Three Filipino Women

by F. Sionil Jose

  She did not continue; her eyes suddenly had a blank stare; she swayed and I rushed to her before she could fall.

  Her body was rigid now, her arms were cold and I carried her to the bedroom, remembering what she said about going into hysteria. I rushed to the kitchen and got some ice cubes then returned to her, prostrate on my bed. I pressed the ice cubes to her face and slapped her hard once, twice. She finally stirred and when she opened her eyes, it would seem as if a great weight was finally lifted off me and I could breathe the good air again.

  She looked at me bending over her and I kissed her mumbling senselessly, “Forgive me, forgive me …” She raised her arms in an embrace, her heart thumping against my chest. I held her tightly now and thanked God for this gift of love.

  FOUR

  Long afterwards, I lay awake, viewing the rubble of my resolution and how, in the end, I was not more durable or steadfast. It was not that I regretted this union—poignant, quivering in its intensity. Though she never asked me for the money that I should have paid her or even made the slightest hint of it, still, it was in my mind like some fishbone stuck in the throat, at times painful, at times unnoticed but still there. I recalled what she had told me about the men who had showered her with costly gifts. “They all wanted me to fall for them,” she said with cold-blooded detachment, “so that they could have me for free.”

  I had enough experience to realize that there was no difference really between commercial sex and what was consummated with a loved one—the orgasm was the same. Still, there was more meaning, more “soul” to a relationship nurtured with affection, familiarity, and sometimes, communion. It was this that I found with Ermi.

  I asked her once if she did not feel squeamish with older men and she had said, only if they were not good to her—an ambiguous reply, and I wondered about the depth of her feelings for me which she had kept to herself. I did not expect anything from her, yet I ached to know, to be told that she thought of me a little. I also imagined something pure about my love—an essence, a distillation and now, I was worried that it had been sullied not so much by the physical deed itself but because I needed to know more than ever the answers to the unspoken questions about her sincerity.

  We talked till dawn stole through the windows, gleamed on the blue drapes and I could trace the fine contour of her face, the beautiful rise of her breasts. We talked about inchoate feelings, the future that did not hold much. She also admitted that she rarely had an orgasm, no matter how handsome the man, no matter how virile. She said she would not go out again to sell her favors, that although I would not believe her, she had to do this now for herself.

  She came to Mabini almost every night after that and sometimes she would stay till morning. One early dawn, we woke up to fire engines wailing in the rain-drenched street below and looking out of the window, we saw our district turning red; the Filipinas Hotel was burning, the flames leaping up the starless sky. Many who were trapped in the building died of asphyxiation. Some jumped out of their windows, some into the pool below. Those who fell into the pool were saved, but many could not jump that far and their battered bodies lined the pool edge. Many of those who died were companions of tourists for the night and about them little was known. Who would miss five dozen prostitutes? They would be nothing but statistics and their relatives might not even go to the authorities to claim their bodies or even identify them.

  I would take her out for breakfast at Taza de Oro and on the way, we would meet them—the girls with oversized handbags coming out of the Aurelio, the Bay View and the other hotels in the area where they had spent the night. They would wait for taxis at the hotel fronts, their Japanese companions waving good-bye to them. Pedro at the Taza soon knew what she always ordered, waffles with bacon and a slice of papaya.

  Sometimes, she would decide to return to Cubao past midnight and I would drive her there, wait in the car while she fumbled at the gate with her keys. I did not leave till she was safely inside.

  I told her of what I learned in one of my trips to Bangkok: how girls from a barren part of that country—the Northeast—went to Bangkok to sell themselves and once they had earned enough money, they would return home to get married, raise a family.

  “There is no stigma to them,” I said.

  “I wish I were Thai,” she said quietly.

  She wanted a baby but was afraid she would not be able to have one anymore. “I will not mind what people will say. I will love him so much he will never regret that I was his mother …”

  I asked her if she had such regrets and she told me that all she remembered of her childhood were those days in the orphanage in Quezon City where she grew up. I wanted to know more but she clammed up.

  We were in my apartment drinking the coffee that she had brewed that morning. Outside, Ermita was beginning to stir; already the jeepneys were snorting down below the window and farther up the bay, the sun was glinting on the calm, glasslike sea.

  “If it is a boy, you will be the godfather.”

  “I’d rather be the father,” I said, wondering if there was any man lurking in the shadows about whom I did not know. It had been that way, my mind riled by questions, by doubts. How would one distinguish, for instance, the sincerity of her embrace? She had told me she had faked it many times with her men so how different then was it with me? I wanted to exact from her the promise that she would never leave me although I knew that she would someday. How does one measure truth? There was only one way by which I would be able to know. And I hesitated to tell her for fear that, just by telling her, I would lose her.

  “I know some girls in Camarin,” she said. “At the opening of the school year, or when their children get sick, they don’t know what to do.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “This apartment, or this district, is not even the place to rear children. But one thing sure, I will not run away from my responsibilities. I can set up a trust fund for him so that when he grows up, he will not be in want.”

  “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 re
lationship 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.

  PLATINUM

  ONE

  It 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 witho
ut 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.