Ermi Rojo taught me this implicitly.
Since the late fifties, I had been bringing journalists to Camarin. Didi was a handsome woman with a deep throaty voice and heavy unplucked eyebrows. Her lips were rather thin but kissable and I suggested once that I kiss her and she had looked at me with such disgust, I would never forget it.
When I was lonely, particularly after Lydia and I separated, Didi would sometimes suggest a girl. She knew my taste; I wanted them sweet—nothing of the mestiza glamor type that other men lusted after. She also knew that I was sometimes repelled outright by commercial sex so she saw to it that the girl never mentioned money which, in the first place, I had already placed at Didi’s disposal. And because I liked illusions, the girl and I often went first to any of the restaurants in Ermita, sometimes to Alba’s or to the Hilton, then home to Mabini.
One afternoon, I got a call from Didi. “You must come tonight,” she said. “You like the intellectual type, a good conversation, that sort of thing. I have a surprise for you.”
In fact, there were two surprises. First, the girl she introduced me to was still a virgin. Second, her price was ten thousand pesos.
From my apartment, I always walked two blocks to Camarin. It was one of those hot, airless evenings when it seemed like a stroll through the back of a furnace, I was perspiring freely and though my heart was fine, there was this feeling of being stifled not so much by the muggy heat but, I soon realized, by my expectations.
The Camarin is the whole ground floor of an office building done in the Spanish style, with grilled iron windows and a grilled iron gate flanked by iron lamps. No neon sign atop the door—just a simple brass marker. You pushed the door open and walked into an expanse of red tiles, with tables topped with real cloth, and the head waiter, Pete, in a black suit. Beyond the bar, that is before the stage was built for the go-go dancers, was a piano and a piano player, Ralph Alfonso, who used to be a popular movie producer and band leader but had fallen into difficult times. Now, in his old age, he was banging away at the piano and sometimes playing out of tune. I liked Ralph and I always bought him a drink and left a few pesos on the piano ledge because he always played some of the old songs, “Ramona” for instance.
That night I was at the Camarin too early. It was only eight, and the girls had not yet arrived although there were already some customers dining. Didi was at her usual table near the bar where she could see everything, specially the cash register. If not for her sexual preference, Didi would have now been quietly married to some hacendero in Negros where she came from. Her family was in sugar in a big way. She had gone to the Assumption, then to a finishing school in Europe, but she preferred this kind of life. To her, it was not only physically satisfying; she was also able to see, as she put it, humanity in the raw, without pretensions. She told me that many prostitutes were by inclination lesbians, and that they always hated or loathed their men. This was useful information for it helped me to understand Ermi better.
She came in exactly at nine. She wore a bright green dress and as she walked to Didi’s table, just about everyone paused to look at her. Her presence was striking, there was elegance in her carriage, yet she was simplicity itself—just a bit of lipstick, her boy’s bob shining in the cartwheel lamp above her. She was beautiful in an exotic Oriental way, her eyes alight with laughter, her oval face finely sculpted. A painter like Carlos Francisco would have exalted over her.
I stood up and pulled out a chair for her. “This is Rolando Cruz,” Didi said. “I wanted you to have my best customer for your first night here.”
“Does he know the price?” She spoke to Didi without turning to me. Though her voice was mellow, there was something final and harsh about the way she asked the question.
“The ten thousand, yes.” Didi turned to me with a grin. “Ermi here does not sit at the usual rate of thirty pesos an hour. It is double for her—but keep this a secret or else all the girls will be in an uproar if they found out.”
I had my usual table near Ralph so I could tell him what tunes to play. Her shoes were not high heeled; she was just a little over five feet and I was taller but not by much. She wore some perfume, Chanel, I think, and I caught a whiff of it as she turned to tell me that Didi had told her about me. Then, as we sat down: “Why does a man of your intellectual background come to a place like this?”
I did not answer immediately. I had thought it better to ignore her question but after she was seated, she repeated it. Ralph had started to play “Ramona” and the waiter had brought me my usual bourbon with water.
“Coke,” Ermi said when the waiter asked her. Then, “You didn’t answer my question.”
I was pressed to the wall. Honesty would be my salvation. “I have been separated from my wife for some time now,” I said, spilling over for some reason. “And I’m to blame. It was not a woman who caused it—it was me, my stupidity, paying too much attention to my job, and ignoring her and the home. It was as if I was not married at all. And now, frankly, I don’t want any emotional attachments. Attachments can inflict pain. It’s best to be casual about sex. Fornicate without affection, fornication without affection …”
She nodded as if she agreed. In the soft light, her skin was pure. In the sunlight, she would look even lovelier.
“What is a pretty girl like you doing here?”
“Money,” she said quickly. “Nothing else. And now that we are through with the introductions, you must make the most of your one hour …”
“Can I ask you your name at least?”
“Ermi,” she said, smiling. “But no family names, no addresses, no telephone numbers. You can always get in touch with me through Didi if you want me …”
“You are so businesslike,” I said. “Which means that you are new in the business. You turn me off that way. I don’t like being hustled. I don’t think any man does.”
She seemed thoughtful. She brought her chin up, her lips in a pout. “Maybe, you’re right. It is my manner, I guess. The directness. Thanks for telling me.”
“That’s a lot better,” I said. “Don’t regard me—men—as your enemy although you will perhaps eventually do that. Some of us can fall in love, too, even with girls like you …”
“Oh?”
“Love is blind, or haven’t you heard?”
“That’s for the birds,” she said quickly. “I keep my head all the time.”
“Sometime in the future, you’ll slip. There are girls right in Camarin who fork over their earnings to boyfriends. They buy cars for their men while they ride in jeepneys.”
“That will never happen to me,” she said grimly. “All the money I will make will be for me. For me alone.”
“And the first is ten thousand.”
She laughed softly, that easy laughter which I would always remember. “Actually,” she explained, “it will only be five. Fifty percent will go to Didi.”
“At that rate,” I said, “it will have to be a rich Chinese sari-sari store owner who will deflower you. Only they can afford it.”
“Do you know one?”
I shook my head.
“And of course, you won’t give up ten thousand for one night of the wildest pleasure you have ever known,” she said. “Look, I have read several sex books, including that crazy Kama Sutra.”
“Not on the first night,” I said. “You will be in pain.”
“But only the first time.”
“There will be no second time for me,” I said. “I am not a teenager anymore.”
“I will make you feel like one again.”
“Not for ten thousand. But if you are willing to have it in installments …”
She pouted again.
“Maybe, one of my foreign friends. One of these days, I’m certain …”
“I speak Spanish, French and, of course, English. A smattering of Visayan and Ilokano, too. Learned them when I was young …”
“Good to know about your gift for language,” I said.
I told h
er that the cult of virginity was fast disappearing as sociological surveys at the University of the Philippines and other schools had shown; that it is only the conservative male who still holds to it in the hope that his virgin wife will be more faithful and his ego satisfied.
“Was your wife a virgin when you married her?”
“Of course,” I said. Lydia and I had premarital relations but she was a virgin when I first took her.
“And what if she wasn’t?” Although the question was hypothetical, it was disturbing just the same.
When I visited Ermi again the following week, she already had a nickname. She was called Dies Mil—or ten thousand, and there were still no takers. She was already Camarin’s most popular girl and men were often there early so they could have her at their table, watch her, listen to her. I could not get her the second time—a balding, middle-aged man had tabled her the whole evening till closing time but was not prepared to part with ten thousand.
Ermi was brighter than I when it came to analyzing relationships. I had thought that in the end ours would be strengthened by the business that I had brought her. But it was I who brought her the man who paid her ten thousand. She never thanked me for it and looking back I think that she loathed me instead for having started her off.
In the mid-sixties, a “Great Leader” from a neighboring country came incognito to Manila for what seemed to be his last fling. He was suffering from gout, high blood pressure and all the ailments with which frenzied high living ravishes the aging body. I got a call that afternoon from his embassy; he had just arrived and he made it clear to his ambassador that he needed a young girl for the night. The ambassador was a dull, colorless bureaucrat who relied on his cultural attaché for this sort of expertise. I happened to know the attaché—one of the multinationals I represented had interests in his country’s massive oil resources and it was natural for me to ingratiate myself with him.
My introducing the Great Leader to Ermi pleased everyone. Two months afterwards, Ermi got a house in Forbes Park and when I saw her again, she was no longer being tabled at Camarin although she still dropped in and made appointments there. Now, she was a prominent item in Didi’s stable; she was on call for three thousand pesos a night and in the sixties, that was very good money.
By then, too, I was drawn to the Camarin more often. I deluded myself into thinking that I was really involved with research, amassing new insights from Didi and her girls. It was Ermi, of course, whom I really wanted to see before she stepped out for the night; it was she who, I hoped, would be able to have a little time at my table, crumbs before a starveling.
We were able to talk briefly on occasion and she attended to me, perhaps out of her initial gratitude for introducing her to the “Great Man.”
She agreed to go to the Luneta one Sunday afternoon and we met at the Hilton lobby then walked over to the park where there was a symphony concert. It was one of those translucent October afternoons, the sky was clean and blue, and the breeze from the sea was cool. She had on a light maroon dress and white high heeled shoes, and she walked with me rather self-consciously for almost everyone was in casual dress, in jeans, and here she was, strikingly handsome as always, making the plain dress so elegant, people looking at her. “I hope,” she said, nudging my arm, “they don’t think I am giving a fashion show.”
She liked the music, the overtures of several ballets, but we did not stay in the open air theatre long; we moved on to the Chinese garden where we found a stone bench to sit on, watching the people pass, the lovers entwined in each other’s arms under the trees in the gathering twilight.
Several people knew of her success by then although she was reticent about it. But we spoke of it anyhow. “Bring me more like him,” she said, laughing, “so I can have a dozen houses in Forbes Park.”
“And how is your house there?”
She was all seriousness again. “No addresses, no telephone numbers …”
“Ermi—still mistrusting men. Even me after all this time. I don’t even know your family name and Didi’s so loyal, she refuses to give it. Don’t I deserve some trust?”
She smiled, her even teeth flashing. “Yes, Roly,” she said, pressing my hand. “I think you deserve some trust. My family name is Rojo.”
How could anyone miss that? The Rojos were extremely wealthy, an old Ermita family. Their original wealth in land had since the end of World War II been diversified into banking, manufacturing …
“I know what you are thinking,” she added quickly. “Not that clan of Rojo. I am not even a poor cousin.”
“Was the poor one,” I corrected her. “You are getting rich now.”
I was not going to be a judge of her morals. I was no missionary out to vanquish sin from the face of Manila. Still, I said, “When are you going to retire? You can do that now, you know. I hear that the Great Leader gave you blue chip stocks in those companies that have investments in his country.”
“Retire? There are still many good years ahead of me. Not while I can command a good price …”
I was shocked at the revelation of her vaulting ambition, her greed. I should have loathed her or, knowing what kind of a person she was, I should have realized the futility of any personal attachment, the impossibility of its maturing into something warm, human, enduring. By then, I had known a bit of the prostitute’s psychology, the ruthlessness which marked her relationship with men, but I ignored these.
The revelation came slowly and when it finally became clear like sunrise, it seared me—the knowledge that I cared for her, that I wanted her to leave her kind of life. I was not going to tell her how I felt …
“Just remember this,” I said instead. “In a world grown dark with deceit there are many who are blinded and few who can hold up a light so that we can see the way. More important, so that we can look at ourselves, as well as others, and know how different or similar we are to the herd.”
She was bright with figures but the soft talk of the humanities bored her and I was now talking elusively, because I did not want to call her a prostitute to her face.
“You’re flattering yourself,” she said. “You want to tell me that you are bringing light to dark corners with your kind of truth and that if I see the light, I will change?”
“No,” I said. “That is not what I meant. I know well enough that I am cynical. But I am also religious because I am a sinner. Not many can say this of themselves. I accept certain realities which I cannot change. I am not trying to give you a sermon.”
“But you are, you know,” she said with a turn of the lovely mouth that was almost a sneer. “You’re trying to say that I am not a moral person, that you look down on me and, therefore, I should feel guilty …”
I did not speak; she knew she was right.
“You and your pompous values,” she laughed quietly. “How can you be so dumb. We are not different, we are very much alike. Go before a mirror, Roly. Ask yourself how you have behaved during the last ten years, or even just during the last ten days. We are alike, I repeat. I sell mine—and you—you sell yourself.”
TWO
As Ermi had bitterly suggested, that evening, I went to the mirror—this pallid face, the lines beginning to form around the nose, the wrinkles deepening on the forehead, the graying around the temples more pronounced. I had thought of dyeing my hair but I was just too egoistical to do it, assuring myself that a man is as young as he feels. I asked this man in the mirror, now in the inevitable grasp of middle age, if he was a prostitute, too, and I scanned the bleak terrain of his past, the years with B.G. Collas when he used to sell everything, including soft drinks, with the habiliments of nationalism. So then, Rolando Cruz, Ph.D. in history, do you recall how you composed advertising copy embellished with your knowledge of your country’s past? The hortatory speeches you wrote for corporate and government hierarchs who did not really know, much less believe, what you put in their mouths? I justified these as providing my family a home, a good education for the children, a
future that would not be wracked by the dismal insecurity and unhappiness that I had known as a boy.
I was now humbled, devastated even by what Ermi had told me. As my conscience, I must see her again. Now, she was behind my mind, insinuating herself, a nagging, unsettling subconscious. I could not concentrate on what was important at hand. I had a staff of about thirty but I had to read all the final reports and correct them if necessary. I initiated research. My foreign clients wanted background on labor conditions, availability of raw materials, political leaders and options for influencing them, loopholes in government procedures and investment laws, taxes—all the information they needed to make profits without sweating.
What had Ermi cast over me? A net? Perhaps a medieval spell, or an aswang talisman which would cripple me if I did not run or persevere in cutting myself away from all that reminded me of her. This was, of course, impossible. Everywhere I turned were new restaurants, bars, massage parlors which had started to proliferate and, later on, the new hotels.
Indeed, how Ermita had changed! Marcelo H. del Pilar Street—what would that self-effacing, courageous propagandist say now if he saw that the street named after him had become “sin avenue” festooned with the glitter and shine of pick-up bars. My own Mabini, named after that stubborn and unswerving ideologue of the revolution, has become a raucous arcade of souvenir shops and that genre painting for tourists which portrayed the Philippines as a land of pouring sunlight, elegiac harvestime, wide-eyed children and forever enchanting village girls.
Once upon a time, the whole Ermita area was the precinct of the mestizo elite. Plaza Militar and its environs, which I could see from my window, were the compounds of the American aristocracy. These streets were lined with acacias then and behind the high walls of ivy, in the august mansions, was a sybaritic life devoid of the anxieties of colonialism. Then the war came and Ermita was leveled; the mestizos and the colonialists left it to form another ilustrado enclave in a former grassland called Makati. And their abandoned mansions which were spared, now decrepit and ill preserved, had become tawdry love motels.
Three Filipino Women Page 8
