Three Filipino Women (2 page)

“Brave girl,” Father said.

He wanted to see what it was that had cut her so we went back to their yard and when Father saw it, he said, “I’d better give you anti-tetanus serum.”

A general practitioner, Father tried to make do without the sophisticated equipment of hospitals but he was always careful. I remember him telling me that about eighty percent of human ailments could be naturally cured by the body without the assistance of either medicines or doctors. But tetanus is tetanus. He decided to have an allergy test first, just giving Narita a bit of injection under the skin. Within seconds she had turned bluish, her eyes dilated and she fell into a faint.

Father blanched. Fortunately, he was prepared for such emergencies.
He immediately gave her an anti-allergy shot and when she revived she described how strange she felt and how suddenly everything started to blur and turn black.

“You are allergic to anti-tetanus serum,” Father said gravely. “I hope you will not forget that …”

I felt guilty and sad for her because her face was disfigured but she just laughed. When the wound healed, there was an indention where the scab had lifted and, in time, the scar itself disappeared. She has had that cleft chin since and, as she herself said, she looked prettier with it.

As an only child, Narita had plenty of time to be alone and it was only later that I learned how much of this time was spent in reverie, daydreams about going away, far away from Santa Ana and its numbing constrictions.

She did not have pets except a big, white cat. She starved the animal once when she came upon a nest of mice in their yard. She placed the hungry cat in a wire-mesh cage where once her father kept his fighting cocks. Then she brought out two of the grown-up mice and put them in the cage. I shudder every time I recall how she sat before that cage, her eyes impassive but alert, watching the cat pounce on the poor, shrieking rodents.

“It is the way of the world, Eddie,” she told me years later when I recalled this. “The strong tearing apart the weak …”

As a boy, I was wary of some of the things Narita wanted me to do no matter how easy or innocuous they seemed. One April afternoon we were in the weedy section of their wide yard. The pomelo trees were laden with ripening fruit and she pointed to a rise in the ground as the best place for me to stand so that I could reach the big oranges that dangled over our heads. I went up the low mound without question only to run from it immediately for a host of giant red ants were all over my legs and biting me. It was an
anthill that she had told me to stand on. I was on the verge of tears and she broke out laughing at my misery. I forgave her for this.

We were together again from first year to senior year in the local high school. I cannot say honestly that I did not have any feelings for Narita other than those shared by two childhood friends. Such feelings, however, were dampened by the fact that she had grown taller than I.

By this time, too, she started to confide to me those things which even my sisters did not tell me: how it was when she had her first menstruation, how it felt when her breasts started growing, how itchy they were that she had to put plaster bands on them, personal things which, in retrospect, seem to have been the basis of our relationship.

I remember that day the girls wore their gala uniform—white with blue collar—the school colors. It was the school’s Foundation Day and, as usual, it was Narita who led the singing of the national anthem. When she got up from her seat, there it was for all to see, the red smudge on her behind. There was twittering among the girls and I had a good mind to go tell her that the menstrual blood had dripped right through. And that was what I did when we filed out of the hall. But she whispered into my ear, her eyes filled with laughter, “I am not due till the fifteenth—as if you didn’t know! That’s just pig blood—I sat on it early this morning in Mama’s stall.”

When we were in our senior year, as everyone expected, she became the queen during our High School Day. She had bloomed. I am sure there were men in town who went to her mother’s stall just to look at her. She also sang in the church choir regularly and one could always pick out that rich, mellow voice; she did not linger long in the high notes but she could maintain her voice in the higher reaches. I beat her in literature and history but she was better than
I was in math, in philosophy and physics, “the subjects that mattered.”

Before she became high school queen, her father, who had by then taken to drinking and gambling, became very ill and would have died had not Father taken him to the provincial hospital; it was a rather complicated move. Knowing how government was, Father got a letter from Senator Reyes, builder of the hospital and one of the richest and most powerful men in the country. The senator came from our province and Father knew him.

In a way, we had always been entwined with their lives. Don Carlos—her father loved being called that though there was nothing affluent or distinguished about him—stayed for quite a time in the hospital with all sorts of complications of the liver, the heart, and whatever else can ravage a man who has indulged and abused himself.

“All the meat in the market and all the money in the municipal treasury,” my mother used to say, “cannot pay for the bills.”

We wondered where they would get the money but as luck would have it, Senator Reyes stood by them and for a very good reason. When he came to Santa Ana to crown our high school queen, he had brought along his youngest and only living son, Lopito, who was then in his early thirties. Lopito looked at Narita once and did not care for anything after that but to have the beautiful virgin as his wife. Senator Reyes was more circumspect. The girl’s personality satisfied him but he wanted to know more about her and her background. This was readily supplied by Father and others in the town whom he had questioned. It was no secret then that when Narita finished high school, great things would be in store for her.

I did not like it: Lopito barging into our street in his fancy sports car, with his driver honking before the old battered house, and Narita coming out all smiles; and their driving together, raising billows of dust as they went to the beach or wherever their fancy
took them while her father lay dying in the hospital and her mother toiled in the meat stall. It would have been better if they married but Senator Reyes had other ideas—they would not marry till she finished college.

I left for Manila in a black mood one April morning, a week after we had graduated from high school. Narita was valedictorian. She had delivered the graduation address with feeling, saying it was time for all of us to part, and Senator Reyes who had come again to give the commencement address had looked at her with pride. In the audience, all of us knew what would happen, that she would go to Manila, too, and be his daughter-in-law. And, years later, I was to realize why Senator Reyes had banked so much on her. Of his four sons only the youngest, Lopito, was alive; two had died and one, an artist, had disappeared in Europe. His two girls had married badly in spite of the fact that their husbands were handpicked by the old man. From all appearances, Senator Reyes had wanted to build a dynasty, as was the practice of most politicians, but had failed. He was not a great believer in heredity. After all, he had often said that it was brains that determined survival and triumph, and he unerringly saw all the virtues that he sought in Narita.

I could not leave without saying good-bye. She was in the yard sweeping the dry leaves of the pomelo trees and she asked me to stay a while. I felt very depressed.

I demurred.

“Well,” she said, her eyes crinkling in a smile. “Aren’t we friends anymore?”

“I wouldn’t want Lopito to say I am using some of your time,” I said finally. “I have already said good-bye.”

She pulled me to the bamboo bench by the gate and we sat there. She had on a cheap, printed blue dress and wooden shoes. I could glory forever in her nearness.

“If I didn’t know you, I’d think you were jealous.”

“Of course not.” I glared at her. “How can I be jealous? How can …”

She caressed my face with her hand. I brushed it away.

“You are in love with me!” she exclaimed. “Eduardo Cortez. You—in love with me!”

“And if I am,” I said, “is that something to despise?”

She caressed my face again and this time, I let her, feeling her rough palm, all resentment gone. Then she held my hand. “But Eddie—you know it cannot be. I will not permit it. We grew up together. Remember how we used to run naked in the rain?” She was looking at me, her big, bright eyes brighter yet, the mischief in them coming through. “And remember this?” She pointed to the cleft in her chin. I smiled with memory and this warm, aching desire to hold her.

“You should be happy that you won’t be stuck with me,” she continued. “There is no mystery about me. I am open to you as you are to yourself. And marriage is something else—a kind of discovery every day …”

“Bullshit,” I said. “What is so mysterious about Lopito and his millions?”

The moment I said it, I was sorry, but Narita did not look away and her expression did not change.

“Eddie—you are so unfair. But I forgive you because you are in love with me. Look at it this way. We are in debt to them. Without Lopito, I would be stuck with this.” She cast a glance around her, at the bedraggled yard, the dilapidated house, the cadena de amor dying and brown on the brick wall.

Mother visited me at the dorm in Diliman a week after school opened. She brought the news that Narita’s father had died, that her mother was now alone in the house together with a niece and still
minding the meat stall and that Narita was in Manila, staying at the Assumption Convent to finish college as arranged by Senator Reyes. She had asked where I was, Mother said, and was given my dorm address.

Sure enough, within the week, a note from her arrived. I knew her penmanship, the strong crosses of the
t
’s, the forceful upsweep of the last letter. I had developed early enough habits of the collector and the scholar and I kept that note as well as the other notes that she passed on to me.

She always signed her letters to close friends with her initial. I did visit her once at Assumption but that was to escort my sisters there when they finally came to Manila. She did come twice to my dorm and my roommate and acquaintances were agog over the prettiest girl they had ever seen coming to visit wretched me.

My parents came to see me every so often and when my two younger sisters started going to college, Father thought it best to build a house in Manila which, in the long run, would save us money and also be a good investment. He bought a lot in Quezon City and
we moved to the house within six months, with Mother commuting to Manila to keep two households. She brought back stories of home, of Narita’s mother finally closing her stall and just staying home, of Narita going to the old hometown with Lopito.

Narita visited us and stayed in the house for a night but I was out doing a field survey in Bulacan. When I returned, my sisters told me that when she arrived she was in tears. She had gotten a full scholarship, was tops in her class and would probably graduate
summa,
was taking singing lessons besides, and acting in the musical which the school was presenting. But these were not enough. Her schoolmates from Negros ignored her and did not even ask her to participate in the annual Kahirup Ball—the sugar bloc’s most lavish social event of the year.

Senator Reyes did not have enough empathy to see to it that his prospective daughter-in-law should be in it and Narita was too proud to ask. She had, perhaps, thought that simply being pretty and talented would be enough to get her accepted into the snootiest Negros circle.

She did not want to stay in the college dorm that night. She had an “important social engagement,” too, even if it meant sulking in an anonymous middle-class home in Quezon City.

Narita must have gloated when, shortly after the Kahirup snub, she appeared on the cover of the
Women’s Week
and was described as “sugarland’s prettiest, with a skin as clear as sunlight and eyes that sparkled like jewels …” It was a comeuppance that should have made her forget the slight, but she would never forget. She came again in December in our last year in college, not to wish us Merry Christmas, but to hand carry an invitation to her wedding. I opened the door and outside was the black Mercedes 220 SE of Senator Reyes with its khaki-uniformed driver. It was such a long time—more than two years—since I had seen her and though I
often ached to catch a glimpse of that face, I thought it best to dampen the desire, to let things be. She wore no makeup, her brownish hair shining in the morning sun, her skin glowing. She walked up to me, saying, “Eddie, Eddie—” then she embraced and kissed me—a wet, warm kiss of affection, the scent of her, her hair swirling around me. I was glad to see her and gladder that I was finally as tall as she.

I led her to the house saying inanities while she plied me with questions about school, my career as a sociologist. I asked about her politics, starring in the school musical that was plastered in the society pages, and her singing so well that a bright career was foreseen for her. She waved them all aside, saying she just wanted to be alive, to do nothing if that was possible, and raise a dozen children.

That really brought me back to earth for those children that she would raise would certainly not be mine. Her wedding would be in two weeks.