I do not know of her intention but what she said dampened my ardor.
“I suppose I am not the first girl you brought to a motel?”
“No,” I said with some honesty.
“I am getting to like you,” she said with a slight laugh. “And who knows …” she stood up, came to me, and kissed my cheek. I flung my arms around her, kissed the lobes of her ears, felt her body warm and close, her silky thighs. But she was like a block of wood. I let her go.
“You’re a tease,” I said. “You lead me on and let me think …”
“I am not a tease,” her voice rose. “Can’t you see that I like you, but not enough to engage in simple fornication? That is what you want—and if you love me, then you know that love is more than that.”
“Shit,” I said, turning. “Even the church dissolves a marriage if it is not consummated. Spiritual love—that is foolish, for nuns. And even nuns have physical needs. Don’t you realize that I want to marry you?”
“Thank you for the nice thought.” Her tone changed immediately. She shucked off her shoes, then lay down. “Come,” she said. “Let’s not waste this bed and all these mirrors. Let us just talk.”
I could not help but laugh. Desire had really cooled. I lay beside her and gazed at the mirror in the ceiling, at the two of us, fully clothed.
“No one would believe this,” I said. Then I asked her what it was that she really wanted to do.
“To be alive,” she said quietly. “To see that time is not wasted. I don’t want to grow old without having lived usefully.”
“Loving is living,” I said. “So I love you and in loving you I am alive.” I lay still, her hand warm and soft in mine, the blisters from Albay already gone. “But suppose I died tomorrow; what is it that you will remember of me?”
She turned on her side and pressed her hand quickly to my mouth. “Don’t talk like this. As if you always look at the dark side of things.”
“There can be a car accident tomorrow. Or a building may collapse on me. These we cannot foresee. Living is always risking.”
She lay back. Even when we did not speak, I could feel myself flow out to her in calm, blue waves. We reminisced about ourselves, her childhood, those days when she had been so self-conscious with her father and how, by that experience, she had learned to use her eyes better and see beneath the patina, the superficiality of appearances and of speech. It was deeds that mattered.
I reiterated; I would soon be through with school and would then take on more duties in our business. It was time to get married.
And that was when she said we could just live together and find out if we were compatible so that, afterwards, if we weren’t, or if we outgrew each other, we could always part and still be friends.
I was shocked. She was a modern, liberated woman, but I did not know she thought so lightly of the institution of marriage.
“You are fooling, Plat.”
“No,” she said amiably. “Marriage is a lifetime commitment and that is what I want to make when I am sure.”
The telephone jangled. The clerk said our “short time” was up. Four hours! Time had gone so fast, it was almost midnight. I wanted to stay longer since there were many things still unsaid, many questions unasked.
We put on our shoes. She brushed her hair and straightened her blouse. I went behind her and encircled her waist. Turning to me, she kissed me again lightly, this time on the lips.
“So, at least,” she whispered, “you will not say that nothing happened.”
We drove to Dasmariñas hardly talking. Her mother opened the door saying, “Hurry, your father needs you.”
I was uneasy, wondering what scolding she would get. Her mother asked me to stay for a cup of coffee. She was a handsome woman in her fifties, without the matronly bulge of most women her age. In her blue housedress, there was a patrician quality about her, and her eyes, like Malu’s, were alive. Look at a girl’s mother, I remember reading, and this is how the daughter will look.
I asked permission to leave, but Malu returned to the living room and told me to wait, her father wanted to talk with me.
“I told him we went to a motel,” she said, laughing.
Her mother must have seen me blush. She smiled at my discomfiture and said Malu was always making those risque jokes. But she is a good girl, she assured me.
“I know that, Ma’am” I said.
She left for the kitchen and returned with the coffee and a piece of chocolate cake.
“She is giving her father a head massage,” she explained. “He is not feeling well.”
“I did not know she was also a masseuse.”
“Not really,” she explained. “She just lays her hand on her father’s brow then prays.”
I wanted to know more, but by then Malu came out and said I should talk with her father. I was nervous—did she really tell him we went to a motel? And would he tell me now never again to come to this house?
She led me across the wide expanse of carpet and upholstered furniture and all that “burgis crockery” as she described it, to the library. By an old writing desk with several tape recorders, Malu’s father sat on an overstuffed leather easy chair. His dark glasses were not on and when he looked at me, his eyes had that blank, unseeing stare. He must have felt that I was standing for he said, “Please sit down,” pointing to the rattan chair before him.
He asked if I was served something and when he was assured that I was, he sighed, “I had this headache again and Malu is the only one who can relieve me of it.”
“She is a wonderful girl, sir.”
He nodded. “She has special gifts. She is the brightest of my children. I know her values are right. She tells me about those teach-ins, those demonstrations, the idealism of it all. I worry about her, her safety, her well-being. If she were only a boy—do you understand what I am trying to say?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you believe in what she is doing?”
“Not all the way, sir,” I said. “Neither demonstrations nor guns will do away with the injustice around us. Education will—I told her that.”
He slapped his thigh as if he agreed, drew his chest in and breathed deeply. He was past sixty, but there was still stamina in him. “But how can I dissuade her? I believe in her goals, too, and that is why I am worried. But I’m glad that you are rooted in solid ground and you can be some sort of anchor to … reason and sanity. Now, let me tell you something you don’t know. She is also a spiritista. Do you know what that is?”
“Yes, sir. She let me read a paper she wrote which she did not want published.”
He shook his head, sadly. “Since 1949—nothing but darkness. Many specialists, even in Europe, have seen me. Do you understand? I was prepared for a life of darkness. I have even forgiven the Japanese for it. I have adjusted to it, although I miss many things. The shape of trees, of houses, the colors … and Malu—my dear child! I have never seen her. If only I could! Sometimes, I touch her face, imagining how she looks. She always tells me she is ugly.”
“No, sir,” I said quickly. “She is the prettiest girl I know. Her eyes, her cheeks …” I was gushing and pitying him at the same time. And I was glad that I could see her and hoped to God that I would know her far better, know the grace that suffused her personality.
“You love her?”
“Very much, sir.”
“We all love her,” he said. “But I have a feeling that we will lose her.”
“Oh, no!”
The sightless eyes locked with mine. “You may not know it, but when she became a spiritista two years ago … Oh—I never found out how she got into it and she has not told me yet. During this last year that she began ministering to me, touching my eyes, praying for me … I could not believe it at first. After all those years of total darkness. But now, I can tell when it is daylight. The reds come flooding into my eyes. Do you know what this means? For a man who knew nothing but night for more than twenty years? I have hope again. And n
ow, when I sit in front of a window, when people pass in front of me, I see shadows. Shadows!”
Malu came to the acacia after her last class; she wore the same old jeans and loose blouse—they were her uniform. She shared with me the chocolate cake her mother had baked and when we were finished, I asked about the spiritistas in Navotas.
“And why are you so interested in them all of a sudden?”
“I want to find out what is in them that attracts you. What are you really looking for? What do you want?”
“Hey!” She playfully shoved a fist into my stomach. “One at a time. I am no computer. What do you want me to be?”
“My wife,” I said immediately. “I want you to raise my children, to keep house, help me be what I want to be …”
“How conventional,” she sighed. “The woman’s place is in the home.”
“It is a major responsibility, Plat. No small matter.”
“I don’t deny that,” she said. “But it is like condemning a woman to prison.”
“A home a prison? Do you want to be free like a bird? But even birds have nests.”
“I know, but you asked what I want. I want peace.”
“It is so abstract, Plat. It is like saying I want truth, beauty …”
“I want those, too, and they are not abstract.”
“Tell me, are you uncomfortable in Dasmariñas Village?”
She did not speak. I had touched the root of it all. She turned to me and said evenly, “My father did not cheat anyone. He worked very hard all his life. My mother, too. I don’t have to explain our kind of life.”
“I am not asking you to,” I said. “People deserve the fruits of their labor.”
“That’s what Father said. The only things I knew were parties, clothes. Oh, yes, Father told us about the poor, but I was protected from real knowledge. Then, when I was a junior in high school, I had a very good teacher in literature. She made us read Rizal, all those stories by our own writers that would waken us. We asked questions. She took us to the Philippine General Hospital and saw all those people in the corridors who were going to die because they had no money. I have been only to the best hospitals—the Makati Center, those in the United States. We read stories about the slums, so we visited—not Tondo—but Malibay in Pasay. And you know, what I used to spend for one dress—that was what one family needed to live on for three months! I was shocked. I felt guilty that I had so much, that I was comfortable and there are so many people who are not. And my teacher, when the nuns learned about what she was doing, they fired her. I really hated them for that.”
“You cannot be Santa Claus,” I said. “This is a job for government. Besides, the poor will always be with us.”
“They are people!” she said emphatically. “That I cannot forget. I wanted to think only of myself, of the fun I used to have. I just couldn’t anymore. And that was when I went into meditation. To ease my mind—not to run away or to seek some enlightenment. Don’t you have mental or emotional problems at all?”
“Yes,” I said. “Lots of them. But the one that gives me the most frustration—is you.”
Her brows arched in mock surprise. “You trouble me a lot, too,” she said. “We should meditate together then. I have my own mantra which is just like saying the rosary over and over.”
“Om ni pad ni om …”
“Not that esoteric,” she said. “What I want the world to have: love … light, love … light.”
She said there must be a way the sick can be helped without going to fancy hospitals and buying those expensive medicines. Many of man’s diseases were psychosomatic and most ailments could be cured by the human body itself. She went searching for faith healers, found most of them were fakes taking advantage of the ignorant, just as many specialists in medicine took advantage of their patients.
All these led her to the spiritistas.
“Can you take me to Navotas to see them?”
“So you can laugh at us, or look at us as if we were freaks?”
I told her then what her father had told me.
“I believe, Plat,” I said simply.
We reached Barrio Santa Clara late in the day. It was not a long way from the boulevard that skirted the bay. We passed new housing areas that were being built on land that was once fish ponds. We turned right into a narrow, cemented street, the wooden houses intruding into the street itself. I drove slowly for people had spilled out into the street, loafing, taking in the late afternoon sun.
The chapel was within a compound of shoddy wooden frame houses and we parked in the driveway cluttered with laundry lines, empty fish baskets, and old lumber. Beyond the driveway, the chapel was just another decrepit building with an open foyer through which I could see no pews but an enclosure with several women and men. They greeted Malu warmly. She introduced me as her future husband and they beamed at me and shook my hand.
We did not stay with them; she led me out to one of the houses by the chapel, across an alley heaped with cooking pots, stacked firewood, and empty chicken coops. The whole place smelled of sweat and tired people. In the dim, almost sepulchral living room, a corpulent woman was stretched on an iron bed stacked with pillows that needed washing, her hair grayish and stringy. When she saw Malu, she half rose and grinned, baring a set of bad teeth stained with betel nut. Malu greeted her politely. She was the priestess, the leader of the congregation.
Dusk was now upon us. Back in the chapel, a single fluorescent tube in the nave was on and several candles in the altar with the image of Christ were lighted. They were all within the enclosure now. I sat just outside on one of the benches by the railing. They started with the national anthem, not the anthem sung in the schools with its exotic Tagalog. The melody was the same, but the words were simpler, more beautiful. The woman whom we had met in the house intoned a prayer first and all the members, not more than fifty and mostly women, stood silently. They were working-class people; their clothes were shabby, and their skins were dark with sun and toil. Now, their eyes closed, they started praying, Malu with them. After a while, many started to sway and tremble; the fat woman walked around, stood before each member, praying. I was transfixed, watching Malu. She had closed her eyes and her arms started to quiver. Each one spoke, not in unison but singly, in a Tagalog I could hardly understand, not the Tagalog of the sidewalk but the Tagalog of the poets. They thanked God and promised they would work for His glory. Then it was Malu’s turn—the priestess was in front of her. Malu was in a deep trance and, perhaps, did not know what she was saying. Her voice was resonant, and her Tagalog was beautiful and frightening and I feared for her, for she said, “Dear God, Your poor and Your weak—Who will help them? When You said You gave us not peace but the sword, where now is the sword so that we may bring justice to Your people?”
For all her radical verbiage, Malu was not one to carry arms; she was scared of them and of military men. Her threshold for physical pain was low. She once suffered through a horrible toothache because she felt it was more torture to sit on a dentist’s chair. Her childhood memories of her visit to one were indelible—the drill, it had seemed to her then, was going right through her tooth, into her being. I accompanied her to my dentist who was an excellent and understanding woman with a calm, soothing manner. Still, she paled visibly with the first shot of Novocain in her gums.
“How can you be a revolutionary when you cannot even visit a dentist without trembling? How will it be then when you get shot at? Or when you see blood?”
“You are no different—you’re just like all of them,” she said. “Did it over occur to you that revolution is not just shooting and dying? It is also cooking, typing, keeping files, planning, teaching—and organizing.”
I knew she was doing a lot of this and during the Christmas break that year, I saw her less, but I phoned every day. She was busy in the slums, worried that those driftwood houses would soon be bulldozed by the government.
“It is for the greater good, Plat,” I said. “That place w
as meant for harbor facilities, for storehouses.”
“But there is no place where they can be relocated,” she said angrily. “And more than that, the government will not start any construction for two years. I know, I researched it.”
I could not argue. Perhaps, I was just being jealous of Charlie who was now with her every day. I knew the slum needed not just simple housing but sewage disposal, garbage collection and a water system. Burned into my mind was that afternoon we went there, the pigpens that passed for homes, the unmistakable imprint of harsh living in the mottled skins of people, the big bellies of children, the rancid smell of rotting garbage and human waste in the alleys.
“I think you are in love with Charlie,” I blurted out.
“Don’t be funny,” she retorted, and banged the phone.
I visited her on Christmas day—her mother had called and said I should have lunch with them and she hinted that Malu needed to see me.
It was a memorable day. I brought this engagement ring hoping it would make her happy. It was not much, a simple .32 carat diamond in white gold setting. It was also a bleak day and I did not give her the ring though she gave me a gold-filled ball pen. I couldn’t give the ring because for the first time, I saw her cry, the tears just welling in her eyes and down her cheeks.
We were out in the garden by ourselves, under the golden shower pergola. I held her, tried to comfort her. Charlie was dead; they had buried him that morning.
“He had so much promise,” she said. He was going back to school so that someday he would be a lawyer and would know how to fight for the “little people” who had no defense; they knew neither the law nor big men.
They were already bulldozing the settlement. The slum dwellers had organized a picket line and Charlie was a leader in the picket. He had left the line to plead with the Metrocom who had now brought the bulldozers. He did not even taunt them. He merely left the line to tell them that all of them, soldiers and squatters alike, were “little people.” They shot him instead.
“I ran to him and they would have shot me, too” Malu said, “had the others not rushed with me to the fallen boy.”
Three Filipino Women Page 14
