Three Filipino Women (8 page)

With both of them now in the Senate, I thought it was time to push through government programs such as those which we had worked so hard to shape. After the euphoria had died, I got the whole sheaf of proposals together one Saturday morning. It was a full two weeks after the election and I knew that the time was opportune to discuss them for soon the Senate sessions would start.

It was not that I personally was filled with love for the downtrodden, but in that small Negros town, Father had attended to the workers in the farm with free professional care. Mother taught school before she married Father and she tried her best to teach the children who did not attend public school the rudiments at least of writing and reading. Father had always hammered into us that the workers, though they were not as educated as we were, had the same blood. I was not about to organize them into a militant and radical labor union nor was I inclined to shout revolution like some of my colleagues at the university. I think I was too comfortable to do that, but I was not going to see them mired in either perpetual ignorance or poverty. I saw enough evidence in America to show that wealth—when spread around—would do everyone a bit of good.

Narita always called when she needed me, which was often. It was one of those few instances when I called her. “All right, Eddie. Come early enough so we can have lunch,” she said brightly.

I had already bought a Volks. Her money was useful and because she was happy with the group, she upped my consultancy fee as she called it to four thousand a month, much, much more than I was making at the university. I had difficulty convincing myself that I really earned it.

She was not yet up when I arrived and it was already past eleven. She had earlier gone horseback riding at the Polo Club then gone back to sleep. By noon, I was served coffee and a plateful of sandwiches and cold yogurt. I was halfway through when she came down in her dressing gown, a shimmery kind, her breasts showing through.

“That is a very sexy dress,” I said, thinking about New York again. In the almost three years since, we never had any kind of real intimacy and all the reward I got was an occasional kiss on the
mouth, the pressing of bodies, a lingering handclasp. I was in a position where I couldn’t expect more.

She took the sandwiches away and told the cook to prepare the table at once. But I already had enough and I barely touched the Chateaubriand. It was a leisurely lunch and I could see that the arduous campaign had not ravaged her; she was as fresh and as lovely as ever. With our coffee, we went to the library. She noticed my bulky portfolio. “It is business then”, she smiled.

I recalled our first meeting with the senator in the same room, how we had talked about responsive government and that as she probably saw in her provincial sallies, the first priority was rural poverty, agrarian reform, anything to improve the lives of the rural poor. She listened for a few minutes while I mapped out the parameters of legislative action, but soon I could see that she was not concentrating.

“You are not interested,” I said with irritation.

“Because I know everything you are saying, Eddie, and right now, I am not really interested.”

I never felt as futile and as helpless as I did then, to be told that I was talking to a stone. I gathered the folders and dumped them into my briefcase. Then, more in sadness than in anger: “I had hoped you would remember not just Santa Ana but the things you told me. Am I wrong in hoping you won’t be like the rest? There should be conscience in politics, else we would be nothing but pigs …”

“Then let us be pigs,” she said with a vehemence that startled me. “Conscience, duty—all those virtues that you hear bandied about—my duty is not to God and country. It is to me—myself first, because without myself, what would there be? And look at you, you and your … genteel morality—what is it that you look forward to first? Your career, no less. I’m not here to clean the
stables, to change tradition—the tradition in corruption. I am part of the herd although very much above the herd. Who can say this with the honesty that I am saying it?”

I could not speak.

She went on. “Listen, Eddie. In these four years, I will do what I can. Only a bit—for my image, for patronage. I am aiming beyond the Senate. Nothing but the top, the Presidency. You understand that? And when I’m there, that’s when we can go to town, do all the things you want to do. You think Papa is all that powerful? No, and neither will I be. I would be very pleased if you boys paid some attention to that. Focus on the next election because that’s where I’m headed. And I will use everything I can to get there.”

“Power has gone to your head,” I said. “You’re using people as if they were things. Objects. I thought you didn’t like America because it is like that.”

“I pay them well. I pay you very well. No one can top what I am giving them, or you.”

“I’ll go back there. To hell with your money.”

“You will rot there,” she said, trying to be conciliatory.

“That is where I prefer to be. I am a scholar.”

“What is scholarship if it is not used?”

“The search for truth is sometimes without use from your point of view. But truth is always useful to humanity at large.”

“The hell with humanity. You can love humanity without loving one single individual.”

“Are you describing yourself? Remember the Caesars.
Sic transit gloria mundi
, all that sort of thing.”

“I am not building an empire.”

“There is no difference. You are in love with power. Caesar, when he was paraded in Rome, there was always this man following him, whispering, chanting: ‘Remember, thou art mortal.’ So Narita, remember—you are full of shit.”

“I will have you fired,” she said under her breath.

“You will have me flogged. But does that destroy the truth? And the truth is that you’re no different from the politicians you despise, from those girls at Assumption who snubbed you. You are snubbing man—and you cannot do that unless you resign from the human race.”

“Get out of my sight,” she shouted.

“Gladly,” I said.

She did not stop me.

Driving on the highway, I was so angry, so frustrated, I started to cry. I decided then that I would not have anything more to do with her. The four-thousand-peso loss would be a real sacrifice. It had helped with the mortgage on the house. There would also be less money for my sisters who were still in school. To help them was one of my duties as the eldest.

I also got frightened. She could very well carry out her threat to have me kicked out of the university. I had tenure but what was tenure if people with no compassion were in power?

I need not have worried. The following day, bright and early, there she was in her new Mercedes 300. I was having breakfast when I saw the car park in front of the gate. I rushed to my room upstairs and told my sisters to tell her that I was not in.

I could hear her downstairs, her disbelief that I would leave so early on a Sunday morning. She said, “Well, I have nothing to do. I can wait the whole day if it comes to that. And I haven’t had breakfast yet.”

There was a scramble to prepare for breakfast and I knew how embarrassed and uneasy my sisters were. Then she asked to go to my study. She wanted to look at my books and get something to read while waiting. My attempt at evasion had ended and I padded down the stairs. She grinned, shook a finger, and said, “Eddie—not on a Sunday morning …”

She stood up and said she wanted to see my study or my room anyway and before I could object, she was up the flight and holding on to my arm, my sisters looking at us with amusement.

My room was a mess as usual, my rubber shoes in the doorway, my dirty underwear under the desk, my books all over the place, my diploma still unframed and stuck on the wall with pins. As soon as we went in, she turned the latch. Then Narita kissed me deeply, passionately, murmuring, “I am sorry, darling, about yesterday. I hurt you, didn’t I? I’m here now to apologize and make up.”

And what could I say when drowning in her sweetness?

We fell on my bed. She had taken off her dress and tossed it on the floor. My sisters were probably listening in the other room so I made nonsensical small talk. The bed began to squeak and she said, “Damn!” She pulled me to the floor. It would have been uncomfortable but she rode me expertly and all the anxiety, all the anger were gone. There was only this woman as I had imagined her.

For a while, I fantasized about us living together.

We lay on the floor for a long time, talking, remembering New York, the campaign. We went over the few mistakes that were made and how they would be rectified next time. The challenge to her ambition was formidable when we finally came to it—the Presidency. She said it was within her grasp. She could convince the President not to run for reelection and perhaps jokingly, I am not sure now, she said: “If he will not accede to that, I will just put a few drops of cyanide in his coffee. He drinks it black so he won’t recognize the bitter taste.”

“How can you talk so complacently and with such familiarity about him?” I asked, turning on my side to face her.

She poked me in the ribs then. “Oh, Eddie, you were really born yesterday! Didn’t you know? The President and I—we became lovers during the campaign.”

…

At first, I had thought of limiting my interview with Senator Reyes to his comments about Narita, to his observations on national politics and the contribution his daughter-in-law had made. But I soon realized that this was a mistake for the senator—it’s obvious now—shadowed Narita all her life, not like some protective umbrella but as a pall, a fate that started on its course at the time the senator first came to Santa Ana and saw the young
mestiza.

The interview with Senator Reyes, therefore, is not just central to this story but a document in itself about an era, of the thinking which shaped a generation and the future, and also made the new definition of nationalism and the new public morality. Senator Reyes knew all the prewar political figures from Quezon onwards. He himself had collaborated with the Japanese in World War II and like all the collaborators of that period, justified his acts in the larger interests of the people. He had seen how the same collaborators like him became rich.

To the very end, when he was already approaching senility, he justified himself, what he had done with politics and his brand of self-seeking nationalism. He sometimes castigated the elite to which he belonged for its depradation of the country, for not bringing alternatives to the corrupt political system. But his criticisms were mild and they were not really intended to sink the boat, not even to rock it. He was for the status quo and nationalism would preserve it. But though it is easy to pass judgment on men like him now, Senator Reyes was elevated to his lofty niche in free elections. It was the people who made the likes of him possible and, perhaps, inevitable.

Senator Reyes:

I stand on top of a mountain—I know that you are perhaps thinking, on top of a heap—and you are not wrong, either. You will ask how does one get to the top? Well, it takes a lot of money to do that, and guts. And cleverness, one must never forget that. Those who profess a high degree of virtue, of morality as indicated in the holy writ have no business trying to be leaders or nation builders. They should work in cemeteries, among the dead who cannot complain. I did a lot of complaining, bitching, haranguing in my time. And I am still doing it.

They are all gone now—my children. Yes, I raised quite a good and handsome brood and I had hoped they would grow into princes and princesses, the heirs that I wanted, but this was not meant to be. Still, fate had been very kind to me, to have let me live to this nice old age to see some of my ideological handiwork take root in a country where anything grows. Perhaps it was wrong for me to have laid so much emphasis, or hope, on the family as the shaper of this country’s future. Yes, I’m an autocrat, a patriarch, and I saw to it that all those under my wing were protected and those outside—I will not say exterminated—although that is what my enemies thought I was doing. Ignored, that is the word. Ignored! I wanted all of them to go as fast and as far as my vision wanted. They were going to be pillars, not only of the clan. I had seen destiny—we the Reyeses—or kings—leading them. I am not His Majesty, although there is really little difference in a country where the family is the beginning and the end.

What is all this talk about revolution, the class struggle? All these I postulated thirty years ago. But how do you really remove the kings? By changing their names and calling them senators? Oligarchs? The intelligentsia agreed with me, they quoted me, they
hovered around, partaking of the wisdom which I threw at them like crumbs. I told them nationalism is necessary and the kings themselves must profess it so that they will not lose their heads. It must not be just love of country, but love of people—and here, I mean the lower classes. And that is what I have done, loved the people, worked for them, gave them jobs, direction to their aspirations for dignity, upliftment from the morass in which they had been immersed and which they had come to accept. I raised them up a bit; and in the process, why shouldn’t I raise myself higher, too, higher than all of them, the way it had always been? What will happen to the people if they have no leaders?

History will judge me not for what I am, however, and not even for what I have done but for what I have said. This is what goes on the record, this is what is dished out to the masses to read. And there will be scholars in the future as there are today who do not question the documents they read, who do not go beyond the archival presentation of the bureaucracy.

Between the lines, that is where history has always been.

There will always be those, however, who will say that history is written by the strong, but that is not enough: history has to be
believed
if it is to have currency, and believers are what I have always tried to make. There are enough dolts and jackasses among our elite who believe that they are so anointed to rule merely because they have their own propagandists churning out praises for them which, in time, they come to accept as the truth. I was never one of them—I always knew the limitations of power. But at the same time, I was also aware of the cupidity of those men who exercised power … Politics has always been accommodation, not uncompromising idealism, although that could help camouflage the real intentions of politicians. This is what I have always told Narita and this, I think, she believed.