Three Filipino Women (16 page)

“Replay. That is an old tune,” she said, pinching my arm.

“But it is still true.”

“Think of your own circle, your friends. Oh, I know you mean it and you can live with what I am. But they will sneer at you, your settling down after all these years with a prostitute from Camarin. Do you think you can endure that? And if we go out to some dinner and there is a man, or two men, whom I know, how would you take it?”

I could not answer. It had not occurred to me that she would put it that way, so neatly, so clearly.

“Maybe,” I said, “we can go somewhere and live by ourselves.”

“And how long can that be? We cannot really run away.” I thought that if she were constantly with me, my anxieties would be banished, that her presence would be the balm to ease my mind and
I would finally settle into comfortable domesticity. But the new relationship was soon battered and awry. We were both to blame, I guess—she for her volatile temper and hypersensitivity to things I said, and me for my candor and openness. There were now bickerings between us, sometimes bitter and long-drawn. It was better if I kept my mouth taped, afraid that I would say something that would make her cross.

Now her presence seemed unreal; when she was gone, it would seem as if she had not been with me at all. There was no lingering trace of her although I always remembered what she said. I was so insecure with her, I was afraid she would even walk out on me in the middle of the night when she was in one of her unexplainable moods.

During one quarrel I was so exasperated with her tempestuousness, I told her perhaps it was best if she became an actress. We had driven sullenly to Cubao and even when she reached her gate, there was none of the joyous reconciliation that I had expected. I spent the night in turmoil, my chest tightened like a vise, and sleep would not come. I had to see her the following day, wait humbly at her gate till she came out.

Her new belligerence confounded me; I suspected that she did this so that she could dominate me and I took pains explaining to her that our relationship should not be one of superiority or inferiority; I had no intention of changing her personality, I took her for what she was. But even a remark like this was enough to send her into a dark and sulking mood.

Often, in those anxious moments of silence, I raked the past and asked myself what wrong I had done. I searched my conscience—the innermost recesses of myself—and there was nothing I could remember which I did wrong. There was one evening when she simply said it was time for good-bye. She did not want to see me
anymore. I was caressing her face when she drew away. I was amassing memories, and God, many of them were bitter. I know that whatever it was I had told her, I was just being myself, I was expressing my nagging fears and nothing else. I concluded then that she was either playing with me or had finally gotten tired because I had nothing to give, nothing but this shriveled self.

We rarely talked about Andrew Meadows now. I knew he would soon leave. Then, by early April, she called and said she wanted me to visit her in Cubao. It was the first time she would let me in, the first man, she said, whom she had ever invited there. We were going to be alone, she was going to send her “family” out to see a movie or to shop at Ali Mall nearby.

She met me gravely at the gate and when a maid lingered, she told her briskly to go out to the garden and water the palmettos, among them, I am sure, the palmetto I had bought for her in Calamba. She was pale and drawn and her eyes seemed glazed. She led me to her house. Though not large it was tastefully decorated. I was happily surprised to see myself everywhere, the knickknacks I had given her, the lacquered trays, the flower vases, the art books. She led me to her bedroom and for a moment, I thought we would make love.

“I am sorry that I had to get you out of your office in the middle of the afternoon,” she said. “But I want you to know—to be the first to know that I have made a decision.”

I thought she had finally decided to live with me.

“I am going to marry Andy,” she said.

The news sank into me with such truculence, my knees felt weak and a deadening sense of loss engulfed me. I had felt this sorrow only once before, when Lydia and the children left me.

I could not speak.

“It is for the best, Roly,” she said. “For both of us. For you
 … and your morality. It will mean that you are finally free of me. Can’t you see? For me, it will be a beginning …”

“We must live with the past,” I said, suppressing the tremor in my voice.

“I know,” she said. “And we must also forget it. Andy wants to take me to America, make a home for him and raise his children. I saw a gynecologist last week. He said I could still bear half a dozen children if I wanted to. And that is what I will do. I will raise them in a happy home and will love them all I can …”

I pressed her hand. I didn’t want to but I understood.

I remembered when she asked me if she looked like a prostitute and how I felt then, how I wanted to be one with her.

“I wish you the best …” I said, even as tears blurred my eyes. But she did not see them for she embraced me then and started to cry, her heart thrashing against my chest. It was the last time I would hold her.

“All the men I had, the boyfriend-boyfriends, I never felt anything for them. I don’t love Andy, Roly. But perhaps, in time, I will. It was you all the time, the first …”

I tried to push her away, to look at the precious face but she would not let me. My cheeks were soon wet with her crying.

“Can you imagine how long it has been?” she asked. “So now, I know what love is. When you said you wanted a relationship that was not plastic, I did not understand. I do now. I have never apologized to any man. Now, I will say to you—” she kissed me softly—“please forgive me …”

Leaving Cubao at dusk, the heat of April melting my bones, I really had nowhere to go. I was happy for Ermi. Perhaps, this is what love has always been, whether it is for a woman or for a cause—the readiness to give and not ask for anything in return, the unquestioning
willingness to lose everything, even if that loss is something as precious as life itself.

“What is death?” she had once asked. “You die once and you will not die again …”

Remembering this, I know how it would be for me. I would return to the old apartment in Mabini and if I could not sleep, I would probably walk over to Camarin. Ralph, the pianist had retired; a son had taken him back to Agusan. Where the piano used to stand they have set up a booth for their stereo system. The bar had deteriorated since Didi migrated to the United States and they no longer had Jack Daniels black. I would probably order a beer and squid roasted in that open grill, then watch Gloria finish her routine. She is buxom like a Rubens girl, she gyrates her hips in a naughty, lascivious way.

After Camarin, I would go to the Luneta and get a bit of salt air in my lungs. I would wait for the night to deepen then return to my apartment and lie down on that wide and empty bed. I would imagine Ermi as it was the night she stormed in. I can still see her even now bending over me, her hair a tumble on my face, her breath warm and sweet. But did she really care? I had asked her to be kind when the moment for my execution came, that she make it swift. I will always languish in her final judgment about how I sold myself. She was right, of course, but it was not just myself that I had sold. And though I will not admit it to anyone, ever, I know that I sold my country, too—I, Rolando Cruz, former guerrilla officer, historian. What have I done to rationalize this treason? They used me—the gnomes of Wall Street and Marunouchi. I did their bidding willingly, eagerly, for I wanted a life that would not be marred by the early hunger that I had known. I had gotten more than food, but now, it was not only Ermi whom I had lost. What will she take of me from this Ermita that had been my perdition and
her beginning? I don’t even have her picture. And knowing that what should be must be, I will probably be wracked by this pain which not even morphine can allay, and when it will finally become intolerable, I will probably go to the compartment under my bookshelf, take out the old forty-five kept from my days in Kiangan, then level it at my head.

Baguio, May 29, 1980.

P
LATINUM
 

ONE
 

I
t is difficult for me to relate this story because it concerns a woman for whom I have always had the deepest affection. Also because it concerns me and the dilemmas that I had to face, not in our relationship, but in the very probing questions she had raised, not so much by what she asked as by the way she had lived.

I am convinced that I loved her as I had never loved anyone. If I did leave my easy life to be with her in the end as I told her I would, it was because of her. I know now that she was right and yet, I have not really changed. Is it because I am a coward? Too much
a creature of habit, of comfort? Or—and I don’t want to answer this question—did I really love her enough?

Every day, I go through the numbing monotony, doing what I have been doing for the last six years. I have prospered by any measure in spite of inflation, the energy crisis, and all those pernicious dislocations that threatened business under martial law. And still I persist although no longer believing in what I am doing. Why then? For the family tradition? Out of momentum or plain, cussed stubbornness?

But I am young and there is time ahead.

Is it because I don’t want to stake my life in a venture which may not bring forth the justice Malu had searched for? I don’t want to think anymore. My mind is in turmoil and I wish Malu were here to confirm me.

I met Malu—short for Maria Luisa—in my senior year when I was contributing to the college journal. I was majoring in business and economics, but I had dabbled in sociology. Thinking about it now, Malu must have regarded me as an incorrigible rightist. I was about to leave the office of Professor Galvez, having submitted a twenty-page manuscript on the multinational corporations and how they were plundering Mindanao, when she came in.

She was tall—almost as tall as I—very fair, and slim. Her hair was neatly combed, hanging loose over her shoulders. She did not have a bit of makeup. But even without cosmetics, her face seemed aglow—that was the first thing one noticed about Malu. She had high cheekbones, full lips, and eyes that shone. Her chest was almost flat, and a fine down covered her arms.

Professor Galvez, who was the journal’s editor, attended to her at once. “Ah, Malu, I suppose you’ve already finished the piece. About time we had something spiritually lifting in this arid little journal.”

Her face was mobile; she was plainly peeved.

“Your article on faith healing and spirits,” Professor Galvez went on blithely, “should really make the next issue more interesting.”

“That is what I came to tell you, sir.” Her voice was mellow. “I’m hesitant about it. I wrote it in the first person and it doesn’t have the objectivity you demand.”

Professor Galvez had a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. He was also an excellent writer. In his late forties, his hair had turned prematurely gray and he looked venerable. “Well, isn’t that the best way to handle something that cannot be explained in the usual scholarly fashion? But we can always break ground the way Carlos Castañeda does.”

Again, the displeasure on her face which the professor missed entirely.

We went out together. I wanted to know her more and what she was doing. She was free the rest of the morning so we went to the cafeteria for coffee.

I was pretentious then, going on pompous. I believed in economic nationalism and was researching the policies of government that were inimical to our interests. It was 1970 and though I did not agree with the student demonstrators and their lofty, radical slogans, I sympathized with their objectives. Malu told me later that I was just expressing the “constipated” view of the nationalist bourgeoisie which wanted the whole cake for itself.

She listened patiently nonetheless to how I was grappling with such weighty subjects as history, progress, and alienation. Thinking back, had Malu been plain, I would not have been interested in her or what she was doing. Faith healing was old news to me, although I wasn’t one to go around writing about spirits.