Three Filipino Women

ONE

In the preparation of my study on Narita Reyes, I am indebted to my colleagues, particularly to my former teachers, Professors Alejo Orina and M. D. Guerzon who read the manuscript and gave valuable advice. I am also grateful to my typist and secretary, T. Jovel, who transcribed most of the tapes, changed my “alright” to “all right,” and kept the door closed to all sorts of noise. And last but not least, I am grateful to the Narita Reyes Foundation for its generous support that allowed me a trip to the United States for research and interviews, and provided for the publication of the political biography of a woman whose personality has considerably altered our view of domestic politics during the last decade.

When I started this project, I was faced with the problem of objectivity. I had known Narita all my life and if I just hewed closely to what is observable data and behavior, I would do injustice to a woman who was far more complex than those personality profiles that the mass media presented. There was much more in what Narita did as compared to what she said; she was sparing in her words and let her actions speak instead.

This much shorter narrative is a spin-off, different from the lengthier and documented original. Nevertheless, with this format, I hope to present one of the most unusual personalities in contemporary Filipino society, in all her scintillating uniqueness.

I have always admired Narita Reyes even though at times it had to be from a distance. As is often said, Ligaw tingin, kantot hangin (courtship by looking, fucking the wind). One reason for this is that she made me feel inferior, a result I think of the fact that when we were in grade school, though we were of the same age, she was taller than I was. It was a feeling which persisted through the years, vanquished only in those rare instances when I could physically express my fondness for her.

Narita was an only child and she lived with her mestizo (half-breed) parents in a small house roofed with rusting tin across the street from ours. Their house which had a brick wall was once the kitchen — all that was left of a much more substantial house that had burned down. The ruins still stood in the wide lot fenced with brick that had fallen apart in places. Her grandfather was once a wealthy landlord but had lost his lands because of gambling and women; all that remained was the wide lot overgrown with weeds, with pomelo and guava trees which hid their house from view. Narita’s father clerked in the municipal building while her mother sold meat in the market, and when Narita was not in school, she helped her mother run the stall.

Narita and I were both Sagittarians; we were born almost to the minute, in the wee hours of the morning of November 30, 1933. Father, who made the deliveries, said it was a hectic dawn — what with him having to rush from our house to theirs and back.

Narita was often in our house for, like me, she liked to read. Father’s library included a set of The Book of Knowledge, some novels, back issues of The National Geographic and other magazines. I was always playing in their wide, weed-choked yard, too, particularly when the guava and pomelo trees started bearing fruit. During the early days of the war, in 1942, her family evacuated with us to our farm in Bogo which was about three kilometers from the town. We did not stay there long; we need not have left town for the Japanese never came to Santa Ana in force except for occasional patrols. As a matter of fact, Santa Ana is quite isolated from the rest of the country and progress really never seemed to have touched it — till Narita came and blazed through in a way Santa Ana will never see again.

For one, the land in our part of the island is rocky and the mountains always seemed to loom closer as the irrevocable margin beyond which our cane fields could not encroach. We depended on the rain for irrigation and sometimes, it was niggardly. And because the land is poor, we never had the largesse that the Silay and Bacolod people enjoyed. In fact, Bacolod could seem as distant as Manila although it is only sixty kilometers away and the only people who went there regularly were men like Father who had business at the provincial hospital or with the drug companies.

Narita could be very quiet. We could be with those books without speaking for hours; yet afterwards, people thought she was a compulsive talker. This was unfair for in later years she could be a patient listener even to the loudest braggart, as if she were hearing words of pure wisdom when they were pretentious drivel — as they often were when most of the politicians she knew wanted to be identified as pious nationalists.

She was in Grade II when she became champion declaimer with her tearful rendition of “The boy stood on the burning deck …” When she was in Grade VI, she was chosen the best singer with her “Lahat ng Araw” (“All of My Days”) — a song she made very popular later. Her voice was scarcely trained but she could render a song better than most of the young singers on radio and TV today because Narita had style.

Even when we were still in school, it was already obvious that she was beautiful and talented but because we were neighbors, I took her for granted. We played a lot, in whatever season. When the rains came and brought green to the fields, we would be there, catching grasshoppers. And at dusk, we looked for spiders in the bushes, in the profusion of cadena de amor that clambered over the brick walls and bloomed in white and pink. There was a particular species of spider that we found among the vines, the one with long limbs and a very small body. It was a good fighter. We would position the spiders on each end of a coconut midrib, watch them inch towards the center and once there, they would grapple and bite each other. The loser was soon rendered immobile and coated with the silky strands that trailed from them. Never was defeat so complete and final.

Narita’s mother supplied us with meat and Mother said she was trustworthy; she gave us the best sections and told us if it was carabao or beef unlike other butchers who cheated their customers. I took this as a matter of course; after all, Father did not charge them for his services.

Their house was always in disarray — a characteristic that Narita did not bring with her later: their clothes all over the place, the bamboo floor already rotting in places, the dishes unwashed in the basin in the kitchen. But there were plants everywhere for Narita loved to grow them, even the weeds in the yard, I think. It was as if by some arcadian magic, she could transform an ordinary place into lush green. She had the touch of life.

When we were in Grade VI, I made a “mark” on Narita. We were playing that Saturday morning in their wide yard. She was then tomboyish and it was not unusual for her to beat me in running, jumping and that morning, basketball. She had rigged up a hoop on one side of their house, up the brick wall. I accidentally pushed her and she stumbled and banged her chin against a rusty piece of iron in the woodwork. When she turned to me, although she was laughing, there was blood on her chin. It turned out to be an ugly wound and, with her handkerchief staunching it, we went to Father who was in his clinic in the ground floor of our house. He looked at the wound, gave her anaesthesia, then sewed it in two stitches all the while asking how it had happened. Narita did not cry, wince or scream as I would have done with all that pain and blood.

“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.

Hello Eddie,

You were not with us when Papa died, but I forgive you because you did not know. You did not have to hurry to Manila so early, whatever your reason, but I also understand that. I promised myself I would not be jealous of your girlfriend. I will major in political science and economics, but I don’t know if this school has the right teachers for me. I would like to be in your campus, but I should be here for this is a wicked city and I need protection. Please come and see me. I want someone to talk with. The girls here know nothing and I am bored most of the time. Will you do this as a favor?

Affectionately,

N

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.

I had a very good excuse for not going: My major term paper was due and I had to go to my village again to observe the farmers there and see how they were responding to the innovations in rural credit. So I was away when she got married in the Forbes Park church but there were pictures all over, including one in which she was being carried by Lopito over the threshold of the new house that Senator Reyes had built for them.

My sisters where pleased to go; it was their first “society” wedding. Mother and Father were also there, perhaps Narita’s “closest relatives.” Their presence was imperative for it was Mother who was the madrina and I ascribed that to Narita’s innate good sense. She was now my “sister” and I often laughed at how ridiculous it seemed afterwards.

By the time I finished college, I met a junior in the Department of Anthropology, a charming Cebuana with a slim figure and a cheerful disposition and, with her, it was easy to forget Narita. After graduation, too, I had a graduate assistantship in the department and before the end of the year, a scholarship to Harvard. I grabbed it although it meant some financial difficulty for my father who still had three other children to send to college.

I did not see Narita again for about three years until I started working for my doctorate. For these lapses in the story, I relied on interviews, on remembered bits of conversation, on clippings of that period but mostly on her, for I never hesitated to ask her the frankest questions.

TAPE ONE

Mrs. Cornelia Cruz, cook:

(I have edited out the questions and repetitions so that this transcript is almost verbatim.)

My name is Cornelia Cruz, widow. I am fifty-eight years old and I was born in Bacolod. I have worked for Senator Reyes and his family for forty years, first as maid then as cook. I am a high school graduate and I learned to cook from Mrs. Reyes who also sent me to study at the Cordon Bleu school every afternoon for six months. I can prepare a European-style meal, Chinese, Indian, at least forty dishes — and even an Ilokano pinakbet (vegetable stew) if I were asked to. The Señorita’s favorite was pinakbet, with lots of prawns in it, instead of pork. She also liked half-ripe mangoes with the special sauce I prepare for it. And yes, salted eggs for breakfast, with tomatoes, and fried rice without lard — but with garlic and onions fried before mixing them with the rice. She always liked her meals hot and never cared much for cold cuts, sandwiches, except yogurt. When she went out, and it was possible, she always had a thermos bottle with her for soup, or tea and, of course, she always liked eating at home. She was a good cook herself and that was why I always tried my best. And yes, she knew meats. She could tell whether it was fresh, whether it was the best part of pork or beef. She even told me of the tricks that those women in the market play on their customers.

I was transferred to the new house of Señorito Lopito a week before they moved in. It was empty then — actually empty, and they lived in the Manila Hotel for two months while Señorita furnished it. She was very meticulous and her decorator was very exasperated, but the Señorita knew what she wanted. It was such a beautiful house and the garden — it was much better than the senator’s. But then, from the very beginning, it was not a happy home. They were always quarreling, from the first day they moved into it. Señorita tried, I think, to be a good housewife, seeing to it that the Señorito’s meals were ready when he came home, and she never left home without asking his permission. She never went places — I know because I sometimes accompanied her to Christian’s — her dress shop in Malate, to the supermarket, or to parties with former college friends. And of course, the driver always took her there. Señorito always asked him to report where she went. Me, I had to tell him who called at the house, what she said. He was not the best husband, that I can say. But he never beat her although he could have done it for Señorito easily got violent. All his sports had something to do with violence and death — archery, shooting, fencing. Señorita Narita knew how to handle him, I suppose, for though she seldom raised her voice, from their silences, I knew that there was a lot of quarreling going on. Sometimes late in the night, I would hear them arguing. And, you know, our quarters are separate from the house but still I could hear. But then, when there was a party, it was as if she was the happiest girl in the world. And parties, we had them almost every day. I was never so tired and never before had I worked so hard as when I was in that house; but it was also good for I was able to apply what I learned. The Señorito was meticulous. He ordered the flowers, supervised the seating arrangements. I think he was showing off his wife all the time and he was really proud of her — brilliant, a good singer, a good actress — she was everything a man would be proud to marry or possess. Yes, I think it was that way — the Señorito wanted to possess her as if she were some property which, of course, the Señorita was not. She had a mind of her own and a very good mind, too. Sometimes, when I heard them talking, it was she who had a head on her shoulders. The Señorito would just sit quietly while his wife lectured to him. He really loved her. He bought her clothes and always tried to select materials for them. He bought her jewels, too, lots of them, and whenever they went to Hong Kong, you can be sure they always returned with something very expensive. And paintings, the Señorita introduced them to him, and santos and prints; they bought so many there is one room full of them for there is no place to hang them. And antiques, too — well, you see so many shops now selling them but when they started collecting, there was not a single shop where you could really get them. But Señorita Narita had a way and soon — other collectors were coming to the house, showing her things. She had taste, that is what Lopito always said and he felt very proud because he thought it was he who developed her taste. But that is not true; with her, taste was instinctive.

She was also clever. She convinced her father-in-law — that old, scheming man — to divide his property before he died so that there would be no squabbling among his children. And there were only three of them left, you know, so you can imagine how happy the Señorito was to have money of his own, lots of it. But wait, knowing how much of a spendthrift Lopito was, the Old Man saw to it that he could not spend the money without the approval of his wife or of the Old Man himself. And the Señorita — she was always visiting the senator, bringing him cakes which she baked, calling him up, inquiring about his health. And it was all very sincere so that even after they had separated, she continued seeing him and regarding him as a dutiful daughter should. It was a miracle, really, how the marriage could have lasted five years. Five years! It should not have lasted more than a year but that just shows you how patient she was, how she made herself the martyr which she was and this many people do not know. It was all his fault — that I can assure you. From the very beginning. I once heard Señorita telling him, and these were her exact words—“You are not only a liar, you are a coward. You should have told me, from the start …” To which Lopito screamed, for he was drunk that night, “So you would have gone out and gotten yourself a dozen men.” And the Señorita said, “Not while I am married to you, Lopito. Not while I am your wife. But I will do that the moment I leave this house.” I am not too sure about what he was lying about. Or being a coward for. But you must have noticed, there was something effeminate about him. It really started when the Señorito began bringing those boys to the house. Some of them riffraff, you know. The first time it happened, the Señorita transferred to the second floor guest room. They were sleeping separately in the second year of their marriage and in the third, they were hardly talking; the Señorito still held parties as if nothing had happened. He tried to win her back but it was impossible. Those boys, you know. Then they had this big quarrel, right after a party, for Lopito was flirting with one of the male guests and the Señorita was so embarrassed. That was when she left him — she went to live with her father-in-law. He followed her there and the senator did not know a thing about the boys, you know, and that was when he disowned his son. The Señorita refused to go back to Forbes Park and he really must have missed her, loved her in his own way. Well, you know, he collected guns. It was a shotgun which he used, stuck it into his mouth. It was no accident the way it was made to appear in the newspapers. When he died, the Señorita returned to Forbes Park and redecorated the house, changed everything, sold all the things that belonged to Lopito so that there would be no trace of him: There were less parties — maybe just once a month and I really looked forward to them for by then, I had become a very good cook. Why, I could apply anytime at any of the hotels or first-class restaurants. I have polished my French cooking so much, we had a guest once from Paris and he said he thought it was a French chef who prepared the meal.

END OF TAPE

I had been thorough in the interviews, of which I conducted literally more than a hundred, and I also visited and revisited the places where Narita had been and which were relevant to this story. I was always welcome in the Forbes Park residence and her two boys called me Tito. I knew their housekeeper, a distant aunt from back home in Santa Ana. It is a Spanish-type house, whitewashed, with a red-tile roof and ornately grilled windows. Tiles all over the place, in the balcony, the kitchen, and the trees planted there — the guava and the pomelo are now bearing fruit. Narita never seemed to have forgotten the old house in Santa Ana. And yes, the cadena de amor scrambles over the walls, not too profusely or wildly.

I had often mused about how it must feel to have someone commit suicide over you. I remember distinctly that afternoon we were having coffee in her library and she reminisced about her marriage to Lopito. I had just finished her major speech on the restructuring of Filipino cultural values and we were as a matter of fact, engaged in a discussion on the subject which had fascinated us in the think tank as well. She could have written it herself but, like me, she had taken up too many chores. By then, she had wanted me to leave the university so that I could be on her staff full-time, but I was never sold on politics as a career and, in hindsight, I was, of course, right.

She was in comfortable jeans, denim jacket, her hair in a ponytail. She was the mother of two but she could have easily been one of the juniors on the campus. She was holding a glass of Campari and soda which she herself had mixed and she had given me a glass of Southern Comfort, an affectation I had picked up in Cambridge. We had the house all to ourselves; the maids were asleep in their quarters, and the boys were vacationing with their grandfather in Baguio. She asked me why, at the very old age of thirty-four — which she also was — I had not yet gotten married.

“I suppose I have always been in love with you,” I said, at which she laughed aloud, that kind of joking, insinuating laughter which meant that while she appreciated the thought, she also automatically rejected it. She was already one of the most popular women in the country and vastly wealthy, the extent of which I had only started to realize.

“Well, at least you are not a homo,” she said, merriment in her eyes. Then it came — sudden, precise, and without any warning. “That was what Lopito was — oh, everyone knew it. Didn’t you?”

I nodded.

“He was what you call AC/DC,” she said, her face all seriousness now. “We had such fun in the beginning when he was going to Santa Ana — remember? And here in Manila, too, when he was parading me around. I was good camouflage for him. But I think that in his own way, he sincerely loved me.” She paused. Her eyes had misted. “He was so kind, so good to me. He did all that I wanted and I promised myself that I would really be true to him, be an old-fashioned Filipino wife. Do you still see the likes of her?”

“Are you asking me as a sociologist?”

“Yes,” she said.

“The society is changing, Narita. Look at you and you understand how times have changed.”

She nodded. “It was not the boys that Lopito brought home,” she said, “although that aggravated it. It was not his putting me on a pedestal to show off to his friends, to his society crowd. I liked that. I had more beauty, more brains than any of them.” Then it all came through again how the girls at Assumption had snubbed her because she had such lowly origins.

“Lopito, we could have been just friends, you know. As two people can be very good friends, the way we are …” She leaned over and pinched me on the thigh. It was more of a caress and it sent delightful shivers through me. “But after we had gotten married, that was when we really had body contact, you know, the kissing and the petting. Man-wife relations. But that was all there was to it. I would be all heated up and anxious and ready — and he could not do it. He could not do it!” She was pounding the throw pillow viciously, her face wrought up in anger, her eyes blazing. I had never seen Narita in such a mood before and I was shocked and frightened.

After Lopito’s death, Narita went into mourning, wore the black dress of widows and — as an informant told me of this period — she was if anything more chic in her black dresses. But her grief was real. You cannot live with a person for five years and not have the slightest attachment to him. She retained her married name and preferred to be addressed as Mrs. Reyes even when she went into politics. And her children, too, though they were not Lopito’s — she gave them her husband’s name. Senator Reyes knew this and it is perhaps for this reason why the Old Man is happy with her children, too.

What would a young, beautiful widow in the Philippines do if she had brains and money as well? The world is wide open and it was at this point that Colonel Antonio Cunio came in. But first, may I point out one basic problem that I also encountered when I started this study.

I had wanted to do a survey of women in politics and we have many examples that date back to the earliest days of suffrage or, if you will, to the revolution against Spain when our women played a vital role. But by zeroing in on a particular subject, a woman I knew very well, I could detail the personal incidents, pry into motivation — all of which cannot be quantified, but which are important in any study. This would, probably, be termed as psychohistory or psychosociology. But I am not one to bother the general reader with obtuse jargon that is often the mumbo jumbo of muddled thinking or which is simply bad writing.

At first, Colonel Cunio, who is now retired, did not want to talk. I had to rely on the usual tricks of the interviewer to thaw out his reserve. I told him that I need not mention his name in the study but afterwards, he gave me blanket authority to use all the “facts” with his name if I wanted to.

As it turned out, he was loquacious, proud of his Korean War record, proud of his machismo.

All that he described happened during the time I was at Cambridge. I had not seen Narita since I left for the United States although in my third year there, I learned that she was in New York. Colonel Cunio was a Philippine Military Academy graduate; he prided himself on his knowledge of Philippine politics and grudgingly admitted that Narita was bright, particularly when she analyzed the Far East. “I don’t know where she got that smattering of Japanese,” he said wryly, “but when she started talking about periods in Japanese history, and Korea, too, she really had the field to herself.”

TAPE TWO

Colonel Antonio Cunio, retired:

I got my commission in 1947 and that same year, I commanded a platoon in the Huk campaign in Central Luzon. I was a junior at the PMA during the war and could have gotten my commission in the field … Nothing spectacular about World War II; we were disbanded in Cagayan and there was some guerrilla work. I was in several operations, including Four Roses — that was when William Pomeroy, the American communist, was captured. I also saw action in the Korean War, I suppose you have read about that although you may have been quite young then. Our battalion figured in the Imjin campaign and that was where I got this Distinguished Service medal. Well, actually, it was a retreat, for the Chinese were coming at us wave after wave and I led a company through a pincer movement. We lost five in that encounter, but I can assure you the Chinese lost many more. They were so close, we were fighting with fixed bayonets. We did no hand-to-hand fighting, but we were lobbing grenades. The barrels of the automatic rifles were hot and still they came, blowing their bugles. I had a flesh wound in the thigh — I did not even know it till one of the men pointed to my bleeding leg and they bandaged it to stop the flow. I was weak but you can rely on this old Tagalog blood to carry me through.

After the Korean War, I was sent to command schools in the United States and that was where I had my first white woman. It was quite an experience, you know. She was the wife of a lieutenant who was assigned to Germany and while she was waiting for her transfer, she came around and provided me company. There was this Korean girl, too, in Pusan. But you know how war is, how things come and go. When I returned after a year at Fort Benning and Fort Leavenworth, I was assigned to Camp Murphy — called Camp Aguinaldo now — to a desk job that had me bored as all desk jobs do. So I started looking around for patronage — you know, the old Filipino standby. And that was when I saw Senator Reyes who had known my father when my father was still active in Bulacan politics. It was the senator who got me as his aide and, later, when he became Senate President — one step to the Presidency — you know what that means! It was as an aide that I met Narita. I used to deliver messages from the Old Man to her, carry parcels, her blasted cakes, the special gifts that she bought for him when she went abroad, those Dutch cigars in special tinfoil. She was always hanging around the Old Man, attending to him more than his daughters ever did, and Senator Reyes was really eating off her palm. Yes, I think the senator became some sort of father to her. And what a father he turned out to be — more generous than any father would be. And I don’t blame him — the way his own children had been treating him as if he did not exist or that he existed only to give them money. I was drawn to her from the beginning, I suppose, although I am ten years older or more. But there is nothing like a younger woman for a middle-aged man. Good and tight, you know what I mean. Then her husband died. It was then that I felt I was free to attend to her. But not before. I still have some sense of ethics left, even when it came to sex. Besides, what would the Old Man say if he found out that I was shacking up with his daughter-in-law? I first dated her a full month after the death of Lopito. She was not a hypocrite. When I asked her if I could take her out nightclubbing at the Amihan, she said yes outright. I told her that it was not one of those high-class places, the food was awful, there were hostesses and she might feel insulted. But I knew she loved good music and there was an excellent band playing there. And she said, yes, don’t lecture me about what is decent and indecent; I can decide that for myself. We went in her Mercedes; she said it was better that way because she felt more independent. Damn it — that was what was wrong with her. She always wanted to be independent. To feel independent. To act independent. She did not give much of a chance for even a man like me to be her master. Or at least be on top. Do you know that even when we were doing it, she wanted to be on top? Well, I couldn’t do much about that. After all, I really needed her and loved her. I tried to keep it a secret but was not successful. My wife, who is also a very clever woman, got to know of it. But there was my career and I was close to one of the most powerful men in the country. She tried to accept it and keep quiet. Narita, too, wanted to keep up appearances and in a way, she was a very moral person. And that was when she thought she should go to the United States so she could be freer and less inhibited than she was in Manila. The Old Man was also very glad to have her go, to improve herself. And he knew of the relationship — he saw to it that I got an assignment in New York as attaché to the Mission there. I really enjoyed New York — that one year of freedom from the duties in Manila. Narita bought this apartment — or house, rather, in the East Sixties. Ah, you know about it. It cost a fortune then and it certainly must be a very expensive piece of property now. I hope that the radiator in her bedroom is already fixed. It was always squeaking, you know, and was often a bother. You know what I mean. Well, we had a son — her older boy, you know that. And I will never forgive her for giving him Lopito’s name. Everyone knew he was not Lopito’s. He was mine. And she told the boy it was Lopito who was his father. ot me. I cannot even visit him or tell him he is mine. That woman — she thought of everything. It could be blackmail, of course. But what could I do? I am a government servant and her father-in-law is one of the most powerful men in government. You know what I mean.

And then, she met Ambassador Iturralde. That was my mistake — I introduced her to him at one of those receptions where I thought I would show her off. You know, in any crowd, she would stand out. But you know something? I had one over all of them, over all of the men that she went with afterwards. Yes, no one can get this distinction from me. And I am very proud. It happened finally on our second date. I did not take advantage of her on the first. Just dancing, cheek to cheek, and a simple good-night kiss. Although I knew that she was waiting for me to make the move, I did not want to play it fast. Experience has taught me never to rush, just play it cool and slow. A week afterwards, I asked her if she wanted to go that Sunday for a drive to Bulacan where I grew up. There was this special restaurant along the highway which served wonderful crabs and snipes when they were in season. And she said yes. Of course, I had already made plans on how to seduce her — if seduction is the word. It is all very clear to me, the first time with her, and it was unforgettable, I suppose, also for her. It was a bright Sunday morning and we drove off towards Calumpit and had lunch at this roadside restaurant. She was game. It was not a fancy place and she seemed to enjoy it. Then I asked her if she wanted to see the fish ponds where the crabs and the milkfish were caught, and have a breath of fresh air besides and she said, yes. So we drove off towards the bay where my family had owned this fish pond for years. You pass this village before reaching it — and the villagers worked for my family, you know, and they knew why I was there. I suppose Narita also suspected. We got off at the village and I pointed out to her the ponds that lay beyond the clump of acacia trees at the turn of the river and said, those are ours. There was this hut alone in the expanse of dikes and water where the workers rest and I asked her if she wanted to go out there and take a closer look and she said, of course, and so we went. We were finally there, alone by ourselves. I took her inside the hut and kissed her. She responded with a passion that surprised me, considering that it was the first time I had really kissed her. At first, she was a bit apprehensive when I started taking off her dress, but I said I would keep watch, and that no one from the village would dare come and interrupt us. After all, this was not the first time I had taken a girl to the hut. Assured thus, she gave herself to me with an abandon that was almost anger. I know — and you know something? Damn it — goddamn it! I was the first. The first! All those years that she was married to Lopito, nothing had happened. I have the proof, damn it. I kept it. She was looking around for some tissue paper, but there was none and I had this white, spotless handkerchief which she used. It was all red, all red! I tell you, that is something no one can take away from me!

END OF TAPE

TWO

In the summer of ’62, I got a note from Narita; I was in my last year and was deep in work, writing my dissertation, and could not be disturbed, so I merely wrote to her saying thank you, yes, I had heard she was in New York and would visit her very soon, perhaps in early fall. It had been very difficult, living in Cambridge and trying to make my scholarship go farther. But I was fortunate to have a cheap studio off Memorial Drive and within walking distance to the Square. It was on the ground floor of a two-storey wooden frame house with a shingle roof. My landlord — a retired air force sergeant — worked as a security guard at Filene’s. His Filipino acquaintances when he was stationed for four years in Clark were black marketeers and hostesses along the Angeles strip and he was pleased to know someone different. He and his termagant wife often did nice things for me — invited me upstairs to dinner or sent me a piece of cake. I had my own entrance from the alley which gave me privacy, but in the winter I had to shovel tons of snow which were dumped on it.

I found it a bit incongruous that I should be working on the rural problems and the family structure of the Philippines in New England when I should have been doing something more original and creative like studying the blacks or even the simpler case of old-timers in Hawaii and the West Coast who were never assimilated into the American mainstream. Filipinos working for their Ph.D.’s in America should study America — otherwise there is no sense in going there, just as Americans working on their Ph.D.’s come to the Philippines for their fieldwork. But there is always a special aura to having an American Ph.D. and we must pay for that aura.

I was very much surprised one afternoon when Narita appeared at my boardinghouse. She was big with child but even though bloated, she looked lovely.

“Eddie, you snob,” she said the moment she came in. I glanced at the big car, a Continental, that was parked in the street and inside was an aging mestizo whom I recognized at once. He had a Filipino driver up front.

“Isn’t that the ambassador?”

“Yes, darling,” she said, taking my hand and taking me inside my cluttered room.

“Well, ask him in. I don’t mind …”

“No, darling,” she said sweetly. “Let him wait. After all, I just asked him for a lift so that I could see you.”

“All the way from New York?”

She smiled and closed the door behind her.

I had known of Lopito’s death two or three years before. Looking at her big belly, I said, “That’s progress. So you got married again.”

“Ummmm.”

“I would like to meet him. Is he in New York with you?”

She tweaked my nose. “You poor dear — so behind the gossip. This is my second. And the father — well, it’s that poor man outside waiting for us to finish our small talk.”

“You mean the ambassador?”

“Darling, certainly not the driver! Didn’t you know?”

I shook my head. She took everything with amusement. “And tell me, how is your dissertation coming along? The other evening, your adviser was in New York, in my house for dinner. Did you know that? I’ve met a few people. I have dated quite a few interesting men. A certain John F. Kennedy—”

“Really now,” I said. Narita was never a braggart. She was just stating a fact.

“Well, it is a long way from Santa Ana, isn’t it?” she said. She asked me about my sisters and my parents, how the old town was. She had not been there since her marriage to Lopito but she had dispatched an engineer to build a house, right where the old house stood, so that her mother would have something better to live in.

Long after she left, I wondered what on earth she had come to see me for. I decided to take up her invitation and that December, shortly before Christmas, I went to visit her.

It had already begun to snow in Boston, the last golden leaf of maple had fallen, and a bleakness was all over the landscape. It was an unusually warm December afternoon when I got to the Greyhound bus station on Forty-second Street and because I just had a small weekender suitcase, I decided to walk to her house on Sixty-eighth Street. It was a good, invigorating walk up Fifth Avenue with its Christmas decor, the smell of roasting chestnuts in the air. I paused briefly at the Rockefeller Plaza where ice skaters were showing off.

Her house was in a residential area on the East Side, a short walk from Central Park, a neighborhood of walk-ups and boutiques. She was expecting me, and she answered the doorbell. Narita, I saw again, was beautiful, her hair falling down her shoulders, her lips red though without a touch of lipstick. She embraced me warmly and gave me another of those full, wet kisses. She smelled of cologne and freshness and all the wonderful scents I remembered of her. She was slim again and she said, “Yes, I had a boy. I have two boys now. Want to see them?”

She took me to the basement which was prettied up into a nursery. I noticed at once that the older boy was dark and the newborn was, like her and Iturralde, very fair.

She smiled at me, divining my thoughts, and pinched me on the side. “I will tell you everything,” she said.

The house had four storeys including the basement. The ground floor opened to a narrow garden which she had done with rocks, evergreens and huge clam shells from the Philippines. A wisteria filled the other end. I could imagine how beautiful it would be all lighted up for some evening party. Nothing ostentatious about the house although the furnishings were expensive, the beige leather sofas, the Afghan rugs, the soft blue velvet drapes. She had an Albers, two Pollocks, plus her paintings from the Philippines, santos, and antique china which would cost a fortune in New York as they already did in Manila. She had three full-time Filipino maids, one a registered nurse who looked after the babies and the house. They occupied two of the rooms in the basement and had their own entrance.

Narita had prepared pinakbet which I was not particularly fond of, but the fact that she had cooked it herself, touched me. She ate a little for she would be going out that evening to a dinner. She would miss the cocktails but since it was close by, she would have more time with me. I wanted to ask many questions but I didn’t have to; she was telling me many things and at the same time asking me about Santa Ana.

“I am not going to be his mistress forever,” she said finally. “His wife won’t divorce him. But even if she did, I won’t marry him. He is a wonderful, thoughtful man — and he has given me all the love and attention that someone in his position can give. He is also a very lonely man, a very misunderstood man, and I love him very much.”

“What is love to you now, Narita?”

I had not meant the question to be so crude.

She was holding the silver spoon and had just ladled out another spoonful of the vegetable stew into my plate. We were in her dining room, before that finely carved rosewood table with the silver candelabra and its four unlighted candles and lace tablecloth.

I had already taken off my jacket and was very comfortable in my turtleneck sweater. I had even shucked off my shoes and had really made myself at home.

“Do not ask me to make definitions,” she said sharply. “Look at me, what I do, how I react. What are words?”

“Extensions of our thoughts.”

“But they could be different from what we do. And I want to do a lot, to live a lot. I also know where I am headed. I have two boys — but that’s not enough. I could live for them, but what do we live for anyway? You ask me what love is, you may just as well ask why I am alive …”

I had not intended to get into a philosophical discussion only to get lost in a maze of contradictions, but she was doing the talking. “We all grow up,” she said. “Or am I presuming things?”

I held her hand.

“Did you know that I have an M.A. in Far Eastern studies from Columbia?”

I had heard about her studying, but the degree surprised me — not that she did not have the talent for it but that she had the perseverance.

“It is always fun, trying to learn more.” She spoke humbly. Then, “But some men — all they want out of life really is sex, and after that is over, you have to talk a bit, right?”

I smiled in agreement.

“I have had my fill of that type. In fact, one of them is the father of my older boy. You looked surprised when you saw him … He was an aide of Papa,” she explained simply. “He was a military type, you know, chest out, chin in, all muscle and no brain. Oh, it was a wonderful, physical relationship, all the orgasms that I had read about but never knew till I met him. But he was a stud — nothing more, just a stud, and how boring he could get after he was used!”

No woman had ever spoken to me before as frankly as she did, and for the first time, I felt uneasy with her and something akin to apprehension. But it went away quickly for she laughed then and asked about my latest girlfriend.

I was dating a Radcliffe girl at the time, a sweet Southerner from Memphis who often came to my place to bake corn bread and cook that slightly hot Southern dish with lots of okra, prawns and tomatoes in it, it almost tasted Filipino. I described Anne, her vices and her virtues, but not our lovemaking.

It was just five o’clock but already it was dark and she got up and switched on the lamps. There was no doubt in my mind that I desired her. In my younger days, I often fantasized about how she would look in the nude. I remembered those times when we were ten or eleven and we raced in the rain and bathed in the creek beyond their house. Her breasts were just beginning to shape and her nipples, small pinkish dots showed beneath her cotton chemise as she rose from the water.

I had finished a plateful of California rice and some of the vegetable stew. She stood up to put away the dishes for the maid to wash in the morning. In a minute, she called from the kitchen. “So, how often do you have it now that Anne has gone home for the holidays?”

“I can be a celibate till she returns,” I said. “And how about you? You said he won’t be back in Washington till February.”

She returned and led me to the sofa in the living room. “It’s no problem,” she said, laughing.

“Without Anne, it is a problem,” I said. “You have to spend a bit on a girl, take her out to dinner, buy her some candy — all those preliminaries that most American girls seem unable to do without.”

“I have dildos,” she said.

“Isn’t that rather boring and automatic?”

Again, that tinkling laughter. “Not if they are live ones.”

Then she looked at me with that kind of knowing, inquiring look I couldn’t mistake.

“I am no dildo, Narita,” I said.

She pressed close to me. “I know,” she said, rising; she took me down the corridor to her room. “We will take a bath together,” she said matter-of-factly.

I marveled at the clearness of her skin, as she let me look at her, her breasts, still firm though she had two boys, the flat stomach, unusually unmarked by childbirth. “You must be careful now,” she said, “or else I may have to go back to the hospital. After all, it’s only been a month — and this is the first …”

I was only half-listening; I was too engrossed with her beauty. She was telling me that men never had a sense of responsibility — it was the women all the time who had to be responsible, but that was fully taken care of now. She told the doctor who delivered her baby that she did not want another, ever, and the doctor had seen to that.

I would have been creation’s most exultant being and there was no hardship I would not have dared; but in that moment when I thought earth and high heaven were finally mine, she pushed me, not brusquely, but certainly with enough force to let me know, to remind me that I should be careful and in that businesslike voice that was a chill change from her caress, she said, “You are messing my hair, Eddie, and I still have that dinner tonight …”

She woke me when she returned a little before midnight and she slipped into bed, cuddling close, her breath smelling a little of wine, her hands wandering all over me. I desired her still but it was her comment about the human dildo that bothered me and would always continue to bother me. I was passive throughout. If she noticed it, she did not say anything. She had her pleasure, more perhaps than the ambassador could give her, and when she was finally tired, she lay beside me.

“I really have no one to talk to here,” she said. “The Americans can be very good friends but they seem so superficial and their view of the world is really limited, not so much by their experience but by what the media tells them. They lack intuition, the passion to see things not just as objects, the way we can do it—”

I asked her to put it simply.

“I thought I was explicit,” she said. “I’m tired of America. I want to return home. I have been here too long. Papa is getting senile. I’d like to go into politics when I return …”

I had to get used to her calling Senator Reyes “Papa.”

“You’ll botch it all up,” I said. “You have too much candor, too much openness.”

“Only with people I really know,” she said.

“What does the ambassador say?”

“I will leave him soon — he doesn’t know it yet. But that is a sure thing.”

“Just as you left that colonel?”

She pressed my hand and was silent.

“I want you to help me when I go into politics. You don’t have to worry about your job in the university. I know that you will command a very high price — but Eddie, I will make it all up to you. On your terms.”

“But why me?”

“Because you know me,” she said with feeling. “My weaknesses. You will protect me, and you will be loyal to me — just as I will be loyal to you, in my own way.”

“But what can I do?”

She was silent again for a while; then she started: “It is really time that we had more brains in our politics, not the old backslapping, vote-buying kind. Magsaysay thought he had all the answers, but actually, he was old-fashioned, buying off the journalists the way he did. No, we can be more scientific than that. If you know what I mean. We should have constant polls, quantify, analyze trends. These are sophisticated approaches. This doesn’t mean that we will abandon the old methods — the guns and goons, the bribery, the innuendo and the false rhetoric — the way Papa had done. And the Old Man, you must admit, has gone very far …”

“But politics is just an instrument, Narita,” I said, annoyed at the brazen implications of what she was saying. “There must be something behind it. Meaning: What is power to you?”

For a while, she did not speak. In the soft light, her face was grim until she broke into a smile. “I will show them,” she said. “I will show them …”

“Show whom?”

“Those nitwits in Assumption. I was the only girl from Santa Ana. They came from Silay, Bacolod, Iloilo — you know, with their twelve-hectare haciendas, acting like princesses. And they had nothing between their dirty ears.”

I remembered Father’s few hectares from which he made so little, barely enough to pay for the mortgage of the house in Diliman, for our education and I reminded her we had only a few hectares.

“But you never snubbed me, Eddie — not till recently, and I had to go to you on bended knees. I will take care of you, too,” she laughed. “In fact, I have already done that.” She pressed her warm breasts to me.

“You can’t embark on something like this, nursing an old hurt. That was years ago, Narita. You have to live and work beyond it. If you become a congressman …”

She drew away. “You must be kidding. I won’t start that low. Nothing less than the Senate for me. Let me tell you this: I know much more than all those asses in the Senate, including my father-in-law. Five years in the United States, I know how power works here, in New York, in Washington. I know all the important House and Senate members, the Ways and Means Committee, the Foreign Relations Committee. And their aides — mind you, never forget the aides. Why, the ambassador often relies on me for advice. Do you know what I am trying to say? For as long as we are an American colony, we should know how our colonial masters operate. And, brother, this is where it starts.”

Her brief exposition on Washington politics was impressive; she had not gone to Columbia for nothing.

“Do you have a program?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said instantly. “Also, one for how to get to power …”

I was getting a bit dizzy and I did not want to ask more questions. She just went into a quiet monologue: “On the local level, meaning Negros, I would like to dismantle the sugar industry. It is a colonial industry and it has tied us to the United States. Unless, of course, the quota system is given up.”

I wanted to ask her how she could do that, her Papa being in sugar, the ambassador being in Washington for no other reason than to protect our sugar interests. And my family, what would happen to us? We knew nothing except sugar …

“I’m interested in culture as well. Not just in the arts, that’s common enough. But in reshaping our mores. Sociocultural engineering. You know what I mean. And in foreign affairs, I want our relationship with Japan and China analyzed further, clarified. We should recognize China immediately. I told Jack—”

“Jack who?”

“Kennedy, of course,” she said, poking me in the ribs. “When he was a senator — that it was wrong for the United States not to have any relationship with China. China is not a threat to the United States, the way the Soviets are, and Japan will be. Japan is a real threat to us — and our damned politicians and businessmen, they are selling us down the river.”

“I hope you will not end up being like them,” I said.

“No, Eddie,” she said gravely. “For one, I don’t need money now. I am rich — very rich. And I need help from young people like you because you are not yet a victim of habit, because you’ll be anxious to prove yourself, try out new ideas. And you will be surprised to find how really close we are. And I am not talking about this …” She kissed me briefly. “Maybe because we come from the same small place, that’s not even on most Philippine maps … But don’t you ever remind me of it again.”

TAPE THREE

Domingo Guardia, private secretary to Ambassador Iturralde:

I am from La Consolacion. My father had worked for the Iturraldes as accountant and it was the ambassador who sent me to college and I worked for him till the day he died. I am not going to tell you anything which is not known to many people, including Doña Alicia. Anyway, both of them are dead now and what I will say will not hurt anyone, even if you do not live up to your promise of discretion. Out of loyalty, I must insist that you edit my comments carefully and use my name sparingly. Mind you, I am not bound by government regulations. I was never employed full-time by the government. I was always hired as consultant or on a contractual basis. My pay comes from Iturralde and Company. Yes, I remember the ambassador told me when he returned from Manila that he had attended a wedding of the son of Senator Reyes. They were very good friends, you know — sugar and politics. If I am not mistaken, he said something about how beautiful Narita was and it was a shame that she had to marry someone like the son of the senator who was known to be good for nothing. Well, he met Narita again in Washington about five years later, I think, after her husband died. She just had a baby by that colonel and the ambassador felt strongly about the man — that he was not fit for her. They were not married so he really had no compunctions about having him sent back to Manila so that he could have the field to himself. One thing about the ambassador, he was a very decisive man. He knew what he wanted. I think he explained the situation to Senator Reyes. At least, he didn’t want his wires crossed. I wrote some of the delicate communications on the matter, you know, and before the colonel knew it, he was given his walking papers — I mean, he was reassigned to Manila. It was neat and simple. The ambassador was old enough to be Narita’s father. She seemed to be attracted to older men. In a way, it was Doña Alicia’s fault. She never liked traveling, the cold climate, and in the many years that he was in Washington, she visited him only once — for a month. She would rather stay in La Consolacion, in that old rambling house, tending her orchids or, on occasion, going to Manila to visit friends and dine at the Casino. And since they had no children — she could not have one — it was not so difficult for the ambassador to rationalize the affair. I really don’t remember too well how it started but all of a sudden, the ambassador was always in a hurry to go to New York on weekends. Sometimes, he even took the Greyhound. Imagine — Ambassador Iturralde on a bus! I have seen pictures of Narita before, on the cover of Philippine magazines. But you know something? She also appeared in Town & Country, in Harper’s Bazaar—and that takes some doing, with no publicity agent. It was her beauty, her wit, her circle of friends and, most of all, her gracious ways that did it. She was truly our first international beauty — and she had enough mixed blood to be fair but enough Malay features as well to be a Filipina. When I first met her at the embassy Christmas party, she was coming down the stairs, holding on to the arm of the ambassador. She was in a black gown, no lipstick, no jewels and God knows she had lots of them, including the diamonds that the ambassador bought for her as a matter of habit. I know because I used to go to Tiffany’s to pay for them. I also looked after their insurance, all that sort of thing. She was the prettiest creature I had ever seen, prettier than Miss America or Miss Universe. We all paused to look at her and when she moved into any circle, conversation stopped. We did not want to talk for fear that we would be distracted. We just wanted to look at her, those eyes, those lips, that perfect nose. Oh, I am forgetting myself. I always do when I see a beautiful woman. How lucky can you get — I am speaking of that colonel, of course. He did not deserve her. Well, the ambassador had had several women before Narita; this girl from New York, very good in her own way, but you know how American women are — they are never feminine enough. And there was this Spanish girl, royalty — from Madrid. But these were ordinary affairs. Nothing profound about them the way it was with her. I know. The driver knows. She rarely came to the embassy although the ambassador was always taking her to receptions and dinners and introducing her as Mrs. Reyes. But everyone knew of course. The ambassador seemed revitalized. You know that old Chinese belief. I will tell you — one of her rare visits to Washington — it was Saturday, too, and all the staff was out, except me because I had something to rush. I always worked overtime, you know how private secretaries are. Well, I bade them good-bye but I forgot something and had to return to my room. I had a key, you know, and floors carpeted as they are and me quiet as a cat, they did not know I was back. They had locked the door, but not the door to my room which adjoined the ambassador’s reception. There was a big sofa there — and they were doing it right there. I looked and I tell you, the ambassador still had it in him. Don’t include this — what does it show? That I am a Peeping Tom? I only wanted to show that she was good for him. They stayed on till close to nine o’clock. I did not bring my coat and it was cold outside and I was hungry. So I went back downstairs and started banging doors and turning on the lights and the ambassador came to my room and I feigned surprise that they were still there, and I said I had forgotten some work and my coat — and, you know, they took me out to dinner before they drove me home. He changed his will twice; I typed them both. When his son was born, he changed it again. He gave her a big slice of his property, a house he had bought shortly after the war, in Washington at the other end of Massachusetts Avenue. It is worth over a million dollars now. And, of course, stocks in the mines, many of the things in his name which won’t be questioned in board meetings and all that sort of thing. All those diamonds. And part of that cash at Chase Manhattan and a bank account in Zurich — things that Doña Alicia never knew about and did not care to know. He would have married her — you know, specially after their son was born. He wanted her to use his name but in the end felt it was wiser that her married name be used. What does it matter anyway? After all, no one can deny the boy’s parentage. And come to think of it, both her children are American citizens — having been born in the United States. I wish I also had that advantage. I could have applied for it; after all, I had lived there so long and the ambassador would have helped me. But America is not for old people. I really don’t know what made her leave him — oh, it is not as tragic as you’d think it was. It was a quiet parting of the ways, with no regrets. After all, she was just returning to the Philippines where he could see her anytime he wanted. And there were also the trips that she made to the United States anytime he asked her to come. But it was a separation just the same. After that, the ambassador drooped. The fires in him died, the juices ran out. He was not the same again. It was really just a matter of time before the cancer finally got him. But he had lots of memories. When he was dying, he would call her up and there would be tears in his eyes. I sometimes listened to the conversation. It would often last for a full hour and he would ask about his boy and Narita would come loud and clear on the line. It was very happy and also very sad.

END OF TAPE

THREE

My adviser in Harvard was a Southeast Asian specialist whose real interest lay in the Philippines and those aspects of what he termed “early American imperialism.” Dr. Donald Harten and his wife even spent a sabbatical in a village in Leyte and he spoke enough Waray to get by in a rural setting. He did not want a compilation of empirical data that would be buried in library indexes like most theses in the past. He wanted something which would be useful and he was always posing questions that made me rethink earlier premises so that my initial writing on the changing patterns of rural family behavior, as innovations were introduced to it, was altered into an analysis of the family not just as a rural institution but as the core of society and as power broker. I say all this now remembering how Senator Reyes was the patriarch in our part of the country and how he had drawn to his fold someone like Narita and the husbands of his two daughters who, I later learned, were handpicked by him not for what they were but for what they could contribute to the Reyes dynasty. My dissertation was wide ranging and discursive and I saw much later how some of the concepts that I had developed were operating in the political campaign that I had witnessed.

I was disturbed by an earlier comment Narita had made in New York when I told her about the inevitability of my returning to the state university and “paying back” my scholarship; she had said that the UP was an elitist school just like Ateneo, La Salle, and Assumption; it was not contributing to the socialization of knowledge and I would do some good if I taught instead in any of the diploma mills where the poorer classes went. I have thought a lot about what she had said but I needed, I must admit, the prestige of the UP and, also, I knew that the workload there and the pay were much better than in those sweatshops on Azcarraga.

Returning to Manila after five years in Cambridge was a traumatic experience. First, the heat. It was April when I left the United States and San Francisco where I spent a few days was deliciously cool. So was Honolulu where I stayed with friends at the East West Center and took to the beach at Ala Moana for a week. Then, Manila — and wham! The heat suffused everything, every single pore of the body, and sweat poured out of me like I was a leaking faucet. And the filth! Boston is not America’s cleanest city — a friend from Texas said it was Houston — but it was antiseptic compared to what one saw in Manila’s main streets, not to mention the back alleys. And the smell — God, the stench of rot, of decay, of brackish esteros—it hangs over everything like a dismal monsoon.

In Diliman many new houses had gone up, most of them ostentatious with their ornate doorways and plaster work and our house now looked forlorn and shabby beside them.

I had a ready position at the university as associate professor — that was what a Ph.D. did and though the salary was not much, it was enough. I was filled with the usual coming-home expectations, the resentment towards the old fogies who should be retired to let in young blood, the eagerness to try out new theories and an unabashed lack of humility, I think, that went with the degree. I adjusted fairly quickly.

In the week that I arrived, one of the first people I called up was Narita. I retained fond memories of that weekend in her house and wondered if there would be a repeat. I was not going to push it, though. There were summer classes but I did not have any; I was just in the department fixing up my new desk and the schedule I would have in June.

“I’m on my way out, Eddie,” she said. “Can I come and pick you up? We can have dinner together …”

I argued against the long drive from Forbes Park but she was adamant. She was not driving, she said.

As luck would have it, by five that afternoon, some of my colleagues had come in and we were all there, bantering and talking shop when she arrived wearing a summer dress and high heels. She rushed over and planted a kiss on my cheek. My colleagues applauded. They gathered around her; they did not even wait for me to introduce her. They started congratulating her for the piece on the Far East in the last issue of the Sunday Times Magazine. It was Dr. R. D. Badoc, chairman of the Asian Institute, who was literally gushing over it. “I am glad you said it, Mrs. Reyes,” he was saying. “Who else could say that we should recognize Red China now? We would be branded immediately as commies. And your observations about Japan …”

“She has an M.A. in Far Eastern studies from Columbia,” I said.

“We know,” they chorused.

“She speaks Japanese and Mandarin …”

The same knowing nods. Then Dr. Badoc asked her: “It is a shame that we cannot afford you. But if you are willing to accept chicken feed, would you like to teach at my Institute?”

“I will consider it,” Narita said sweetly. “Let’s shake on it,” she held out her hand and Dr. Badoc, the perennial woman chaser, held it for some time.

We proceeded to the waiting Mercedes 280 SE, the parade following us. I was walking on a pillow of feathers. We went to Makati — how the place had changed, the soaring new buildings, the wide streets! I thought we would go to the new hotel at one end of the square but we went instead to the supermarket coffee shop and took a table close to the door. We ordered hamburgers and coffee. It was then that I realized what a politician Narita had become. The visit to the university, her meeting my crowd, even the seat we took in the supermarket — all provided her direct contact with people.

When she arrived from the United States, as we had discussed in New York earlier, she should maximize her exposure but be careful in her image building. She had written a paper in school on China’s and Japan’s relations with Southeast Asia; she had merely halved the article, added some contemporary comments, then walked over to the editor of the largest Sunday magazine in the country. Not only was the article published in two installments, she was also photographed in color for the magazine cover. Now she was all over the society pages. To keep busy in New York, she had written a modern zarzuela (musical drama or operetta) on the labor problem — the sacadas (migrant workers) — of Negros. Poor boy, rich girl sort of story and maudlin, as most zarzuelas go. That established not just her acting and singing talents but also her concern for social justice. And in an interview on television, she had attacked the American bases and echoed the clichés of her father-in-law. The nationalists lapped it all up. She was asked to do a column for one of the newspapers and she did it with aplomb and easily dethroned Etang Papel who had been considered the finest woman columnist in Manila. All these in less than a year. She had really taken off!

When school opened in June, I was anxious about my classes and eager to make an impact. I wanted sociology to be not just a credit subject; I was determined to make it a window into the society so my students could understand it better, its weaknesses. I was all fired with Relevance. By then, too, I was involved with Narita’s career, how I could help shape it. I had no illusions about being a Professor Higgins, for she was no cockney lass. I decided to take down notes of our meetings, the subjects discussed, what courses of action were to be taken. But looking back, there was hardly any new insight that I could glean; all that I did was emphasize the obvious which is, perhaps, the function of the scholar, to dig for bones and then call those bones what they are — bones.

After school had started and routine had settled, she asked me to set up a think tank — not necessarily from my university but from my age group, not just academics but even businessmen and journalists who might be able to contribute something creative to the fossilized political thinking and planning then. There were seven of us — a disparate group which was good, for there is nothing like disagreement to sharpen one’s reasoning. I was, of course, the unofficial chairman although we never took votes or suggested one solution to any problem; always, there were options and what would happen if a certain option was picked up. The members:

— Ismael del Mundo, nationalist businessman

— E. Hortenso, Marxist professor of politics

— Julio Acosta, Jesuit historian

— Greg Collantes, novelist

— M. B. Reyes, editor

— Tomas Monte, farm leader

By the end of the year, we had to include a new name in our group. Dr. E. Samonte, statistician. Not one of us was past fifty and it was Dr. Samonte whom everyone called Doctor in deference to his seniority for he was fifty-five. At first, we did not ask for any remuneration; it was enough that we were doing something other than what we were normally engaged in. It was also flattering for us to be asked by Narita, particularly after she had won the election. Now, we considered ourselves closer to the center of power and we could finally do something about the ideas that churned in our minds.

Academicians often have notions about good government, even a commitment to it, but are never given the opportunity to test their ideas or move the awesome and massive machinery. Narita also knew how much professors were paid. In the group, for instance, it was only del Mundo who had a car. Even Dr. Samonte had to ride in jeepneys. But money was of no consequence to Narita and a representation allowance of one thousand pesos each in 1966, even before she won the election, was something.

I have always wanted to know Senator Reyes personally. His speeches had impressed me with their depth and probity and that Sunday evening at Narita’s Pobres Park residence, I finally got to meet him. She had sent us an RSVP card, saying it was a sit-down dinner, and I was the first to arrive. I had many questions to ask, the most important of which was how she would be able to reconcile her nationalist platform with her being a member of the sugar bloc; how she would now bring justice to the sugar sacadas whose lives she had commented on in her zarzuela. She could always retort that I should pose the same questions to the senator. But, at least, Senator Reyes never claimed a social conscience; he was an old cacique who wanted the whole pie and cut off the Americans — a sentiment shared by many politicians turned entrepreneurs.

I now realize that these contradictions did not bother Narita; her concern was not image any longer or the ideological foundation for her campaign, but strategy. And we were her generals.

That was the night I should have quit but I did not have the sense then to dichotomize my vanity, my needs, from the full meaning of integrity. I glowed with self-importance; I was an agent of change, and were it not for the likes of me, the forces of decay, of evil, would triumph. And looking at myself at the time I now realize why the technocrats in government today — for all their objectivity and decency — will never leave the corrupt regime not only because they have power and prestige but because they feel that without themselves in government, it could be worse. That, of course, is their highest form of delusion.

Narita wore black pants and the new style barong designed by her dressmaker. She was elegant; and, tonight, instead of kissing me on the cheek, it was on the lips with a little insinuation of her tongue and just as my fancies were starting, she brought me crashing back to earth: “Your deadline for that Muslim profile will be on Monday, Eddie. I know you always meet your deadline, but I am reminding you nonetheless …” And with that, she went into chitchat, guiding the conversation where she thought it should go, never wasting my time, always pumping information out of me.

By seven-thirty, everyone was in and the talk became livelier with Royal Salute, Wild Turkey and cognac. Nothing but the best in Narita’s house and tonight, even her bartender wore white. It was April and steaming outside, but I should have put on a jacket for the air-conditioning was on full blast and even in that cavernous, living room, it was freezing. We were arguing about centralizing data and Isme del Mundo suggested a computer. It was at this moment that Senator Reyes arrived, saying that he had to leave his poker session although he was already winning a hundred thousand pesos — well, anything for his favorite daughter.

I had not seen him since he came to Santa Ana to address our graduating class and he seemed to have changed but little except for the white mane and the slightly perceptible stoop. He was as dark as the bottom of a pot and his pugnacious face which was familiar to all of us in Negros was rendered malevolent by his eyes which were narrow slits, the pouches bulging from under them. Narita brought him in and we stood up as he slouched on the sofa before us. “We were talking about a computer, Papa, which we need for the campaign and for other things. You can feed it all that mess in your office and simplify your operation as well …”

“Order it tomorrow, hija,” he said indulgently, taking the glass of cognac that the waiter immediately handed him.

Del Mundo, always conscious of costs and particular with figures, spoke then: “It is very expensive, Senator. At least a quarter of a million dollars and we would have to train programmers and a staff to run—”

The Old Man did not even look at Isme. “You can raid any of the companies in Manila that have the competent people, hijo. Make that your job, offer them incentives. IBM should be able to satisfy us. And as for taxes …” He did not continue; he was not president of the Senate for nothing.

At dinner, it was all trivia interspersed with the senator’s bawdy jokes which were pathetically dated. Narita did not laugh at them and, at first, I thought she was being prudish as we, ourselves, hypocrites, were laughing as if we had not heard them before. The Old Man was sharp. “Narita does not laugh at these jokes anymore.” he said dryly. “She has heard them so many times but she lets me tell them just the same.”

It was a fine French meal that started with vichyssoise. With our stomachs finally stuffed with soufflé, cups of coffee in hand, we proceeded to the library for the session that was to last till four in the morning, the senator lording over it. He started with grandiloquence and self-depreciation: “Politics is the highest form of human enterprise for with politics, we shape the state and, therefore, the nature of society. It is an honorable profession made dishonorable by rascals like myself who have, like bad weeds, lived this long. I must go but the state lives on. And if you want to better the state, then look at politicians as necessary evils. Not that Narita is evil—,” he looked at his daughter-in-law seated on the arm of the sofa, her hand on his shoulder. “But she is a pretty little devil, isn’t she?” We all laughed and Narita accepted the compliment with a smile. She really had the Old Man wrapped around her little finger and I wouldn’t have been surprised then if the senator, the old goat that we all knew him to be, desired her, too. Then, “I have discussed it with the President and all the Party chieftains. I could have made a unilateral decision, but I believe in the democratic process. And, besides, this will be the first time that the Party will have a beautiful and brilliant candidate.”

The king is dead! Long live the king! We all clapped in complete harmony. Now, we really had work to do, now we had an objective — to win the election — two years away.

“You are all family now,” the senator boomed. “So let us talk frankly. Candidly. You are also novatos—but brilliant novatos who have ideas. Or is it plots? I would like to hear all of them. Talk of nothing else but how to win …”

The discussion was freewheeling; we started with regional issues, the Ilocos and tobacco and the possibility of reestablishing the cotton industry there. Tourism for the Mountain Province and resettlement in Cagayan Valley and in the foothills of Sierra Madre. Rice and agrarian reform in Central Luzon. Decentralization of the sugar industry, fishing in the Visayas and intensified agriculture, the Muslim problem in Mindanao. Then we went into foreign relations, the American bases and, finally, tactics.

Narita participated in this discussion but all talk stopped whenever the Old Man made a point or suggested details. He had, after all, four decades of practice. He was right. We were novices and we never talked about cheating, the use of violence, intimidation, pork-barrel funds, and blackmail; these were real instruments, but we blithely ignored them.

Narita and the Old Man were peeved. I had not known how very much alike they had become in their thinking. “If it will mean victory, then cheat!” the Old Man pontificated.

“The objective is to win,” Narita said coolly. “You cannot talk morality with opponents who are immoral. You cannot tell the truth to people who will not accept that truth.”

I felt uneasy; my training was different. In that small town where I was born, my parents had pounded a little bit of honesty into me.

“You must always have options,” Narita was continuing. “That is what politics is. Always the possible …”

We were exhausted although the fruit, cake, coffee, and liquor came continuously. Saliva dripped from the corner of the Old Man’s mouth and Narita dutifully wiped it off. He was starting to doze off, and she told him to go upstairs and sleep but he said he would go home. We took him to his car and bade him good-night. The others were driven home but I stayed behind.

Alone, finally, she cuddled close as we talked, the stereo playing Chopin softly. She sighed. “I can hardly wait to put everything into motion, Eddie. I know you have reservations, but, for my sake, don’t remind me of that small house — not in the presence of others. The past is just for the two of us …”

“I did not talk about Santa Ana,” I said.

“You did, too.”

“No.”

“Want to bet?” She went to the desk at the other end of the library, fiddled with some knobs in a drawer. The music stopped and clearly, very clearly, our voices — excited and pitched — came alive. She had taped the entire discussion; the library, perhaps the whole house, was bugged.

The pre-convention plan was set. Her zarzuela was transported to Davao, Dumaguete, Bacolod, Cebu, Iloilo, and even Dagupan. It was bringing culture to the provinces. She was also invited to lecture at the universities in the South, all the way to a small college in Bongao, Sulu, and there was her thrice-a-week column that I liked to read for its freshness and unpredictability.

In the process, she was making political profiles of the provinces and checking up with the senator on the personalities she had met or wanted to meet.

She learned fast and she had a retentive memory. When the computer came at the end of the year, I wondered how necessary it really was. She had committed to memory so many things, she could have won without it.

FOUR

I have seen Narita in tears only once. By this time, she already had a suite in her father-in-law’s Makati building, the nerve center for her political future. She had an excellent clipping service. She had called me, I thought, about some urgent problem. When I arrived, she closed the door, told me to sit down and read an item in a weekly gossip column by Mita Guzman.

Narita never had much respect for Filipino journalists — an attitude she got from Senator Reyes who handed envelopes at the end of every month to a wide assortment of reporters. They covered the Senate and other trivia and passed themselves off as journalists. She had the long list and on it were editors, some of whom professed the highest moral motives.

Mita Guzman was a slight acquaintance; so was the husband, a small, henpecked man who was once my classmate in political science but who had dropped out to take a job as PR man for one of the congressmen. She was a woman to be feared both physically and otherwise for she had the face and the muscle of a sumo wrestler and the nastiness to skewer anything that crossed her path. Now, in her column: “She is young, pretty, and able. She has a Columbia degree and she sings well in a modern musical. Watch out for this girl now for though her father died a drunk and her mother sold meat (not rotten) in the old hometown, she has claims to royalty and will yet make it to the Senate next election …”

When I finished the item, which was encircled in red, Narita said: “Why can’t they forget where I came from? Did I commit a crime? We were poor, Eddie, but not starving. You know that …”

I went to her and held her shoulders. “You should expect these things. Remember, Narita, you’re in politics now. There will be more when you campaign. It will not stop.”

“I will get her, I tell you,” she said grimly, then quavered and tears ran from her eyes. I held her close and could feel her heart thrashing. She clung to me as if I were a raft and cried, the sobs stifled. I did not know whether it was in anger or grief. I said: “There is nothing to be ashamed of, Narita. How many Filipinos are poor? This is your capital, if you want to make it work for you. Cinderella story. Girl from the sticks makes it in New York. Is there a more romantic theme?”

She stopped crying abruptly and drew away, a look of surprise, of resentment, on her tear-washed face. “What?” her voice leaped. “Expose myself to more ridicule? That’s unthinkable! I’ll have none of it. Poverty is not something to be proud of. It is degrading and don’t ask me to think otherwise.”

She did get Mita Guzman, in her own way. One morning I came upon Guzman waiting in Narita’s Forbes Park living room, a bunch of red roses in her hand. When Narita came out, she attended to me first as if Mita did not exist. And only after she had put Mita in place did Narita go to her, kiss her on the cheek, and thank her for the flowers. Mita waited outside while Narita and I had coffee leisurely in the kitchen where she told me how she did it.

The Guzmans had hocked their house to the Philippine Bank to buy a small press. Having learned of this, Narita — through the Senate President — turned the screws and Mita had no alternative but to come a-visiting. Mita had been to see her more than a dozen times, enriching some florist with the roses she always brought.

To complete the noose, Narita suggested that with her help, the Guzmans should have a larger press capability and they should not worry about printing jobs. There was so much in the Senate that they could do. And then, there was this election campaign that was coming. And yes, she was such a good writer, it would be great if she did Narita’s official biography — and of course, Narita would pay for it all and reward their publishing company handsomely.

“She is also cuckolding her husband,” Narita said. “It’s all in the computer now. She is no different … the whole bunch …”

I wanted to say that her father-in-law and she made them that way, but by then, I had decided to keep such thoughts to myself.

If the Party convention was lutong makaw (prearranged), so was the election. I watched the campaign and sometimes helped distribute those envelopes with money in them. She had exhausted most of us just keeping up with her. I don’t know where her iron energy came from — it certainly was not the yogurt, nor the pills. She would be up mapping out the next meeting with her flip cards and notebooks while we were still asleep. I would have recorded more of her techniques and performance but my leave from the department was up.

She had all the handbills that she needed but there was one picture-poster of her, printed in Japan through the courtesy of Senator Reyes’ Japanese contacts, a big 16″ X 24″ in full color, a prim, almost Mona Lisa-like smile on her face, so elfin, yet so innocent like the Virgin Mary’s as well. There was no name on the picture but in those few months, it had become the most popular election material. She autographed it and it was displayed — just like a magazine cover — which it had been earlier for all the vernacular weekly magazines whose editors she had bought. I saw it inside sari-sari stores, in farm homes, in offices long after the campaign and I presume that to this day, there are rural houses adorned with it.

Those flip cards really helped. Before she went into a new territory, the team zeroed in on it, the important people, personal details — hobbies, deaths, birthdays, relatives — all these came in handy. She did not upstage the other candidates but sometimes the clamor for her was just too loud to be ignored. By now, they were calling, Manang, Narita! When it was her turn, she would start in the local language. She could converse passably in tongue twisters like Pangasinan and Zambal and she even picked up a bit of Tausug.

There was nothing intellectual or explosive about her speeches on the road. Soon, the audience would clamor for her to sing and she always gave them “Lahat ng Araw” which she included in her zarzuela. She even had different versions of it; a university poet whom she flattered wrote Ilokano lyrics and she had a journalist from Cebu do it in Cebuano as well. The song became a hit and look at all the record companies doing it in instrumental and vocals now.

But it was a case of overkill and I don’t know whose idea it was — Senator Reyes’ or Narita’s. Underneath the glossy exterior of that campaign, the music, the fanfare, there was something sinister. And that first meeting with Senator Reyes came to mind.

I am fully aware of course that to go deeper into this is to tread on dark, unfamiliar terra infirma. I can only guess her views on poverty developed because of her childhood; her rejection of the slums afterwards was based not on a sense of moral outrage but on aesthetics. She could not stand the unsightly around her, whether it was a man like me who did not comb his hair or a slum dweller’s barong-barong. Her view of the world was, therefore, cosmetic although she, herself, would not admit it.

The violence — and I had reports of it — was committed in many places, in our own town, mostly in our province. A former clerk in the municipio had dredged up the fact that her father had absconded with some money. The poor man was beaten up and Father had to treat him for lacerations. She was perhaps determined that in her homeground, she should be on top — which she was not only because Senator Reyes poured a lot of money but because she was the local girl who made good. The opposition mayor of Tubas, close to our town, was killed. It was a shooting “accident” and although people had come to Manila to say it was not, there was no mention of it in the papers. That was the extent to which the papers were manipulated. And vote-buying, bribery, dumping — I will not recite these. It is enough that I knew they happened not because she and her father-in-law were insecure but because they believed in overkill.

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.

TAPE FOUR

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.

What can I say about her? She was my daughter, she was my pupil, she was my heir. All my children — it is not that they have failed me. It was never in their blood — I see that now — to give the nation the service, the thinking that it needed, the way I devoted my life to it. But Narita — from the beginning, I knew that she would do justice to the name she had taken.

If I were only younger … but it does not matter. She was some woman, better looking than all the women I have had, and there have been a few … She learned very fast, she should have been the first woman president. She got as high as the Senate but even there, look at what she had done, the many programs on nutrition, on culture, on science she had started, the many Centers that were built at her inspiration. Food production has increased, thanks to her, and the sugar workers — although I should not be talking like this — are better off now because of her untiring and unselfish devotion to their cause. Don’t laugh — you know that my life had always revolved around sugar, its problems, its world market and, of course, that beautiful quota from the United States. But we were willing to be pushed a bit, not by those mealy mouthed priests, not by those radical labor leaders, but by those whom we trust, who know our feelings, who are part of our constellation. If we give justice to people, we should do so without being prodded and, by God, that is what we did.

These and so many more are Narita’s achievements and no gossip monger, no vitriolic critic can take these away.

I knew Narita as a child, I watched her grow; her ideas on nationalism, she got them from me. I was instrumental in shaping them, guiding them. Not that she did not have a mind of her own. In fact she was so independent at times, she could even afford afterwards to antagonize my friends and taunt the whole system itself.

So she has left me two wonderful boys who will not forget their mother as the most heroic, the most unusual Filipina in our history. Gabriela Silang, Tandang Sora, all those revered Filipinas in our lineage — they are really nothing compared to her. The scholars should have no difficulty in confirming this …

END OF TAPE

Looking back, I have often wondered about the exact moment when I began to delude myself. I know now that it was done slowly, bit by bit, with my own circumstances and needs, pushing me, my desire to justify myself, that I was really earning the money that she paid me. I also began to believe, towards the latter part of the relationship, that nothing much could be done about our political malaise until she had real power, when she could dictate and no longer have to deal with slimy politicians and make compromises. I realize that this is a fallacy, that government is not a vacuum, that where there are human relationships, compromises are inevitable and that, precisely speaking, the statesman is also a superb politician.

During the first year of her term, I worked hard and there were heated arguments within the think tank for the others were never told — and I never told them — that she was aiming for the Presidency. Of course, that did occur to them. The programs that we shaped always kept her in the public eye. She was a national figure now and well beyond the narrow partisan confines of bloc, of party. She had taken on, too, the nationalist mantle that the aging senator bestowed on her.

It was in the second year of her term that she went to this small college in our province to deliver a commencement address. It was a request she could not deny; besides, it afforded her a chance to see again the old hometown and, perhaps, renew ties. And as the newspapers related it, after she had finished her extemporaneous address on social justice as an ideal she wanted the young to promote, there was a standing and thunderous ovation. It was at this instance, too, that the young graduates all rushed to the stage to congratulate her. It was a mob scene and the stage suddenly swayed and then collapsed.

She had been knocked against a rusty iron truss, there was a gash on her arm — nothing serious, and she was moving around with a sling when she got to the provincial hospital her father-in-law had built.

It was the ultimate irony; a doctor decided to give her an anti-tetanus shot, just to be sure. In seconds, she was gasping in a massive anaphylactoid attack. There was no resuscitator, no anti-allergy shot available at that instance. In less than five minutes, she was dead.

These details were ignored by the papers. It was more dramatic to say it was the people’s enthusiasm which killed her, that she died in her home ground, defending the rights of the poor sacadas against the rich sugar oligarchs, the applause of the youth her lasting epitaph.

The mythmakers, particularly the PR staff of Senator Reyes, had more than a kernel to start with: The Narita Reyes Foundation immediately came into being purportedly to perpetuate the ideals for which Narita gave her life. Nowhere was it mentioned that the young people had rushed and crowded that flimsy stage for at the end of her speech Narita started handing out those envelopes that were, by then, a familiar gimmick in her public appearances and her campaign …

In a couple of years, there floated around variations of her last moments, perhaps to fit the temper of the times. Now, the CIA was responsible. She had been vocal in her anti-Americanism, in her espousal — like her father-in-law — of the removal of the American bases. The CIA saw to it that the stage would collapse!

I knew her well enough to see through her, that like Senator Reyes whose sugar interests survived on American largesse, Narita’s anti-Americanism was for the galleries, for the pseudointellectuals of the campuses.

The aides of Senator Reyes woke me up at three o’clock that morning and the senator and I flew to Bacolod in his Cessna, with the casket on board in the back. He was silent during the flight, his crumpled face grown darker with his grief. When we got to the hospital at daybreak, he thundered and raged and said he would have every doctor there forbidden to practice and jailed. We went to the room where Narita lay and at the sight of her, he broke down, the sobs torn out of him in gusts.

They brought the casket in and he forbade them to touch her; only the two of us could. I did not realize till then how light she was. Looking at the quiet face, the eyes closed as if in sleep, the cleft chin, it all came back — the little girl I had played with in Santa Ana, the splashing rain, the ripe guavas and the green cascade of cadena de amor in bloom. I did not want the Old Man to see me cry so I let the tears burn and fall without my wiping them.

She was buried in Manila. Her mother, my parents, and some of our hometown friends who could afford the trip were there. It was a hot April day and we sweated in the hall of the Senate as we listened to the lengthy eulogies.

It was vacation time anyway so after the funeral, I decided to go home with Father and Mother. Our house looked shabby, its wooden sidings in need of paint. I walked over to Narita’s new house. It was much more substantial, the biggest house in Santa Ana, bigger than the municipio. The guava and pomelo trees had not been cut but they could not now hide the big house with wooden balustrades and red-painted roof as they had the old house roofed with rusting tin. I don’t know if it was on Narita’s instructions, but they did not tear down the old brick wall that enclosed the yard and the cadena de amor — now scraggly brown and shorn of leaves — clambered over it. Sometime soon, when the rains shall have started, the vines would be green again.

Sei Thomas Gakuin

Kyoto, April 6, 1979.