Three Filipino Women

by F. Sionil Jose

  How could I ignore Ermi? How could I stop breathing? She was now embedded in my mind, a part of me. I could no longer think. My job demanded a mind free from all these impediments that made it impossible to relate cause and effect.

  Cause and effect! There was nothing I did which excluded her. If I went to an appointment in the afternoon or in the evening, would it enable me to pass by Camarin so that I could see her before someone took her out? She had by now a good clientele. There were many offers, she told me, to make her a full-time mistress, to be “garaged” as the expression went, but she was familiar with the liabilities that arose from such arrangements. But what really vexed me was the fact that though she could afford to quit, she still persisted.

  I started taking meditation lessons. Indeed, after a half hour of contemplating my feet, my mind would be rid of junk and all thoughts of Ermi that bedeviled me. But only for a while. Soon enough she intruded again. I realized then that I would have to leave Manila—even just for a few weeks—time enough to flee the single subject that had begun to canker me.

  The first stop was Honolulu. Lolling on the beach at Ala Moana enabled me to think soberly not only of her but of Manila. It was beginning to wobble under the accretion of ancient problems, a radicalized youth movement battering at the hoary walls of privilege, including the multinationals which I represented and defended. I had sympathized with the demands for change but my bread did not come from kids who massed at the American embassy and rampaged in the streets of Ermita, smashing shop windows and splattering their vaulting slogans on the walls.

  I had brought my notes on sexuality and began to work on them, particularly those about the lesbians and transvestites with whom Didi had put me in touch. I was amused, remembering an “international fashion show” by the transvestites at a UN Avenue auditorium the week I left. They were all dolled up and even under those lights, no one would have thought they were men.

  Honolulu was, of course, wide open to the changes in sexual mores that had transformed much of American society, perhaps fundamentally. More so was San Francisco which had become the gay capital of America. But my interests were centered on home. America eddied around me, distant, impermeable. I was not involved.

  A month in the United States, a month in South America which pitched me up the heights of Machu Picchu, and also one month in Europe—with the exotic food, one-night stands—and I instead—continued to marvel at what had happened in Manila. Had I procrastinated, I would have been enslaved by emotions I could no longer control. Now, I wanted to find something I could latch on to, not just history which had fired me in the past, but something equally immaterial, some ideal that would sustain me in this solitary middle age.

  The pleasant deviations in New York, the cherry stone clams at Nathan’s, the juiciest steaks at Gallaghers, all the sensual pleasures of Babylon did not, however, waylay memory. I had hoped it would be easy to forget Ermi but the distance only served to heighten my loneliness, my desire to be with her again. What did I recall of our talks? She did tell me she was good at math. Yes, she loved chocolates although sometimes too lazy even just to take the tinsel wrapping off Hershey’s Kisses before putting them into her mouth. I began to suspect that, perhaps, I was a masochist, that I was getting satisfaction from the agony that I was undergoing. It was when I slept that I should have had some peace but she obtruded in my dreams.

  Then, the three months were over. Back in Manila, I wanted to rush to Camarin but I must test my will. For weeks I did not go although twice in that period, one of my staffers called up Didi for her girls. In the third week, my determination collapsed.

  Didi was at her usual table and she asked why I had kept away so long. A business trip, I explained. And Ermi?

  “She left about two weeks ago,” she said.

  I regretted my foolishness. I damned myself.

  “For the United States,” Didi continued. “You must have missed her a lot.”

  I nodded. “Will she stay there long?”

  “Maybe two months, maybe two years.”

  It was just as well then, I consoled myself. Her protracted absence, about which I could do nothing, would be my final cure.

  Martial law came and for the first time in my operation, everything went awry as the rules were changed. The media targets were more easily defined for there was no longer a free press and all the owners of media were either friends or relatives of the occupant of Malacañang. Gathering economic data was both easy and difficult. All that one had to know was the pattern of new elite relationships, the regions where the entrepreneurs came from. But now, government information sources were very secretive and what were once normal public documents were regarded as state secrets. One clear pattern emerged—the centralization of corruption and a thrust towards the building of infrastructures for export that depressed wages and gave new and dazzling capital sources to a favored few. I had heavily invested in the construction of a modest office building in Makati and put money in blue chip stocks. I was a segurista—I was not going to gamble with the little money I had made. Although more multinationals were coming, there was much less work for us now and I was forced to let some of my top people go along with a third of the work force. I also had to sell the office building to meet not just current obligations but the growing inflation. My mistake was not in forging the right connections early enough. In retrospect, even if I had, I would not have been able to do much for I was never really that close to the new oligarchs. They set up a similar company which naturally got all the new businesses plus a lot of what I used to have.

  I should not complain too much; I was not badly off in the end, unlike some of my friends in media who lost their franchises, their newspapers and the positions of prestige they once held.

  I was soon to see some acquaintances who were virtual paupers in 1966 become multimillionaires in 1976, with newspapers, ranches in Mindoro and timberlands in Palawan, all of them rich enough to buy majority holdings in established companies which the new dispensation wanted to take over.

  How easily fortunes have changed, I thought, even for Ermi who had disappeared in the gilded vastness of America. I sometimes called Didi to ask if she had returned, only to learn that she never even sent a card to her madam. Perhaps, by now, she had dropped out of the trade; perhaps I would never see her again. I thought that time and distance would obliterate memories of her; these were the simplest tools with which to drain or cleanse the mind. But these were not enough.

  It was a warm March afternoon and I was browsing in my favorite bookshop on Padre Faura when I sensed, when I knew, she was there. She did not see me at the far corner, among the history books, but I saw her at once. Now I realized with a pang both of sorrow and exaltation that I had never stopped caring. I crouched low before the Philippine shelves and moved towards the Asian shelves so I could have a better look. She was going through the samples of wrapping paper for which the bookshop was noted and was admiring a sheet with a big cartoon rendition of an elephant. She was in a green print dress with small yellow flowers, her hair almost brownish in the light. She had slimmed, perhaps by ten pounds. I have never been fond of voluptuous women anyway, leaving those to Rubens or Boticelli. Looking at her, how could I keep away? How could I deny myself again? To be with her was a compulsion, a mesmeric force. The moth flew at the flame.

  She was asking the salesgirl how much the sheet cost. I stood up then and went to her, my heart thrashing wildly, my throat as dry as a riverbed in April. I did not speak. She turned, recognized me at once.

  “Roly, this is a surprise …”

  “I am here almost every Saturday afternoon,” I said. “I live close by.”

  “I have not forgotten.”

  I asked where she was going from the bookshop. She was evasive as usual. I must not lose track of her ever again so I asked if I could take her home but she said no—no one ever took her home.

  “I’d like to be your friend, Ermi,” I said. I had told her that once before and s
he had said it was impossible for a man to be a real friend of a woman like her. That friendship would surely end in bed and the relationship would then be irrevocably altered.

  She smiled and shook her head.

  “Please, I would like to see you again.”

  “You can always get in touch with me at Camarin.”

  I was surprised; I had thought she had given up the trade.

  “No, I would like to take you out. Tomorrow, Sunday. Anytime you want, anywhere you please …”

  I went out with her to the street. Her manner was abrupt. “Don’t follow me,” she said. “I have an appointment. But tomorrow …” She seemed to give the idea some thought. “Ten o’clock at the east entrance to Rustan’s in Cubao. Do you know the place?”

  I nodded. She shook my hand then turned towards Mabini where she hailed a cab.

  Ten o’clock. The night before, I barely slept thinking how it would be, the important things I would tell her. She was prompt. She was in blue jeans and a white blouse with red flowers, her face lightly made up. The day was unusually muggy and warm and was, so I learned the day after, the hottest day of the year. Her brow was moist so I let her use my handkerchief.

  “Let’s go see a movie,” she said tentatively. “But I can see one any time. Why don’t we go somewhere else instead?”

  My whole day was for her. “Let’s go to Calamba,” I said.

  She did not know much about Rizal or his novels, and she had not even visited Fort Santiago though she had lived in Manila much of her life.

  “Shame on you,” I said. “You have no sense of history.”

  “The past be damned,” she said with a viciousness which surprised me.

  I asked why she chose Cubao as our meeting place and she said she lived in the area.

  “And what about your house in Forbes Park?”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “How can I ever live there? I am renting the house out and I have bought a much smaller one.”

  I knew then that she would not end up selling sweepstakes tickets and said so.

  “And what makes you think that I will end up that way?”

  “Many of the girls do,” I said. “You are good for only a few years. Then you start getting old, wrinkles on the face, the breasts sag. It is then that you get loved for what you are … if you are loved.”

  She was silent and that was when I said: “You will find that it will only be one man who will care for you then.”

  She did not speak, as if she did not hear.

  “Ermi,” I said, “before you left, I almost went crazy over you. I went away, too, for three months. What did you do in the States?”

  “I saw my mother,” she said quickly. It was the first thing about her life which she had told me.

  “Tell me about her.”

  Her eyes were imploring. “Roly, please don’t ask questions about my family, my past. I don’t want to talk about them. It hurts, just remembering …”

  I did not ask her again.

  “I have had many nasty experiences,” she said. “I don’t want them repeated.”

  “I promise not to embarrass you.”

  “I know that. But in the future, I am sure to meet these men again and there will be phony explanations to make.”

  “I am not ashamed to be seen with you,” I said and meant it.

  She pinched my arm. We were now on the highway to Calamba, bright and wide and hot. “I am sorry,” I said. “This ten-year-old Mercedes is not air-conditioned. I am not rich and martial law has been very unkind to me.”

  “You need not apologize,” she said. “Just don’t take me to those ritzy places where there are many people. I am ill at ease there. I would rather go out at night, with no one seeing me, knowing me. I am tired having to look down, always avoiding the eyes of people.”

  It all came back, the darkness being kind, hiding as it does almost everyone. I never knew and perhaps will never know what got her started in Camarin. But I do know that if money was the reason for her having started, it was not valid now as the cause for her return. “I am disturbed but glad because I can see you again. Why did you go back, Ermi? I thought that with your success with the Great Leader, the house in Forbes Park …”

  “Are you going to give me a sermon again?”

  “You are too old for that and I am too tired to give one. Besides, who am I to make judgments?”

  “But you don’t approve of my going back, I know. Well, no one forced me in the beginning. And no one forced me to return, if that is what you want to know. I did it by myself.”

  I told her that relationships in Camarin had a certain attraction, a magnetic pull to those who were there. Friendships, very strong bonds at that, were created. Her return was certainly welcomed by the girls there for it confirmed, it justified them.

  “You are right,” she said. “But it was still my decision and I am answerable to no one but myself.”

  The old highway was clogged with traffic and in the midday heat, she looked fatigued. I was relieved when we reached Calamba and parked in the acacia-shaded yard of the church where we went before visiting the old Rizal house. I told her about the ilustrados and Rizal’s Sisa and her two sons. The old house, how it was designed and maintained, fascinated her. She marveled at the number of fruit trees in the yard. She was interested in house-plants and on the way back, we stopped on the highway and I bought her a potted palmetto which I placed in the back of the car.

  It was almost four in the afternoon and still hot. “I can drop you off in Cubao where you can get a taxi,” I said. “I know you don’t want me to bring you to your gate.”

  She was quiet again for a time. We were now in Cubao and I turned to the right, to the Farmers Market parking area.

  “You can take me home,” she said. “But promise not to get out of the car when we get there.”

  Her house was in a small side street. It had high walls and a black, iron gate with a lock. She had a key and in a while, a boy came out and took the plant. I caught a glimpse of her bungalow and its yard green with plants.

  “When will I see you again?”

  “Next Sunday, late in the afternoon, if you are free,” she said. “I want to see Fort Santiago.”

  I returned to Mabini convinced that I could not now free myself of her. Now, I wanted a definition of love not circumscribed by the sexual act for it had become mundane, a commerce bereft of those nuances for which a man would commit murder or suicide. Copulation was no longer an expression of love. While it was not sordid, it had become a measure of one’s wealth. The more I needed it, the more I had to pay. With Ermi, how then should I express myself? There are, of course, more profound ways of saying it, the immersion of the self in compassion. Love which is true after all demands no rewards, no favors. How easily I understood now that it is better to give than to receive.

  But what could I give her? It was money she wanted most, which led her to Camarin and that commodity was not now easily available to me.

  I took her to the old fort that Sunday evening shortly after nightfall. The walls were bathed with light and in the expanse before the entrance were people enjoying the cool night air. Some excavation was being done where the old moat was and they had dug up World War II relics, helmets of Japanese soldiers, bones. The Rizal cell was closed so we meandered to the top of the fort where I showed her the section of the Pasig where the galleons used to set sail for Acapulco. I pointed out the old Parian across the river and close by, the landmarks of Spanish sovereignty, the Manila Cathedral, the Archbishop’s Palace, the Ayuntamiento—where these used to stand. Then we went down the broad stone steps to where this solitary cross stands, a marker for the hundreds of Filipinos who were killed by the Japanese in the fort. She read the inscription intently and for a time, seemed engrossed in her own thoughts, then she asked, “Were the Japanese really all that bad during the war?”

  Her question startled me. I had thought all along that Japanese brutality in World War II was taken
for granted. But she was not old enough to have known the Occupation so I told her how it was, my own experiences, the campaign against Yamashita. Quickly, it came hurtling back, those iron cold, rainy nights in the mountains beyond Kiangan, the ribbons of mist that clung to the floor of the valleys in the mornings, and the Japanese—cornered, starved, demoralized—but still fighting viciously where we found them.

  It was now thirty years after Yamashita had surrendered but the Japanese never really lost that war. They are back in full force, with their transistors, their lusts. And what had happened to the brave men who had stood up to them once upon a time? The survivors have all become obsequious clerks, and I was among them.

  I almost did not get out of that valley; one night, they came down the mountain, slithering on the grass and tossing grenades all over the place. “I was lucky,” I said aloud. “Thanks to an old forty-five which I still keep …”

  I’ve had this unlicensed gun for years and almost shot an American advertising client with it. When martial law was declared and the government demanded the surrender of all guns of high caliber, I hid it instead in a more secure place—under the panel, close to the floor, of my bookshelf.

  “Now, you know it,” I told her. “I hope you will not report me to the Constabulary.”

  “I can blackmail you,” she said brightly. Then her face clouded and she seemed pensive. “Each one of your generation seems to have a Japanese horror story,” she said. “Will you believe it, will you be horrified if I told you that my father was a Japanese soldier?”

  I gazed at the bright brown eyes, the serene face, and briefly, there came to mind, the faces of the Japanese dead which we had left at the Pass, their bodies bloated, their uniforms rotted. I remembered, too, the neatly uniformed officers—in gold braid, swords by their sides, brown leather boots shiny in the sun—and here she was, claiming kinship with them. If this was 1945, I don’t know how I would have reacted—perhaps with more than loathing. But this was 1974—and for many of us, the war was no more than a memory. What was done was done.