head. “It’s bad enough as it is.”

The name, loved and lingering yet, stirred the imperishable hurt. His head slightly dizzy with drink, he drifted again to another place and time, to that high noon in Rosales when, after seven long years, he finally saw Emy and the boy, her son, his son — Emy braving everything, the world, because these were her real treasures: faith and courage and this boy who might someday grow to loathe him, to spit at the very mention of his name. He did not tell them what had happened long ago in that small wooden house by the railroad tracks in Antipolo, the Igorot blanket that was flung across the room that he and Emy shared.

“So what if you are cousins,” Godo pursued the subject. “You should have gone right ahead and gotten a dispensation from the pope. Those Negros hacenderos would marry their sisters just to keep their haciendas from breaking apart. Now I’m not saying it’s incest. If it were love …”

“It’s not incest,” Tony said, breathing deeply, hoping that Godo would stop. Then he could not dam the words anymore, and, looking away, he spoke barely above a whisper, “I saw Emy only last week. Emy has a child. And the child …”

“Oh, well,” Godo said expansively, and bluntly, “I was just saying how much better it would have been if Emy were already married, then there’d be no more problem. But Carmen, hell, Tony, you are worlds apart. Art, truth, beauty — these are never in the world of the Villas, and you … you had so much promise. You still could fulfill that promise if—”

Tony glared at his inquisitor and said aloud, almost for everyone in the bar to hear, “Emy’s son is six years old — the time I was in America, all the time I was there.… Can’t you see? The child is mine! And that’s not all.” The words flowed freely now and he could not stop. “My father— I never told you about him. I never told anyone about him, not even you whom I call my closest friends. He had rotted in jail and I let him die there. I didn’t even claim his body. And do you know who he was and what he did? Listen, he was a brave man, braver than all of us. He burned down our town hall; he killed a hacendero and three soldiers. He was as brave as no one among us will ever be. And I … I’m a coward because I’ll never be able to whisper my father’s name without recoiling at my own shame. Now do you know what I really am?”

Silence, the hum of an air-conditioning unit, the clinking of glasses at the counter, and the squeaky laughter of a girl somewhere in the shadowed cubicles.

Then Charlie spoke. “Life is always sad. That’s what makes suicide so tempting, because life is all that we really have and haven’t. Death makes us equals, too, because the foul and the good all die. The past, the present, and the future — what escape is there from these? None. And yet sometimes we are life’s happy victims.”

“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 the 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.

“Nothing,” Tony said.

“Please be more understanding …”

“What more do you want? I am leaving without touching a hair on you.” He strode to the tall narra cabinet and opened it. When she followed, he barked at her, “Leave me alone. I have a lot to pack.”

Carmen lingered. Strange, there was no high drama, no passionate remonstrances. This was the Big Scene in his life and he was, like her, acting “civilized.” This was what she wanted and he was acting according to her script.

“Will it matter if I explain, if I tell you how it happened? You must know at least how I feel — there were so many things we did together, told each other.…” Her voice suddenly had the warmth and tenderness he had missed all these months.

“Well,” he said, looking briefly at her, “I suppose I shouldn’t mind the background music. Go ahead, shoot your mouth off.”

“Tony,” she was imploring him. “Listen and do not hate me for what I am going to tell you.”

“I can’t hate you enough,” he said.

Her voice was quivering. “Once upon a time, I knew I would do anything for you. I’d do what you would command me to do. If you had wanted, we could have gone together wherever you wanted to go, lived where you wanted to live. I would have missed many things and I would have objected strongly. But I would have gone with you just the same … if you had put your mind to it, if you did not fall so easily to Father’s bait — and to mine. I love the things I’m accustomed to, but I would have gone with you.…”

“But it’s different now. Is that what you’re saying?”

She turned away. “So many things have changed. Now I see nothing of value. And you, I don’t blame you, because a man’s ambition is different, and because Father wanted you — honestly, sincerely … and I … I pushed you …”

“You know damn well this wasn’t what I wanted,” he said hotly. “Not all this, not all—” Then he stopped, suddenly aware that he was lying. He had coveted this, this comfort, this bigness, this power.

“I pushed you, that’s what I did,” she said quietly.

“No, no one did,” he told her. “My fate, my reasons, are mine alone. Now that you have made your excuses please leave me alone …”

She stood by as he carried another suitcase from the closet and laid it open on the bed.

“Believe me,” her voice betrayed a real disconsolation. “It won’t happen again. I’m bad. I guess I had forgotten, I’ve always been bad. I will never be a saint.”

“It’s not simply a matter of forgetting. So don’t talk about sin.”

“I imagine you are sorry for yourself,” Carmen said. “If it were Emy you had married, it wouldn’t have turned out like this. I must see her sometime and learn from her.”

“She has suffered enough without your seeing her.”

“But it’s true,” Carmen said hollowly. “She is different. She’s good in spite of all that happened. Maybe that has been in the back of my mind all the time — her goodness and my rottenness.”

“It happened long ago,” Tony said, going back to the closet. She followed him there.

“You can forgive me,” she said desperately.

“I can, but it won’t be the same again.” He paused. “And most of all, how can I forgive myself?”

“Are you going back to her?”

“To Emy?”

“Who else? You have always been sentimental about her.”

“Even if I did she wouldn’t take me. No, I’m returning to Antipolo, that’s all.”

“You don’t have to go. Do you want me to explain how it happened?”

“You don’t have to. It happens to the best people.”

“Don’t say that. I’m not the best. Father is not the best. You said so yourself once. You said he is a scoundrel, a patriot for convenience. Maybe that’s the reason. For convenience we do so many things.”

“Don’t explain life,” he said. “Please, I don’t want to hear another word from you. I despise you.”

Carmen shuffled to the door but did not close it after her.

Then he was ready. He surveyed the room, wondering if he had forgotten anything. All that he wanted to bring were in these two suitcases, bulging now with his old clothes. The rest he left behind, and if Carmen should send them to him he would write her a thank-you note. That, too, was the civilized thing to do.

He lifted the two suitcases. They were heavy and he was amazed, since they did not really hold much. He remembered that he had not done any manual labor in months and had not lifted anything heavier than a portfolio. He smiled at himself and, flexing his muscles once, carried the suitcases to the door.

Mrs. Villa stood there, her flabby form barring the way. She was still dressed in blue denim overalls, her party costume. The theme was industry and she represented a typical steelworker. Her voice sounded old and it lacked the acidity with which it always dripped. “Carmen’s crying. She didn’t tell me what you quarreled about and I don’t think I can find out from either of you. You are both old enough to know what’s right and what’s wrong. Are you really leaving, Tony?”

“Yes, Mama,” he said, putting down the suitcases.

“Is it because I have been mean to you?”

Tony studied the painted lips, the fleshy chin, the wide, inquiring eyes. “I’ve learned to like you, although I know you never liked me. You wore no mask. You were yourself.”

“That was not everything, son.” It was the first time she referred to him as a son and the word touched him. “I’m sorry if I made you think I didn’t like you.”

“It’s all right, Mama,” he said. “With you I didn’t have to be on guard. That’s the truth.”

“I’m such a scatterbrain, Tony.”

“But you are sincere. You didn’t try to be good to me, because you didn’t like me. And I didn’t have to be jolted by the way you acted, because from the beginning— Remember, Mama, when I first came here?”

“That’s past,” she said. “We should all learn to keep the past where it should be.”

“But the past is important. It’s linked with the present.”

“Well, I don’t care about the past. Why should I?”

“I know, Mama.”

“Did Carmen tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“She never did tell you what my family was?”

“Never, but I know. I’ve known it for a long time now and, frankly, I never cared.”

“Well, it was more by accident, but why should I tell you what you already know? And after all the things that I’ve done to you?”

“I understand, Mama.”

“You don’t,” Mrs. Villa said, “for if you did, you’d unpack your things now.”

“I wish what you just told me made a difference, but it doesn’t. It merely explains your distaste for me. I remind you of yourself.”

“Don’t try to talk smart,” Mrs. Villa scolded him.

“I’m sorry, Mama.”

“Don’t be a fool. I’m not saying that you should stay here because I like you. I’m a selfish woman, Tony. What’s going to happen to Carmen? You are the first good thing that she has had, the first good thing this family ever had — if I may flatter you. Somehow, well, let’s admit it, my friends often talk about you. They say you have another kind of brains, something the Villas never had — unless, of course, you mean brains for making money.… And your papa, he’s my husband and I know — nights he’d lie awake, saying, ‘Tony is right. Tony is right …’ ”

“I didn’t know I had a market value or that I had some snob appeal,” Tony said.

“Don’t talk smart, I said. What I’m trying to say,” Mrs. Villa came forward and shook a pudgy finger at him, “is: have some sense. Someday you’ll find that what’s good for the Villas is also good for you.”

Tony could not face Mrs. Villa anymore. “I’m leaving, Mama,” he said with finality. “I don’t know, but if I change my mind, you’ll be the first to know.”

Mrs. Villa shook her head. “I know your kind,” she said softly. “When you make up your mind it’s made up. Once you’ve gone through that door you’ll never return.”

“Am I such an open book?”

Her hand drifted to his arm, held him tightly but her grip relaxed as Tony moved to the door.

“It will never be the same again, Tony,” she said sadly. She followed him to the hall.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” he said, holding the suitcases firmly. They seemed lighter now and he carried them, almost blithely, down the rear stairway and to the back entrance, where he called a cab.

The night was quieter when he reached Antipolo. Traffic had not cluttered Blumentritt yet, and beyond the asphalt and the weeds, the street where he once lived was what it had always been — narrow, incongruous, wooden frame buildings thrusting their ugly roofs, their shapeless forms, from the black earth. A few jeepney drivers who lived in the shanties farther up the narrowings and curvings of the road were at Mang Simeon’s store, drinking cheap coffee, their jeepneys parked before the store, waiting for the meager traffic that would stir when the Bicol Express arrived.

It had been weeks since he was here last and he remembered with a dull ache how he had tried to forget the street. Now he was back like some criminal returning to the scene of his crime, for it was here where he had done people wrong — his sister Betty, Emy, and, finally, himself.

He carried his suitcases across the narrow alley flanked with scraggly weeds. The door to which he went was closed, but within the house a faint light burned. He knocked twice, wondering how he would tell his sister what had happened. His knocking did not stir anyone in the house, so he rapped again, this time a little louder, calling out, “Manang Betty, Manang Betty,” his voice resonant in the night.

Finally, a stirring sounded from within. A lightbulb above the door went on and, at the door, Betty’s squeaky voice: “Who is it?”

“Tony,” he said. The door opened and Betty stood before him, looking thinner. He had not seen her since she told him of their father’s death, and the shame that nagged at him now formed an impossible barrier to all that he wanted to say, the words of entreaty and regret. He stood in the light, the suitcases on the ground. The sight of him in the night must have startled his sister and, for a while, they just stood there, wordless. Then Betty spoke, as if this was Tony coming home from school or a binge: “Come in with your things before some rascal picks them up. It’s good you remembered to visit us.”

Tony could glean the sarcasm. He had expected it, for had he not really forgotten them — his sister who had sent him to school and this wooden crate that was home? And yet it did not hurt as much as he had imagined it would, because it was his sister who spoke. She had a right to feel aggrieved. Never had he realized it as fully as he did now that he had really strayed away and forsaken them all the while that he was in Santa Mesa, all the while that he roamed in an ethereal region that was never meant to be his.

Wordless, he followed Betty to the living room. It had not changed, either — the battered bejuco furniture with the knife marks inflicted by his young nephews; the starched white doilies that Emy had left behind; the Ocampo painting that still hung by the staircase, dominating everything in the house with its splurge of color. Yes, nothing in Antipolo was altered.

“I’m not here on a visit, Manang,” he said humbly. “I’m here to stay, and I hope you will take me back.”

Now Betty’s sarcasm was more defined: “What has happened now? Have you at last decided that you belong here and not in that palace in Santa Mesa?” Triumph tinged her voice.

“I don’t know how you will take it,” Tony said, not caring really about what Betty’s answer would be. “Maybe I’m foolish, but I have left Carmen.”

Betty sat on the rattan sofa beside the stairway and regarded her brother. She had become amiable again and she smiled. “Your Manong still snores like a hog, and so do the children. Listen to them now. They didn’t even hear you knocking, although the whole neighborhood has been roused.”

But Tony did not want to talk light. “Tell me, Manang,” he said, “did I do right? Don’t bother about the reason. Did I do right?”

“You have to tell me why you left her,” Betty said.

Tony turned away. “It does not matter, really,” he said. “I quarreled with Carmen, that’s all.” Deep within him what he wanted was confirmation, not denial. What he wanted was sympathy, not the truth.

“You were wrong,” his sister said evenly. “You were wrong to leave. I was trying to tell you: your beginning is there. Not here. This is the end, Tony. You’ll never get the same chance again.”

“But I’m free now,” he insisted, his voice faltering with emotion.

Betty laughed bitterly. “Pride is not for us, it’s for the wealthy. How many times have I told you that?”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I mean it,” Betty said. She stood and listened to the snoring from upstairs. She turned to Tony. “How long are you staying here?”

“I don’t know,” he said, rising, too. “Maybe I’ll stay here for as long as you will let me.”

“It will be crowded,” Betty said, her displeasure completely banished. “You’ll be needing quiet. Are you going back to teach at the university? Have you any savings?”

He shook his head. “I will not teach and, of course, I have no money.”

“You will not find this neighborhood quiet anymore. And what will the neighbors say? Everyone knows how well you have married. Everyone teases me when I wear my old rags, or when we have nothing but tuyo for lunch.”

“You are right. I’ll stay here until I find a new place. And, most important, after I find a job.”

“Is that what you will do in the meantime? Look for a job?”

He nodded. “I need the money not only for myself but also for my pledge to you.”

“You can forget that,” Betty said amiably. “As long as your Manong and I have jobs we will be able to send the children to school.”

“I know my duties,” Tony said. “And that’s final. But, really, it’s Emy who worries me most. Her son …”

“She shouldn’t worry you. She can take care of herself and her boy.”

“Yes, she can. But her son … he’s mine, Manang. I didn’t know it until last week when I went to Rosales.”

Betty bent forward, not quite convinced by what she had heard.

“Yes,” Tony repeated, “the boy is mine. Six years — how she has suffered!”

“But Tony, what can you do now?” she asked after a long silence.

“I don’t know.”

“What did she say?”

“She despises me. She didn’t say so, but I felt it.”

“I wouldn’t be so harsh if I were you,” Betty said. “If I know Emy, she would never be that harsh.…”

“She has a right to be harsh,” Tony said.

“But what will you do now? Marry her? You know you can’t do that. We don’t divorce, and Carmen — Will she let you go?”

“I don’t care anymore what she does. And as for Emy, I want to do right by her.”

“And what is that?”

“I don’t know. Give her things, perhaps — the things she never had. And more so now that there’s the boy. I don’t want him to grow up hating me. I’m his father and it feels so different being one.”

“Still, you can’t marry Emy.”

“I know.”

“I’d like to help you,” Betty said with feeling. He had not asked for her assistance and her offer touched him. “I may have been a little impossible — that’s the schoolteacher for you. But I want to help.”

“The family, we … we will always stick together.”

“You are my brother. You may steal, you may murder, but you are still my brother. I’ll fix you a place to sleep.” She turned and went up the wooden stairs.

Alone in the house where he had known possession and its haunting joy, it finally occurred to him that he was, after all, part of the herd — the herd with the gross instincts of self-preservation.

He stood up and walked to the window. Through the iron bars he looked into Antipolo, which was as dark and disreputable as ever. This is corruption, this is decay of both the spirit and the body, this is home. Then, above his own musings, he heard his brother-in-law, Bert, saying thickly, “I’m sorry, Tony. I was sound asleep, I didn’t know.”

Bert was standing beside him in his underwear as chubby as ever. His hair was still cropped short and his face shone swarthy and full in the light.

“It’s I who should be sorry, Manong. Waking you up at such an hour.”

“Betty told me about your leaving Carmen. It’s a big mistake. You know what I mean.”

He smiled. “I don’t think it’s a mistake, Manong.”

Betty joined them. “Go on up and sleep,” she said, tugging at his sleeve.

Tony sat down on the sofa instead. All of you have a reason to go on living, he thought, but I have lost everything that is good and true. Emy, the future — I’ve lost all of it because there is inherent corruption in me. It’s something entwined with my flesh and I can’t wash it off. My God, I should have known this long ago. I should have known then that I was weak and that I hadn’t suffered enough. He turned the words over in his mind, and because they were true, he pounced on them as if they were the only nuggets his soul could treasure.

“I am not really sleepy,” he said, laying a hand on the old narra sofa. It had a lot of bedbugs once and he remembered how he took it out in the sun between the railroad tracks and poured boiling water on it, then left it there, exposed, the whole, hot afternoon.

“Your bed upstairs is being used by the boys now,” Betty said, “but I will spread a mat for you on the floor. It’s not soft — you haven’t slept on the floor for years, I know. But it will be daylight soon.”

“It’s all right,” Tony said. “I’ll go out and take a walk and maybe I’ll be able to think better.” He lied, of course, because never before had his mind been as clear as it was now. He moved to the door.

“You need sleep,” Bert said.

“It’s all right, Manong,” he said. “I need the walk more.”

They accompanied him to the door, telling him to be careful because this was Antipolo and not Rosales, and danger lurked in the crevices and alleys. He stepped out into the night after appropriate assurances that he could really take care of himself here in Antipolo, which was the beginning. Would this also be the end?

The realization that it was swept over him and strangled all hope, all sense of enduring life. He had gone so far, trying to leave Rosales and then Antipolo. He could not return to Rosales now, not anymore, for he could not face Emy, whom he had wronged, or look into the eyes of his son, who would grow up in a world he might not want and might never be able to change. But the boy would be different. He would take after his mother, who would dote on him, teach him, and imbue him with a courage as true as blood. That was it: the boy would be rooted in the land, unlike him who had severed his roots. And while he could hope for the boy and keep him always in his thoughts, Tony could not reach out to him, hold his hand, claim kinship with him. He had sinned not only against Emy but also against this son and, from the depths of him, the agony was wrenched out: Emy, forgive me, forgive me.

There was no warm hand to touch him and tell him everything was going to be all right. There was no Emy to loosen the deadening grip of what he had discovered — that it was she whom he really loved; it was Emy after all who was a part of him, who could have been his salvation if he had possessed but a fraction of her faith.

He was here in this desolate and meaningless geography, this Antipolo. Yes, this would be the end, when all his life he had tried to run away from it, repudiate it, this ugly street and its clinging smell of old ammonia and foul decay. And now he was back, inexorably, it seemed, because there was nowhere else he could turn, not Rosales and Emy, who had sent him away, not the university, which he had discarded, and not Newspaper Row, either, because there his frustration would rekindle itself into that wild, consuming fire that had already burned out men of more vigor and vision than he. Would he end up like Godo and Charlie, afraid of the slightest stirring of the wind, who had sublimated their fears and their insecurity with senseless bravado? No, none of these alternatives were for him.

The knowledge that he had been rejected implicitly by everyone, that there was really no place he could turn to now for one single, saving bit of peace, of belonging, shriveled all his pride. He had never felt as lonely as he felt now — not even in America, in that iron-cold winter, nothing of this terrible loneliness had ever touched him before, for it was too huge, too engulfing to be defined. Although, of course, it was not new, for this loneliness was actually the final growth of that greater loneliness called truth or living that had corroded him from the start without him actually being aware.

Perhaps it would help if he cried just a while. Then the ache would be eased. But only a sob broke in his throat. No tears came to his eyes, and the tightening vise upon his chest seemed to choke all blood and breath.

He turned to the alley that ended in the railroad tracks, and from the distance he heard the unmistakable whistle of the train — the Bicol Express, perhaps — echoing in the early dawn.

Now the vision was clear and reassuring, as if he had vaulted the last terrifying abyss of doubt. It was not so much really what Carmen had done that tortured his mind; he could forgive her easily, for he was, after all, broad-minded and capable of taking a less personal attitude to her treachery — did he not believe in the ulog and in the primordial faithlessness of man’s urges? Perhaps they could still make something out of their marriage and he could still live with her and share with her the beneficence of the Villas, making believe that this was what he wanted, this surfeit of ease.

But it was not as simple as that; it was not so much what she did that was the gentle nudge, the flimsy straw, the last turn of the screw — it was what she had told him, what was behind the act, inconsequential in its implication but too damning, too grievous in magnitude and meaning to be ignored; the act had peeled off the last skein that had shielded him from the truth.

What he would do now was not for Carmen, that would be granting her too much value. It would be for himself more than anyone. It would be the only act by which he could illustrate to himself his own brand of courage. He was, after all, his father’s son.

He brought to mind the grandfather he had never seen, the acolyte who served God and had written in Latin of ambition and humility. And he wondered how that brave and illustrious forefather had died, if in that last moment of lucidity and conscience he had believed, had no cankering doubts, as Tony now doubted — not only the wisdom but the very existence of a just and powerful God who rewarded virtue and goodness so that these might be perpetuated and spread like blessings upon the face of a land that was damned. You kill Him who doubt Him. The thought came briefly, but in this hour, surrounded by poverty’s bleak conquest, by need’s sorriest shapes, he could feel no piety, not the slightest twinge of regret for what he must do. It was no sin. It was no sin, and if there was sin, it was not his but those of his fellow men who had shaped him, who had molded him so that in the end he had no choice but to succumb to the illusions of his own righteousness when he was neither right nor beyond cavil. He could still atone for all this, could still wipe out the huge and shameful blot, could be contrite and win virtue again, but he could not pray. My God, he repeated in anguish, I am doing no wrong; I cannot repent, I cannot pray!

There was no shred of doubt in his mind now. He had been deluded; for he was human after all, and the desires that were stirred in him were really as ancient as life itself. He was not the first to have succumbed to them. He accepted his humanity now and, therefore, recognized his capacity for sin. With a little more striving — and courage — he would have been redeemed not from God’s hell but from the endless turmoil only conscience could make. There was honor in death, and if he was a traitor, or a weakling, he would not depart as one.

How many times had he conjured it and never realized that it was the only way, the only honorable thing for one like him to do? He had been weak, he knew this fully now, and the knowledge was seared upon his breast with all the pain and wisdom a child attains when, for the first time, he reaches out to a living flame. And this … this would be his only act of strength and, perhaps, faith. He would do it now or he would not be able to think of it seriously on the morrow, when the sun would be true and it would deceive him again as it had already deceived him — in Boston during that bleak winter when he subsisted on nothing but stale bread, and even in his hometown, in Pangasinan, when he thought he would never be able to go to college. It was too late to write a letter, and besides, a letter would do no good. It would even be useless. In the first place, he did not want to be melodramatic about what was inevitable, for he could not blame anyone for it, not even Carmen. It would perhaps be a bad joke that she would not dare discuss in public when she found out — as surely she would.

He looked at his watch, and the luminous dial shone in the dark. It was almost five and the morning star still blazed like a solitaire among the lesser stars winking out from the black bowl that arched above.

Antonio Samson breathed deeply. It was strange that he could not detect the usual odor redolent of human decay, of rot and blackish mud in the canals along the tracks. The air that he sucked in seemed fresh and clean instead. It could be the night, he told himself, for the night bathed everything, and he could not see the wobbly houses and all their sorry shapes.

He stooped and touched a rail. The steel was cold and unfeeling. The sentiment was again a cliché, but the wheels of the train — like Fate — would be warm.

I’ll be a mess, he thought, and shuddered, but only for an instant. “I’ll be a mess,” he repeated, this time aloud, and for the first time in his life he really did not care how it would appear or how it would feel when Death finally came.

CHORUS

Lawrence Bitfogel, specialist in agricultural economics, arrived in Manila in early December. He was being thrown into the godforsaken dump called Vientiane, in Laos, and Manila would be his last civilized stop before proceeding there. So, for the two weeks that he would be in the Philippine capital, he had arranged for himself a full schedule that would set his perspective in better alignment. For him the Philippines was now a more interesting object of study after he had stayed in South America for two years. He had seen the influence of Spanish civilization in the continent and the far-reaching impact of that civilization upon the traditional society of the Indian peasant. He wondered if the pattern of feudal exploitation and development such as that operating in South America had been transposed to the Philippines. This scholarly interest was, of course, secondary. What he wanted most was to see Antonio again and check on the “little lies” Tony had told him about the country. The bare-breasted damsels and the trial marriages in Mountain Province — how Tony Samson had spiced his stories!

It was early dawn when the Super-Constellation flew in and the lights of the city spread out below and sparkled like jewels spilled out of a basket. It was a full two weeks before Christmas, but the small airport was already decked with Christmas lanterns and multicolored lights, and from the jukebox of the restaurant across the customs zone, “Jingle Bells” blared forth in all its raucousness. Indeed, as Tony had told him, he would not feel homesick in Manila, because the city and the Filipinos had long been hopelessly Americanized. The airport, just as Tony had described, was ramshackle and dirty. It seemed flooded with that stale odor common to all government buildings — of cuspidors and disinfectants and tobacco — and the customs officials were extraofficious. He did not mind these things too much, for, as he said, he had taken a liking to the Philippines and to that thin, smart-alecky Filipino who had shared a room with him in Cambridge for four years.

The surprise he planned never materialized, for that same afternoon Larry learned of Tony’s death.

One cannot live with a fellow for four years without feeling an attachment to him. And now he was too late even for the wake.

He arrived at the campus shortly before four, and for once in his travels, the new scenery did not catch his eye. Thinking about it afterward, all he recalled of that trip from the agency to the university was the greenery flitting by, the paper lanterns, the wooden houses, and the stretches of grass. He could not quite accept the fact of Tony’s death, of all people. And he recalled one of Tony’s jokes, adapted from the original Scottish tale, about half of the populace of an Ilocano town committing suicide when a funeral parlor operator, as an advertising gimmick, made it known that all funeral services for a week would be free.

He thought grimly about death and the possibility of its striking him, too quickly and without a by-your-leave. There was so much promise in Tony, so much virgin hope and dogged dedication. Young men like him — and Lawrence enthused once more over those intellectual jousts in Maple Street — young men like Antonio Samson should not die before they have proven themselves.

With this, Dean Lopez readily agreed, and when the aging professor learned that this inquisitive American had been a roommate of Antonio Samson, his manner softened. “The good die young,” he said, rising from his swivel chair and offering the American a bottle of Coke, which the dean’s secretary had brought in.

Larry took the bottle, said thanks, and was silent again.

“I had high hopes for him,” Dean Lopez said. He moved to the window and looked out at the sunny campus. “You know, I would have seen to it that he got far in the academic world, but he had other ideas. Did you know that he quit the university and forfeited everything?”

The dean had wheeled around. Larry shook his head. “That’s unusual. It was the last thing he would have done.”

“I thought so, too,” Dean Lopez said, “but you know how young people are. They have ideas — particularly those who have gone to the United States and returned with Ph.D.’s. They think they can change the world in one sweep. I’m not saying that Antonio Samson was immature. He was very close to my heart. Why, everyone knows that it was I who helped him get that scholarship.”

“I know that,” Larry said. “He told me so himself. He held you in very high esteem, sir. He wanted to work under you, to follow your direction especially in this project he was working on — the Ilocano migration. I gather that you are an Ilocano, too.”

Dean Lopez smiled. “Well …” after a long pause, “he was impatient. In this country people must have patience.”

“I always had the impression that he was patient,” Larry said softly. “When he was working on his doctorate, particularly, I know the research problems that he encountered. Anyone without patience would have given up.”

Dean Lopez nodded. After another awkward silence he resumed talking: “His doctoral dissertation — his study on the ilustrados and the Philippine Revolution — is already out. His wife had it published about two months ago. And I hear that his notes on the Ilocano migration will also come out soon.”

Dean Lopez strode to the bookcase behind his desk and picked out a new, shiny volume. He handed the book to the young American.

Larry opened it, the words swam before his eyes, and in the acknowledgment he saw his name together with those of the other people Tony Samson had consulted. And in his mind’s eye there loomed again the old room and Tony Samson bent over the walnut table, laboring in longhand, his frail figure bundled up in his woolens, while outside snow fell and glistened on the windowpane. He remembered, too, their long discussions about vested groups, wars, and revolutions, about the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie always banding together to protect their business interests and collaborating with whoever the victors were when the bloodletting was over. It’s a pattern that will always persist in whatever climate, in whatever country, Lawrence Bitfogel had said, and Tony Samson had answered that it was not always so, not in the Philippines, anyway, because the ilustrados were also revolutionists.

Larry found himself smiling. “Yes,” he said softly, returning the book to Dean Lopez, “we had wonderful times together.”

Then Larry asked how Antonio Samson died.

“You don’t know?” Dean Lopez asked. He went back to his chair, shaking his head. “It’s a sad story. They say it was an accident. It happened very early in the morning and they said that he was drunk. He had just left a party or something and had gone to visit his relatives in Antipolo. The train engineer said that he tried to stop …”

“God!” Larry said hoarsely.

Dean Lopez nodded. “Tony Samson’s back was to the train. He was trying to cross the tracks. There’s a double track in Antipolo, you know. It was an accident — all that drink. You see now how he had dissipated himself? It’s this thing called civilization and his hurry to get to the top.”

“And his wife?”

“You don’t have to worry about her,” Dean Lopez said with a smile. “That’s the least of the things you should worry about. I’ve never seen her, but they say she is very pretty — a mestiza. And that’s not all. You know who her father is? Manuel Villa. The Villa Building on the boulevard. Real estate, plywood, shipping, steel …”

Lawrence Bitfogel sighed. “So, Tony Samson didn’t have it bad after all. If he had only lived …”

When he called Don Manuel thirty minutes later, Larry was pleased to find the entrepreneur eager to see him. “Yes, Professor Bitfogel. Tony did talk about you. Look, you don’t know how happy I am to know that someone close to Tony is in town. Are you doing anything tonight?”

Larry said no.

“Good!” the voice boomed. “Don’t leave your hotel. Someone will pick you up at seven. I would be very pleased to have you join us tonight for dinner. There are a few friends who are dropping in. One of my boys got elected barrio lieutenant of Pobres Park. And a friend is leaving for Rio and this is his despedida, too. You may be able to take the talk away from business. It’s so depressing—” Larry noticed a sudden softness, almost sorrow, in the businessman’s voice. Then the lilt returned, “Say you will come, won’t you? And if you get bored I’ll have you taken back to your hotel right away.”

“I’d be very happy to come, sir,” Larry said.

He took the warning about being bored to heart — one can never tell what will happen at a dinner with businessmen, who know nothing except how to make money. Afterward, thinking of that evening in the house of Manuel Villa and in the affluent appointments of Pobres Park, he knew that he would never be able to attend a gathering as enlightening and as transcendentally provoking as that again. He never regretted having attended the party in the sense that it had revealed to him the nature of the Philippines and the mighty odds against which people like Tony and well-meaning Americans like himself must pit themselves. It came to Larry with the clarity of lightning; under such onerous pressures, there was not much that Tony could have done.

It was Ben de Jesus and his wife who picked him up, and when he went down to the lobby, they were having martinis at the bar and already had a glass waiting for him. The lobby looked pleasant and cool. The capiz lamps were all lighted. But for the other Caucasians who were there in their charcoal-gray suits, Larry would have felt awkward in his navy blue suit. Ben was in barong Tagalog and his wife, a lumpy woman, wore a blue cotton satin frock that made her look formidable.

After Larry had started to sip his drink, Ben said, “You sure do look like an Ivy Leaguer — three-button suit, crew cut. You are not yet thirty, are you?”

“I am,” Larry said. “I’m thirty-two.”

“I can’t fancy an Ivy League man in this neck of the woods,” Ben continued. His wife, all aglow, punctuated her husband’s small talk with appropriate giggles.

“I’m in government. Agricultural economics,” Larry explained briefly.

“Well, I majored in farm management,” Ben said expansively. They had finished their drink. Ben stood up. He was tall and handsome, and his wife, who was light-skinned, could have been beautiful once. “Farm management — but that doesn’t mean a thing in this bloody country,” Ben continued as they stood below the hotel marquee. Their car, a chauffeur-driven Lincoln, drew up and they got in. “You see, our farms aren’t producing as well as they should. And that’s the reason why I have to be here in Manila, working for Don Manuel. I’m not complaining, mind you.”

“You’re so modest,” his wife said. “Everyone knows that without you Don Manuel’s real estate investments wouldn’t pay.” She turned to the American. “He helped develop Pobres Park — that’s an exclusive suburb — and that’s why he was elected barrio lieutenant of Pobres Park last Sunday.”

“My ever-loyal wife,” Ben said, patting his wife’s chubby hand.

“Congratulations,” Larry said mechanically. “I understand the party tonight is for you.”

Dusk had shrouded the city completely, but when they slipped into the boulevard, the dazzling mercury lamps, the afterglow above the bay, the multicolored lights and star lanterns that adorned the shops, softened the night and momentarily dispelled all the dark thoughts that crowded Larry’s mind. The air, too, had a freshness sharpened with the odor of asphalt.

As they drove on, Ben became more voluble. “There’s a new dance step — the off beat — you should visit our nightclubs and learn it.”

“I have only two weeks here,” Larry hedged.

“Now, now, remember, all work and no play …”

They let it go at that and the talk glided on to less nettlesome subjects — the weather, Christmas, the local color. In a while, they were going up an incline to a street flanked by tall trees; then they entered the wide lawns of the Villas.

When they joined the company on the terrace, Larry knew at once that Don Manuel had already had a lot to drink, although all the guests had not yet arrived. His eyes were bleary, and in the cool light of the lanterns on the terrace, his face was red and there was a brashness in his manner as they shook hands. He seemed frail and anemic but his grip was firm, and it somehow relayed to Larry an initial sincerity. “I’m so glad you came, Professor Bitfogel. You know, I seldom meet Americans like you. Those I meet are usually carpet-baggers.”

Larry was caught off-balance and he turned around to the assemblage for some cue, for some sign that would put him at ease, but the guests — about two dozen men and women who had gathered to bid this Senator Reyes good-bye and congratulate Barrio Lieutenant de Jesus — were all grinning. He was a guest — that was the thing to consider — and he sallied on bravely, Don Manuel’s grip on his arm. “Thank you for the compliment, sir,” he said dryly.

There were the hurried and mumbled introductions: Senator Reyes, looking important and pleased with the world; Alfred Dangmount, the American millionaire; a couple of Chinese; a Japanese who showed his teeth; and an assortment of bejeweled matrons and their husbands, their hair slicked with pomade, fingernails carefully manicured, some of their conversation in Spanish, which he understood. He was led to the main table and placed opposite Don Manuel’s wife. The drinks and the canapes came and he took a gin and tonic. He looked around him again, but when the introductions were over, no one seemed to notice his presence anymore. Only Mrs. Villa seemed to be interested. She leaned over and asked, “How long will you be staying here, Professor?”

“Just two weeks, Mrs. Villa,” he said politely. “I had intended to surprise Tony. We were roommates for four years, you know, and—”

Mrs. Villa seemed to have definite ideas about what kind of conversation she should have. She interrupted him rather rudely; he could sense that. “You should stay here longer,” she said. “Two weeks isn’t enough for you to know the hospitality of the country.”

“Mama, there’s no hospitality in this country,” Don Manuel said, standing up and winking at his American guest. “Come, Professor, let’s have a chat. It’s too noisy here.”

He went to Bitfogel and held the American’s arm again. “Take your drink,” the businessman said amiably.

They walked slowly across the grass under the multicolored lights. He did not know what to say except that he knew he must humor Don Manuel by reminiscing and making polite noises. “Please forgive my sentimentality,” he said. “I don’t want to impose on you, but Tony and I were together for four years. We did a lot of things together and I just can’t quite believe that he is dead.”

Don Manuel paused. He was shorter than the American and he peered at his guest with bloodshot eyes. He said without emotion, “He is dead and that is that. Oh, I’m sorry that he is dead. He died so young.”

The garden was indeed wide, with many rows of bougainvillea and roses, carefully tended shrubs, and an expanse of well-trimmed grass. Beyond the grass was the pool, shining bluish and placid in the light.

“It’s so nice to be able to talk to a stranger who is not involved in my life. You are that stranger, Professor,” Don Manuel said. He glanced up at the sky. “You can be a shadow or a ghost who can only listen and not talk back — or bother me. You get what I’m driving at?”

“No, sir,” he said uneasily.

“Don’t act like an innocent. You talk to yourself once in a while, don’t you?”

The American nodded.

“Well, I must tell you that I am a dummy — a rather expensive dummy. Do you have dummies in the States, too, Professor Bitfogel? I’m sure you have dummies there. Now, who am I dummying for?”

He took Larry by the arm and pivoted him to the edge of the pool. Then, continuing in the sinister manner of conspirators, Don Manuel droned on: “I know what I’m saying, Professor. Just remember this. Tonight I may be drunk, but tomorrow I’ll be as sober as a judge. And tomorrow I’ll leave my conscience behind me. You know who I’m a dummy for?”

“Please, sir, let’s not spoil the party.”

“Look, I’m not spoiling it, but you are. I have to tell this to you and you must listen. You know that Dangmount over there? He came to this country with nothing but two tin bars on his shoulders. That was way back in 1945—during the Liberation. Do you know how much he is worth now? Over thirty million. He’s got his money in everything — shipping, agriculture, tobacco — in everything. And I am his associate. I give him a measure of respectability.”

“I am not sure I want to hear this, sir. You may regret it later,” Lawrence said, trying to move away, but Don Manuel’s grip was firm. “Listen, you are an economist, aren’t you? Like my son, Tony Samson, you have bright ideas, haven’t you? Well, let me tell you that I am surrounded by a lot of bright fellows. Dangmount is only one of them. That Chinese over there, Johnny Lee, is in the Villa bandwagon, too. He smuggles dollars to Hong Kong regularly. He takes care of some of our dollar remittances. And that toothy Japanese, ah, you will enjoy Saito San. He takes care of barter and the Japanese end of the line. He helped put the steel mill up. But these goddam Japs, they always have you where they want you.….”

“You shouldn’t be telling me these things.” Lawrence Bitfogel spoke weakly.

Don Manuel laughed. “You’ll not report me to the authorities, will you?”

Don Manuel turned and headed for the terrace. “And, yes,” he said, “I almost forgot. When Senator Reyes leaves tomorrow for that conference in Rio, you know what else he is going to do? He will be taking out with him pesos and dollars. He is a bright messenger boy. He salts it away for us, but of course he always takes care to salt away a lot for himself, too. No one will bother to search him, of course. Inspect a senator? That’s unthinkable …” Another quiet laugh.

Back in the company of his friends, Don Manuel spoke aloud for all to hear: “You all look happy and contented. That’s what I like about you.” He was addressing no one in particular. Food was already being served. “You have no time to examine your consciences. You have only time for food, for liquor. I hope these will last forever.”

Senator Reyes, hefty and dark at one end of the table, laughed aloud. “That’s what I like about you, Compadre. You have such a wonderful sense of humor. No wonder you don’t grow old.”

“Coño—Satan is ageless,” Don Manuel said.

Senator Reyes changed the subject. “Compadre, what’s this I hear about Carmen selling her Thunderbird?”

“She did,” Don Manuel said. “That was three months ago. She used the money to publish a book.”

“Is she a writer after all?”

“You are an optimist,” Don Manuel said. “It was not her book. It was her husband’s.”

“Did Rivera really get the car? That would make twenty-four in his stable.”

“Twenty-four cars?” Larry asked.

“Yes. Rivera — you should meet him.” The senator turned to the American. “He is a sugar planter. He collects cars just as he collects fighting cocks and women.”

Larry shook his head in disbelief.

“That’s true,” Senator Reyes said a little sadly. “You can believe that. Why, I used to have eighteen cars myself, including a 1930 Rolls-Royce. That was before I got into politics. Now I have only twelve, half of them junk. If you wish,” he winked at the American, “I can give you a spin in my latest toy. It’s not much really, just a Karmann Ghia …”

“You should sell them all for scrap, coño,” Don Manuel said. He took another glass.

Senator Reyes laughed. “You are really funny tonight.”

Mrs. Villa laid a restraining hand on her husband’s arm. “Don’t Papa. That’s the seventh. I have been counting.…”

“Again?”

“Please, Papa.”

But Don Manuel raised the glass just the same.

“You are drinking like a fish now,” Senator Reyes said.

“I must drown my conscience,” Don Manuel placed the glass down. “Oh, it’s all right with you, chico.”^* He thrust his chin at Senator Reyes. “You don’t have to drink at all. You have no conscience.”

Again Senator Reyes laughed. “Padre, that’s the best quip from you tonight. But it’s true. In politics you can’t afford a conscience.”

A servant hovered by and asked Larry if he wanted a second helping of dessert. “I have never tasted mangoes this sweet,” the American said, nodding to the waiter.

Don Manuel did not let the nicety pass. “Imported from Cebu. Everything good we have is imported. And don’t you know? Many American scholars and soldiers stay here on the pretext of studying the country or loving the people. Actually, they are here to marry into our wealthy families. And that’s good, because we like foreigners — even if we use them as bulls to improve the native breed.”

Larry felt warm under the collar as another gale of laughter went around the table. When it subsided, unable to find something to say, he leaned over to Mrs. Villa. “I would like to extend my condolences to Tony’s wife, Mrs. Villa,” he said softly. “Is there a way I may reach her.”

Mrs. Villa looked up from her ice cream, but she did not speak.

“I’d like very much to meet her. Tell her I knew Tony. Maybe that will take a load off her mind.”

Mrs. Villa looked at her husband and all conversation stopped.

“Well,” Don Manuel said suavely, grinning, “don’t just sit there, all of you, and pretend to be ignorant. What are we so secretive about?” He turned to the American and smiled wanly. “There’s really nothing to hide, Professor. But you see, my daughter, Mrs. Antonio Samson — how she likes using that name! — is at this moment indisposed. Hell, that’s one way of saying it. She is in the hospital now with a psychiatrist, whatever you call him. She is high-strung and emotional. She is going crazy. Is she to blame for the death of her husband? She thinks it was suicide. I insist that it wasn’t. Still, I know that boy and I have reason to think that it was so. And Carmen — my Carmen — do you know what she did? A month — one full month, thirty days — she did nothing but piece together the things that her husband had written and torn apart. A full month. And when it was ready she had the book published. She hadn’t worked that hard before and with such dedication — never before. Why then should a young man commit suicide if his wife loved him so? God, people quarrel. Mama, how many times do we quarrel in a day?”

“Papa, please,” Mrs. Villa placed another restraining hand on Don Manuel’s arm.

“It’s all right, Mama. Everyone is talking about us anyway.”

“I’m very sorry, sir,” Larry said, almost choking on the words.

“I don’t know what made him do it. Was it an accident? I can’t believe that one hundred percent. How am I to know? When a person dies, he takes with him all his secrets. He had freedom, that Tony. That’s the most important thing, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what you mean by freedom, sir,” Larry said. He tried to smile, but he just could not make himself do it.

“Freedom,” Don Manuel said, taking another glass of scotch and raising it to his lips, “is there more than one kind?”

He hated having to explain himself, but he was cornered. “Well, sir,” he said cautiously, “the word takes on other meanings when spoken by other groups.”

“Ah,” Don Manuel sighed, “you are like Tony, too damned technical and precise. When a man can wander to great heights — that’s what I call freedom. Tony called it mobility.”

“Well, sir,” Lawrence Bitfogel said calmly, “that is a pretty good definition. But freedom, the one I’m thinking of now, is in the mind more than anywhere else. It enables one to dream. And there’s no ceiling to those dreams.”

It was almost midnight when the party broke up. They had talked of many things — agriculture, the national economy, Europe, and the Common Market. On the way home, Ben de Jesus was quite excited.

“Look,” he said as they slid down the highway to Santa Mesa Boulevard, “I don’t quite agree with you when you say that reform and development must start with the land. Why, you are voicing what some radicals and the Huks have been saying all along.”

“I am sorry if I gave that impression,” Larry said, trying to sound apologetic. He was weary and did not want to argue anymore. “That is just an opinion, really. It isn’t dogma. After all, I don’t know much about your agrarian conditions except what I have read and heard from people like Tony.”

“That’s the trouble,” Ben said. “I wish you would study the situation more. I told you I majored in farm management. I have a farm in Nueva Ecija and I know just how to make it produce more. I’m starting to mechanize it now. That’s the only way to make the farm productive. But the tenants, they know nothing about mechanization. They are impossible. It will take them centuries to learn the value of tractors and fertilizers. They are also thieves and they are ignorant — it’s useless teaching them new things.”

“I can’t comment on that,” Lawrence Bitfogel said. “But you must be sure of what you want the land for. And as for your tenants, if they don’t own the land, don’t expect them to make sacrifices. It never works, you know. Besides, the transition shouldn’t create dislocations. It isn’t easy to shift from agriculture to industry.”

“Talk about dislocations,” Ben said with a hint of impatience. “Do you know what the supposed intellectuals are trying to do? They are campaigning to have the tenant get the land at our expense — and they call it the Magsaysay Revolution. I call it robbery. The tenants don’t know how to work the land. They are so damned ignorant. What do tenants know about farming and efficient production? They have never gone to school to learn these. I know all these things.”

Ben’s anger petered out as they drove along the quiet streets. After a while of leaden silence, Ben spoke again, this time in a lighter vein. “Look, Dr. Bitfogel, why don’t you drop in at the house? There’s a cafe-espresso set that I bought in Italy last year. I’d like you to have some really good coffee.”

Bitfogel wanted desperately to return to his room and shake off the tedium and useless talk to which he had been exposed all evening. “I don’t want to impose on you. It’s so late and—”

“It won’t take long,” Ben said, and before Larry could say anything else the landlord ordered the driver to proceed to Pobres Park.

The coffee, as Ben had said, was strong and excellent. Sitting in the couple’s cozy living room, Larry examined everything in it — the gray marble floor; the rich, upholstered sofas; the heavy blue drapes; the oil portraits of Filipino patriarchs and landscapes, the finely paneled walls and, beyond the living room, the gleaming crystal and silver of the dining room, the appurtenances of Filipino upper-class living. The whole house was air-conditioned, and the air was spiked with the refreshing scent of cologne. He remembered his own home in Cleveland, the simplicity of its furnishings, and again there rushed to his mind in all its vividness the room he once shared with Tony — its two iron beds, the porcelain washbowl, the sagging wooden cabinets …

“I must say, your good taste shows in the way you have furnished your house,” he told Nena de Jesus. She had not talked much and now, at the compliment, she started gushing. “It was a difficult thing to do. You must understand my problem. It was difficult ordering the furniture. It’s good that I was able to go with my husband abroad again last year. Notice the drapes — they are from Marshall Field’s — and the furniture, well, I managed to gather odds and ends together.”

He felt like a heel asking about it, but he asked nevertheless, “Did Tony and his wife have a home of their own?”

“No,” Mrs. de Jesus said with keen interest now. “That’s the trouble. They never lived away from his in-laws. You don’t know how terrible Mrs. Villa can get sometimes. Heavens, she is close to me, she adores me, but she can get on one’s nerves.”

Ben finished his cup and asked the sleepy maid standing by the door of the dining room to pour another cupful. He nodded to his wife’s talk.

“I always say,” Nena said firmly, “that young people should be able to experience a little suffering, that they should start from the bottom. When we were married, Ben and I … you know what happened? Father packed us off to that horrid farm, to an old house. Imagine, we had only five servants and an old Ford. I was angry at Father, but, of course, he always knows best. That’s the root of it all. Carmen and Tony — they were pampered. They never knew what it was to start from the bottom or to live alone as we did.”

He drained his cup, turned to Ben de Jesus, and finally asked the question that had tightened his stomach all evening: “Is it true that Tony committed suicide?”

Ben smiled broadly and he answered with the readiness and familiarity conviction engenders. “Carmen believes it’s suicide,” he said. “Her father, too. But me, I don’t. It was an accident, what else could it be? Why, the fellow had absolutely no reason at all. What more can a man want? His luck — it couldn’t happen to just any guy, not in a million years.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” Ben said impatiently. “Why should the man commit suicide? Everything was laid out for him — the future, all the money and the comforts he wanted. And most of all, you should have seen his wife then. She’s slimmer now — this breakdown business is simply sapping her vitality. But she’s a knockout, a real beauty. Tell him, Nena.”

Mrs. De Jesus smiled. “She had a wonderful figure. She’s thin now, but she’s still lovely. Why, I think she is one of the loveliest girls in the country. I never could understand how she fell for Tony Samson, his being Ilocano and all that.”

He did not want the couple to accompany him to his hotel, but they insisted. There was nothing more they could talk about. Nena tried to point out some of the impressive houses in the Park, but they seemed shapeless and anonymous, and so were the names of the residents she rattled off, names she tried to impress upon him as important. To her prattle Bitfogel could only reply with polite, meaningless grunts. It was only much later that he understood why Ben had wanted very much to take him to Pobres Park. It was not only to show him the accoutrements of the De Jesus residence, but also to point out with an almost personal pride that this Park was the epitome of gracious living and could compare with the richest neighborhoods in the United States. In the two weeks that he was in the Philippines, he was to see the Park again in the daytime — its fire trees in bloom, the whitewashed fences and sprawling residences almost uniform in their ostentatious bigness, so uniform in fact that even after he had left the Philippines he could not recall what the houses in Pobres Park looked like, although he could readily bring to mind the poetry of the nipa huts and the shell-adorned windows of the frail wooden houses that lined the main streets of the small towns.

They were now driving out of the Park and were crossing an expanse of open country that separated it from the less affluent suburbs of the city, and it was on this highway, away from the cozy security of high fences and armed guards, that a rear tire of the de Jesus limousine blew out.

They got out of the car, shaken by the explosion, which had sounded ominously loud in the night, and Larry could sense the urgency in Ben’s voice: “We cannot stay here at a time like this!” To the driver he said, “Hurry up. Do something!”

Larry looked at his luminous watch. It was already three o’clock and the sky above them arched immensely black and wonderful with its millions of stars. The air was sharp, and above the smell of the asphalt he could make out the familiar odor of grass and living earth. “I don’t think you should worry,” he said lightly. “If it’s only a tire, I can help.”

The driver had already opened the rear compartment of the car and was heaving the spare tire out. “Of all things,” Nena could not hide her apprehension, “here on this road. Do you know, Dr. Bitfogel, that robberies have been committed here?”

“Well, you can always give the robbers what they want,” Lawrence Bitfogel said lightly. “We can also walk back to the Park. It’s so near. Or we can flag down a car. Do you think a car will stop?”

Ben de Jesus answered with a meaningless grumble and, with his wife, moved toward the narrow shoulder of the road. The driver fumbled in the dark, and when he could not see what he was doing, he would strike a match and the little flame would cast light on his shadowed, anonymous face and the apprehensive faces of Ben de Jesus and his wife.

In a while two bright headlights appeared and came streaking toward them. The vehicle screeched to a stop behind them. A babble of voices — young, high-pitched, and raucous — followed, and Larry soon recognized the vehicle as one of those converted jeeps that crowded the city streets. From it there poured out more than a dozen men.

It was around him, standing on the asphalt, that they crowded. “Whatsa trouble, Joe?” one of them asked.

“A flat tire,” Larry said, trying to make out the faces before him. He was surprised to find that they were all youngsters. The jeep engine was running, its headlights on. Orientals always look younger than Occidentals, and he roughly placed their ages at eighteen and below. One carried a guitar and another a ukelele. All of them wore some sort of uniform — white shirts with frilled cuffs and dark pants that sank into what looked like cowboy boots.

“We can help, Joe,” the fellow who held the guitar said. The guitarist gave orders to the rest of the boys, and the uniforms took the names of Rod, Clem, Roger, Sam, and what else. A flashlight materialized and Larry joined them, watching their young enthusiasm translated into swift, sure movements, into gawking at the car and its fine finish, while all the time, on the narrow shoulder of the road, Ben and his wife stood motionless and silent.

“I see that you are wearing a uniform,” Larry said to no one in particular. All the bolts of the flat tire were already loosened and two of the boys were helping the driver to pull the tire off.

“Yes, Joe,” the guitarist replied. “We are called the Gay Blades.”

“What’s that?” He did not understand.

One of the boys brought from the jeepney what looked like a bass fiddle. The only difference was that it had only one string and at the other end of the silly-looking contraption was an empty gasoline container — the rectangular kind that usually went in the rear of an old U.S. Army jeep as a reserve gas or water tank. On this container was painted in bold, unerring red, The Gay Blades.

“We do many things — play basketball, sing. We’re the Gay Blades, Joe. You have something in the States like we have here, Joe?”

“My name’s not Joe,” Larry said, a bit annoyed.

“Sorry, Joe,” the guitarist went on. “We just came from a contest, you know. Good luck for us. We won second prize. We will beat the Roving Troubadors, yet. Just watch us, Joe.”

From the shadows, Ben de Jesus and his wife finally emerged and joined the group. The last bolt was being tightened and some of the boys — the one who carried the improvised bass fiddle and the one with the ukulele — went back to the jeepney.

Then the driver stood up. A look of triumph brightened his face and the faces of the youngsters who had helped him.

“Well, Joe,” the guitarist said, moving toward Larry with an extended hand. Lawrence took the hand and shook it. “We better roll now.”

It was only then that Ben spoke. “No, wait,” he said. He went to the youth and thrust out a bill. “Here — here, take this.”

They spoke in the vernacular and argued a bit and, from the drift and tone of the young men’s voices, Larry knew that the payment was being refused. “It’s Christmas — it’s Christmas anyway,” Ben was saying.

Some discussion had started in the jeep now and then they poured out — the bass fiddle and the ukuleles and a pair of bongo drums — and there in the open highway, under the stars, Larry heard the Gay Blades and the song they had adapted, the song they spiced with bongos, ukuleles, and the silly-looking bass fiddle — a medley of “White Christmas” and “Jingle Bells” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”—and while the boys sang, two cars slowed down, then zoomed on, and in the glare of the headlights he saw them clearly, fully: the lean, young faces, the alert eyes, the shiny black boots and the blue pants, the immaculate white silk shirts. But most of all, he relished hearing them, the clear voices welded as one, and in the end, after the final flourish of instruments and voices, the guitarist stepped forward. And having received the money from Ben, he shook Larry’s hand again.

“Merry Christmas,” the Gay Blades said.

When he returned to his room, Larry was amazed at himself, at how in the end he had managed to stand up to Ben de Jesus. He had never been quick to anger and he could not immediately trace the root of his vehemence, for he often prided himself on his self-control. His voice had trembled and, even now, there was the empty feeling that always sucked in his belly when he was angry. He wondered how Ben and his wife took his rudeness, particularly after they had invited him to their house and shown him their hospitality.

He did not feel sleepy, although it was almost daybreak, and an unusual freshness and clarity of mind suffused him instead. Above his anger, everything that he had heard and seen was lucid and well-defined. He decided to write down his impressions on this early dawn — a useful habit he had acquired since he started working for the agency in South America. After a few sentences, however, he gave up. The impressions were incisive, yes, but always he could hear, like some grating and endless commercial in the back of his mind, the blustery talk of Senator Reyes and Don Manuel and the cocksure assertions of Ben de Jesus.

He stood up and lingered before the window. He could not see what lay beyond the glass, for the light of the table lamp diffused all images in the room. He turned the lamp off and the images before him jumped out — the lights of the ships that sat in the bay, the acacia trees brooding over the boulevard, the glistening mercury lamps, and the star lanterns of the shops and eateries. It suddenly seemed strange that he was here, alone in this distant, tropical land now undergoing the turmoil of change. How will it end? Lawrence Bitfogel wanted to divine the answer, and what immediately formed in his mind was unpleasant. But the big men he had met tonight were not representative of the race, for there were also other people to consider — the Gay Blades, for instance — and there was the pervasive malleability of the race itself that could always absorb a shock or be relied upon in a moment of need. Yes, the Villas and the Reyeses were not representative, but unless they were changed, and made impotent, weren’t they the people who controlled the country? Wealth dictates government, and in this fair Oriental land, wealth resided in a few hands, in the hands of people like Manuel Villa and Ben de Jesus.

And where were the young people like Antonio Samson, who had gone to the United States and to its fountainhead of wisdom if not of courage? They were destroyed because they were bribed. And because they were destroyed, the country and the beneficent change they would have brought were lost. The future that once seemed evocative and real when it was but an academic subject to be tossed around in a crowded room on Maple Street had been aborted in the dank bowels of the earth. Knowing the dark immensity of this fact, Larry felt all joy leave him. A tautness clutched at his heart, and in the quiet of this room he could hear his own grief welling up. He thought of Tony, fought back the tears that scalded his eyes, and when they stopped, when his hands were no longer shaking, he had one consolation left: he had told Ben de Jesus just what he thought.

He could not quite understand why the young businessman had been needlessly riled by the Gay Blades after they had helped change the tire. When they arrived at the hotel, Ben had checked the car’s hubcaps. As for the youngsters with those outlandish uniforms, he had dismissed them: “Juvenile delinquents, that’s what they are. They would have robbed us, too, of more than just the hubcaps if they had a chance. See what’s happening to our young people? They go about in the craziest costumes and they have lost all sense of respect.”

“I’m glad they came along,” Lawrence Bitfogel had said.

Now that he thought about the Gay Blades some more, and of their singing on the road just outside Pobres Park, he marveled at their capacity to improvise. The bass fiddle, for instance, and that jeepney they rode in, that omnipresent carrier in the narrow streets of Manila, gaudily painted, driven by impious individualists, rakishly modern with chrome and the most atrocious-looking fins — where else could one find something like it but in a country where ingenuity thrives and where the young people are capable of almost anything?

But de Jesus had chosen not to look at it that way, and he had snorted instead. “They are thieves, and they will kill you if you don’t give them what they want.”

It was then that Lawrence Bitfogel could not hold back the anger coiled within him, and when it sprang, it was clear and loud: “Damn you! Those kids are not thieves. The robbers in this country, the real murderers, are people like you. All of you — you conspired, you killed Antonio Samson. Why, the poor guy didn’t have a chance! You had snuffed out his life before he could fling himself on the tracks!”

He had left them speechless in the driveway, in the shadow of the acacias that fronted the hotel, and he did not even close the door of the car. He had raced up to his room and, alone at last, he had cried — something he had not done in years. Now, when was it that he had cried last? Was it when his father died? In a way he was glad that he had spoken his mind when the need for it finally came. This thought, though it all seemed so futile afterward, brought back to him that sense of peace that had eluded him all through the frantic evening. And he knew that if Tony Samson were aware of this, if Tony had seen him and heard him speak out loud, that dear old friend would have applauded.

— Marquina, Vizcaya

June 1, 1960

* Chico: Brown, golf-ball-size tropical fruit; also, a term of endearment.