Sins

by F. Sionil Jose

  Like an eager voyeur, I had asked her to describe her initiation, but although it happened not too long ago, recollecting the details was difficult. What she remembered most was her fear.

  I did not realize then the cruelty of what I was doing, and I asked if she had enjoyed it like she was now enjoying our relationship. An immediate and violent shaking of the head. “It was so painful I cried. I thought it would last forever.”

  She hated the man’s breath—it was foul—and his saliva was all over her face. The realization that she was no longer a virgin grieved her more than anything; there was a boy she had grown up with, and she had promised herself she would give that gift to him.

  Early on, when I was still in grade school, my father had told me to select my friends not because they possessed good character but because they were rich like us, so that there would be no difference in social status. And knowing them would give some assurance of mutual help in the future. As for women, I should never marry below my class and should look at marriage as a social and economic arrangement. “You cannot let our wealth be broken up, be divided among these villagers.” Thus he described the nonmestizos. “Better if you go to Europe and Spain and marry there rather than have your bloodline sullied by them.”

  I knew then that Severina was just a plaything. I think she knew this, too. It was not easy for me to absorb this view, to get it entwined with my mind and heart, to live with it, and it was just as well, perhaps, that I had to experience this dilemma, this hurt and wrenching away from someone who, I later realized, I had cared for. Not that I became callous, but always I had to think of my position, which should not be eroded by adolescent sentimentalism.

  How I missed her! Her aunt, the cook, said simply that she had gone back to Nueva Ecija, but when I inquired from the other help, they said they didn’t know for sure that she had returned to the hacienda. I learned much, much later that the cook knew Severina had to leave. Could it be Corito’s doing? But Corito said flatly she did not send her away. It was beneath her, she said with imperious disdain, to be jealous of a muchacha.

  If she went back to the hacienda, for sure the encargado would take her again. It would seem that the cook knew this would happen. In afterthought, I did recall Severina saying that she would leave for some distant place in the Visayans, where relatives had migrated earlier. I had completely ignored her, thinking this was a ruse. I had also thought that she was just a body to be possessed, all that brown softness, those shy kisses and the caress that seldom came—all these were embossed in memory, and they would all return as reverie, as remembered bliss so intense as to be almost physical.

  My last night with Severina will always be enshrined in my mind and heart. It is all revealed wisdom now why she had acted the way she did—so vivacious, so happy. She did not want our last moments marred by recriminations, by gloom. I did not know it was to be our last so I lived the moment, too. Before she left me, however, I had a last look at the charm. Maybe it was a trick of light, the sallow shadow of the bedpost, a dulled reflection, but the triangle was no longer so white—it seemed streaked with tiny blobs of amber. It had changed color.

  Severina’s absence was somehow soothed by Corito, my dear sister, who was always there, ready and even hungry for my embrace. I do not know if my parents ever suspected my relations with Severina. As for Corito, they were pleased by our seeming closeness, as it augured well for our harmony after they had gone.

  Soon, Severina’s absence was no longer a nagging ache. As for the war, my parents had talked about its coming. More than once, General MacArthur had come to the house for those splendid parties my parents gave. Once, the general had danced with Corito, which made her so happy she talked about it for days. Major Dwight Eisenhower, who was then MacArthur’s aide, came too. He played excellent bridge and was popular with the ladies. When MacArthur sent Eisenhower back to the States, Father said it was because he was jealous.

  On the advice of the general and other high officials, Father had ordered the building of an air-raid shelter right in the house, by the porch, a cavern of cement with lights, flush toilet and bunks for six—although there were just four of us. Here, too, was stocked all sorts of supplies, canned food, sacks of rice, beans and even toilet paper. We were never short of food during the war, and we did not touch this reserve until the last year of the war, when there was a shortage of food everywhere. To augment our food supply, a portion of the garden was also planted to vegetables, camote—sweet potato—and cassava; with high walls surrounding it, our house was a fortress against hunger and also the marauding world.

  As for the guerrillas, like most Filipino leaders, Father knew how to take care of his flanks and his rear. It was, of course, somewhat of a surprise for me to learn after the war that he was a guerrilla leader—the main reason why he was not imprisoned like Recto and the others who collaborated with the Japanese. I am sure that his friendship with General MacArthur assured him immunity.

  My father also did something during the war that only a few people knew about. One of his Japanese friends was General Kuroda, who was fond of the pleasures of the bedroom. Father procured for him from among the impoverished mestizo families in Ermita and Malate who had no way of making a living as the businesses they were all engaged in were closed down.

  This was one lesson that the war taught me—that every event in time presents opportunities that are recognizable only to those with enough sensibility to see them, that it is possible to thrive in adversity if the needs of the rulers are pandered to.

  But this is going ahead of the story. The war was also for me a time for growing up, for learning how men can rise above the misfortune of others. Big thoughts now in retrospect but, at the time, I was really concerned with just the gonads. With Severina gone and Corito having become a comfortable habit, I wanted something less trite, different.

  I am sure Father was only too aware of my physical needs. It was so many years later that I realized he knew of my relations with Severina. One afternoon, he took me to this house in Pasay, which turned out to be ours, although I did not know it until after the war when I had to make an inventory of our real estate properties.

  Mid-1944, the Occupation was now on its third year, the Japanese were hated and feared. Guerrillas roamed the countryside and the city itself. Japanese soldiers were often ambushed right in the city, and they took hostages whom they executed at will. Even for us, who were used to so much comfort, there were now inconveniences. Gasoline was rationed and only one of the cars in the garage was running, and was used only when Father and Mother had some special occasion to attend. Most of the time, we used the dokar. As I said, life in the city had worsened and many residents had gone to the provinces where some food was available.

  The house in Pasay was substantial and was rented by an American businessman who was interned in Santo Tomas. It had a wide yard like the house in Sta. Mesa, with acacia trees. The eight bedrooms were on the second floor. The living room was large. Unlike some of the houses in Pasay, it had a cement wall ten feet high. Such a wall would prove no protection later on, during the battle for Manila. I can only imagine the ferocity of that battle, which engulfed the city south of the Pasig, including Pasay.

  I was truly bored. I soon developed some desire for reading. Though the library at home was big and growing bigger with the Filipino first editions that my father bought, both my parents never really read; they were collectors, visiting the Philippine Education Company on the Escolta every so often to see what books were worth adding to the library, what old books on the Philippines were available.

  I have digressed again, so let me go back to the house in Pasay and how Father sent me there one afternoon in January. He had simply instructed me to watch over the place; I suppose that all he wanted really was for my presence to be noted there as some form of deterrent against anything that might be detrimental to him, particularly at this time when the war was turning badly for the Japanese—that, too, was what he said.

/>   I was surprised the moment I entered the house. But first, may I relate the elaborate security at the gate, all of it iron as high as the wall, with a peephole for the guard to ascertain visitors. The opened gate revealed another enclosure within with grills, and before it was opened, two men looked at us and greeted Father very politely. Father had not really told me what it was that I would oversee, but there in the living room, sprawled in various forms of undress, gossiping and eating green mangoes, were a dozen mestizas. I realized soon enough that the house was a brothel, but at the time I did not consider Father’s operating it as something socially abominable. In afterthought, what he had done was not unique. As any historian who has studied the Visayan elite will confirm, the Danteses operated not just gambling dens but whorehouses wherefrom they branched into more socially acceptable businesses.

  A very corpulent mestiza in her early fifties met us at the door. As if she had known me for years, she greeted me gustily and with a hug. She was all blubber and her perfume was overwhelming. Her greeting in Spanish was very informal, but not the manner with which she addressed Father. Soon, they were in a hush-hush discussion, the same way Father had discussions with Mother when they did not want Corito and me to hear. While they were talking, the girls kept quiet and assumed stiff, formal manners so unlike their comfortable slouch when we had arrived.

  Her instructions finished, Señora Meding, as she was called, waddled up to me and embraced me again, her bad breath assailing me. At fifteen, I was big, but she was bigger. No, huge would be the more apt description. She must have weighed at least two hundred and fifty pounds, this at a time when almost every Filipino was losing weight on a diet of gruel and camote tops. I soon learned that the Japanese officers brought not just money but food, and those rice crackers that I liked.

  My instructions were simple. I was to stay in the house, keep my eyes and ears alert, and report on the Japanese officers who came at any time of day.

  Señora Meding’s instructions were different. “I am to see to it that you are not bored and that you stay out of trouble.” She took me to the second floor, to Father’s room, which was now going to be mine. It overlooked the middle-class houses beyond the high serrated walls, a few vacant lots planted to vegetables as every empty lot in Manila then was planted to camote or talinum.

  Then, before she turned to go, Señora Meding did something that shocked me. She fondled my crotch and smiled. “There are a dozen of them here. I do not see how this”—she pressed it firmly, pleasurably—“can be idle.”

  Father’s bedroom was larger than the other rooms and had shelves filled with the books—novels mostly, some poetry, history—the American tenant had left. In a sense, it was in that room that I first learned to appreciate literature, having so much leisure to make use of. After a time, let me say this, if sex is freely available, it can become a terrible bore.

  For many of us, whatever our social background, war was an experience that tested character, enabling people to recognize not so much their strengths but their weaknesses. I knew then that I was a sensualist, that I craved whatever pleased the senses, be it a gourmet dish or a woman in all her glory, the fine down on the back of her neck, the narrow waist broadening into her buttocks, those limbs down to the dainty feet and, of course, I must not forget the beautiful mounds of her breasts. As for food, there were the delicacies that the Japanese officers brought, dried fish and various kinds of pickles and pastes, all of which I learned to appreciate.

  A dozen mestizas who were anxious to be in the embrace of a young lion entertained Japanese officers only, and they told me they smelled of fish and soy sauce and performed mechanically. Was this automatic performance attributable to their culture, which regarded women as inferior? As my reading of Japanese history later showed, there was a time when the Japanese killed baby girls at birth.

  I had planned on going home every evening, but soon enough decided to stay in Pasay for days at a time. The brothel’s varied delights enthralled me. I would like to describe these sensual intimacies in some detail, but I have never really appreciated pornography.

  Not one of the girls was over twenty. I cannot now remember them all, but one left me not just with a memory but something physical that the reader will soon know about.

  Adela reminded me of Severina. She was mestiza but was what we call morena, brown with classic features. Afterward, when I started taking pictures, I realized that she had photogenic features and her face could have easily propelled her to stardom, our movies being what they are, nothing but vehicles for lousy actors and actresses with mestizo features. Adela’s skin was pure—not one blemish on her entire body. Her thighs were a lighter shade, as were her belly and her breasts. She would stand before me, pleased by my admiration of her body, and I would simply watch her and be mesmerized by that animal splendor. In the heat before the advent of the cool months, she moved about my room in her pristine beauty. I wonder if the Japanese officers appreciated her as much as I did, having seen afterward the ivory luster of the skin of Japanese women.

  During my stay in Pasay, I became friendly with Colonel Masuda, who was in charge of the propaganda corps. It must always be remembered that my father’s brothel was exclusively for high-ranking officers—no lower than a colonel. He was a graduate of one of the California universities and his English was much better than mine. We had the same weakness—we both wanted Adela. He came once a week, and if Adela was in my room, I had to let her go. I was jealous; I asked her what kind of a man he was. Like my sister, Adela had gone to an exclusive girls’ college in Ermita, but when the war came, her father lost his business. Unlike us, the family had no other resources. They had no land in the province, and there was no rent to collect on their real estate in Manila. Now, she was feeding a family of six living in a lovely Ermita home, but without the affluence to maintain their old lifestyle.

  Looking back, I realize how tenaciously some images of adolescence linger, how the adult mind feeds on this remembered past. Its hurts are magnified and the transient pleasures even more so, so that in recollection, all these seem to have occurred only recently. In those moments with Adela, I never fully accepted her as a whore.

  She told me the Japanese were losing, that the Americans were already in Leyte, this at a time when the Tribune flatly stated they were still in the South Pacific, island-hopping, that it would take them a hundred years to reach the Philippines in that slow process. It was now late in 1944, and fewer and fewer officers were coming to the brothel. Manila was bombed in September of that year by American carrier planes, dark like drones in the sky, more than a hundred of them, the hum of their engines cascading down into the starving city. I was in my room with Adela. I remember this moment in history very well; I was at the height of my physical exertions and couldn’t stop. Adela had become tense but I had to fulfill destiny, and only when it was over did we go out, not knowing then how dangerous it was, as falling shrapnel from Japanese antiaircraft shells had killed several Filipinos.

  Colonel Masuda came early that evening. I remember bits of our conversation, how he missed his country, his wife and child, how he hoped someday all this nastiness would be over and we would meet again.

  I appreciated his candor, his offer of friendship, young as I was. He was different from the other officers. I think he knew from the very beginning that Japan couldn’t win, which gave his conversation at times a tone of melancholy and, at other times, an arrogance that was so unlike him.

  We were both in the living room and he had brought along some sake and those rice crackers. Someone had beaten him to Adela and he was going to wait. He was not interested in any other girl.

  “Young man.” He always called me thus. I did not resent his patronizing attitude. “We are a great nation. Look at the map, and realize that my country is small, that it is mountainous and many of my countrymen are still poor. We Japanese are destined to lead. We Japanese …” He did not continue as his eyes traveled to the ceiling, the plaster already cracke
d, and then he sighed.

  It was one of those seemingly quiet October evenings—the tremor of war muted, distant. Manila no longer had electricity, but we had candles. Many residents had already sought refuge in the provinces; the air raids had become incessant and the Japanese no longer fired their antiaircraft guns; they let the American pilots fly at will over the city. We were not to leave Manila, however. We had enough food stashed in the air-raid shelter and were safer in the city, too, although, at the time, I did not think any place was safe at all.

  Colonel Masuda’s last visit to Pasay gladdened me, for now I was assured Adela would have more time for me. He stood up after a while, removed his sword and his khaki jacket. He had also shucked his boots, which, for the first time, I noticed were not polished. In his white shirt, without the full trappings of his uniform, his head clean-shaven as always, he did not look forbidding at all; there was something boyish about him. It was not the sake that had made him more relaxed, I think; it was the fact that he could speak in English to a sixteen-year-old. What he said did not fully register then, but it did with Father when, as usual, I recounted it to him.

  There was not a single sign that he was drunk; as always, his English was lucid. “From the very beginning,” he admitted finally, “I knew we would lose this war. I have lived in America and I know how vast, how powerful that country is, particularly when it is aroused. And we Japanese have never been able to think logically, rationally, because we are too sentimental, because we are overcome too easily by emotion, by mass hysteria. You do not know what that means—you Filipinos, you do not have a nation.” He then proceeded to explain Pearl Harbor—an explanation that was wasted on me for I did not know Japan then as well as I do now—now that I am in partnership with them.

  “I agree with General Kuroda. Do you remember him?”