Three Filipino Women (15 page)

“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
 

L
ong 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.”