It was almost daybreak, mayas were chirping on the sill outside, and she slept a little more. The best time to look at a woman, to find the truth about her inner beauty, is in the morning when she wakes up. Ermi’s face, even with the wash of sleep, was appealing in its simplicity.
We breakfasted in our room—fried rice, eggs, ham, coffee and a slice of papaya. Then we went out to buy her a pair of walking shoes. Her high heels were not made for the inclines of Baguio. She bought a bunch of bananas—their skins clear yellow and untarnished. “They are so pretty,” she said. “I will just look at them first.” I also bought her a rattan shoulder bag. After the market we did Mines View Park, Burnham, the souvenir shops. I took pictures of her all the way but she insisted that I give her the film when the roll was finished, which I did.
There was a carnival on the grounds of the Pines and we lingered there on our last night. It was brightly lit, throbbing with music, but there were so few people, it was pathetic. It was, after all, the last days of the dry season and Baguio would soon be bereft of vacationing crowds. She tried her hand at the darts and then at a shooting gallery and was rewarded with two small packets of mentholated candy. Above us, the Ferris wheel was still but there were people at the roller coaster which had started and was soon clattering noisily above us. “I am scared of that,” she said. “In Manila, when I first took a ride in it, I screamed and ordered it stopped …”
We talked again till past midnight. I was now sure that it was I who was in a roller coaster, that there was no stopping the ride, and that in the end, it would not ease down but zoom up instead into that gray, terrifying space from where there can be no returning.
She was in my arms again, her hair upon my face. She always turned away after a prolonged kiss and I suspected it was my breath she did not like. This time, I held her face and probed her mouth. She did not open it.
“For whom are you reserving it?” I asked.
“You are too much,” she said, sticking out her tongue at last. The taste was of honey salt. “There,” she said. I looked at her eyes that had dredged from me my deepest secrets, my regard for myself and I realized that with her, I was shorn of armor and shield. I did not know till then how vulnerable I had become and I was afraid lest she take advantage of me.
We had begun, surely there must be an ending as well. “Ermi,” I said softly, “please don’t make a plaything out of me. Should there come a time very soon when you don’t want to see me anymore, just say so. I will stay away.”
“What are you saying?” she asked.
“With you, I have no pride,” I said. “It seems as if I had given you a knife and said, kill me. If that time comes, please make it swift.”
“This is all very melodramatic,” she said. “But it never entered my mind.”
I bent over and kissed the line of her neck, her breasts.
“Thank you,” I murmured.
“What for?”
“For being kind.”
“That is not difficult to do,” she said. “Now, shall we make love?”
I looked lingeringly at her. I shook my head.
She raised herself on her elbows, hugged me and whispered, “Thank you.”
After breakfast in our room, I got her bag from the dresser and placed the envelope in it. “What is that?” she asked.
“My contribution to your restaurant.”
She took the envelope and gave it back. “But we didn’t do it,” she said. “You don’t owe me anything.”
“But I do,” I insisted. “You gave me two nights.”
“I had free lodging. I did some sight-seeing and had one of the most engaging conversations in my life. No, you don’t have to give me anything.”
“If I did not do it, it was not your fault.”
She grinned and pinched me. “All right then,” she said, “if you want your guilt feelings eased.” She tore the envelope open, picked out a few hundred pesos bills without counting them, and placed them in her bag.
My first meeting was to be in the evening. There was time for me to go to Manila with her then return to Baguio.
“You don’t have to. It is such a tedious trip.”
“I want this suffering,” I said, shushing her.
We sat together in the bus and on occasion, her hand would rest on my thigh or she would hold my hand as we talked. As in the night when she arrived, the first rains of May were upon the land. They came in sheets over the plains of Pangasinan that had started to green. “See what rain does to a land that is parched,” I said.
She pressed my hand.
“You make plants grow,” I said. “When your gate opened, I caught a glimpse of your lawn—the plants looked very healthy.”
“I love gardening,” she said.
I remembered the people in her house. “Who are those living with you? Relatives?”
She shook her head. “A driver and his family …”
“But you have no car.”
She smiled again. “No, he stopped driving a long time ago. He is old now. His wife and children—and grandchildren …”
“And you are not related?”
“Not blood relations, but something more real. And there is a girl. She was like me, you know. But she became a drug addict. She has a daughter and she cannot work anymore. She has lost her looks, you know what I mean.”
“And you work for them?”
She did not speak. “They are my family,” she said simply.
“You are a good girl, Ermi.”
“Flattery will get you somewhere,” she said.
After our first weekend in Baguio, I noticed a change in my attitude towards the girls in Camarin. Although I still needed them to service my clients, I dropped Ermi from my list. I still went there and sat with one of the girls for drinks or some banter and though the urge was often strong, I started sublimating it with meditation, with my writing. I no longer brought any of the Camarin girls to my apartment. It was easy for me to understand why; though I never told her, it was my regard for Ermi that inhibited me. I just did not feel right anymore making it with any of them, and not because I had abstained from Ermi, either. Maybe, it was a form of loyalty, and considering Ermi’s work, it could easily be misconstrued as a perversity. I had never believed in man’s monogamous nature and had rather presumed that my sexual needs could never be leashed. Now, I understood how it could be done, without compulsion, not by religious sanctions, not by social constrictions but by that self-willed and strongest bond of all. The knowledge of what love could do gladdened me, surprised me. I was not too old to learn.
The Puesto opened the following year in November. Ermi leased a corner lot on Pasay Avenue, close to Makati. The restaurant was small compared to the plush establishments in the area. Fortunately, the adjoining lot was empty and she promptly rented it for parking. I helped her with suggestions, the decor, how to make good coffee so that people would go there for it and cakes as well. It did not specialize in any particular cuisine. What was offered was almost like home cooking and it could be French, Italian, Chinese, Spanish—whatever was available fresh from the Quezon City markets where she did the shopping herself.
There was nothing pretentious about the Puesto—the tiled front roof, the grilled door, the picture windows which were curtained in the lower portion so that one could have a view of the inside but not of the people eating. The chairs were comfortable, the napkins were of white cloth, the tablecloths in dark red. Ermi’s houseplants were all over the place—trailing lantanas, parlor ivy, orchids—hanging from the ceiling, in corners, lush and jungly in the doorway. They gave the Puesto its ambience. She hired a pretty hostess from the University of the Philippines while she herself sat in the booth near the cashier where she could not readily be seen by the customers but where she had a view of the kitchen around the corner, the small bar, and the counter for cakes and pastries. The baking was done right on the premises and the cooking which she often supervised was in a spotless kitchen that was half expos
ed to the customers so that they could see the food being prepared through glass panels. Even the comfort room was spotless. She had a passion for cleanliness as she, herself, took good care of her personal hygiene.
The inauguration of the restaurant was very quiet—just me and her “family” whom I met for the first time.
But even after having gone out with her several times, what did I really know about her? That she was born after the war but would not tell me her birthday. That her mother was in America, that her father was a Japanese soldier although there was hardly any trace of Japanese in her features except for her clean, creamy complexion which she could have gotten from her mother. She had a house in Forbes Park which she rented out. She was easily scared and could get hysterical. She had, she said, “executed” all the men who loved her after she had gotten what she wanted or after the affair had become sticky. I had nothing—just memories. She had not given me a copy of the pictures I took of her in Baguio although she showed them to me. It is not that I regretted giving her small things, a box of chocolates, a book of crossword puzzles, or records when I returned from Hong Kong.
I suspected that through the few times that we had been together, she had begun to confide in me. I had tried to learn more about her from Didi but Didi was an impregnable repository of secrets. She was now preparing to immigrate to the United States; she had tired of what she was doing in Camarin but more than that, she was beginning to reel with the onslaught of the malaise that had battered most of us, the dishonesty, the deceit that pervaded public life and business as well. “I gave you her phone number, Roly, something I have never done—and only because I know you love her. What you need to know you must get from her. Is her past really all that important since you love her?”
It was not; I took Ermi as she was.
We went to Baguio again. Now, I felt guilty, using up her time without her profitting from me. I owed her a lot now. I was no different from the traditional tenant farmer, forever indebted to his landlord, a serf who can no longer pay his debts in full no matter how hard he works.
Again, I held back. She was amazed at my self-control; she said no one would believe that we had shared a room just so we could talk. But that was what really happened.
By then, her restaurant was flourishing. I hoped that she had already stopped her kind of living but there were evenings when I dropped by the Puesto and she was not there. When I called up her house, she was not there either. I would then be torn with anxiety, anger even, wondering who had taken her out and to what hotel. She had told me to blot these from my mind and I had tried. God, I really tried but it was not possible.
We were at Mario’s that early evening, this restaurant along Session Road, and she had ordered spaghetti with meat sauce which she liked very much. She was feeling naughty. “Always remember,” she said half seriously, within earshot of the waiter who was showing me the dressings for the chef’s salad, “that I am collecting men, just as you are collecting memories.”
“Even now, you are playing with me,” I said.
She looked at me, the mischief gone from her eyes. “No, Roly,” she said. “I am not playing with you.”
“How long has it been?” I asked myself rather than her. “There is no waking hour that you are not in my mind—during the day, even when I am engrossed in my work, and at night when I am in bed. All of a sudden, you are there and when I close my eyes, I can see you.” There was another thought which riled but I did not want to plead or beg. “So, when my time comes, let me prepare the coffin at least …”
She looked down and was silent. Close to the window, by the street, a Filipino boy and two American girls were having fun and their laughter seemed to fill the whole restaurant. When Ermi raised her head again, she looked at me and in the flicker of that single candlelight, her face was all seriousness. “I think of you a lot,” she mumbled and then, as if disturbed by her confession, she started working the spaghetti into her fork and shook her head slowly as if she wanted to deny what she had just uttered.
It was more than I had asked or hoped for. It seemed as if in that tenuous instant, all the burdens that had weighed me down were finally lifted. In the many times that we had talked, she had always been this solid rock, an enigma, and there was so little of her thoughts that I could divine, the real feelings that moved her. Was she finally thawing to become the woman I coveted and not the Ermi who was sought after by everyone at Camarin? I was in a state of euphoria, eating my salad without really tasting it, when a man walked to our table.
“Ermi,” he greeted her, holding her shoulder, all attention on her as if I did not exist. “Fancy seeing you here.”
She turned to me. “This is Andy Meadows, Roly.”
Andy glanced at me and grinned. “We have met,” he said, winking. I stood up and shook his hand. He was at ease in the heavy army jacket he was wearing. More niceties, he would like to join us but a couple of his business associates were coming. When he finally left to take a table close to the window, Ermi said simply, “He has proposed to me …”
It was difficult for me to believe it, but then, Americans are romantic and are capable of such things. “What do you know of him?” I asked.
She smiled but did not reply.
“Do you think he is serious?”
“I can take care of myself,” she said brightly. “No one—and absolutely no one—can make a plaything of me.” She had perhaps noted the belligerence in my voice. “Besides, you are jealous.”
“The hell I am,” I said. “And it was I—of all people, who sent him to Camarin. Will you accept him?”
Her hand slipped up my thigh and she pinched me. “It is a very tempting offer and it is difficult to resist. But I don’t know.”
That same week, I called Steve Williams in New York and asked him to run a check on Andrew Meadows. It would cost a bit but to me it was important. By the end of January, the report arrived by airmail—a manila envelope thick with information. Ermi received the news with alacrity; in an hour, she was in my apartment. I handed her the folder which I had already gone through and she dug into it avidly. She started with the curriculum vitae, then the other bits of information, copies of press clippings, some duplicate photographs including that of his wife who had just divorced him. Sometimes, as she read, a smile would wreath her face and she would exclaim, “Why—the son of a bitch, he did not tell me this …” Or, “Ha! So that is the way it is …”
Andrew Meadows was genuine and I was happy for Ermi that she had finally found a man who wanted to marry her. Still, I had to be sure so I asked her, “Does he really know—I mean, your past?”
She laughed, a throaty kind of laughter that was almost gloating. She confirmed it, that even with her successful restaurant, she was still whoring.
“Isn’t that restaurant enough? Have you become so greedy that even with a business that is already making money, you still go into this?”
She jabbed a finger at me. “You really don’t understand,” her voice leaped. “What difference does it make now if I continued or stopped? People will always say, there goes the woman who made a lot of money from that Southeast Asian leader. She now runs a restaurant so men can see her on display and proposition her right there. So, why then shouldn’t I make the most of it?”
Her logic escaped me. I loved her but now I loathed her as well. I decided not to see her again, to leave her to Andrew Meadows and the wrath of heaven. In the office, I had all calls screened and if it was she who called and she did that every day, I was out, in a conference or in Baguio. I did not take calls in the apartment.
It was a miserable, pain-wracked withdrawal.
I had read about alcoholics being wrenched away from the bottle and dried up, how addicts underwent agony after a day without their drugs. I now understood the anguish I had to go through was not so much for my salvation but for hers. I hoped she would get married properly so that she would have a new life, something I could never give her.
The tort
ured days turned into a week, then two weeks. One evening I jogged needlessly longer than usual at the Luneta, then went to the Sultan in Mabini for a good rubdown. I could hardly keep my eyes open when I reached the apartment.
I did not even remove my jogging shoes; I fell forward on my bed and promptly went to sleep.
The loud banging on the door woke me up. Still sleepy, I staggered to the door. It was the guard downstairs and with him was Ermi. I thanked him but even before I could ask Ermi what brought her to Mabini at this time of night, she had pushed me back to the room.
In the soft light of the lamp in the foyer, her face was ashen and the corners of her mouth curled in anger. “Roly,” she cried. “What are you trying to do?”
I had not thought that my avoiding her, my silence really mattered to her. I shook my head. “I cannot hurt you,” I said. “If I do, as I have always said, it is not intentional.”
“Then, what do you call this? Keeping away from me as if I were a leper? Your office does not give you my calls and look!” She picked up the phone which was disconnected. “You are doing this intentionally. What have I done to you that you should hate me?”
“I want you to have a good life, a good marriage—all the things this little daddy cannot give. Andy has everything.”
She rushed to me, embraced me. “Tonight,” her voice was pleading, “let me stay with you. Please …”
I pushed her gently away, looked into her distraught face. “I don’t have three thousand pesos.”
“Stop it!” I was sure her scream carried through the door and across the hall. “Don’t insult me anymore. Can’t you see what you have done? Are you that blind and selfish?”
I shook my head.
“You condemn me, you look down on me. I am dirt to you. But what wrong have I done, Roly? Have I ever stolen from anyone like those big people whom you know and serve? It is them you should hate and fight—and they are everywhere, robbing the people, self-righteous, honored in the newspapers. I have—”
Three Filipino Women Page 11
