The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) Read online

  PRAISE FÒR F. SIONIL JOSÉ

  “The foremost Filipino novelist in English, his novels deserve a much wider readership than the Philippines can offer. His major work, the Rosales Saga, can be read as an allegory for the Filipino in search of an identity.”

  —IAN BURUMA, The New York Review of Books

  “One of the [Philippines’] most distinguished men of letters.”

  —Time

  “America has no counterpart … no one who is simultaneously a prolific novelist, a social and political organizer, an editor and journalist, and a small-scale entrepreneur.… As a writer, José is famous for two bodies of work. One is the Rosales sequence, a set of five novels published over a twenty-year span which has become a kind of national saga.”

  —JAMES FALLOWS, The Atlantic

  “Impressive is José’s ability to tell important stories in a lucid, but never merely simple prose.… It’s refreshing to see a politically engaged writer who dares to reach for a broader audience.”

  —LAURA MILLER, San Francisco Weekly

  “Tolstoy himself, not to mention Italo Svevo, would envy the author of this story.… This short … scorching work whets our appetite for Sionil José’s masterpiece, the five-novel Rosales Saga.”

  —JOSEPH COATES, Chicago Tribune

  “[José is] an outstanding writer. If ever a Nobel Prize in literature will be awarded to a Southeast Asian writer, it will be to F. Sionil José.”

  —The Mainichi Shimbun (Tokyo)

  “Considered by many to be Asia’s most likely candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature.”

  —The Singapore Straits Times

  “F. Sionil José could become the first Filipino to win the Nobel Prize for literature … he’s a fine writer and it would be welcome recognition of cultural achievement in his troubled country. [He] is widely known and acclaimed in Asia.”

  —JOHN GRIFFIN, The Honolulu Advertiser

  “José is one of Asia’s most eminent writers and novelists. His passionate, sometimes transcendent writings illuminate contemporary Filipino life in graceful and historically anchored narratives of power brokers and the brokered, of landowners and the indentured.”

  —SCOTT RUTHERFORD, Islands Magazine

  “The literary work of José is inseparable from the modern politics and history of the Philippines.”

  —Le Monde

  “In Filipino literature in recent years, the creative work of Francisco Sionil José occupies a special place.… José is a great artist.”

  —IGOR PODBEREZSKY, Institute of Oriental Studies, Moscow

  “The reader of this slim volume of well-crafted stories will learn more about the Philippines, its people, and its concerns than from any journalistic account or from a holiday trip there. José’s book takes us to the heart of the Filipino mind and soul, to the strengths and weaknesses of its men, women, and culture.”

  —LYNNE BUNDESEN, Los Angeles Times

  “If we had to choose only one literary text to represent the twentieth century, it might arguably—vociferously arguably—be the only prose epic of our time … keeping alive the ancient epic tradition of heroes unable to achieve heroism without the active help of the community.”

  —ISAGANI R. CRUZ, playwright and critic

  “The great Philippine novel takes place within two critical decades … Dusk, with its transitional fusing of dark with light, is possessed of a grand brooding material and metaphoric immanence that seems to guide all of Sionil José’s work.”

  —REAMY JANSEN, The Bloomsbury Review

  “He has spoken the awful truths and grappled with the fearful realities that centrally confront us, not in just one novel but at length in four or five books which, taken together, are the most impressive legacy of any writer to Philippine culture.”

  —RICAREDO DEMETILLO, University of the Philippines

  “José writes English prose with a passion that, at its best moments, transcends the immediate scene. He is a masterful story writer.”

  —CHRISTINE CHAPMAN, International Herald Tribune

  “His stories truly carry the reader into the petty, debilitating, nepotistic, and often nightmarish world of politics and power.”

  —DAVID MCELVEEN, Asiaweek (Hong Kong)

  “José writes with an urgency that recalls D. H. Lawrence and preoccupations resembling those of Hemingway. [His] prose has, at its best, a sustained intensity that is highly impressive.”

  —DAVID BURLEIGH, Mainichi Daily News (Tokyo)

  2000 Modern Library Paperback Original

  Copyright © 2000 by F. Sionil José

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

  Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by

  Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada

  by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Modern Library and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The novels in this work were originally published separately as The Pretenders

  (copyright © 1962 by F. Sionil José) and Mass (copyright © 1982, 1983 by F. Sionil José) by Solidaridad Publishing House, Manila, Philippines.

  The Samsons is a work of fiction. The characters and events are

  products of the author’s imagination. Where actual historical persons or

  incidents are mentioned, their context is entirely fictional.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  José, F. Sionil (Francisco Sionil).

  The Samsons: The pretenders; and, Mass / F. Sionil José.

  p. cm.

  “Originally published in English as The pretenders, and Mass”—T.p. verso.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83032-6

  1. Philippines—History—1898—Fiction. I. José, F. Sionil (Francisco Sionil), 1924– Pretenders. II. José, F. Sionil (Francisco Sionil), 1924– Mass. III. Title.

  PR9550.9.J67 S26 2000

  823—dc21

  99-087896

  Modern Library website address:www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Pretenders

  Mass

  Afterword: Notes on the Writing of a Saga

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  The Pretenders

  For Teresita

  … They were bright young men who knew what money meant. But though they were rich and were educated in the best schools of Europe, their horizons were limited and they knew they could never belong to the alien aristocracy which determined the future.… They cried for reforms, for wider opportunities, for equality. Did they plead for freedom, too? And dignity for all Indios—and not only for themselves who owed their fortunes and their status to the whims of the aristocracy? Could it be that they wanted not freedom or dignity but the key to the restricted enclaves of the rulers?

  —ANTONIO SAMSON, The Ilustrados

  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 a
nd 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.