Three Filipino Women

ONE

I hesitate to put down some of the details in this story because they are so intensely personal, they are bound to be misunderstood by friends who know me for my objectivity and detachment, qualities that have made me quite successful in a field crowded by charlatans. Not that my hands are impeccably clean — if we define integrity narrowly, if we polarize the world in black and white, then, certainly, I have not been morally upright. I must avoid euphemisms and say outright that I have been a pimp; for what else is procuring some of the most expensive call girls in town to service clients who have flown in from Wall Street or from Marunouchi? That is precisely what I had done, proceeded to find out who in Didi’s stable was available for the evening.

In a way, I am afraid of women. When I was ten, my mother left my father to live with another man. I am now certain that this was the single, most traumatic incident in my life. I worshipped my father and I could not imagine my mother in the arms of another man.

Looking back at what had happened to my marriage I am not surprised that Lydia left me, too, although not for another man, but to flee from the implacable demands of my office, my erratic behavior — as she called it. She had wanted to raise our three children in an atmosphere free from tension and I suppose she succeeded. The kids are grown up now and they seem very normal and happy. Sometimes though, they wonder aloud why Lydia and I never got together again.

My father was not too good at providing for us — he had to work doubly hard at being a surrogate mother and tried to give us a good education, knowing his money would not be wasted. He knew I would be able to make it on my own, from the days of World War II when I was one of the youngest guerrilla officers to fight in the Yamashita campaign. I bore no wounds from that war, other than what scabbed in the mind and heart. I still have the forty-five caliber automatic which I carried then and never used after the war was over. I have not been vicious except, perhaps, once, but this story is not about my war experiences, nor about Media Consultants which I manage, but about my obsession with Ermi.

How could this happen to me at the late age of fifty-five? I have traveled and wallowed in the pleasures of one Babylon or another. I thought I knew all the pitfalls, yet I was shorn of my pride and became naked as the day I was born.

And all because Ermi Rojo was a prostitute.

Ever since the breakup of my marriage in the early sixties, I have lived in an apartment in Mabini, near Padre Faura. In the early evenings, if I don’t jog at the Luneta, I often take a walk along the district’s darkened streets. Mabini itself is swept clean for the tourists, as with all of Manila’s major avenues, but the narrow sidestreets are awash with the stench of uncollected garbage and human waste oozing out of clogged sewers. Sometimes, I am apprehensive knowing that I may be accosted by hoodlums, beaten up and stabbed. I take a walk just the same almost as a matter of habit, a kind of ceremony with which I welcome the night.

My favorite bar-restaurant, the Camarin — the classiest call girl establishment of them all — has undergone several changes since it was set up in the fifties. It used to serve native cooking, nothing exceptional; then, shortly after martial law was declared in 1972, it became a discreet beer house with first class pulutan, including marinated raw fish with generous slices of onions.

The Japanese brought the latest fad to Camarin — the open grill where fresh fish, eggplant and what-have-you are roasted right before the customer. Now, it has a dozen go-go dancers, all young and curvy, who prance about on a narrow stage, in very brief costumes.

I join the night crowd there, the smoke densely floating around, the smell of beer and mankind gone sour comingled with the heat of day. A chubby girl ambles up the stage, her flanks tawny in the yellow light and on her rear the name Gloria. What glory can she possibly bring to these jaded lechers like myself? She gyrates her broad hips, thrusts them towards her audience lasciviously to the rhythm of “Saturday Night Fever,” her face without expression. The men talk on, barely giving her a glance.

Didi, my lesbian friend who manages the Camarin, sits at one corner. For more than a decade, she had watched over the place, showing an album of stabled girls only to customers of long standing. She is stouter now than when I first met her. She still regards men as competitors and her eye for feminine beauty is as sharp as ever. It was she who introduced Ermi Rojo to me and that night I met Ermi is permanently etched in my mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ermi Rojo taught me this implicitly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can I ask you your name at least?”

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

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

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

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

“Oh?”

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

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

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

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

“And the first is ten thousand.”

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

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

“Do you know one?”

I shook my head.

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

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

“But only the first time.”

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

“I will make you feel like one again.”

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

She pouted again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She agreed to go to the Luneta one Sunday afternoon and we met at the Hilton lobby then walked over to the park where there was a symphony concert. It was one of those translucent October afternoons, the sky was clean and blue, and the breeze from the sea was cool. She had on a light maroon dress and white high heeled shoes, and she walked with me rather self-consciously for almost everyone was in casual dress, in jeans, and here she was, strikingly handsome as always, making the plain dress so elegant, people looking at her. “I hope,” she said, nudging my arm, “they don’t think I am giving a fashion show.”

She liked the music, the overtures of several ballets, but we did not stay in the open air theatre long; we moved on to the Chinese garden where we found a stone bench to sit on, watching the people pass, the lovers entwined in each other’s arms under the trees in the gathering twilight.

Several people knew of her success by then although she was reticent about it. But we spoke of it anyhow. “Bring me more like him,” she said, laughing, “so I can have a dozen houses in Forbes Park.”

“And how is your house there?”

She was all seriousness again. “No addresses, no telephone numbers …”

“Ermi — still mistrusting men. Even me after all this time. I don’t even know your family name and Didi’s so loyal, she refuses to give it. Don’t I deserve some trust?”

She smiled, her even teeth flashing. “Yes, Roly,” she said, pressing my hand. “I think you deserve some trust. My family name is Rojo.”

How could anyone miss that? The Rojos were extremely wealthy, an old Ermita family. Their original wealth in land had since the end of World War II been diversified into banking, manufacturing …

“I know what you are thinking,” she added quickly. “Not that clan of Rojo. I am not even a poor cousin.”

“Was the poor one,” I corrected her. “You are getting rich now.”

I was not going to be a judge of her morals. I was no missionary out to vanquish sin from the face of Manila. Still, I said, “When are you going to retire? You can do that now, you know. I hear that the Great Leader gave you blue chip stocks in those companies that have investments in his country.”

“Retire? There are still many good years ahead of me. Not while I can command a good price …”

I was shocked at the revelation of her vaulting ambition, her greed. I should have loathed her or, knowing what kind of a person she was, I should have realized the futility of any personal attachment, the impossibility of its maturing into something warm, human, enduring. By then, I had known a bit of the prostitute’s psychology, the ruthlessness which marked her relationship with men, but I ignored these.

The revelation came slowly and when it finally became clear like sunrise, it seared me — the knowledge that I cared for her, that I wanted her to leave her kind of life. I was not going to tell her how I felt …

“Just remember this,” I said instead. “In a world grown dark with deceit there are many who are blinded and few who can hold up a light so that we can see the way. More important, so that we can look at ourselves, as well as others, and know how different or similar we are to the herd.”

She was bright with figures but the soft talk of the humanities bored her and I was now talking elusively, because I did not want to call her a prostitute to her face.

“You’re flattering yourself,” she said. “You want to tell me that you are bringing light to dark corners with your kind of truth and that if I see the light, I will change?”

“No,” I said. “That is not what I meant. I know well enough that I am cynical. But I am also religious because I am a sinner. Not many can say this of themselves. I accept certain realities which I cannot change. I am not trying to give you a sermon.”

“But you are, you know,” she said with a turn of the lovely mouth that was almost a sneer. “You’re trying to say that I am not a moral person, that you look down on me and, therefore, I should feel guilty …”

I did not speak; she knew she was right.

“You and your pompous values,” she laughed quietly. “How can you be so dumb. We are not different, we are very much alike. Go before a mirror, Roly. Ask yourself how you have behaved during the last ten years, or even just during the last ten days. We are alike, I repeat. I sell mine — and you — you sell yourself.”

TWO

As Ermi had bitterly suggested, that evening, I went to the mirror — this pallid face, the lines beginning to form around the nose, the wrinkles deepening on the forehead, the graying around the temples more pronounced. I had thought of dyeing my hair but I was just too egoistical to do it, assuring myself that a man is as young as he feels. I asked this man in the mirror, now in the inevitable grasp of middle age, if he was a prostitute, too, and I scanned the bleak terrain of his past, the years with B.G. Collas when he used to sell everything, including soft drinks, with the habiliments of nationalism. So then, Rolando Cruz, Ph.D. in history, do you recall how you composed advertising copy embellished with your knowledge of your country’s past? The hortatory speeches you wrote for corporate and government hierarchs who did not really know, much less believe, what you put in their mouths? I justified these as providing my family a home, a good education for the children, a future that would not be wracked by the dismal insecurity and unhappiness that I had known as a boy.

I was now humbled, devastated even by what Ermi had told me. As my conscience, I must see her again. Now, she was behind my mind, insinuating herself, a nagging, unsettling subconscious. I could not concentrate on what was important at hand. I had a staff of about thirty but I had to read all the final reports and correct them if necessary. I initiated research. My foreign clients wanted background on labor conditions, availability of raw materials, political leaders and options for influencing them, loopholes in government procedures and investment laws, taxes — all the information they needed to make profits without sweating.

What had Ermi cast over me? A net? Perhaps a medieval spell, or an aswang talisman which would cripple me if I did not run or persevere in cutting myself away from all that reminded me of her. This was, of course, impossible. Everywhere I turned were new restaurants, bars, massage parlors which had started to proliferate and, later on, the new hotels.

Indeed, how Ermita had changed! Marcelo H. del Pilar Street — what would that self-effacing, courageous propagandist say now if he saw that the street named after him had become “sin avenue” festooned with the glitter and shine of pick-up bars. My own Mabini, named after that stubborn and unswerving ideologue of the revolution, has become a raucous arcade of souvenir shops and that genre painting for tourists which portrayed the Philippines as a land of pouring sunlight, elegiac harvestime, wide-eyed children and forever enchanting village girls.

Once upon a time, the whole Ermita area was the precinct of the mestizo elite. Plaza Militar and its environs, which I could see from my window, were the compounds of the American aristocracy. These streets were lined with acacias then and behind the high walls of ivy, in the august mansions, was a sybaritic life devoid of the anxieties of colonialism. Then the war came and Ermita was leveled; the mestizos and the colonialists left it to form another ilustrado enclave in a former grassland called Makati. And their abandoned mansions which were spared, now decrepit and ill preserved, had become tawdry love motels.

How could I ignore Ermi? How could I stop breathing? She was now embedded in my mind, a part of me. I could no longer think. My job demanded a mind free from all these impediments that made it impossible to relate cause and effect.

Cause and effect! There was nothing I did which excluded her. If I went to an appointment in the afternoon or in the evening, would it enable me to pass by Camarin so that I could see her before someone took her out? She had by now a good clientele. There were many offers, she told me, to make her a full-time mistress, to be “garaged” as the expression went, but she was familiar with the liabilities that arose from such arrangements. But what really vexed me was the fact that though she could afford to quit, she still persisted.

I started taking meditation lessons. Indeed, after a half hour of contemplating my feet, my mind would be rid of junk and all thoughts of Ermi that bedeviled me. But only for a while. Soon enough she intruded again. I realized then that I would have to leave Manila — even just for a few weeks — time enough to flee the single subject that had begun to canker me.

The first stop was Honolulu. Lolling on the beach at Ala Moana enabled me to think soberly not only of her but of Manila. It was beginning to wobble under the accretion of ancient problems, a radicalized youth movement battering at the hoary walls of privilege, including the multinationals which I represented and defended. I had sympathized with the demands for change but my bread did not come from kids who massed at the American embassy and rampaged in the streets of Ermita, smashing shop windows and splattering their vaulting slogans on the walls.

I had brought my notes on sexuality and began to work on them, particularly those about the lesbians and transvestites with whom Didi had put me in touch. I was amused, remembering an “international fashion show” by the transvestites at a UN Avenue auditorium the week I left. They were all dolled up and even under those lights, no one would have thought they were men.

Honolulu was, of course, wide open to the changes in sexual mores that had transformed much of American society, perhaps fundamentally. More so was San Francisco which had become the gay capital of America. But my interests were centered on home. America eddied around me, distant, impermeable. I was not involved.

A month in the United States, a month in South America which pitched me up the heights of Machu Picchu, and also one month in Europe — with the exotic food, one-night stands — and I instead — continued to marvel at what had happened in Manila. Had I procrastinated, I would have been enslaved by emotions I could no longer control. Now, I wanted to find something I could latch on to, not just history which had fired me in the past, but something equally immaterial, some ideal that would sustain me in this solitary middle age.

The pleasant deviations in New York, the cherry stone clams at Nathan’s, the juiciest steaks at Gallaghers, all the sensual pleasures of Babylon did not, however, waylay memory. I had hoped it would be easy to forget Ermi but the distance only served to heighten my loneliness, my desire to be with her again. What did I recall of our talks? She did tell me she was good at math. Yes, she loved chocolates although sometimes too lazy even just to take the tinsel wrapping off Hershey’s Kisses before putting them into her mouth. I began to suspect that, perhaps, I was a masochist, that I was getting satisfaction from the agony that I was undergoing. It was when I slept that I should have had some peace but she obtruded in my dreams.

Then, the three months were over. Back in Manila, I wanted to rush to Camarin but I must test my will. For weeks I did not go although twice in that period, one of my staffers called up Didi for her girls. In the third week, my determination collapsed.

Didi was at her usual table and she asked why I had kept away so long. A business trip, I explained. And Ermi?

“She left about two weeks ago,” she said.

I regretted my foolishness. I damned myself.

“For the United States,” Didi continued. “You must have missed her a lot.”

I nodded. “Will she stay there long?”

“Maybe two months, maybe two years.”

It was just as well then, I consoled myself. Her protracted absence, about which I could do nothing, would be my final cure.

Martial law came and for the first time in my operation, everything went awry as the rules were changed. The media targets were more easily defined for there was no longer a free press and all the owners of media were either friends or relatives of the occupant of Malacañang. Gathering economic data was both easy and difficult. All that one had to know was the pattern of new elite relationships, the regions where the entrepreneurs came from. But now, government information sources were very secretive and what were once normal public documents were regarded as state secrets. One clear pattern emerged — the centralization of corruption and a thrust towards the building of infrastructures for export that depressed wages and gave new and dazzling capital sources to a favored few. I had heavily invested in the construction of a modest office building in Makati and put money in blue chip stocks. I was a segurista—I was not going to gamble with the little money I had made. Although more multinationals were coming, there was much less work for us now and I was forced to let some of my top people go along with a third of the work force. I also had to sell the office building to meet not just current obligations but the growing inflation. My mistake was not in forging the right connections early enough. In retrospect, even if I had, I would not have been able to do much for I was never really that close to the new oligarchs. They set up a similar company which naturally got all the new businesses plus a lot of what I used to have.

I should not complain too much; I was not badly off in the end, unlike some of my friends in media who lost their franchises, their newspapers and the positions of prestige they once held.

I was soon to see some acquaintances who were virtual paupers in 1966 become multimillionaires in 1976, with newspapers, ranches in Mindoro and timberlands in Palawan, all of them rich enough to buy majority holdings in established companies which the new dispensation wanted to take over.

How easily fortunes have changed, I thought, even for Ermi who had disappeared in the gilded vastness of America. I sometimes called Didi to ask if she had returned, only to learn that she never even sent a card to her madam. Perhaps, by now, she had dropped out of the trade; perhaps I would never see her again. I thought that time and distance would obliterate memories of her; these were the simplest tools with which to drain or cleanse the mind. But these were not enough.

It was a warm March afternoon and I was browsing in my favorite bookshop on Padre Faura when I sensed, when I knew, she was there. She did not see me at the far corner, among the history books, but I saw her at once. Now I realized with a pang both of sorrow and exaltation that I had never stopped caring. I crouched low before the Philippine shelves and moved towards the Asian shelves so I could have a better look. She was going through the samples of wrapping paper for which the bookshop was noted and was admiring a sheet with a big cartoon rendition of an elephant. She was in a green print dress with small yellow flowers, her hair almost brownish in the light. She had slimmed, perhaps by ten pounds. I have never been fond of voluptuous women anyway, leaving those to Rubens or Boticelli. Looking at her, how could I keep away? How could I deny myself again? To be with her was a compulsion, a mesmeric force. The moth flew at the flame.

She was asking the salesgirl how much the sheet cost. I stood up then and went to her, my heart thrashing wildly, my throat as dry as a riverbed in April. I did not speak. She turned, recognized me at once.

“Roly, this is a surprise …”

“I am here almost every Saturday afternoon,” I said. “I live close by.”

“I have not forgotten.”

I asked where she was going from the bookshop. She was evasive as usual. I must not lose track of her ever again so I asked if I could take her home but she said no — no one ever took her home.

“I’d like to be your friend, Ermi,” I said. I had told her that once before and she had said it was impossible for a man to be a real friend of a woman like her. That friendship would surely end in bed and the relationship would then be irrevocably altered.

She smiled and shook her head.

“Please, I would like to see you again.”

“You can always get in touch with me at Camarin.”

I was surprised; I had thought she had given up the trade.

“No, I would like to take you out. Tomorrow, Sunday. Anytime you want, anywhere you please …”

I went out with her to the street. Her manner was abrupt. “Don’t follow me,” she said. “I have an appointment. But tomorrow …” She seemed to give the idea some thought. “Ten o’clock at the east entrance to Rustan’s in Cubao. Do you know the place?”

I nodded. She shook my hand then turned towards Mabini where she hailed a cab.

Ten o’clock. The night before, I barely slept thinking how it would be, the important things I would tell her. She was prompt. She was in blue jeans and a white blouse with red flowers, her face lightly made up. The day was unusually muggy and warm and was, so I learned the day after, the hottest day of the year. Her brow was moist so I let her use my handkerchief.

“Let’s go see a movie,” she said tentatively. “But I can see one any time. Why don’t we go somewhere else instead?”

My whole day was for her. “Let’s go to Calamba,” I said.

She did not know much about Rizal or his novels, and she had not even visited Fort Santiago though she had lived in Manila much of her life.

“Shame on you,” I said. “You have no sense of history.”

“The past be damned,” she said with a viciousness which surprised me.

I asked why she chose Cubao as our meeting place and she said she lived in the area.

“And what about your house in Forbes Park?”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “How can I ever live there? I am renting the house out and I have bought a much smaller one.”

I knew then that she would not end up selling sweepstakes tickets and said so.

“And what makes you think that I will end up that way?”

“Many of the girls do,” I said. “You are good for only a few years. Then you start getting old, wrinkles on the face, the breasts sag. It is then that you get loved for what you are … if you are loved.”

She was silent and that was when I said: “You will find that it will only be one man who will care for you then.”

She did not speak, as if she did not hear.

“Ermi,” I said, “before you left, I almost went crazy over you. I went away, too, for three months. What did you do in the States?”

“I saw my mother,” she said quickly. It was the first thing about her life which she had told me.

“Tell me about her.”

Her eyes were imploring. “Roly, please don’t ask questions about my family, my past. I don’t want to talk about them. It hurts, just remembering …”

I did not ask her again.

“I have had many nasty experiences,” she said. “I don’t want them repeated.”

“I promise not to embarrass you.”

“I know that. But in the future, I am sure to meet these men again and there will be phony explanations to make.”

“I am not ashamed to be seen with you,” I said and meant it.

She pinched my arm. We were now on the highway to Calamba, bright and wide and hot. “I am sorry,” I said. “This ten-year-old Mercedes is not air-conditioned. I am not rich and martial law has been very unkind to me.”

“You need not apologize,” she said. “Just don’t take me to those ritzy places where there are many people. I am ill at ease there. I would rather go out at night, with no one seeing me, knowing me. I am tired having to look down, always avoiding the eyes of people.”

It all came back, the darkness being kind, hiding as it does almost everyone. I never knew and perhaps will never know what got her started in Camarin. But I do know that if money was the reason for her having started, it was not valid now as the cause for her return. “I am disturbed but glad because I can see you again. Why did you go back, Ermi? I thought that with your success with the Great Leader, the house in Forbes Park …”

“Are you going to give me a sermon again?”

“You are too old for that and I am too tired to give one. Besides, who am I to make judgments?”

“But you don’t approve of my going back, I know. Well, no one forced me in the beginning. And no one forced me to return, if that is what you want to know. I did it by myself.”

I told her that relationships in Camarin had a certain attraction, a magnetic pull to those who were there. Friendships, very strong bonds at that, were created. Her return was certainly welcomed by the girls there for it confirmed, it justified them.

“You are right,” she said. “But it was still my decision and I am answerable to no one but myself.”

The old highway was clogged with traffic and in the midday heat, she looked fatigued. I was relieved when we reached Calamba and parked in the acacia-shaded yard of the church where we went before visiting the old Rizal house. I told her about the ilustrados and Rizal’s Sisa and her two sons. The old house, how it was designed and maintained, fascinated her. She marveled at the number of fruit trees in the yard. She was interested in house-plants and on the way back, we stopped on the highway and I bought her a potted palmetto which I placed in the back of the car.

It was almost four in the afternoon and still hot. “I can drop you off in Cubao where you can get a taxi,” I said. “I know you don’t want me to bring you to your gate.”

She was quiet again for a time. We were now in Cubao and I turned to the right, to the Farmers Market parking area.

“You can take me home,” she said. “But promise not to get out of the car when we get there.”

Her house was in a small side street. It had high walls and a black, iron gate with a lock. She had a key and in a while, a boy came out and took the plant. I caught a glimpse of her bungalow and its yard green with plants.

“When will I see you again?”

“Next Sunday, late in the afternoon, if you are free,” she said. “I want to see Fort Santiago.”

I returned to Mabini convinced that I could not now free myself of her. Now, I wanted a definition of love not circumscribed by the sexual act for it had become mundane, a commerce bereft of those nuances for which a man would commit murder or suicide. Copulation was no longer an expression of love. While it was not sordid, it had become a measure of one’s wealth. The more I needed it, the more I had to pay. With Ermi, how then should I express myself? There are, of course, more profound ways of saying it, the immersion of the self in compassion. Love which is true after all demands no rewards, no favors. How easily I understood now that it is better to give than to receive.

But what could I give her? It was money she wanted most, which led her to Camarin and that commodity was not now easily available to me.

I took her to the old fort that Sunday evening shortly after nightfall. The walls were bathed with light and in the expanse before the entrance were people enjoying the cool night air. Some excavation was being done where the old moat was and they had dug up World War II relics, helmets of Japanese soldiers, bones. The Rizal cell was closed so we meandered to the top of the fort where I showed her the section of the Pasig where the galleons used to set sail for Acapulco. I pointed out the old Parian across the river and close by, the landmarks of Spanish sovereignty, the Manila Cathedral, the Archbishop’s Palace, the Ayuntamiento—where these used to stand. Then we went down the broad stone steps to where this solitary cross stands, a marker for the hundreds of Filipinos who were killed by the Japanese in the fort. She read the inscription intently and for a time, seemed engrossed in her own thoughts, then she asked, “Were the Japanese really all that bad during the war?”

Her question startled me. I had thought all along that Japanese brutality in World War II was taken for granted. But she was not old enough to have known the Occupation so I told her how it was, my own experiences, the campaign against Yamashita. Quickly, it came hurtling back, those iron cold, rainy nights in the mountains beyond Kiangan, the ribbons of mist that clung to the floor of the valleys in the mornings, and the Japanese — cornered, starved, demoralized — but still fighting viciously where we found them.

It was now thirty years after Yamashita had surrendered but the Japanese never really lost that war. They are back in full force, with their transistors, their lusts. And what had happened to the brave men who had stood up to them once upon a time? The survivors have all become obsequious clerks, and I was among them.

I almost did not get out of that valley; one night, they came down the mountain, slithering on the grass and tossing grenades all over the place. “I was lucky,” I said aloud. “Thanks to an old forty-five which I still keep …”

I’ve had this unlicensed gun for years and almost shot an American advertising client with it. When martial law was declared and the government demanded the surrender of all guns of high caliber, I hid it instead in a more secure place — under the panel, close to the floor, of my bookshelf.

“Now, you know it,” I told her. “I hope you will not report me to the Constabulary.”

“I can blackmail you,” she said brightly. Then her face clouded and she seemed pensive. “Each one of your generation seems to have a Japanese horror story,” she said. “Will you believe it, will you be horrified if I told you that my father was a Japanese soldier?”

I gazed at the bright brown eyes, the serene face, and briefly, there came to mind, the faces of the Japanese dead which we had left at the Pass, their bodies bloated, their uniforms rotted. I remembered, too, the neatly uniformed officers — in gold braid, swords by their sides, brown leather boots shiny in the sun — and here she was, claiming kinship with them. If this was 1945, I don’t know how I would have reacted — perhaps with more than loathing. But this was 1974—and for many of us, the war was no more than a memory. What was done was done.

Still, I was more than surprised. “Looking at you, and being with you like this — it is difficult to believe,” I said.

I knew so little of her past and every bit about it that she revealed had an aura of fiction. Could this be one of them? I did not know where she was born, or anything about her education, but because she spoke French and Spanish, I was sure she was not educated in some diploma mill or cheap public school. If her father was a Japanese soldier, how come then that her family was Rojo, not Yamamoto or some such? However, I had no choice but to believe her for I was certain she was not lying or making up a story.

On our way out, we passed couples necking in the dark, behind abutments in the old wall, on the grass, almost everywhere and she said it was the first time she had seen such sights.

“They have no money,” I said. “Perhaps, they are students or office workers. If they had money, they would go to the motels.”

“Would you like to take me to one?” she asked, holding on to my arm.

“Of course,” I said. “But I cannot afford you. Only my clients can and they can write it off their income tax as entertainment. I am heavily in debt.”

“Coward,” she whispered as she pulled me to an empty bench near the fountain. And it was then that she asked, “Roly, do I look like a prostitute?”

It was a question I least expected from her, this girl who was brash, who was rich now and who made playthings of men. She had always dressed with simplicity, she was bright, she talked intelligently. It was an instant wherein her life, the sorrow she had to bear, suddenly became luminous and clear. I wanted to embrace her, protect her; it was a feeling completely shorn of desire. It was truly, sincerely love.

“No, Ermi,” I said. “You don’t look like a whore. You will make a man very happy one day …”

“I want to get out,” she said. “Start a new life. I know how to cook a bit, and bake. One day, you should taste my chocolate cake. It is my favorite. I will open a small restaurant, I don’t know where. I will make a different kind of living.”

Her dream gladdened me. She had a future mapped out and it would not be in Ermita. She had started there, she would not end there. I had talked with bar girls, sauna parlor attendants along M.H. del Pilar Street and all of them went into prostitution with the same squalid story, of having been left by their husbands or boyfriends to care for their babies, of having to support brothers and sisters or parents who were no longer capable of earning a living. There was no one I met who went into the trade out of a strong psychological need or for the love of sensuality itself.

I returned to Padre Faura and bought a dozen cookbooks, the best recipes as concocted by the outstanding chefs of Europe. I also got books on how to make canapés, desserts, salads. Now, all she needed for her restaurant was the staff. I was sure that she already had the money to start a modest one. I drove over to Cubao with the bundle and knocked on the iron gate. Her maid recognized me and opened it. I did not linger as if waiting for an invitation to come in.

That night, while I was working on my notes on sexuality in our folk songs, the phone rang.

“Thank you for the books,” Ermi said gaily. “When I start that restaurant, you will be my official taster.”

“Thanks for the job,” I said. “I wish you would assign me something less meaningful. After all, I cannot be your sugar daddy …”

Before Christmas that year, there was another influx of inquiries from American financing institutions and one of my visitors included Andrew Meadows from Atlanta, a clean-cut type with teeth good enough for a toothpaste ad, and reddish hair. He was in his late forties. One evening, while we were having dinner at Bon Vivant in Ermita, he was musing aloud about how he was put off by one of the girls he had brought to his room at the Hilton. That same evening, I sent him to Camarin. It was obvious that he was extremely pleased after the Camarin introductions for he never bothered me again about his asinine evenings.

We did talk, however, about how different Filipino hookers were compared to those in the United States. “There is always something very feminine about them,” he said. “Most of those in America are just plain hustlers. They never give men a chance at either illusion or romance …”

He was also amused by the government campaign against “indecent” publications, pornographic movies which were really tame compared to what was shown in New York. And it struck him as outrageously foolish — having to blot out the shapes of guns, knives and other weapons in movie ads when these were recognizable anyway. I told him such campaigns were often a camouflage for the insincerity and insecurity of our highest officials. We have always been earthy like all people in feudal, agrarian societies. We who are close to the land regard sex and procreation as natural as eating. Take any village boy; he will recite limericks that are obscene by middle-class standards. All the folk songs I learned when I was young were obscene but no one objected to them, least of all government officials.

In prewar Manila, the highest officials lived graciously, visiting houses of pleasure that offered them relaxation otherwise not available in their own bedrooms.

There is something revolting about photographs of people doing what they should in the privacy of their bedrooms. What is objectionable is not a matter of morality but of taste and, in this sense, the public display of private parts and functions. Magazines like Playboy are sold openly in Manila’s plush hotels, in Angeles. Porno shops in Tokyo, London, in Scandinavia and, of course, New York’s Forty-second Street operate for adults. They are seen not as evil but as aesthetic nuisances which, in truth, they are.

The obscenities in this country are not girls like Ermi, either. It is the poverty which is obscene, and the criminal irresponsibility of the leaders who made this poverty a deadening reality. The obscenities in this country are the palaces of the rich, the new hotels made at the expense of the people, the hospitals where the poor die when they get sick because they don’t have the money either for medicines or services. It is only in this light that the real definition of obscenity should be made. There is so much dishonesty today, not just in government but in business. Perhaps, sex is the only honest thing left.

I believed in these conclusions but, looking back, I realized that I had not really done anything to buttress my thinking with action. I served the Establishment, the multinationals — promoted their welfare, and they held no responsibilities at all towards the banishment of our poverty. They were here to make money and nothing else. It was to their advantage that we remained poor, but since I was working for them, I had become comfortable.

In any case, I finally had three thousand pesos. I missed a few luncheon dates, scrimped on supplies, cut corners. I had a meeting in Baguio and I asked Ermi to go with me. “It will cost you a little bit,” she said, half mockingly.

I seldom drove to Baguio by then not only because the price of gasoline had soared but because I no longer trusted the old Mercedes to go that far without breaking down. She had told me that she would be at the bus station at seven-thirty and it was the longest thirty minutes of my life, waiting in that narrow room. She did not arrive and ruefully I went up the bus alone. When I arrived at the Pines that afternoon, the first thing I did was to place a call to her house — something I never did before because she told me never to call the number which I had inveigled from Didi.

“I overslept, Roly,” she said apologetically.

“Can you catch the three o’clock bus this afternoon?” I asked. “I will be at the station to meet you.”

“I will be there.”

It was only seven but I was already at the station, braced by the coolness of the mountains. What had attracted me to Ermi? I had asked this of myself every so often. Perhaps, it was her eyes — vibrant and clear and yet holding so much melancholy. I prided myself in the magnitude of my experience. I had told her that it was just as well that I was emotionally and intellectually mature so I could accept the reality of what she was. But if I had been twenty or so, without the understanding which only age and experience can create, I would probably have gone mad just thinking about the men she had. Or, being unable to accept this, I would probably commit suicide.

It began to drizzle; waiting for her in the rain-washed station, these thoughts rankled again. Then it was eight and still no bus. I began to wonder, a clamminess in my hands even as I crossed my fingers. Had the bus fallen off one of those ravines? Had she taken it at all? Other buses arrived, their headlights bright on the pavement, disgorging their passengers into the night. One finally drew in. I saw her as she came down, trim in her blue jeans and white silk blouse, her plastic high-heeled shoes gleaming momentarily in the glare of headlights. She held on to me with the cozy familiarity of a wife and we walked to the Pines close by. She just had an overnight bag which contained an extra pair of jeans, a couple of T-shirts and over her shoulder, a brown leatherette jacket.

I was going to take her first to the coffee shop so she could have something warm in her stomach but she said she was full, she had eaten a sandwich in Tarlac and wanted to go to bed immediately because she was tired.

The room had twin beds. I was not too sure that she would want to share a wider bed because I snored, but she would have none of that so I pushed the two beds together. Then she said: “Don’t leave me alone. I am afraid.”

I thought she was just making a professional gesture, a commercial caress, but she added quickly that she could get into a panic in this strange room if left alone. Even as she spoke, she started to breathe heavily. I wondered if she was doing this to turn me into manageable putty in her hands, if there was some reason in her clever mind that I did not know or could not know. I was quite alarmed when she said that if she fainted or went into hysteria, I should give her a glass of water immediately. I held her close, felt her body tremble.

It was sometime before she really calmed down. But by then, she had become sullen. She went to the bathroom and then came out in her pajamas, her breasts showing through the transparent blouse. She sat on the edge of the bed, and did not move. I went to her and explained that I just did not know how to react to her. She just sat there, motionless, a block of wood. Then she turned, a smile breaking on her face, and kissed me.

It was our first and I let it pass like a whiff of wind upon a desert.

“Roly, please don’t think I am trying to be difficult,” she said after a while. “But I am like this — when I am angry, or very sad, or very frightened. I remember, when I was a child, I’d just keep silent when I was angry — and then, everything would turn black. Even now, at home, my family pampers me and everyone tries to protect me. Still, it sometimes happens — and then when I become conscious again, I realize that someone has bitten my thumb to revive me. My thumb would hurt after that. But what can I do? Will you remember that?”

“The world is too much with you,” I said. “I will keep problems away from you … if I can. But remember this: We cannot run away. We have to face them sometime. To live with ourselves …”

She lay beside me, her breathing now quiet and slow, and as she kissed me again on the cheek, somehow, I could not quite forget that I was just another hunk of flesh, no different from all the others who had loved her. I was determined to hold back, not because I did not want to spend the three thousand pesos — she had consented to come and that in itself was a binding contract. But by not possessing her, this was the only way I would be different; I was going to transcend the act which had, to her, become a common-place thing. It was difficult, of course. I desired her, this union, this fullest expression of affection. But what would it do for me?

I recalled a massage parlor attendant I had interviewed much earlier; she was building a house somewhere in Pasay and the house was not yet finished. Looking at the windows that lacked shutters, at the kitchen that still had to be tiled, she had told me that she wondered aloud how many more men she would serve before her house would be finished. I was not going to be either a tile or a shutter in her restaurant. I wanted Ermi to remember me as a man who loved her not with his money, of which I had little, but with his heart.

Perhaps it was masochism as well. I asked her to tell me about the lovers she remembered best and she started talking breezily about them. There was one customer she pitied afterwards for he had spent a sizable sum on her. His wife had hired a detective to trail him and succeeded in producing some photographs of Ermi getting into his car. The wife knew where they usually met and she went there ahead of her husband and talked with her, begged her rather to set him free. “Which I did,” Ermi said proudly, “but only because his wife was so nice and decent about it all …”

By midnight, we had not yet made love. Her head nestled in the crook of my arm and the warmth of her nearness drugged me into blissful silence. Then she said it, without warning, without the pretense that must have always accompanied her behavior with men. “I am so unhappy, Roly. Sometimes, I just sit by myself, wondering how I got into this …”

I gazed at the lustrous eyes, the finely molded face, the lips slightly parted. I never knew her as she was now, the belligerence drained from her, the mask finally torn away. At last she was herself, insecure and, I think, wracked by feelings of guilt. She was being honest with me the way I was always honest with her. I had told her of my unhappy childhood, which I never told anyone, the detestable things I had to do to make a comfortable living. I had also told her that if she could not love me, she could, at least, trust me. Did she trust me now? And why should she when I was a man of words? When I had used words as a veneer — shiny and brimming with guile — while underneath them was the dark intent?

I wanted to comfort her, to let her know that if all others would condemn her, I would not.

I had never expected a moment like this when it would come easily to me, the capacity to give shape to this seeking. I uttered the words hoarsely, surprised that I said them at all, that I meant them, that this woman whose body belonged to everyone who could afford it would now be the object of my faith.

“Ermi, I love you.”

I was sincere and knowing this sent a cold chill to my marrow. What has happened to me? Had I, in this one moment, forgotten what she was?

She did not stir; she seemed lost in some limbo.

“Ermi, I love you.”

She sighed. She had heard the words all too often and they must have lost their meaning. Turning, she kissed me on the chin. The gloom in her face vanished and in its place, this glow of contentment. Somehow, I had succeeded.

“Bola,” she said, smiling.

“With your experience, you know it is not bull.”

She did not speak for some time. “I have never loved anyone,” she said finally.

“I don’t expect anything from you,” I said. It would be that way. “I am not young anymore. I am not rich, I cannot give you anything. I am not handsome …”

“I was never impressed by handsome men,” she said pinching my shoulder. It had become a habit with her and though it hurt a bit, I let her.

“All that I am, all that I can give — it’s like rain fallen on stone.”

She did not understand, she asked me to explain.

“Rain which falls on the ground, on the parched earth, brings life. The seeds grow into plants, into harvests. But not rain which falls on stone. Nothing grows on it.”

She kissed me again, a wet kiss and I wondered about all the men to whom she had given that token of affection.

“You are my precious piece of rock,” I said. “But have you heard of the Chinese water torture?”

She was now an avid listener. “No, tell me.”

“Well, water has power, too. The Grand Canyon — you must have also seen those seashores with the stone cut and polished by the constant battering of waves. Erosion. Right on Kennon Road — those big rocks cut by water …”

“The Chinese water torture, does it operate on the same principle?”

“They strap a man to a seat and directly above him there is this pail of water with a tiny hole. Water drips slowly, drop by drop, on the man’s head, on the same spot …”

“It would take ages for that kind of water to break his skull,” she said.

“It is not that way,” I explained. “The drops come slowly, they make a sound inside the man’s brain. He waits for them. Waiting is agony, and when the next drop comes, it is an explosion which gets louder, louder, louder. He is driven insane …”

“Is that what you will do to me?”

“This does not work on stone,” I said.

She was surprised, of course, when I really refused to touch her.

For a moment, perhaps she suspected that I was impotent had she not felt a stirring in my loins when her hand had wandered there. I assured her I would not cheat her of her money and she laughed at this. Then turning on her side, she was soon breathing deeply, and then she snored, too, lightly.

THREE

The mountain cold seeped through the shuttered windows and she snuggled closer. Through stretches of wakefulness, I watched her face in repose; looking at her quiet in sleep, I felt all desire ebb away and in its place this ineffable tenderness. I wanted to enfold her, to shield her from the ignominy that we both knew. I had never experienced this feeling before; it warmed me, filled me with wonder, a strength to do anything to give her joy, to protect her — yes, except how could I protect her from herself?

Once during the night, she roused me with her mumbling. She was moaning softly. I woke her up. “Ermi, is something the matter?”

Her eyes opened and they were frightened. Her arms shot up as if to defend herself and she said aloud, “Don’t — don’t!” then she realized that it was me.

“I was having a bad dream,” she said, her arms now tight around me. “I feel so weak …” For some time, she just lay beside me breathing softly, her eyelids fluttering. I held her hand and found her pulse beating very fast. “I am all right,” she assured me. “I was being pushed off a cliff — and I was fighting back.”

It was almost daybreak, mayas were chirping on the sill outside, and she slept a little more. The best time to look at a woman, to find the truth about her inner beauty, is in the morning when she wakes up. Ermi’s face, even with the wash of sleep, was appealing in its simplicity.

We breakfasted in our room — fried rice, eggs, ham, coffee and a slice of papaya. Then we went out to buy her a pair of walking shoes. Her high heels were not made for the inclines of Baguio. She bought a bunch of bananas — their skins clear yellow and untarnished. “They are so pretty,” she said. “I will just look at them first.” I also bought her a rattan shoulder bag. After the market we did Mines View Park, Burnham, the souvenir shops. I took pictures of her all the way but she insisted that I give her the film when the roll was finished, which I did.

There was a carnival on the grounds of the Pines and we lingered there on our last night. It was brightly lit, throbbing with music, but there were so few people, it was pathetic. It was, after all, the last days of the dry season and Baguio would soon be bereft of vacationing crowds. She tried her hand at the darts and then at a shooting gallery and was rewarded with two small packets of mentholated candy. Above us, the Ferris wheel was still but there were people at the roller coaster which had started and was soon clattering noisily above us. “I am scared of that,” she said. “In Manila, when I first took a ride in it, I screamed and ordered it stopped …”

We talked again till past midnight. I was now sure that it was I who was in a roller coaster, that there was no stopping the ride, and that in the end, it would not ease down but zoom up instead into that gray, terrifying space from where there can be no returning.

She was in my arms again, her hair upon my face. She always turned away after a prolonged kiss and I suspected it was my breath she did not like. This time, I held her face and probed her mouth. She did not open it.

“For whom are you reserving it?” I asked.

“You are too much,” she said, sticking out her tongue at last. The taste was of honey salt. “There,” she said. I looked at her eyes that had dredged from me my deepest secrets, my regard for myself and I realized that with her, I was shorn of armor and shield. I did not know till then how vulnerable I had become and I was afraid lest she take advantage of me.

We had begun, surely there must be an ending as well. “Ermi,” I said softly, “please don’t make a plaything out of me. Should there come a time very soon when you don’t want to see me anymore, just say so. I will stay away.”

“What are you saying?” she asked.

“With you, I have no pride,” I said. “It seems as if I had given you a knife and said, kill me. If that time comes, please make it swift.”

“This is all very melodramatic,” she said. “But it never entered my mind.”

I bent over and kissed the line of her neck, her breasts.

“Thank you,” I murmured.

“What for?”

“For being kind.”

“That is not difficult to do,” she said. “Now, shall we make love?”

I looked lingeringly at her. I shook my head.

She raised herself on her elbows, hugged me and whispered, “Thank you.”

After breakfast in our room, I got her bag from the dresser and placed the envelope in it. “What is that?” she asked.

“My contribution to your restaurant.”

She took the envelope and gave it back. “But we didn’t do it,” she said. “You don’t owe me anything.”

“But I do,” I insisted. “You gave me two nights.”

“I had free lodging. I did some sight-seeing and had one of the most engaging conversations in my life. No, you don’t have to give me anything.”

“If I did not do it, it was not your fault.”

She grinned and pinched me. “All right then,” she said, “if you want your guilt feelings eased.” She tore the envelope open, picked out a few hundred pesos bills without counting them, and placed them in her bag.

My first meeting was to be in the evening. There was time for me to go to Manila with her then return to Baguio.

“You don’t have to. It is such a tedious trip.”

“I want this suffering,” I said, shushing her.

We sat together in the bus and on occasion, her hand would rest on my thigh or she would hold my hand as we talked. As in the night when she arrived, the first rains of May were upon the land. They came in sheets over the plains of Pangasinan that had started to green. “See what rain does to a land that is parched,” I said.

She pressed my hand.

“You make plants grow,” I said. “When your gate opened, I caught a glimpse of your lawn — the plants looked very healthy.”

“I love gardening,” she said.

I remembered the people in her house. “Who are those living with you? Relatives?”

She shook her head. “A driver and his family …”

“But you have no car.”

She smiled again. “No, he stopped driving a long time ago. He is old now. His wife and children — and grandchildren …”

“And you are not related?”

“Not blood relations, but something more real. And there is a girl. She was like me, you know. But she became a drug addict. She has a daughter and she cannot work anymore. She has lost her looks, you know what I mean.”

“And you work for them?”

She did not speak. “They are my family,” she said simply.

“You are a good girl, Ermi.”

“Flattery will get you somewhere,” she said.

After our first weekend in Baguio, I noticed a change in my attitude towards the girls in Camarin. Although I still needed them to service my clients, I dropped Ermi from my list. I still went there and sat with one of the girls for drinks or some banter and though the urge was often strong, I started sublimating it with meditation, with my writing. I no longer brought any of the Camarin girls to my apartment. It was easy for me to understand why; though I never told her, it was my regard for Ermi that inhibited me. I just did not feel right anymore making it with any of them, and not because I had abstained from Ermi, either. Maybe, it was a form of loyalty, and considering Ermi’s work, it could easily be misconstrued as a perversity. I had never believed in man’s monogamous nature and had rather presumed that my sexual needs could never be leashed. Now, I understood how it could be done, without compulsion, not by religious sanctions, not by social constrictions but by that self-willed and strongest bond of all. The knowledge of what love could do gladdened me, surprised me. I was not too old to learn.

The Puesto opened the following year in November. Ermi leased a corner lot on Pasay Avenue, close to Makati. The restaurant was small compared to the plush establishments in the area. Fortunately, the adjoining lot was empty and she promptly rented it for parking. I helped her with suggestions, the decor, how to make good coffee so that people would go there for it and cakes as well. It did not specialize in any particular cuisine. What was offered was almost like home cooking and it could be French, Italian, Chinese, Spanish — whatever was available fresh from the Quezon City markets where she did the shopping herself.

There was nothing pretentious about the Puesto — the tiled front roof, the grilled door, the picture windows which were curtained in the lower portion so that one could have a view of the inside but not of the people eating. The chairs were comfortable, the napkins were of white cloth, the tablecloths in dark red. Ermi’s houseplants were all over the place — trailing lantanas, parlor ivy, orchids — hanging from the ceiling, in corners, lush and jungly in the doorway. They gave the Puesto its ambience. She hired a pretty hostess from the University of the Philippines while she herself sat in the booth near the cashier where she could not readily be seen by the customers but where she had a view of the kitchen around the corner, the small bar, and the counter for cakes and pastries. The baking was done right on the premises and the cooking which she often supervised was in a spotless kitchen that was half exposed to the customers so that they could see the food being prepared through glass panels. Even the comfort room was spotless. She had a passion for cleanliness as she, herself, took good care of her personal hygiene.

The inauguration of the restaurant was very quiet — just me and her “family” whom I met for the first time.

But even after having gone out with her several times, what did I really know about her? That she was born after the war but would not tell me her birthday. That her mother was in America, that her father was a Japanese soldier although there was hardly any trace of Japanese in her features except for her clean, creamy complexion which she could have gotten from her mother. She had a house in Forbes Park which she rented out. She was easily scared and could get hysterical. She had, she said, “executed” all the men who loved her after she had gotten what she wanted or after the affair had become sticky. I had nothing — just memories. She had not given me a copy of the pictures I took of her in Baguio although she showed them to me. It is not that I regretted giving her small things, a box of chocolates, a book of crossword puzzles, or records when I returned from Hong Kong.

I suspected that through the few times that we had been together, she had begun to confide in me. I had tried to learn more about her from Didi but Didi was an impregnable repository of secrets. She was now preparing to immigrate to the United States; she had tired of what she was doing in Camarin but more than that, she was beginning to reel with the onslaught of the malaise that had battered most of us, the dishonesty, the deceit that pervaded public life and business as well. “I gave you her phone number, Roly, something I have never done — and only because I know you love her. What you need to know you must get from her. Is her past really all that important since you love her?”

It was not; I took Ermi as she was.

We went to Baguio again. Now, I felt guilty, using up her time without her profitting from me. I owed her a lot now. I was no different from the traditional tenant farmer, forever indebted to his landlord, a serf who can no longer pay his debts in full no matter how hard he works.

Again, I held back. She was amazed at my self-control; she said no one would believe that we had shared a room just so we could talk. But that was what really happened.

By then, her restaurant was flourishing. I hoped that she had already stopped her kind of living but there were evenings when I dropped by the Puesto and she was not there. When I called up her house, she was not there either. I would then be torn with anxiety, anger even, wondering who had taken her out and to what hotel. She had told me to blot these from my mind and I had tried. God, I really tried but it was not possible.

We were at Mario’s that early evening, this restaurant along Session Road, and she had ordered spaghetti with meat sauce which she liked very much. She was feeling naughty. “Always remember,” she said half seriously, within earshot of the waiter who was showing me the dressings for the chef’s salad, “that I am collecting men, just as you are collecting memories.”

“Even now, you are playing with me,” I said.

She looked at me, the mischief gone from her eyes. “No, Roly,” she said. “I am not playing with you.”

“How long has it been?” I asked myself rather than her. “There is no waking hour that you are not in my mind — during the day, even when I am engrossed in my work, and at night when I am in bed. All of a sudden, you are there and when I close my eyes, I can see you.” There was another thought which riled but I did not want to plead or beg. “So, when my time comes, let me prepare the coffin at least …”

She looked down and was silent. Close to the window, by the street, a Filipino boy and two American girls were having fun and their laughter seemed to fill the whole restaurant. When Ermi raised her head again, she looked at me and in the flicker of that single candlelight, her face was all seriousness. “I think of you a lot,” she mumbled and then, as if disturbed by her confession, she started working the spaghetti into her fork and shook her head slowly as if she wanted to deny what she had just uttered.

It was more than I had asked or hoped for. It seemed as if in that tenuous instant, all the burdens that had weighed me down were finally lifted. In the many times that we had talked, she had always been this solid rock, an enigma, and there was so little of her thoughts that I could divine, the real feelings that moved her. Was she finally thawing to become the woman I coveted and not the Ermi who was sought after by everyone at Camarin? I was in a state of euphoria, eating my salad without really tasting it, when a man walked to our table.

“Ermi,” he greeted her, holding her shoulder, all attention on her as if I did not exist. “Fancy seeing you here.”

She turned to me. “This is Andy Meadows, Roly.”

Andy glanced at me and grinned. “We have met,” he said, winking. I stood up and shook his hand. He was at ease in the heavy army jacket he was wearing. More niceties, he would like to join us but a couple of his business associates were coming. When he finally left to take a table close to the window, Ermi said simply, “He has proposed to me …”

It was difficult for me to believe it, but then, Americans are romantic and are capable of such things. “What do you know of him?” I asked.

She smiled but did not reply.

“Do you think he is serious?”

“I can take care of myself,” she said brightly. “No one — and absolutely no one — can make a plaything of me.” She had perhaps noted the belligerence in my voice. “Besides, you are jealous.”

“The hell I am,” I said. “And it was I — of all people, who sent him to Camarin. Will you accept him?”

Her hand slipped up my thigh and she pinched me. “It is a very tempting offer and it is difficult to resist. But I don’t know.”

That same week, I called Steve Williams in New York and asked him to run a check on Andrew Meadows. It would cost a bit but to me it was important. By the end of January, the report arrived by airmail — a manila envelope thick with information. Ermi received the news with alacrity; in an hour, she was in my apartment. I handed her the folder which I had already gone through and she dug into it avidly. She started with the curriculum vitae, then the other bits of information, copies of press clippings, some duplicate photographs including that of his wife who had just divorced him. Sometimes, as she read, a smile would wreath her face and she would exclaim, “Why — the son of a bitch, he did not tell me this …” Or, “Ha! So that is the way it is …”

Andrew Meadows was genuine and I was happy for Ermi that she had finally found a man who wanted to marry her. Still, I had to be sure so I asked her, “Does he really know — I mean, your past?”

She laughed, a throaty kind of laughter that was almost gloating. She confirmed it, that even with her successful restaurant, she was still whoring.

“Isn’t that restaurant enough? Have you become so greedy that even with a business that is already making money, you still go into this?”

She jabbed a finger at me. “You really don’t understand,” her voice leaped. “What difference does it make now if I continued or stopped? People will always say, there goes the woman who made a lot of money from that Southeast Asian leader. She now runs a restaurant so men can see her on display and proposition her right there. So, why then shouldn’t I make the most of it?”

Her logic escaped me. I loved her but now I loathed her as well. I decided not to see her again, to leave her to Andrew Meadows and the wrath of heaven. In the office, I had all calls screened and if it was she who called and she did that every day, I was out, in a conference or in Baguio. I did not take calls in the apartment.

It was a miserable, pain-wracked withdrawal.

I had read about alcoholics being wrenched away from the bottle and dried up, how addicts underwent agony after a day without their drugs. I now understood the anguish I had to go through was not so much for my salvation but for hers. I hoped she would get married properly so that she would have a new life, something I could never give her.

The tortured days turned into a week, then two weeks. One evening I jogged needlessly longer than usual at the Luneta, then went to the Sultan in Mabini for a good rubdown. I could hardly keep my eyes open when I reached the apartment.

I did not even remove my jogging shoes; I fell forward on my bed and promptly went to sleep.

The loud banging on the door woke me up. Still sleepy, I staggered to the door. It was the guard downstairs and with him was Ermi. I thanked him but even before I could ask Ermi what brought her to Mabini at this time of night, she had pushed me back to the room.

In the soft light of the lamp in the foyer, her face was ashen and the corners of her mouth curled in anger. “Roly,” she cried. “What are you trying to do?”

I had not thought that my avoiding her, my silence really mattered to her. I shook my head. “I cannot hurt you,” I said. “If I do, as I have always said, it is not intentional.”

“Then, what do you call this? Keeping away from me as if I were a leper? Your office does not give you my calls and look!” She picked up the phone which was disconnected. “You are doing this intentionally. What have I done to you that you should hate me?”

“I want you to have a good life, a good marriage — all the things this little daddy cannot give. Andy has everything.”

She rushed to me, embraced me. “Tonight,” her voice was pleading, “let me stay with you. Please …”

I pushed her gently away, looked into her distraught face. “I don’t have three thousand pesos.”

“Stop it!” I was sure her scream carried through the door and across the hall. “Don’t insult me anymore. Can’t you see what you have done? Are you that blind and selfish?”

I shook my head.

“You condemn me, you look down on me. I am dirt to you. But what wrong have I done, Roly? Have I ever stolen from anyone like those big people whom you know and serve? It is them you should hate and fight — and they are everywhere, robbing the people, self-righteous, honored in the newspapers. I have—”

She did not continue; her eyes suddenly had a blank stare; she swayed and I rushed to her before she could fall.

Her body was rigid now, her arms were cold and I carried her to the bedroom, remembering what she said about going into hysteria. I rushed to the kitchen and got some ice cubes then returned to her, prostrate on my bed. I pressed the ice cubes to her face and slapped her hard once, twice. She finally stirred and when she opened her eyes, it would seem as if a great weight was finally lifted off me and I could breathe the good air again.

She looked at me bending over her and I kissed her mumbling senselessly, “Forgive me, forgive me …” She raised her arms in an embrace, her heart thumping against my chest. I held her tightly now and thanked God for this gift of love.

FOUR

Long afterwards, I lay awake, viewing the rubble of my resolution and how, in the end, I was not more durable or steadfast. It was not that I regretted this union — poignant, quivering in its intensity. Though she never asked me for the money that I should have paid her or even made the slightest hint of it, still, it was in my mind like some fishbone stuck in the throat, at times painful, at times unnoticed but still there. I recalled what she had told me about the men who had showered her with costly gifts. “They all wanted me to fall for them,” she said with cold-blooded detachment, “so that they could have me for free.”

I had enough experience to realize that there was no difference really between commercial sex and what was consummated with a loved one — the orgasm was the same. Still, there was more meaning, more “soul” to a relationship nurtured with affection, familiarity, and sometimes, communion. It was this that I found with Ermi.

I asked her once if she did not feel squeamish with older men and she had said, only if they were not good to her — an ambiguous reply, and I wondered about the depth of her feelings for me which she had kept to herself. I did not expect anything from her, yet I ached to know, to be told that she thought of me a little. I also imagined something pure about my love — an essence, a distillation and now, I was worried that it had been sullied not so much by the physical deed itself but because I needed to know more than ever the answers to the unspoken questions about her sincerity.

We talked till dawn stole through the windows, gleamed on the blue drapes and I could trace the fine contour of her face, the beautiful rise of her breasts. We talked about inchoate feelings, the future that did not hold much. She also admitted that she rarely had an orgasm, no matter how handsome the man, no matter how virile. She said she would not go out again to sell her favors, that although I would not believe her, she had to do this now for herself.

She came to Mabini almost every night after that and sometimes she would stay till morning. One early dawn, we woke up to fire engines wailing in the rain-drenched street below and looking out of the window, we saw our district turning red; the Filipinas Hotel was burning, the flames leaping up the starless sky. Many who were trapped in the building died of asphyxiation. Some jumped out of their windows, some into the pool below. Those who fell into the pool were saved, but many could not jump that far and their battered bodies lined the pool edge. Many of those who died were companions of tourists for the night and about them little was known. Who would miss five dozen prostitutes? They would be nothing but statistics and their relatives might not even go to the authorities to claim their bodies or even identify them.

I would take her out for breakfast at Taza de Oro and on the way, we would meet them — the girls with oversized handbags coming out of the Aurelio, the Bay View and the other hotels in the area where they had spent the night. They would wait for taxis at the hotel fronts, their Japanese companions waving good-bye to them. Pedro at the Taza soon knew what she always ordered, waffles with bacon and a slice of papaya.

Sometimes, she would decide to return to Cubao past midnight and I would drive her there, wait in the car while she fumbled at the gate with her keys. I did not leave till she was safely inside.

I told her of what I learned in one of my trips to Bangkok: how girls from a barren part of that country — the Northeast — went to Bangkok to sell themselves and once they had earned enough money, they would return home to get married, raise a family.

“There is no stigma to them,” I said.

“I wish I were Thai,” she said quietly.

She wanted a baby but was afraid she would not be able to have one anymore. “I will not mind what people will say. I will love him so much he will never regret that I was his mother …”

I asked her if she had such regrets and she told me that all she remembered of her childhood were those days in the orphanage in Quezon City where she grew up. I wanted to know more but she clammed up.

We were in my apartment drinking the coffee that she had brewed that morning. Outside, Ermita was beginning to stir; already the jeepneys were snorting down below the window and farther up the bay, the sun was glinting on the calm, glasslike sea.

“If it is a boy, you will be the godfather.”

“I’d rather be the father,” I said, wondering if there was any man lurking in the shadows about whom I did not know. It had been that way, my mind riled by questions, by doubts. How would one distinguish, for instance, the sincerity of her embrace? She had told me she had faked it many times with her men so how different then was it with me? I wanted to exact from her the promise that she would never leave me although I knew that she would someday. How does one measure truth? There was only one way by which I would be able to know. And I hesitated to tell her for fear that, just by telling her, I would lose her.

“I know some girls in Camarin,” she said. “At the opening of the school year, or when their children get sick, they don’t know what to do.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “This apartment, or this district, is not even the place to rear children. But one thing sure, I will not run away from my responsibilities. I can set up a trust fund for him so that when he grows up, he will not be in want.”

“Replay. That is an old tune,” she said, pinching my arm.

“But it is still true.”

“Think of your own circle, your friends. Oh, I know you mean it and you can live with what I am. But they will sneer at you, your settling down after all these years with a prostitute from Camarin. Do you think you can endure that? And if we go out to some dinner and there is a man, or two men, whom I know, how would you take it?”

I could not answer. It had not occurred to me that she would put it that way, so neatly, so clearly.

“Maybe,” I said, “we can go somewhere and live by ourselves.”

“And how long can that be? We cannot really run away.” I thought that if she were constantly with me, my anxieties would be banished, that her presence would be the balm to ease my mind and I would finally settle into comfortable domesticity. But the new relationship was soon battered and awry. We were both to blame, I guess — she for her volatile temper and hypersensitivity to things I said, and me for my candor and openness. There were now bickerings between us, sometimes bitter and long-drawn. It was better if I kept my mouth taped, afraid that I would say something that would make her cross.

Now her presence seemed unreal; when she was gone, it would seem as if she had not been with me at all. There was no lingering trace of her although I always remembered what she said. I was so insecure with her, I was afraid she would even walk out on me in the middle of the night when she was in one of her unexplainable moods.

During one quarrel I was so exasperated with her tempestuousness, I told her perhaps it was best if she became an actress. We had driven sullenly to Cubao and even when she reached her gate, there was none of the joyous reconciliation that I had expected. I spent the night in turmoil, my chest tightened like a vise, and sleep would not come. I had to see her the following day, wait humbly at her gate till she came out.

Her new belligerence confounded me; I suspected that she did this so that she could dominate me and I took pains explaining to her that our relationship should not be one of superiority or inferiority; I had no intention of changing her personality, I took her for what she was. But even a remark like this was enough to send her into a dark and sulking mood.

Often, in those anxious moments of silence, I raked the past and asked myself what wrong I had done. I searched my conscience — the innermost recesses of myself — and there was nothing I could remember which I did wrong. There was one evening when she simply said it was time for good-bye. She did not want to see me anymore. I was caressing her face when she drew away. I was amassing memories, and God, many of them were bitter. I know that whatever it was I had told her, I was just being myself, I was expressing my nagging fears and nothing else. I concluded then that she was either playing with me or had finally gotten tired because I had nothing to give, nothing but this shriveled self.

We rarely talked about Andrew Meadows now. I knew he would soon leave. Then, by early April, she called and said she wanted me to visit her in Cubao. It was the first time she would let me in, the first man, she said, whom she had ever invited there. We were going to be alone, she was going to send her “family” out to see a movie or to shop at Ali Mall nearby.

She met me gravely at the gate and when a maid lingered, she told her briskly to go out to the garden and water the palmettos, among them, I am sure, the palmetto I had bought for her in Calamba. She was pale and drawn and her eyes seemed glazed. She led me to her house. Though not large it was tastefully decorated. I was happily surprised to see myself everywhere, the knickknacks I had given her, the lacquered trays, the flower vases, the art books. She led me to her bedroom and for a moment, I thought we would make love.

“I am sorry that I had to get you out of your office in the middle of the afternoon,” she said. “But I want you to know — to be the first to know that I have made a decision.”

I thought she had finally decided to live with me.

“I am going to marry Andy,” she said.

The news sank into me with such truculence, my knees felt weak and a deadening sense of loss engulfed me. I had felt this sorrow only once before, when Lydia and the children left me.

I could not speak.

“It is for the best, Roly,” she said. “For both of us. For you … and your morality. It will mean that you are finally free of me. Can’t you see? For me, it will be a beginning …”

“We must live with the past,” I said, suppressing the tremor in my voice.

“I know,” she said. “And we must also forget it. Andy wants to take me to America, make a home for him and raise his children. I saw a gynecologist last week. He said I could still bear half a dozen children if I wanted to. And that is what I will do. I will raise them in a happy home and will love them all I can …”

I pressed her hand. I didn’t want to but I understood.

I remembered when she asked me if she looked like a prostitute and how I felt then, how I wanted to be one with her.

“I wish you the best …” I said, even as tears blurred my eyes. But she did not see them for she embraced me then and started to cry, her heart thrashing against my chest. It was the last time I would hold her.

“All the men I had, the boyfriend-boyfriends, I never felt anything for them. I don’t love Andy, Roly. But perhaps, in time, I will. It was you all the time, the first …”

I tried to push her away, to look at the precious face but she would not let me. My cheeks were soon wet with her crying.

“Can you imagine how long it has been?” she asked. “So now, I know what love is. When you said you wanted a relationship that was not plastic, I did not understand. I do now. I have never apologized to any man. Now, I will say to you—” she kissed me softly—“please forgive me …”

Leaving Cubao at dusk, the heat of April melting my bones, I really had nowhere to go. I was happy for Ermi. Perhaps, this is what love has always been, whether it is for a woman or for a cause — the readiness to give and not ask for anything in return, the unquestioning willingness to lose everything, even if that loss is something as precious as life itself.

“What is death?” she had once asked. “You die once and you will not die again …”

Remembering this, I know how it would be for me. I would return to the old apartment in Mabini and if I could not sleep, I would probably walk over to Camarin. Ralph, the pianist had retired; a son had taken him back to Agusan. Where the piano used to stand they have set up a booth for their stereo system. The bar had deteriorated since Didi migrated to the United States and they no longer had Jack Daniels black. I would probably order a beer and squid roasted in that open grill, then watch Gloria finish her routine. She is buxom like a Rubens girl, she gyrates her hips in a naughty, lascivious way.

After Camarin, I would go to the Luneta and get a bit of salt air in my lungs. I would wait for the night to deepen then return to my apartment and lie down on that wide and empty bed. I would imagine Ermi as it was the night she stormed in. I can still see her even now bending over me, her hair a tumble on my face, her breath warm and sweet. But did she really care? I had asked her to be kind when the moment for my execution came, that she make it swift. I will always languish in her final judgment about how I sold myself. She was right, of course, but it was not just myself that I had sold. And though I will not admit it to anyone, ever, I know that I sold my country, too — I, Rolando Cruz, former guerrilla officer, historian. What have I done to rationalize this treason? They used me — the gnomes of Wall Street and Marunouchi. I did their bidding willingly, eagerly, for I wanted a life that would not be marred by the early hunger that I had known. I had gotten more than food, but now, it was not only Ermi whom I had lost. What will she take of me from this Ermita that had been my perdition and her beginning? I don’t even have her picture. And knowing that what should be must be, I will probably be wracked by this pain which not even morphine can allay, and when it will finally become intolerable, I will probably go to the compartment under my bookshelf, take out the old forty-five kept from my days in Kiangan, then level it at my head.

Baguio, May 29, 1980.