The war years! How truly memorable they were, not because we suffered—we never did—but because through all those years, my sexual awakening opened up to me a sensual world I would always covet. What are social taboos? They are the absurd and even grotesque creations of society. Look at the Bible—you have everything there: incest, adultery, murder. Does the Bible lose its value because of these depictions? I am not rationalizing my relations with Corito—God knows I love her in the fullest, sincerest measure of the word. Sin is a social definition, not a moral one.

We had a dozen maids, maybe more, of varying ages, from the new addition from the hacienda, this girl Severina, who was sixteen at the time that I was fourteen and a sophomore in high school, to the cook, who was fifty. Severina was very dark when she arrived; I noticed her at once when she served us breakfast for the first time, her slimness, her very good teeth and those big, beautiful eyes. The work in the fields had not only darkened her skin, it had also roughened her hands. But her skin was unblemished and, as I later saw, her thighs were much fairer than her legs.

Severina helped in the kitchen, which meant she had to do the dishwashing, cleaning up and assist in the marketing. Mother actually went to the Quiapo market almost every day in the early days of the war but stopped altogether when transport became difficult, as there was no more gasoline for the cars. We had this dokar, actually a glorified calesa with car tires for wheels and drawn by a pony retired from the Sta. Ana race-track. I often sat beside Severina in the rear, the cook on the other side, when they went to market. I would drop them off in Quiapo first, then proceed to Intramuros. I’d crowd Severina, sit so close to her so that at times my arm would press against her breast. She did not move away.

As the war lengthened, classes became desultory, and I often went home early. I would tarry in the kitchen and talk with Severina as she went about her chores. The cook must have noted my interest but she did not show it. It was only much later that I learned Severina was her niece.

I always felt that I could do anything I pleased with the help. I had seen Mother slap them when they displeased her, and they would whimper, “No, Señora. Yes, Señora.” I had also seen Father kick the tenants in the hacienda and whip them with his riding stick, which he always carried even when he was not riding. So I knew I could also do whatever I wished with Severina.

Although this was how I looked at the help, at that age I nonetheless felt some twinge of conscience perhaps, some uneasy feeling, an awkwardness in the mind, but I couldn’t stop, a compulsion beyond my control dictated my acts.

The first time I called Severina away from her chores, I said any other maid could do what she was doing, I needed her in my room. It was one of those evenings when I was alone in the house. Corito had gone to visit a friend in Malate, and my parents were off at some official function; my father then was a member of the cabinet. Severina was in her white uniform. Although she was older, I was much taller and heavier. I had a tendency toward obesity like my father and mother, but in later years, I took care of that with a regimen of exercise and diet.

I called Severina from the stairs, and as all the help had been instructed, she came immediately. She was in her bare feet; in the house, the servants were not allowed to wear shoes or slippers so that the floor would always be shiny and clean. It was only we who wore shoes.

The moment she got to my room I told her to lock the door. I suppose that, at that instant, she suspected something untoward would happen, for immediately anxiety clouded her face. But lock the door she did, and then she stood there, waiting. I merely looked at her. The chandelier in the ceiling, the reading lamp on my table were switched on. In that brightness, she truly looked pretty, prim even, in her white uniform.

“Take off your clothes, Severina,” I snarled.

She blanched. “No, Señorito,” she said.

I was seated on my bed. I stood up and went to her, trying to manage an angry visage, although, to put it frankly, I was quite nervous. “Take them off or I will beat you.”

She gaped and for a while I thought she would scream, but she didn’t. Then, slowly, she took off her white uniform and, underneath, a white chemise. In those days, girls rarely wore bras. Corito did not, neither did Mother.

Her body, from the breasts down to her thighs, was much fairer than her arms, legs and face, which were exposed to the sun. Her breasts were not large like Corito’s. She stood silently, eyes downcast. She cringed as I approached and tilted her chin so she would look at me. Her eyes were misty.

She wore a necklace—a thin strip of leather from which hung what seemed to be a locket but on closer scrutiny turned out to be a triangular seashell, whitish and smooth, with inscriptions that were not legible.

“It is a charm,” she explained shyly as I started fingering it. “It was given to me by my mother when I was small … to protect me from harm, or evil.…”

“Like me?” I inquired. She did not reply; on her face was this smile, half free.

“No, Señorito,” she whimpered. I fingered her panty.

“Take it off,” I growled, raising my hand as if to strike her. Slowly, she slid it down her legs.

I walked around her slowly, admiring her, comparing her with Corito’s voluptuousness, how slim she was and how little pubic hair she had compared to Corito. After a while, I told her to put her dress on, and this she did hastily. I told her to return to her chores but to slip into my room when everyone in the maids’ quarters was asleep.

At this juncture, may I relate again my grandfather’s sterling legacy to this nation. Some are saying now that he was an operator, that he brokered the Biaknabato agreement between the revolutionaries and the Spanish rulers wherein a lot of money changed hands. The Cobello name is most honorable and I will not permit anyone to tarnish it. Whatever my grandfather did was for a larger cause; why should he be blamed if, in the process, he also profited? Remember that he did not act on his own, that everything he did was approved by a consensus, by the leaders of the revolution itself. This is not clearly mentioned in the history books. From what I remember of the old man, he was at heart a democrat, not an autocrat like my father or, if you will, like myself.

He had prescience—his eyes focused on the future while his feet were firmly planted on the ground. He never foreswore his Spanishness, but he quickly learned the language of the Americans, much of it self-taught, and thereby placed himself on a plateau far above the other ilustrados who didn’t know English and couldn’t talk with the new hierarchs. The acquisition of a new language is the acquisition of the power to communicate—so inordinately basic—and those who had limited themselves to Spanish found themselves isolated, frustrated, when the Spaniards left. As writers, Rizal and Mabini saw early enough the creeping dominance of English, which was to continue far into the future, and all those noisy Tagalistas, if they believe their nationalist cant, are doomed to be left by the roadside.

Grandfather worked for peace always, be it with the Spaniards or with the Americans who succeeded them. In this regard, my father was merely a continuum of this tradition when, during the occupation by the Japanese, he accepted—maybe sought is a more apt word—a cabinet position in the puppet government.

In the library are pictures of my grandfather, dapper in his gray suit, felt hat and mustache. He is pictured with some of the leaders of the revolution, then with the American governors-general. He was, after all, one of the founders of the Federalista Party, which sought federation with the United States. Later on, with other mestizos, he went to Washington with the first Philippine mission. Father’s pictures with Japanese officers and with Prime Minister Tojo when he visited Manila are not on display; they are in a special album and will certainly be displayed when, once more, history shall have made the judgment that collaboration with the Japanese was most honorable. Indeed, time has that ultimate capacity to render the passions of the past when recalled in the present as no more than grandiloquent gestures.

Like I said, I can easily trace my ancestry to Castille in the late eighteenth century; certainly, there was some dilution with a bit of Indio and Chinese blood into our line. But I am arrogantly certain about my illustrious ancestry. Recently, I was so incensed by an article written by this young punk of a historian Lamberto Campo. In it, he implied that my grandfather was a scoundrel, that his wealth was actually embezzled from revolutionary funds entrusted to him. I say, Qué barbaridad!

At first, I had thought of filing a libel charge against him, but then I realized it would only polish his ego. I decided, instead, to just let it pass—people forget. If there is anything Filipinos do not have, it is memory. I had thought, of course, of applying the ultimate critique. I could have easily done it and, indeed, it would have been more satisfying and conclusive. I would have had my hirelings do the job, of course—they are always very efficient at whatever chore I give them. But he was not worth all the messiness that could, in the future, bother my conscience.

I have digressed.

Severina feared me at first, but, soon enough, that fear was banished and, afterward, I no longer had to remind her about her nocturnal duties. She seemed to have accepted them as part of her lot. Soon my demands took her out of the kitchen even in the mornings or afternoons. I did not bother to think what the cook thought about it.

We would talk softly far into the night, savoring each other’s warmth, and this is how I came to know that she was born in this small island in the Visayas and had lived there until her parents uprooted the family for an equally harsh life in a hacienda—ours. She spoke of white beaches and limestone caves, and spirits that roamed the ether, some of them malevolent. And while she spoke she would clasp the charm hanging from her neck.

I had really grown up. My juvenile fear of lightning and thunder was gone, maybe because during the Occupation, with the Japanese soldiers occupying the schoolhouse below the hill, every so often I heard the sound of their guns when they were drilling. It was on one such stormy night in July that Corito, perhaps missing me, perhaps wondering why I no longer sought her, barged into my room. I had been careless. Or perhaps Severina had forgotten—the latch to the door had not been fastened. Corito stood there watching, Severina suddenly stiff like a block of wood, but how could I stop? How could I? It was as if I didn’t hear her at all when she said aloud, “Puñeta! You are doing it to a muchacha! Have you no deli-cadeza at all?” She stomped off and banged the door just as I was shattered into a million pieces of sheer bliss.

Perhaps, in a very profound manner I did not understand at the time, Severina was my first love. I was not the first, however, and though in my adolescence I couldn’t tell, I felt some regret, jealousy even, for the man who had deflowered her. How many chances really can a man get to have that experience with a virgin, particularly these days?

She told me a common enough story about how peasant women were preyed on by the landlords of the time. She was thirteen—she had not gone beyond grade four in the village school, her parents did not have the money for her to go to town five kilometers away to attend the intermediate grades.

“But, you know,” she said, pride shining in her eyes, “I can read and write in English better than someone in the village who finished grade seven.…” Indeed, I was to learn later how bright she was, how easily she learned Spanish not just from the cook but, I suppose, some of it from me, for soon enough it was in Spanish that I spoke to her, my Tagalog being extremely poor.

“Give me anything to read,” she challenged me, and rising naked from my bed, she went to my study table and took the first book there within reach, Philippine history for high schools, and proceeded to read with clear diction the chapter on the discovery of the Philippines. I was simply amazed—it was as if she had been speaking English for a long time.

Let me digress again and explain how Father and his father before him managed Hacienda Esperanza and other properties in Manila. They never really had direct contact with the tenants. The management, the division of the harvest, the collection of rents were all left to caretakers, encargados. Depending on their skills and trustworthiness, these men—with education and often small landowners themselves—managed tracts of land and the sugar mill, kept the books, doled out loans, collected our share of the harvest and stayed in the town or the larger villages in the hacienda.

We had a big house at the other end of San Quentin, but we didn’t stay there too long, for my parents missed the company of their mestizo friends and those dinners at the Club and the Casino and, most of all, those parties at Malacañang Palace, to which my parents were frequently invited. We did go to San Quentin during the school vacation, sometimes at Christmas—how Father loved playing Santa Claus without the outlandish costume!

On Christmas day, the tenants’ children—hundreds of them—gathered in the yard before the house. From the balcony, Father would toss to them fistfuls of new coins. A mad scramble and he would stand there, a supreme look of satisfaction on his face. It was fun for the children, and I would have joined them if Father had not restrained me.

Severina’s father had borrowed from the encargado; his debts had piled up because of the high interest. There was no way he could really get out of that bog. The encargado saw the young girl—“Let her serve in my house in payment of some of your debts,” he said. Severina’s family knew the implication of that order, but what could they do? The encargado could drive them away from the land with the flimsiest excuse, and though they could appeal to my father, seldom did a farmer take this recourse.

This is Severina’s story, which she, at first, hesitated to tell: “I was very young, fourteen, but at that age there are many things that we in the village already know. The work was not difficult—I helped in the kitchen, I scrubbed the floor and went on errands for the mistress, for their children. I rarely saw the encargado—he was away most of the time, attending to his land and to the hacienda. But every time he was home, when he was eating with his family and I was serving, always his eyes were on me. And, once, he found me alone in their bedroom scrubbing the floor and, without warning, he started squeezing my breasts till they hurt. I told him, so he stopped.

“Then, one weekend, his family—all of them—went to the city to vacation for two weeks. It was April and warm, and the rains had not yet come. He told me to go to our village with half a sack of rice, which I carried on my head; it was for my family, he said they needed it and, of course, I was grateful for anything that I could bring home.

“I returned late in the afternoon, very tired, because our village was very far from the house. He told me to take a rest, and after supper that night he told me to take a bath, then to go to his room.

“I knew it would happen one day, but I did not expect it so soon, and I really prayed that it wouldn’t hurt. I had started menstruating four months before.”

Like an eager voyeur, I had asked her to describe her initiation, but although it happened not too long ago, recollecting the details was difficult. What she remembered most was her fear.

I did not realize then the cruelty of what I was doing, and I asked if she had enjoyed it like she was now enjoying our relationship. An immediate and violent shaking of the head. “It was so painful I cried. I thought it would last forever.”

She hated the man’s breath—it was foul—and his saliva was all over her face. The realization that she was no longer a virgin grieved her more than anything; there was a boy she had grown up with, and she had promised herself she would give that gift to him.

Early on, when I was still in grade school, my father had told me to select my friends not because they possessed good character but because they were rich like us, so that there would be no difference in social status. And knowing them would give some assurance of mutual help in the future. As for women, I should never marry below my class and should look at marriage as a social and economic arrangement. “You cannot let our wealth be broken up, be divided among these villagers.” Thus he described the nonmestizos. “Better if you go to Europe and Spain and marry there rather than have your bloodline sullied by them.”

I knew then that Severina was just a plaything. I think she knew this, too. It was not easy for me to absorb this view, to get it entwined with my mind and heart, to live with it, and it was just as well, perhaps, that I had to experience this dilemma, this hurt and wrenching away from someone who, I later realized, I had cared for. Not that I became callous, but always I had to think of my position, which should not be eroded by adolescent sentimentalism.

How I missed her! Her aunt, the cook, said simply that she had gone back to Nueva Ecija, but when I inquired from the other help, they said they didn’t know for sure that she had returned to the hacienda. I learned much, much later that the cook knew Severina had to leave. Could it be Corito’s doing? But Corito said flatly she did not send her away. It was beneath her, she said with imperious disdain, to be jealous of a muchacha.

If she went back to the hacienda, for sure the encargado would take her again. It would seem that the cook knew this would happen. In afterthought, I did recall Severina saying that she would leave for some distant place in the Visayans, where relatives had migrated earlier. I had completely ignored her, thinking this was a ruse. I had also thought that she was just a body to be possessed, all that brown softness, those shy kisses and the caress that seldom came—all these were embossed in memory, and they would all return as reverie, as remembered bliss so intense as to be almost physical.

My last night with Severina will always be enshrined in my mind and heart. It is all revealed wisdom now why she had acted the way she did—so vivacious, so happy. She did not want our last moments marred by recriminations, by gloom. I did not know it was to be our last so I lived the moment, too. Before she left me, however, I had a last look at the charm. Maybe it was a trick of light, the sallow shadow of the bedpost, a dulled reflection, but the triangle was no longer so white—it seemed streaked with tiny blobs of amber. It had changed color.