The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) (26 page)

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.

I
t 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.