Three Filipino Women (10 page)

Two years after I set up Media Consultants, I began to have a bit of time on my hands, time which, I thought, I could use to write. I had set up my Makati office in recognition of that old saying that if you can’t lick them, join them. Nationalism is edifying for conversation, editorials, etc., but not profitable in actual practice for as long as the Philippines remains an American colony. This was my experience in the ten years that I worked for B.G. Collas’ advertising agency; I saw his outfit dwindle, his accounts taken over by American firms because these accounts were, in the first place, also American.

But I had the right credentials and luck was on my side. Steve Williams, a former classmate at Yale, came to Manila. He was then head of the economic research department of one of the major Wall Street financing houses and he wanted ties with a Filipino firm that would give his company economic intelligence as well as an “in” with Filipino media. There was no such firm in Manila and there and then, he said he would help me start up Media Consultants, in partnership with the New York firm which had worldwide affiliations and whose president happened to also be a Yale man. A rush trip to New York finalized the arrangement and before long, I had several American and Japanese financial institutions as clients. I had always believed that management made more practical sense than book-learned knowledge and in two years, my outfit was efficiently functioning.

I reread my dissertation on the Filipino entrepreneurial elite and realized that it was empty of the insights that I had now. The
dissertation never touched on the social vices of this elite, the function of sexuality in determining not just status but, in a far more significant way, how sex influences corporate mobility, the rise and even downfall of businesses through excesses in the ancient
querida
system. This lack led me to delve deeper into Filipino sexuality, from the time of Pigafetta to the present, not just as historical fact but as an expression of our culture.

To put it in another way: Two great thinkers had postulated man’s drives and salvation. Marx pontificated on the stomach and Freud on the gonads. I was going to be the “third great thinker”—I would synthesize the two approaches and explain what makes Filipino society, why we behave the way we do.

But postulating was not enough; I needed data, background on the earliest sexual practices of Filipinos, the marriage customs of the ethnic groups and what they could reveal about pre-Hispanic attitudes towards marriage and family. I wanted to find out how our contemporary writers handled sex in their stories, novels, their poetry, how homosexuals influenced culture because of their pivotal positions as movie and stage directors and as couturiers who influenced the wives of the elite. I had some background on the sexual practices of executives, the backrooms of their offices furnished like bedrooms for after-lunch sex. I knew of one powerful brokerage manager who had a covey of women in his shop employed solely to provide him with gratification. One of the girls, as a matter of fact, was there to give him a blow job during the morning coffee break.

The amours of the political elite were flagrant. Some of the men close to our past presidents, from Quezon onwards, shared with me their knowledge of affairs in the Palace. But as my research continued, I realized that I had begun to look at prostitution not as a social condition but as a matter of integrity.

Ermi Rojo taught me this implicitly.

Since the late fifties, I had been bringing journalists to Camarin. Didi was a handsome woman with a deep throaty voice and heavy unplucked eyebrows. Her lips were rather thin but kissable and I suggested once that I kiss her and she had looked at me with such disgust, I would never forget it.

When I was lonely, particularly after Lydia and I separated, Didi would sometimes suggest a girl. She knew my taste; I wanted them sweet—nothing of the
mestiza
glamor type that other men lusted after. She also knew that I was sometimes repelled outright by commercial sex so she saw to it that the girl never mentioned money which, in the first place, I had already placed at Didi’s disposal. And because I liked illusions, the girl and I often went first to any of the restaurants in Ermita, sometimes to Alba’s or to the Hilton, then home to Mabini.

One afternoon, I got a call from Didi. “You must come tonight,” she said. “You like the intellectual type, a good conversation, that sort of thing. I have a surprise for you.”

In fact, there were two surprises. First, the girl she introduced me to was still a virgin. Second, her price was ten thousand pesos.

From my apartment, I always walked two blocks to Camarin. It was one of those hot, airless evenings when it seemed like a stroll through the back of a furnace, I was perspiring freely and though my heart was fine, there was this feeling of being stifled not so much by the muggy heat but, I soon realized, by my expectations.

The Camarin is the whole ground floor of an office building done in the Spanish style, with grilled iron windows and a grilled iron gate flanked by iron lamps. No neon sign atop the door—just a simple brass marker. You pushed the door open and walked into an expanse of red tiles, with tables topped with real cloth, and the head waiter, Pete, in a black suit. Beyond the bar, that is before the stage was built for the go-go dancers, was a piano and a piano player,
Ralph Alfonso, who used to be a popular movie producer and band leader but had fallen into difficult times. Now, in his old age, he was banging away at the piano and sometimes playing out of tune. I liked Ralph and I always bought him a drink and left a few pesos on the piano ledge because he always played some of the old songs, “Ramona” for instance.

That night I was at the Camarin too early. It was only eight, and the girls had not yet arrived although there were already some customers dining. Didi was at her usual table near the bar where she could see everything, specially the cash register. If not for her sexual preference, Didi would have now been quietly married to some
hacendero
in Negros where she came from. Her family was in sugar in a big way. She had gone to the Assumption, then to a finishing school in Europe, but she preferred this kind of life. To her, it was not only physically satisfying; she was also able to see, as she put it, humanity in the raw, without pretensions. She told me that many prostitutes were by inclination lesbians, and that they always hated or loathed their men. This was useful information for it helped me to understand Ermi better.

She came in exactly at nine. She wore a bright green dress and as she walked to Didi’s table, just about everyone paused to look at her. Her presence was striking, there was elegance in her carriage, yet she was simplicity itself—just a bit of lipstick, her boy’s bob shining in the cartwheel lamp above her. She was beautiful in an exotic Oriental way, her eyes alight with laughter, her oval face finely sculpted. A painter like Carlos Francisco would have exalted over her.

I stood up and pulled out a chair for her. “This is Rolando Cruz,” Didi said. “I wanted you to have my best customer for your first night here.”

“Does he know the price?” She spoke to Didi without turning
to me. Though her voice was mellow, there was something final and harsh about the way she asked the question.

“The ten thousand, yes.” Didi turned to me with a grin. “Ermi here does not sit at the usual rate of thirty pesos an hour. It is double for her—but keep this a secret or else all the girls will be in an uproar if they found out.”

I had my usual table near Ralph so I could tell him what tunes to play. Her shoes were not high heeled; she was just a little over five feet and I was taller but not by much. She wore some perfume, Chanel, I think, and I caught a whiff of it as she turned to tell me that Didi had told her about me. Then, as we sat down: “Why does a man of your intellectual background come to a place like this?”

I did not answer immediately. I had thought it better to ignore her question but after she was seated, she repeated it. Ralph had started to play “Ramona” and the waiter had brought me my usual bourbon with water.

“Coke,” Ermi said when the waiter asked her. Then, “You didn’t answer my question.”

I was pressed to the wall. Honesty would be my salvation. “I have been separated from my wife for some time now,” I said, spilling over for some reason. “And I’m to blame. It was not a woman who caused it—it was me, my stupidity, paying too much attention to my job, and ignoring her and the home. It was as if I was not married at all. And now, frankly, I don’t want any emotional attachments. Attachments can inflict pain. It’s best to be casual about sex. Fornicate without affection, fornication without affection …”

She nodded as if she agreed. In the soft light, her skin was pure. In the sunlight, she would look even lovelier.

“What is a pretty girl like you doing here?”

“Money,” she said quickly. “Nothing else. And now that we are
through with the introductions, you must make the most of your one hour …”

“Can I ask you your name at least?”

“Ermi,” she said, smiling. “But no family names, no addresses, no telephone numbers. You can always get in touch with me through Didi if you want me …”

“You are so businesslike,” I said. “Which means that you are new in the business. You turn me off that way. I don’t like being hustled. I don’t think any man does.”

She seemed thoughtful. She brought her chin up, her lips in a pout. “Maybe, you’re right. It is my manner, I guess. The directness. Thanks for telling me.”

“That’s a lot better,” I said. “Don’t regard me—men—as your enemy although you will perhaps eventually do that. Some of us can fall in love, too, even with girls like you …”

“Oh?”

“Love is blind, or haven’t you heard?”

“That’s for the birds,” she said quickly. “I keep my head all the time.”

“Sometime in the future, you’ll slip. There are girls right in Camarin who fork over their earnings to boyfriends. They buy cars for their men while they ride in jeepneys.”

“That will never happen to me,” she said grimly. “All the money I will make will be for me. For me alone.”

“And the first is ten thousand.”

She laughed softly, that easy laughter which I would always remember. “Actually,” she explained, “it will only be five. Fifty percent will go to Didi.”

“At that rate,” I said, “it will have to be a rich Chinese
sari-sari
store owner who will deflower you. Only they can afford it.”

“Do you know one?”

I shook my head.

“And of course, you won’t give up ten thousand for one night of the wildest pleasure you have ever known,” she said. “Look, I have read several sex books, including that crazy
Kama Sutra.
”

“Not on the first night,” I said. “You will be in pain.”

“But only the first time.”

“There will be no second time for me,” I said. “I am not a teenager anymore.”

“I will make you feel like one again.”

“Not for ten thousand. But if you are willing to have it in installments …”

She pouted again.

“Maybe, one of my foreign friends. One of these days, I’m certain …”

“I speak Spanish, French and, of course, English. A smattering of Visayan and Ilokano, too. Learned them when I was young …”

“Good to know about your gift for language,” I said.

I told her that the cult of virginity was fast disappearing as sociological surveys at the University of the Philippines and other schools had shown; that it is only the conservative male who still holds to it in the hope that his virgin wife will be more faithful and his ego satisfied.

“Was your wife a virgin when you married her?”

“Of course,” I said. Lydia and I had premarital relations but she was a virgin when I first took her.

“And what if she wasn’t?” Although the question was hypothetical, it was disturbing just the same.

When I visited Ermi again the following week, she already had a nickname. She was called
Dies Mil
—or ten thousand, and there were still no takers. She was already Camarin’s most popular girl and men were often there early so they could have her at their table, watch her, listen to her. I could not get her the second time—a
balding, middle-aged man had tabled her the whole evening till closing time but was not prepared to part with ten thousand.

Ermi was brighter than I when it came to analyzing relationships. I had thought that in the end ours would be strengthened by the business that I had brought her. But it was I who brought her the man who paid her ten thousand. She never thanked me for it and looking back I think that she loathed me instead for having started her off.

In the mid-sixties, a “Great Leader” from a neighboring country came incognito to Manila for what seemed to be his last fling. He was suffering from gout, high blood pressure and all the ailments with which frenzied high living ravishes the aging body. I got a call that afternoon from his embassy; he had just arrived and he made it clear to his ambassador that he needed a young girl for the night. The ambassador was a dull, colorless bureaucrat who relied on his cultural attaché for this sort of expertise. I happened to know the attaché—one of the multinationals I represented had interests in his country’s massive oil resources and it was natural for me to ingratiate myself with him.

My introducing the Great Leader to Ermi pleased everyone. Two months afterwards, Ermi got a house in Forbes Park and when I saw her again, she was no longer being tabled at Camarin although she still dropped in and made appointments there. Now, she was a prominent item in Didi’s stable; she was on call for three thousand pesos a night and in the sixties, that was very good money.

By then, too, I was drawn to the Camarin more often. I deluded myself into thinking that I was really involved with research, amassing new insights from Didi and her girls. It was Ermi, of course, whom I really wanted to see before she stepped out for the night; it was she who, I hoped, would be able to have a little time at my table, crumbs before a starveling.

We were able to talk briefly on occasion and she attended to me,
perhaps out of her initial gratitude for introducing her to the “Great Man.”