Three Filipino Women (7 page)

The Old Man did not even look at Isme. “You can raid any of the companies in Manila that have the competent people,
hijo.
Make that your job, offer them incentives. IBM should be able to satisfy us. And as for taxes …” He did not continue; he was not president of the Senate for nothing.

At dinner, it was all trivia interspersed with the senator’s bawdy jokes which were pathetically dated. Narita did not laugh at them and, at first, I thought she was being prudish as we, ourselves, hypocrites, were laughing as if we had not heard them before. The Old Man was sharp. “Narita does not laugh at these jokes anymore.” he said dryly. “She has heard them so many times but she lets me tell them just the same.”

It was a fine French meal that started with vichyssoise. With our
stomachs finally stuffed with soufflé, cups of coffee in hand, we proceeded to the library for the session that was to last till four in the morning, the senator lording over it. He started with grandiloquence and self-depreciation: “Politics is the highest form of human enterprise for with politics, we shape the state and, therefore, the nature of society. It is an honorable profession made dishonorable by rascals like myself who have, like bad weeds, lived this long. I must go but the state lives on. And if you want to better the state, then look at politicians as necessary evils. Not that Narita is evil—,” he looked at his daughter-in-law seated on the arm of the sofa, her hand on his shoulder. “But she is a pretty little devil, isn’t she?” We all laughed and Narita accepted the compliment with a smile. She really had the Old Man wrapped around her little finger and I wouldn’t have been surprised then if the senator, the old goat that we all knew him to be, desired her, too. Then, “I have discussed it with the President and all the Party chieftains. I could have made a unilateral decision, but I believe in the democratic process. And, besides, this will be the first time that the Party will have a beautiful and brilliant candidate.”

The king is dead! Long live the king! We all clapped in complete harmony. Now, we really had work to do, now we had an objective—to win the election—two years away.

“You are all family now,” the senator boomed. “So let us talk frankly. Candidly. You are also
novatos
—but brilliant
novatos
who have ideas. Or is it plots? I would like to hear all of them. Talk of nothing else but how to win …”

The discussion was freewheeling; we started with regional issues, the Ilocos and tobacco and the possibility of reestablishing the cotton industry there. Tourism for the Mountain Province and resettlement in Cagayan Valley and in the foothills of Sierra Madre. Rice and agrarian reform in Central Luzon. Decentralization of the sugar
industry, fishing in the Visayas and intensified agriculture, the Muslim problem in Mindanao. Then we went into foreign relations, the American bases and, finally, tactics.

Narita participated in this discussion but all talk stopped whenever the Old Man made a point or suggested details. He had, after all, four decades of practice. He was right. We were novices and we never talked about cheating, the use of violence, intimidation, pork-barrel funds, and blackmail; these were real instruments, but we blithely ignored them.

Narita and the Old Man were peeved. I had not known how very much alike they had become in their thinking. “If it will mean victory, then cheat!” the Old Man pontificated.

“The objective is to win,” Narita said coolly. “You cannot talk morality with opponents who are immoral. You cannot tell the truth to people who will not accept that truth.”

I felt uneasy; my training was different. In that small town where I was born, my parents had pounded a little bit of honesty into me.

“You must always have options,” Narita was continuing. “That is what politics is. Always the possible …”

We were exhausted although the fruit, cake, coffee, and liquor came continuously. Saliva dripped from the corner of the Old Man’s mouth and Narita dutifully wiped it off. He was starting to doze off, and she told him to go upstairs and sleep but he said he would go home. We took him to his car and bade him good-night. The others were driven home but I stayed behind.

Alone, finally, she cuddled close as we talked, the stereo playing Chopin softly. She sighed. “I can hardly wait to put everything into motion, Eddie. I know you have reservations, but, for my sake, don’t remind me of that small house—not in the presence of others. The past is just for the two of us …”

“I did not talk about Santa Ana,” I said.

“You did, too.”

“No.”

“Want to bet?” She went to the desk at the other end of the library, fiddled with some knobs in a drawer. The music stopped and clearly, very clearly, our voices—excited and pitched—came alive. She had taped the entire discussion; the library, perhaps the whole house, was bugged.

The pre-convention plan was set. Her
zarzuela
was transported to Davao, Dumaguete, Bacolod, Cebu, Iloilo, and even Dagupan. It was bringing culture to the provinces. She was also invited to lecture at the universities in the South, all the way to a small college in Bongao, Sulu, and there was her thrice-a-week column that I liked to read for its freshness and unpredictability.

In the process, she was making political profiles of the provinces and checking up with the senator on the personalities she had met or wanted to meet.

She learned fast and she had a retentive memory. When the computer came at the end of the year, I wondered how necessary it really was. She had committed to memory so many things, she could have won without it.

FOUR
 

I
have seen Narita in tears only once. By this time, she already had a suite in her father-in-law’s Makati building, the nerve center for her political future. She had an excellent clipping service. She had called me, I thought, about some urgent problem. When I arrived, she closed the door, told me to sit down and read an item in a weekly gossip column by Mita Guzman.

Narita never had much respect for Filipino journalists—an attitude she got from Senator Reyes who handed envelopes at the end of every month to a wide assortment of reporters. They covered the
Senate and other trivia and passed themselves off as journalists. She had the long list and on it were editors, some of whom professed the highest moral motives.

Mita Guzman was a slight acquaintance; so was the husband, a small, henpecked man who was once my classmate in political science but who had dropped out to take a job as PR man for one of the congressmen. She was a woman to be feared both physically and otherwise for she had the face and the muscle of a sumo wrestler and the nastiness to skewer anything that crossed her path. Now, in her column: “She is young, pretty, and able. She has a Columbia degree and she sings well in a modern musical. Watch out for this girl now for though her father died a drunk and her mother sold meat (not rotten) in the old hometown, she has claims to royalty and will yet make it to the Senate next election …”

When I finished the item, which was encircled in red, Narita said: “Why can’t they forget where I came from? Did I commit a crime? We were poor, Eddie, but not starving. You know that …”

I went to her and held her shoulders. “You should expect these things. Remember, Narita, you’re in politics now. There will be more when you campaign. It will not stop.”

“I will get her, I tell you,” she said grimly, then quavered and tears ran from her eyes. I held her close and could feel her heart thrashing. She clung to me as if I were a raft and cried, the sobs stifled. I did not know whether it was in anger or grief. I said: “There is nothing to be ashamed of, Narita. How many Filipinos are poor? This is your capital, if you want to make it work for you. Cinderella story. Girl from the sticks makes it in New York. Is there a more romantic theme?”

She stopped crying abruptly and drew away, a look of surprise, of resentment, on her tear-washed face. “What?” her voice leaped. “Expose myself to more ridicule? That’s unthinkable! I’ll have none
of it. Poverty is not something to be proud of. It is degrading and don’t ask me to think otherwise.”

She did get Mita Guzman, in her own way. One morning I came upon Guzman waiting in Narita’s Forbes Park living room, a bunch of red roses in her hand. When Narita came out, she attended to me first as if Mita did not exist. And only after she had put Mita in place did Narita go to her, kiss her on the cheek, and thank her for the flowers. Mita waited outside while Narita and I had coffee leisurely in the kitchen where she told me how she did it.

The Guzmans had hocked their house to the Philippine Bank to buy a small press. Having learned of this, Narita—through the Senate President—turned the screws and Mita had no alternative but to come a-visiting. Mita had been to see her more than a dozen times, enriching some florist with the roses she always brought.

To complete the noose, Narita suggested that with her help, the Guzmans should have a larger press capability and they should not worry about printing jobs. There was so much in the Senate that they could do. And then, there was this election campaign that was coming. And yes, she was such a good writer, it would be great if she did Narita’s official biography—and of course, Narita would pay for it all and reward their publishing company handsomely.

“She is also cuckolding her husband,” Narita said. “It’s all in the computer now. She is no different … the whole bunch …”

I wanted to say that her father-in-law and she made them that way, but by then, I had decided to keep such thoughts to myself.

If the Party convention was
lutong makaw
(prearranged), so was the election. I watched the campaign and sometimes helped distribute those envelopes with money in them. She had exhausted most of us just keeping up with her. I don’t know where her iron energy came from—it certainly was not the yogurt, nor the pills. She would be up mapping out the next meeting with her flip cards and
notebooks while we were still asleep. I would have recorded more of her techniques and performance but my leave from the department was up.

She had all the handbills that she needed but there was one picture-poster of her, printed in Japan through the courtesy of Senator Reyes’ Japanese contacts, a big 16″ X 24″ in full color, a prim, almost Mona Lisa-like smile on her face, so elfin, yet so innocent like the Virgin Mary’s as well. There was no name on the picture but in those few months, it had become the most popular election material. She autographed it and it was displayed—just like a magazine cover—which it had been earlier for all the vernacular weekly magazines whose editors she had bought. I saw it inside
sari-sari
stores, in farm homes, in offices long after the campaign and I presume that to this day, there are rural houses adorned with it.

Those flip cards really helped. Before she went into a new territory, the team zeroed in on it, the important people, personal details—hobbies, deaths, birthdays, relatives—all these came in handy. She did not upstage the other candidates but sometimes the clamor for her was just too loud to be ignored. By now, they were calling,
Manang
, Narita! When it was her turn, she would start in the local language. She could converse passably in tongue twisters like Pangasinan and Zambal and she even picked up a bit of Tausug.

There was nothing intellectual or explosive about her speeches on the road. Soon, the audience would clamor for her to sing and she always gave them “Lahat ng Araw” which she included in her zarzuela. She even had different versions of it; a university poet whom she flattered wrote Ilokano lyrics and she had a journalist from Cebu do it in Cebuano as well. The song became a hit and look at all the record companies doing it in instrumental and vocals now.

But it was a case of overkill and I don’t know whose idea it was—Senator Reyes’ or Narita’s. Underneath the glossy exterior of
that campaign, the music, the fanfare, there was something sinister. And that first meeting with Senator Reyes came to mind.

I am fully aware of course that to go deeper into this is to tread on dark, unfamiliar terra infirma. I can only guess her views on poverty developed because of her childhood; her rejection of the slums afterwards was based not on a sense of moral outrage but on aesthetics. She could not stand the unsightly around her, whether it was a man like me who did not comb his hair or a slum dweller’s
barong-barong.
Her view of the world was, therefore, cosmetic although she, herself, would not admit it.

The violence—and I had reports of it—was committed in many places, in our own town, mostly in our province. A former clerk in the
municipio
had dredged up the fact that her father had absconded with some money. The poor man was beaten up and Father had to treat him for lacerations. She was perhaps determined that in her homeground, she should be on top—which she was not only because Senator Reyes poured a lot of money but because she was the local girl who made good. The opposition mayor of Tubas, close to our town, was killed. It was a shooting “accident” and although people had come to Manila to say it was not, there was no mention of it in the papers. That was the extent to which the papers were manipulated. And vote-buying, bribery, dumping—I will not recite these. It is enough that I knew they happened not because she and her father-in-law were insecure but because they believed in overkill.