She listened patiently nonetheless to how I was grappling with such weighty subjects as history, progress, and alienation. Thinking back, had Malu been plain, I would not have been interested in her or what she was doing. Faith healing was old news to me, although I wasn’t one to go around writing about spirits.
“It is not that he lacks empathy, because he is good,” she said, still irritated by Professor Galvez’s remarks which, she said, were patronizing. “He is less a Filipino—like all the rest who have gone to the United States and brought back all those inappropriate ideas about research and methodology. Look, all over the country, in spite of our science and our Christianity, a belief in the world of the spirit persists. This world is open to everyone who wants to enter it. Nothing exotic or mysterious. All of us have experienced an inkling, a premonition. Extrasensory perception they call it now. The early Christians were mystics. And Saint Theresa of Avila levitated. The Bible is full of miracles—and why not? Is mysticism Christian when even Christians hardly believe in it anymore? Those who flock to Baclaran or Quiapo praying to those images for favors, that’s not mysticism. It is just simple human need, a natural reaching out to the supernatural …”
I liked the way she explained it. I knew how right she was. In my senior year in high school, I was in the library one afternoon when I distinctly heard Father’s voice. I turned, expecting to see him. But there was no one. As a matter of fact, I was alone except for the clerks at the far end.
I was very disturbed and since it was already late in the day and I had no more classes, I decided to go home instead of playing basketball. Only the maids were in; Mother had rushed to the hospital. Father had had a heart attack and had died at about the same time I heard his voice.
“That is not unusual,” Malu said. “It has been documented. The air is charged with energy, the spirits of people, and sometimes, in cases of great urgency, contact is made.”
The semester was about over; it was a faultless October morning and the sun shone brilliant on the campus, washing the grass and the cream-colored buildings with dazzling light. She did not want to linger in the cafeteria so we crossed the street to the library and beyond it to this huge acacia tree—perhaps the biggest in the entire campus. She liked its cool shade and we were to meet again and again beneath it.
I was flattered that she had read my article listing the economic imperatives of nationalism. She said it was well argued, but then she added that it lacked social purpose. What was nationalism for? What did it mean to the lower classes, to those who worked the land?
So her interests were also in the here and now. Aside from her involvement with ESP and spirits, she turned out to be a political activist.
We had barely seated ourselves on a protruding root of the tree when she asked if I had joined any of the student demonstrations that were sweeping the city. I had not bothered with them. With a touch of melancholy, she said, “I think you’re a dilettante … engrossed with the veneer and not with the pith.”
I reminded her about what a Frenchman once said: if one is not a communist when one is eighteen, he has no heart; but if he is still a communist when he is forty, he has no head. She retorted that I was neither eighteen nor forty—so what did that make me? And then she railed against the inequities that surrounded us, this girl who lived in an exclusive Makati village, who went to an expensive school. She was going to teach me, she said with some levity, what social awareness was.
Malu was majoring in clinical psychology and was, I am sure, never short of subjects. I suppose that she considered me one, given the manner she asked questions. Often she would be quiet as if my answers were being studied and fitted into her equations. She had a tendency to be patronizing like Professor Galvez. She called me “Teng-ga,” meaning lead, which could have easily been “Tanga,” meaning stupid. I was ponderous, capable of thought, but when all was said, the profundity was without value. I was not concerned with the kind of justice that could only be brought about by a mass movement.
At first, I resented the nickname. I decided to give her one in kind.
“I know myself,” I said. “And the man who knows himself is not only secure but wise.”
“But there are things you don’t know about yourself,” she insisted. “And knowing oneself is not being profound. It is being conceited.”
“And you are not?”
“I don’t think I am the center of the universe.”
“I suppose you consider yourself some sort of precious metal then. Like gold.”
She shook her head. “I am not expensive.”
“But you are,” I said. “With your ideas, who is the man who can afford to love you? Imagine what you will do to his psyche, if not his wallet.”
As if on impulse, she stretched out her hand and held mine.
“And you think you’re heavy, too,” I said.
I remembered my parents’ wedding rings—they were heavy and they looked plain, like silver, or even lead, but they were expensive. “Platinum. That’s what you think you are. I will call you Plat.”
“Male revenge!” she exclaimed. “And I am thin, my breasts are no bigger than kalamansi!”
Her candor touched me. “But their smallness cannot diminish your beauty, Plat. And I would like to make them grow.”
“Into pomelos.” She laughed.
I wanted to take her home the next afternoon so that I could meet her parents, but she demurred. She guessed what I had in mind. “You are so square,” she said, crinkling her nose as if some bad odor assailed her. “You would like to pay court in the traditional way and ask Father for my hand. You should work in our house then, chop firewood, draw water from the well. After all these sacrifices, are you sure you will have a virgin?” She was putting it lightly, but then she came close and breathed into my face. “But I like the way you are doing it.”
She would not give me her address. This I found out soon enough from the registrar’s office where I had a friend. I went there on a Sunday morning and since her house was in Dasmariñas Village, I was not surprised that it was grand. Unlike most of the houses in this expensive Makati area, it was done in the old colonial style—red-tile roof, thick adobe walls, intricate ironwork on the sash windows and balustrades, and a heavy gate of solid molave with iron braces and filigrees. I also realized why she did not want me to visit her—this girl who always rode in buses and jeepneys, who dressed in T-shirt and faded jeans and formless katsa—a fabric similar to cheesecloth—blouses; she was trying to live down the fact that she was rich.
“But in the beginning we were not,” she explained.
My visit had surprised her, but she had asked me in. We proceeded to the patio that overlooked a wide, well-groomed garden, and she served me coffee and the chocolate cake her mother had baked.
“It was all my father’s doing. He is a good businessman. He had this land in Bataan which later became very expensive property. He is a genius in real estate—no one can steal him blind …”
It was meant to be a pun of sorts. Her father was tortured by the Japanese during the war and had lost his sight. He had given Malu as a child a sense of inferiority; she was particularly annoyed when her classmates called him “Antiojos” because of the dark glasses he always wore, even on that evening when she graduated (as valedictorian) in grade school. She went with him on trips, describing places and people, reading the papers to him. She had become adept at description and at intuition by being his perceptive eyes.
I felt that she reluctantly brought me up to the house afterwards because she did not want me to see its rich interior. But I wanted to meet her father, this man who had taught her vision and forebearance. He sat before a TV set, listening to a documentary on Japanese culture. When we entered the room, he turned to the sound of our entry. His eyes were unblinking, glimpsed through the dark glasses. He extended his hand and I grasped it. His grip was strong and warm. Malu was right—if I did not know, I would have thought he was not blind at all. “So, at last”
he turned to her. “You have brought a young man home. I suppose it is serious then.”
Malu pinched my arm. “Yes, sir,” I said, not minding her.
“Well, Malu has one more year in college. I suppose both of you can wait.”
Malu was glaring at me even as I said, “Hardly, sir.”
There was exuberant closeness in the family. Malu was the youngest and was the favorite. She had a way with almost anyone and was headstrong. I knew they accepted me when her father told me to forgive Malu’s vaulting enthusiasms. And boys, it seemed, were not one of them. He tolerated her politics; she was doing, he said, what he would do were he young again.
The audience over, Malu took me to the garden.
Again, the familiar cliches about the working class, the blighted rural areas.
“But do you really know how it is over there? In the most depressed parts of the country?” I questioned the factual basis of her judgments. “You have never lived on a farm,” I said, badgering her.
“Do you know how I can be in one?” she asked. “I will bring a team—all girls, at least a dozen of us.”
Uncle Bert had this farm in Albay, but if they stayed with him, they would be comfortable. I asked him to arrange for the “education” of a dozen colegialas, that they be exposed to the worst conditions in Bicol. Uncle Bert laughed and said he would see to that.
After the semestral break, she returned from Albay sunburned, her hands blistered. But there was a radiance in her face. They had paid economy fare at Tutuban station. They did not bring any food because they thought they would have their meals in the first-class restaurant on the train. They were herded into a dusty coach which pitched and loped when they were finally on the way. Vegetables and crates were piled on the corridors and platforms. There was no place for them to sit except on the crates. They got hungry and there was no restaurant in third class.
Some passengers offered them their food—cold chunks of rice with pieces of dried fish wrapped in banana leaves. They bought additional food from vendors in the stations.
The farm she was assigned to was at the foot of a mountain, and isolated. Many days she felt she would simply go mad. She would wander beyond the house and shout her lungs dry just so she could hear herself. After mundane conversations with the family, she had no one to talk with, nothing to read. She did not bring a novel, not even a writing pad, and the family did not have a transistor radio. There was no flush toilet and worse, she forgot to bring toilet paper.
The family’s lack of interest in politics of the kind she believed in did not faze her; she had met the same skepticism and even suspicion in the slum families of Tondo when she started teach-ins. She had to talk with them in terms of their needs, what they could relate to in their daily lives—why prices of copra were low, who made the money in the trade, and why they worked so hard and yet earned so little.
She was amazed at their endurance. They would climb the foothills to gather coconuts then bring them to the yard where they were husked. The two youngsters in the family who were not even in their teens carried four coconuts each and she carried only two. By the time she reached the top of the hill, she was so tired and breathless from crawling on her knees and hands, while her young companions would still be bouncing ahead of her. She also helped in the harvesting in the valley. Bent over in the field, she could only work briefly in the morning when it was not too hot. She would be drenched with sweat, she itched horribly, and her back ached so much she thought it would break.
She had brought some canned food and was sure the family fed her with the best they could afford. She did not want to appear conspicuous so she brought her oldest clothes. There was a funeral in the village, but even with her rags, she was the best dressed.
Still, she was when she returned home, as I said, radiant.
TWO
It was not my intention to wean Malu from her politics, just see to it that she saw the other side, that progress was not a result of a class war, that motivation was important, and that as a student of psychology, she should recognize this.
I saw her almost daily during lunch when school started again if she was not in the slums or in demonstrations at the American embassy and Malacañang. I was going to graduate in a few months and had already started working in the family business. Perhaps it sounded flippant when I asked if she was now ready, after all her experiences, to move out of Dasmariñas and lead the revolution.
She was not usually given to flare-ups, but this time, she all but screamed, “Damn your money! How much do you pay your workers?”
I did not let that pass. I asked if she ever understood why so many generations stayed on in Tondo which had been there in Bonifacio’s time, and even earlier. “They are lazy, they lack initiative,” I told her. “You can love humanity—but it will not change.”
“And why should they not be lazy?” she flung back. “This is the whole debilitating effect of colonialism. They work so hard and still don’t make enough. Or eat enough.”
“In our furniture factory,” I said, “there is a lot of absenteeism after payday. What do they do? They get drunk and don’t report for work for three days. They don’t save. I can go through a long list.”
“But not in the farms where your uncle sent us.”
“They are not his farms. All of us, we give justice to our workers.”
“They work very hard,” she went on. “Without rest, and when all is done, there is still very little for them.” Then she challenged me. “I bet you have never been in a slum, you have never been inside a poor man’s house, in Tondo or anywhere.”
She trapped me, all right, and that very afternoon, it was my turn. We drove to Barrio Magsaysay where her group was organizing action teams.
We parked in the bay boulevard because we could not get through the maze of alleys. It was late November, the rains had paused; otherwise, as she explained it, we would have to wear boots because the alleys became rivulets of fetid mud. When we got there, what disturbed me really was not the sorry construction, the pigsty atmosphere—it was the eagerness, the dedication on her face as we entered this misshapen world of people who greeted her with warmth.
She introduced me to Charlie—a frail boy of fifteen who looked much older, and like all youths in the slum, he had dirty skin and bad teeth. He was in faded shorts and his rubber slippers were about to break apart. Wherever we went, he followed. He adored Malu and for a while, I was jealous.
“He is the brightest boy in the Barrio,” she said, enthusiastically. He had organized the youngsters and got them to clean the alleys, keep order. He was out of school; he would have been a high school junior had he enrolled, but his tuition money went to the hospital when his father fell ill. He helped at a stall in Divisoria, got three pesos a day plus some leftover, wilted vegetables.
There were many things that Malu could have done for them but she felt they must do a lot for themselves and I agreed. Still I knew that someday, if it had not already happened, they would possess her and I did not want that. I coveted her.
It was late afternoon when we left the Barrio. We went to the Hilton. I had thought of walking around the Luneta but she was hungry.
We sat together in the coffee shop and I held her hand under the table. Her closeness was intoxicating, an invitation; I was now sure she had some affection for me. I relished that Sunday morning when I visited her, warmed to the memory of her pinching me when I told her father how serious my intentions were. I just loved looking at her, the sinuous line of her jaw, those eyes, expressive of joy and yet seeing sorrow everywhere. I loved listening to her even when she was like some broken record repeating the same phrases about the oppression of the poor which, really, no single person could change for as long as we lived within the iron logic of capitalism.
“I am miserable, Teng-ga,” she said, pressing my hand. “I can’t find peace of mind. Oh, no, not the spiritual kind. It seems as if I’m at ease only when I am trying to help people.”
Sh
e moved closer. I desired her then, imagined her naked under me, crushing those lips in a kiss. Looking at her, composed and serene, I wondered how she would look in surrender, her self-assurance completely sundered.
I did something stupid that day which, as it turned out, was a revelation not only about myself but about her. We had finished our hamburgers. The late afternoon was untarnished and driving along the boulevard, the smell of the sea wafting into the car, she sat close to me, silent, as if her mind were far away. Soon, it would be dark. As we turned left through Cuneta to get to Makati, the motels lined up on both sides on the narrow road.
“Let’s go into one,” I said, and before she could object, I had turned left to an entrance. She tugged at my sleeve briefly as if to stop me, but it was too late. I swung the car to an open garage which one of the boys who had risen from a bench pointed to.
I had expected her to object, perhaps just a little. She looked at me, shaking her head, then she rolled up the window and together, we went up the stairs. It was obviously her first time in a motel and now, she was all curiosity as she studied the room, the huge mirrors that surrounded the wide bed, the knobs that controlled the red lights and the piped-in music. When the buzzer rang and the boy came, she went out to the anteroom and watched me sign the smudged register with a fictitious name.
After the boy had gone, she sat on the wide bed, looked disapprovingly at me, and asked, “Are you going to rape me?”
I shook my head. “I am not going to do anything you don’t want.”
“I am glad you said that,” she said, “because I’m not ready for this. Oh, I know that by the time you are a junior in the university, you are no longer supposed to be a virgin. But I still am—whatever you may think of my manners.”
“And you’re proud of holding on to it?”
“Maybe, but that is not the reason. I would like to give it to someone I really care for.”
Three Filipino Women Page 13
