Free The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) by F. Sionil Jose

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 graduatestudents, 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 andtumultuous 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