Three Filipino Women (9 page)

What can I say about her? She was my daughter, she was my
pupil, she was my heir. All my children—it is not that they have failed me. It was never in their blood—I see that now—to give the nation the service, the thinking that it needed, the way I devoted my life to it. But Narita—from the beginning, I knew that she would do justice to the name she had taken.

If I were only younger … but it does not matter. She was some woman, better looking than all the women I have had, and there have been a few … She learned very fast, she should have been the first woman president. She got as high as the Senate but even there, look at what she had done, the many programs on nutrition, on culture, on science she had started, the many Centers that were built at her inspiration. Food production has increased, thanks to her, and the sugar workers—although I should not be talking like this—are better off now because of her untiring and unselfish devotion to their cause. Don’t laugh—you know that my life had always revolved around sugar, its problems, its world market and, of course, that beautiful quota from the United States. But we were willing to be pushed a bit, not by those mealy mouthed priests, not by those radical labor leaders, but by those whom we trust, who know our feelings, who are part of our constellation. If we give justice to people, we should do so without being prodded and, by God, that is what we did.

These and so many more are Narita’s achievements and no gossip monger, no vitriolic critic can take these away.

I knew Narita as a child, I watched her grow; her ideas on nationalism, she got them from me. I was instrumental in shaping them, guiding them. Not that she did not have a mind of her own. In fact she was so independent at times, she could even afford afterwards to antagonize my friends and taunt the whole system itself.

So she has left me two wonderful boys who will not forget their
mother as the most heroic, the most unusual Filipina in our history. Gabriela Silang, Tandang Sora, all those revered Filipinas in our lineage—they are really nothing compared to her. The scholars should have no difficulty in confirming this …

END OF TAPE

Looking back, I have often wondered about the exact moment when I began to delude myself. I know now that it was done slowly, bit by bit, with my own circumstances and needs, pushing me, my desire to justify myself, that I was really earning the money that she paid me. I also began to believe, towards the latter part of the relationship, that nothing much could be done about our political malaise until she had real power, when she could dictate and no longer have to deal with slimy politicians and make compromises. I realize that this is a fallacy, that government is not a vacuum, that where there are human relationships, compromises are inevitable and that, precisely speaking, the statesman is also a superb politician.

During the first year of her term, I worked hard and there were heated arguments within the think tank for the others were never told—and I never told them—that she was aiming for the Presidency. Of course, that did occur to them. The programs that we shaped always kept her in the public eye. She was a national figure now and well beyond the narrow partisan confines of bloc, of party. She had taken on, too, the nationalist mantle that the aging senator bestowed on her.

It was in the second year of her term that she went to this small college in our province to deliver a commencement address. It was a request she could not deny; besides, it afforded her a chance to see again the old hometown and, perhaps, renew ties. And as the
newspapers related it, after she had finished her extemporaneous address on social justice as an ideal she wanted the young to promote, there was a standing and thunderous ovation. It was at this instance, too, that the young graduates all rushed to the stage to congratulate her. It was a mob scene and the stage suddenly swayed and then collapsed.

She had been knocked against a rusty iron truss, there was a gash on her arm—nothing serious, and she was moving around with a sling when she got to the provincial hospital her father-in-law had built.

It was the ultimate irony; a doctor decided to give her an anti-tetanus shot, just to be sure. In seconds, she was gasping in a massive anaphylactoid attack. There was no resuscitator, no anti-allergy shot available at that instance. In less than five minutes, she was dead.

These details were ignored by the papers. It was more dramatic to say it was the people’s enthusiasm which killed her, that she died in her home ground, defending the rights of the poor sacadas against the rich sugar oligarchs, the applause of the youth her lasting epitaph.

The mythmakers, particularly the PR staff of Senator Reyes, had more than a kernel to start with: The Narita Reyes Foundation immediately came into being purportedly to perpetuate the ideals for which Narita gave her life. Nowhere was it mentioned that the young people had rushed and crowded that flimsy stage for at the end of her speech Narita started handing out those envelopes that were, by then, a familiar gimmick in her public appearances and her campaign …

In a couple of years, there floated around variations of her last moments, perhaps to fit the temper of the times. Now, the CIA was responsible. She had been vocal in her anti-Americanism, in her
espousal—like her father-in-law—of the removal of the American bases. The CIA saw to it that the stage would collapse!

I knew her well enough to see through her, that like Senator Reyes whose sugar interests survived on American largesse, Narita’s anti-Americanism was for the galleries, for the pseudointellectuals of the campuses.

The aides of Senator Reyes woke me up at three o’clock that morning and the senator and I flew to Bacolod in his Cessna, with the casket on board in the back. He was silent during the flight, his crumpled face grown darker with his grief. When we got to the hospital at daybreak, he thundered and raged and said he would have every doctor there forbidden to practice and jailed. We went to the room where Narita lay and at the sight of her, he broke down, the sobs torn out of him in gusts.

They brought the casket in and he forbade them to touch her; only the two of us could. I did not realize till then how light she was. Looking at the quiet face, the eyes closed as if in sleep, the cleft chin, it all came back—the little girl I had played with in Santa Ana, the splashing rain, the ripe guavas and the green cascade of cadena de amor in bloom. I did not want the Old Man to see me cry so I let the tears burn and fall without my wiping them.

She was buried in Manila. Her mother, my parents, and some of our hometown friends who could afford the trip were there. It was a hot April day and we sweated in the hall of the Senate as we listened to the lengthy eulogies.

It was vacation time anyway so after the funeral, I decided to go home with Father and Mother. Our house looked shabby, its wooden sidings in need of paint. I walked over to Narita’s new house. It was much more substantial, the biggest house in Santa Ana, bigger than the municipio. The guava and pomelo trees had not been cut but they could not now hide the big house with wooden
balustrades and red-painted roof as they had the old house roofed with rusting tin. I don’t know if it was on Narita’s instructions, but they did not tear down the old brick wall that enclosed the yard and the cadena de amor—now scraggly brown and shorn of leaves—clambered over it. Sometime soon, when the rains shall have started, the vines would be green again.

Sei Thomas Gakuin   

Kyoto, April 6, 1979.

O
BSESSION
 

ONE
 

I
hesitate to put down some of the details in this story because they are so intensely personal, they are bound to be misunderstood by friends who know me for my objectivity and detachment, qualities that have made me quite successful in a field crowded by charlatans. Not that my hands are impeccably clean—if we define integrity narrowly, if we polarize the world in black and white, then, certainly, I have not been morally upright. I must avoid euphemisms and say outright that I have been a pimp; for what else is procuring some of the most expensive call girls in town to service clients who have flown in
from Wall Street or from Marunouchi? That is precisely what I had done, proceeded to find out who in Didi’s stable was available for the evening.

In a way, I am afraid of women. When I was ten, my mother left my father to live with another man. I am now certain that this was the single, most traumatic incident in my life. I worshipped my father and I could not imagine my mother in the arms of another man.

Looking back at what had happened to my marriage I am not surprised that Lydia left me, too, although not for another man, but to flee from the implacable demands of my office, my erratic behavior—as she called it. She had wanted to raise our three children in an atmosphere free from tension and I suppose she succeeded. The kids are grown up now and they seem very normal and happy. Sometimes though, they wonder aloud why Lydia and I never got together again.

My father was not too good at providing for us—he had to work doubly hard at being a surrogate mother and tried to give us a good education, knowing his money would not be wasted. He knew I would be able to make it on my own, from the days of World War II when I was one of the youngest guerrilla officers to fight in the Yamashita campaign. I bore no wounds from that war, other than what scabbed in the mind and heart. I still have the forty-five caliber automatic which I carried then and never used after the war was over. I have not been vicious except, perhaps, once, but this story is not about my war experiences, nor about Media Consultants which I manage, but about my obsession with Ermi.

How could this happen to me at the late age of fifty-five? I have traveled and wallowed in the pleasures of one Babylon or another. I thought I knew all the pitfalls, yet I was shorn of my pride and became naked as the day I was born.

And all because Ermi Rojo was a prostitute.

Ever since the breakup of my marriage in the early sixties, I have lived in an apartment in Mabini, near Padre Faura. In the early evenings, if I don’t jog at the Luneta, I often take a walk along the district’s darkened streets. Mabini itself is swept clean for the tourists, as with all of Manila’s major avenues, but the narrow sidestreets are awash with the stench of uncollected garbage and human waste oozing out of clogged sewers. Sometimes, I am apprehensive knowing that I may be accosted by hoodlums, beaten up and stabbed. I take a walk just the same almost as a matter of habit, a kind of ceremony with which I welcome the night.

My favorite bar-restaurant, the Camarin—the classiest call girl establishment of them all—has undergone several changes since it was set up in the fifties. It used to serve native cooking, nothing exceptional; then, shortly after martial law was declared in 1972, it became a discreet beer house with first class
pulutan
, including marinated raw fish with generous slices of onions.

The Japanese brought the latest fad to Camarin—the open grill where fresh fish, eggplant and what-have-you are roasted right before the customer. Now, it has a dozen go-go dancers, all young and curvy, who prance about on a narrow stage, in very brief costumes.

I join the night crowd there, the smoke densely floating around, the smell of beer and mankind gone sour comingled with the heat of day. A chubby girl ambles up the stage, her flanks tawny in the yellow light and on her rear the name Gloria. What glory can she possibly bring to these jaded lechers like myself? She gyrates her broad hips, thrusts them towards her audience lasciviously to the rhythm of “Saturday Night Fever,” her face without expression. The men talk on, barely giving her a glance.

Didi, my lesbian friend who manages the Camarin, sits at one corner. For more than a decade, she had watched over the place,
showing an album of stabled girls only to customers of long standing. She is stouter now than when I first met her. She still regards men as competitors and her eye for feminine beauty is as sharp as ever. It was she who introduced Ermi Rojo to me and that night I met Ermi is permanently etched in my mind.