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

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 hisfriends, 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