Sins

by F. Sionil Jose

Come February 14 in his senior year, when young people celebrated Valentine’s Day, I found he had no party to go to. I had invited four of my prettiest young nieces, none of whom I had fornicated with. We went to the Polo Club for dinner and some dancing. I had asked him to put on one of the tropical suits Francesco had made, but he came in the same old khakis, freshly laundered for sure, and a cheap synthetic fiber barong Tagalog. He had also had a haircut. I made sure that he joined us—I had him picked up at his residence by one of the drivers, and when he arrived, Angela, growing up very fast, rushed to the door and greeted him with a loud kiss.

  “Delf!” she exclaimed. “You are very handsome!”

  She led him to our table. Corito and the girls were chatting happily in Spanish but all conversation stopped when Delfin arrived at the table. It must have been obvious to him, to Corito and to Angela that the four girls were there so he could meet them. The introductions over, they vied for his attention, chattering in English with him but switching to Spanish when they talked among themselves. I now realized by the expression on his face that Delfin understood every word, but he refused to speak with them, or to me and Corito, in Spanish. It was only with Angela, I learned later, when it was just the two of them, that he spoke Spanish with some diffidence. Dutifully, he danced with all my pretty nieces, and took them back to our table, impassive and silent. Then he brightened up when Angela asked him to dance with her. She was around ten, and tall; she danced awkwardly, gawkily, and we looked at them, extremely amused. She seemed, however, to be very happy. Indeed, she would tell me later that it was the most beautiful Valentine’s Day she had ever had.

  But for Angela, it was a disastrous evening for Delfin; he ignored the other young ladies completely and barely talked with them, preferring instead to talk to Angela and to Corito and, occasionally, to me.

  I wondered what was wrong with the girls—they were all good-looking, three of them seniors at the Assumption, one had just finished college in California. They were sophisticated and adept in all the social graces. No, there was nothing wrong with them. Delfin, reared in that village in Siquijor, was still a country boy and did not fit in. By nine, after dinner, Angela said she was sleepy and wanted to go home. Corito wanted to stay.

  “I will accompany her,” Delfin said. He must have been so bored he wanted to leave.

  I decided to leave, too, so I could be with my son. Corito would take care of the girls; there were many bachelors at the Club, the girls could easily find dancing partners.

  The three of us sat in the rear. Angela, in the middle, was already asleep, her head resting on my arm. Could she be listening if I talked with Delfin about women? I asked what was wrong with the girls I invited.

  “They are snobs, sir,” he said flatly. “I know their kind. Some are in my own school.”

  What could I say? Maybe I was a snob myself, since I did not see anything wrong with them.

  “I had hoped that you would find at least one of them interesting,” I said. “I had invited them just so you could meet them.”

  “Thank you, sir,” he said quickly. “I know that. I am sorry that I had to call them snobs …”

  “Maybe you are right,” I said. Then I asked if there was a girl in Siquijor.

  “Yes, sir,” he said quickly. In glimpses of his face lighted by passing cars and streetlamps, I could see he was smiling.

  “Would you like to tell me about her?”

  “There isn’t much to tell, sir. She finished high school but couldn’t go on to college. Her family could not afford it.”

  “She—you, what are your plans?”

  “None, sir. How could …” But he did not go on.

  “You wanted to say something.”

  Angela stirred and we stopped talking. After a while, Angela seemed to be asleep again.

  We had reached Sta. Mesa. “Carry your cousin to her room,” I said. He scooped Angela up in his arms and carried her up the steps.

  I wanted to know more about the girl in Siquijor. We went to the library. I asked one of the maids who was up to bring some cold cuts. I hadn’t eaten much at the Club. From the bar, I got myself a glass of Pedro Domecq, another for Delfin. I suspected he had never had brandy, so I told him to sip it.

  I sprang the question without warning. “Are you still a virgin, hijo?”

  He laughed slightly. No tone of embarrassment in his reply, but he was not looking at me when he spoke. His eyes were on the shelves bulging with books, some of them leather-bound.

  “No, sir.”

  “That girl in Siquijor?”

  He nodded, but did not speak.

  “You did not get her pregnant?”

  He shook his head.

  “You owe her some loyalty then.”

  “More than that, sir.”

  “Well, you are in Manila now. Here the temptations are everywhere. But I am sure you know how to protect yourself? Condoms and all those things. Disease can be infectious. You will be hurting not just yourself but others if you are not careful.” I was now speaking of myself, with authority, with the hope that this boy would not make the same mistake I had.

  “I know well enough of that, sir,” he assured me. “It is really better to abstain, and to keep away from the professionals.”

  I was relieved. I was finally having a man-to-man talk with my son and, that evening, I felt as close to him as any father could to his son. Knowing, too, how strong-willed he was, he would surely be able to stay celibate, or if he ever surrendered to the flesh, he would be dressed for the occasion.

  Did I trust too much his sense of personal discipline, propriety? Only time, of course, would tell how he would stand when finally subjected to the test.

  I had fallen asleep, pleased and at peace with the world, confident that my relations with my son were growing closer, warmer, and that I had slowly widened the once narrow corridor where we both trod. It must have been long past midnight—I was wakened by Corito who had returned from the dance. In the dimness, I could make her out as she slipped into my bed and lay beside me, still in her party frock. She kissed me on the cheek, a sisterly kiss, smelling a little of wine, and feminine fragrance. She had put on some weight, was now buxom, but still very good-looking. She was not going to extract her pleasure from me tonight—if that was her intent, she would have come in her negligee with nothing underneath. There were times when I really liked her beside me like this, comfortable, undemanding, and full of domestic chitchat.

  “Did you notice that Delfin and I danced twice tonight?” she asked.

  I had noticed, of course.

  “Oye, Carling,” she said, “you know what I did? I gave Delfin a terrific hard-on.”

  I turned to her. I could not believe what I heard.

  Her hand wandered down my stomach, slipped under my pajama and held the stem firmly, tightly. She croaked, “I rubbed against his groin. I could feel it really hard, and he pressed it to me …”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said, not reacting at all to her caress.

  She drew her hand away and sat up.

  “Ask him,” she said. “Ask him,” she repeated with a gloating laugh as she headed for the door.

  I will be asked by that supreme inquisitor—no, not God, but my own conscience: What meaning have you given your life? I must retort: Should life have any meaning other than it be lived pleasurably? This is not a hedonistic attitude; all over the world, people are searching for objects of belief; some see it in politics, in religion, but this attempt to reach out for eternity—in a sense, this is what this searching is all about—is bound to fail because eternity does not exist; the pristine nature of things change, and it is this inevitability of change that, from the beginning, we must always be conscious of. But human nature is, by itself, unchanging, the lust and the greed commingled with the saintly attitudes and selflessness of those who are so inclined. And I? Look not just at myself, inutile now and in this hapless condition. Look at what this mind and this body have achieved! I have bequ
eathed to this nation progress, fed hundreds, gave them and their families their reasons for being. Don’t talk to me about justice—I know it not as an abstraction, but in the fullness of my deeds. Those yammering crusaders, those who have lambasted me, what have they themselves done? I scorn them, ignore them, regard them as despicable cockroaches hiding in dark, stinking crevices of oblivion. They could not do what I have done, and knowing this, I stand above them all, superior not so much because of my genes but because I have used my wealth and my power in my best moral lights.

  At this juncture, perhaps, I should explain my continued interest in prostitution not as a social problem but as an instrument by which I could further my influence, my interests. I have already stated how I set up a travel agency. It served me and my companies very well. But above such a service, two of my talent scouts recruited girls from the Continent, not for some brothel such as my father operated in Pasay, but for the social lions of Manila, the powerful politicians and businessmen who wanted sexual variety and at the same time would be assured of complete privacy. They could well afford the prettiest women—all of them non-Filipinos—which my agency recruited and, God, I made them pay! It was for this reason that these aides were always in Australia, the United States and Europe, in Spain and Italy particularly—for it is in these two countries where they obtained the best girls, who visited as tourists and were billeted in houses in Makati or in the five-star Manila hotels.

  “Hijo,” I told Delfin, “if the compulsion comes, let me know. I have so many connections. Beautiful women, all of them very clean—I can assure you of that.”

  I had become a pimp to my own son, but I was determined that he suffer no disease as I had done. I may have shocked him, but it was common enough for the rich fathers I knew to initiate their boys into this domain that is woman with the girls I had procured from Europe.

  When I learned that Delfin was giving away almost all of his money, I decided to limit the amount I sent to his bank account, but there would always be enough for him to fall back on. Yes, that was it, I was his fallback position even if he did not admit it. Perhaps his knowledge that I was there with the safety net emboldened him, gave him a sense of security. I always demanded this when I went into a new enterprise; if it failed, what was our fallback position? Actually, I did not bother too much with it, although I made sure it was always there. With my bulging portfolios, I had great liquidity, stocks and bonds in the international market, U.S. treasury notes, hard currencies squirreled away and earning slowly but surely, and yes, gold bullion, too.

  May I say here, now, how much I admired the Leader, particularly after he declared martial law. I was not in his anointed inner circle; I am not Ilokano or a classmate. But I did not want him to consider me an enemy either. Even before he grabbed so many enterprises, I had already protected my flanks, and not only in my friendship with him and his cronies—hah! how many times were the European beauties in my stable his for the asking. I had connected with the Japanese, the Americans and the Germans; they were a safeguard against his greed. And whenever I was asked, I was also prepared to give.

  I said I admired him; he would have been the complete entrepreneur, taking over established businesses with verve and premeditation—the very virtues that I would have possessed more of. Of course, what he did with what he grabbed, that I did not approve of. Whatever one may say about my massive investments abroad, I have not neglected this country, not out of loyalty, mind you, but because this is where I live. Capital, like water, seeks its own level. Wherever there’s profit to be made, it will go there.

  Delfin was now on my mind often. I had decided to mold him into an heir fit to take over my empire. That is not an exaggeration. It is an empire of sorts that stretches from the Philippines to Europe, to America and, of course, Asia, too. Not in the grand manner of the Greek tycoons, the Arab sheiks or the Sultan of Brunei, but on a more modest scale, though global just the same.

  All my companies were earning and my food-processing factory was ready to go regional. All were directed by my holding company, Cobello y Cia. I had an intelligence operation that kept me informed about my own people, the opposition and those in power. Every bit fed to me was double-checked and triple-checked. When someone’s head was cut off, the victim always knew he had it coming. I never did the executions myself. Always there were subalterns who did it for me. I had learned from my father how to protect myself by having others do the dirty work. And they did it skillfully, gladly, for all of them were rewarded well. Divide et empere! It is an easy game to play and those who play it must always be sure they will not be dragged down by the undertow.

  Liberal arts for Delfin took only three years, not four. He was now entering law school. He landed a job at the Nojok law office as a researcher, a job he was very proud to have found, for I learned later that he worshipped this lawyer, this Nojok.

  I did not like Nojok at all, his nationalist posturing, his continuous harping about corruption in government. In a sense, I was glad when the Leader imprisoned him; he should have kept him there longer. Not only was he bad for the Americans with whom I had very lucrative relations but for business in general. In the earlier years, he had run out of the country a business associate, Alfred Dangmount. Alfred had come to the Philippines as an American GI and had stayed on after Liberation to set up several businesses. The man had vision. I know, because I was involved in his plans to set up factories. He had planned on making this country self-sufficient and productive in textiles and, together, we had begun ramie plantations in Mindanao and cotton in the Ilocos.

  We would have been the world’s foremost producer of this

  magic fiber, ramie, but this Nojok hounded Dangmount. What wrong did Dangmount do? He was no different from us, whether Spanish or Chinese mestizos. He just blabbered too much, and said nasty things, such as he could buy any public official, which was true anyway. And so he went and, of course, the businesses that he started were soon taken over by us. I worried, perhaps unnecessarily, that Nojok would also go after people like me, but, fortunately, people like him, these crusaders, do not last long in government. They are soon booted out because they go against the grain, because they turn the faucets off when so many politicians are thirsty.

  These do-gooders, these pseudo saints, when will they ever understand that it is this symbiotic relationship between business and government that makes quicker progress possible? Look at Japan’s rise to economic dominance in such a short time! Nojok’s populist nationalism also bothered me; one of our best assets has always been cheap labor, be it rural or urban. He was always pleading for social justice, for the expulsion of the American bases, for honesty in government—all of these anathema to my own interests. And now, my son was working for him!

  Yet I should have expected it. I recall an early conversation about why Delfin was going to take up law. As a lawyer, he had a ready niche in my business. I could see that. Angela could not do the job, given her poor physical condition and being a woman and so young at that. And what was his explanation then? That there was a lot of injustice in Siquijor.

  He was going to be Sir Galahad, a knight on a white horse, with youthful idealism that would be tempered by age, by the reality of the world outside that campus. Former student leaders, radicals in their college days, but now, in fine summer suits in Makati, timorous conservatives, work for moneybags like myself. Surely Delfin would mature and, in anticipation of that, I had drawn my will for the third time, made many corrections on the first that named Corito and Angela as the major beneficiaries.

  I am convinced of Delfin’s common sense. His ancestry will compel him to do as I have done. When the responsibility of running the estate passed on to me upon Father’s death, I had to be equal to the challenge, I could not have spent all that fortune gambling, because I didn’t gamble, or on luxurious living, because there was more than enough for that, or on women—I didn’t have to go far to have that hunger appeased.

  So will it be with Delfin—and,
thank God, he is a lawyer and better equipped than I was at his age. By himself, he cannot destroy an organization that has its own momentum, a machine that performs with the least interference from he who owns it. Will he make the engine stop? He is full of goodwill—he will need all the money he can to fulfill that goodwill in his heart. And when he realizes this, then he will also realize that he cannot kill the goose that lays those precious golden eggs!

  He had derided the Rockefellers and the robber barons. He cannot be accused of hypocrisy—he can very well follow their do-gooding example—and what I have built will then be sanctified by him with a halo of philanthropy.

  And Angela, my dear Angela, ten, twelve years younger than he, will be his beacon. All through her young years, I have told her that wealth begets wealth begets wealth. She understands this logic. She is not a Cobello for nothing.

  Four years and Angela had bloomed in many ways, but she was still frail, in need of constant medical care. She had become asthmatic and she suffered the omnipresent dust, the dampness, the slight variations of weather. But she was brave, determined, taking up sports that were not strenuous and following the regimen prescribed for her. At fourteen, she was simply beautiful, her hair glossy and brownish in the light, her eyes alight and large. Indeed, she deserved her name—she had an angelic countenance and a voice so clear, so limpid, it was such a pleasure to listen to her. Maybe I exaggerate her attributes.

  It was from Angela now that I got the latest news about my son, for all through intermediate school, Angela visited him at least once a week at his boardinghouse in Diliman. She brought him things, food, fruits, candy, whatever she fancied. “He is a very good teacher, Tito,” she told me.

  I was very glad they had developed such an affectionate relationship. “He is not uncomfortable with your visits?”

  Angela puckered. “No, he is fun to be with.”

  She knew enough not to visit Delfin in any of the big cars, the Mercedes—two of which were new additions in the garage. She was driven in an old battered Ford that the cook used when going to the market.