In Manila, I often dialed Seoul knowing Choonja would have to clear the call. I had nothing important to say, I just wanted to hear her voice. She would laugh gently, knowing the truth, and if her boss was not around, we would talk at length. In this way, I learned of her engagement to one of the company’s engineers a year later.

It was January and cold in Seoul but pleasant in Manila. I asked her to spend her honeymoon in the Philippines and I sent her two airline tickets so she wouldn’t be able to say no. They were met at the airport by my travel people and brought to the Dasmariñas house. I gave a small dinner for them that evening and invited the Korean ambassador and his deputy chief of mission who, as it turned out, had been the groom’s classmate at Seoul National University.

Choonja was in a pastel green cotton dress and her cheeks were pinkish with youth. I didn’t pay much attention to her husband, but I did have a brief conversation with him to make him feel comfortable. He knew about the mink coat—in fact, her whole office knew about it, and they had considered her very lucky indeed. And now, this honeymoon trip. I sent them to Baguio for a couple of days, then the yacht took them to Palawan for a week of fishing, lolling on the beach and snorkeling. They returned to Manila sunburned but happy.

On their last Sunday, the deputy chief of mission took Choonja’s husband for a game of golf in Marikina. They were to be there the whole day and, in the evening, the classmate was giving a dinner for them.

“I will see to it that Choonja is entertained,” I assured him.

I took her to the Club for breakfast, then we motored to Tagaytay. We reminisced on the way, and I held her hand, which she did not draw away, her hands so soft, the fingers tapering, her nails clipped and unpolished.

My visit to Tagaytay also enabled me to look at the real estate I had bought there—three hundred contiguous hectares, some on the plateau overlooking the lake and the volcano and extending across the national highway. All of this would someday be developed as either residential area or intensively cultivated farms, planted to vegetables not possible to grow in the lowland heat.

As we ascended the plateau, Choonja noted the perceptible greening of the land although the rainy season had passed. On both sides of the road, interspersed among the coconut palms, were low papayas, rows of daisies, and pineapples. It was the first time Choonja had seen pineapple plants. They were far sweeter, I told her, when picked ripe, unlike those that were exported to her country and to Japan—pineapples from Hawaii, harvested while still unripe.

We passed a long stretch of fallow land—all of it mine—that was to be developed soon. Again, I got all of it cheaply by adding credibility to the well-known reputation of this region as bandit country, plagued by many unsolved murders, and that many of the earlier landowners were forced to leave because of threats from these “bandits,” some of them in my employ in my security agency.

I had support from the public officials who stood to profit because they knew that Cobello y Cia would eventually come to the rescue of this desolate land.

At the time, I had not yet built a house in Tagaytay; that would have sent the wrong signal to upper-class Filipinos who appreciated Tagaytay’s climate and isolation from Manila, a scarce thirty miles away.

We drove over to the old lodge that had been built before the war. As we neared it, Choonja gasped in awe and wonder: to our left, like some blue mirage, Taal Lake suddenly appeared through a screen of grass and trees, glittering in the noonday sun. At its center rose the green cone of the volcano.

“It is beautiful,” she murmured.

At the lodge grounds, I took a picture of her standing against the ledge that overlooked the lake. She wore a skyblue ramie dress that I had asked Christian—Manila’s best couturier—to make; had she been in Spain, I would have asked Balenciaga to design a few dresses for her. She brightened the frame—she would be photogenic; even in closeups, that beauty would shine through.

We went to the lodge coffee shop. We just had coffee, then went to the Mercedes and drove back to Manila. She dozed in the car and I put an arm around her. She leaned on me, her fragrance swirling around me. I had wanted to ask her about her husband then, but I did not want the driver to hear an intimate conversation.

Now, all my drivers—in fact, my entire household staff—are discreet and trustworthy. And my drivers are also trained mechanics and are my bodyguards as well, experts in the martial arts, fully armed and skilled marksmen. I don’t believe in going around with a platoon of bodyguards; just one, well trained and loyal, will do, particularly since, I am quite sure, I have no real atrasos—that is to say, people who would really want to do me in are few and wouldn’t have the determination and courage to do it anyway.

As we neared Manila, she woke up, and realizing that my arm was around her, she snuggled closer. I had remembered only too well my Seoul misadventure, my disastrous failure that certainly lessened my self-esteem. I wondered how she had felt on those two nights that we had embraced, both of us anxious, and I couldn’t do it! I had never felt such humiliation before, such a damning sense of impotence, and thinking back, I was thankful for her expression of sympathy rather than ridicule, how she had kissed me so tenderly, as if such expression of affection would banish the bone-deep anger and frustration that shriveled me.

We returned to the penthouse.

While the cook was preparing our lunch, we drank some red wine in the living room.

It occurred to me then to ask about her husband.

“Did you enjoy Baguio? It is quite cool there.”

She smiled and nodded.

Without warning I asked, “Is he a good lover?”

She looked at me quizzically. “I don’t understand,” she said.

“When he made love to you, did he please you? Was he good in bed?”

Again, that impish smile. “Charlie—I really don’t know. I never knew any man other than my husband. In fact”—she leaned over, held my hand and pressed it—“you would have been the first …”

For some time, I couldn’t speak. I finally said, a knot in my throat, “I am very sorry—oh, not for you, but for myself …”

She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek—no insinuation of passion, just a simple, domestic kiss.

A leisurely lunch on the terrace, Korean barbecue—prawns, thin strips of beef and chicken—on the brass brazier I had brought back from Seoul, and the kimchi she had not forgotten to bring. When it was over, I asked her if she wanted to nap—my bed was ready. But she said she was not tired. I took her to the bedroom. We were now alone and I kissed her. She responded, but her kiss was sterile, a habit.

I let go, then told her that I wanted to take her portrait, to which she gladly acceded, knowing that I enjoyed photography.

Let me again be immodest and say that some of my best pictures would be envied by Cecil Beaton and my portraits can equal if not surpass those of Richard Avedon. I had been taking pictures since before World War II with those simple box cameras and, afterward, with the more sophisticated models from Germany and, after the war, with the first Japanese imitations of the Leica and the Contax. Some critics have pointed out that my reputation as a photographer is enhanced by my being rich. That even with my expensive equipment, most of my pictures are lifeless. They have perhaps seen only my still lifes, not the portraits and the other “living” pictures I have taken of anonymous people at their chores. Yes, I have a roomful of cameras, including those antiques that are still serviceable and the latest models including the Japanese electronic gee-gaws. But people do not normally know how hard I work in the darkroom, sometimes the whole night when I have taken some pictures that I think are experimental or great. The darkroom! That’s where pictures are created, and the photographer who does not know a developer from a fixer is a phony. There are men of means who call themselves photographer-artists but have never been inside a darkroom!

We went to the game room with the skylight; it was meant to be my studio as well. I lowered several screens for background and positioned the strobe lights and the shades. I posed her seated on a sofa, standing by a wooden pillar, holding a rose. These being over, I said I wanted to photograph her in the nude.

For an instant, hesitation clouded her face.

“I have seen you twice in your glory,” I said. “I want to record that. Are you ashamed, Choonja?”

She smiled and said, “No. But this picture, only you will see it?”

I assured her so. I showed her the file of nudes I had taken, all of them under lock and key, the safe where the negatives were stored. “You can keep the negatives if you wish,” I said.

Again, that beatific smile. “Will you tell my husband?”

“That is your decision.”

“No,” she said firmly. “He does not know anything.”

She started peeling off her clothes; her skin much, much fairer where the bathing suit had covered it. It would make a stark contrast, particularly since I was photographing her in black and white. Seeing her thus, my throat ached, the blood in my ears thundered. I had to wait a little for the welts on her skin made by her bra and panty to disappear. I took a bottle of lotion from the shelf to apply to portions of the skin that seemed shiny and, as I touched her, I could feel myself coming to life at last. I embraced her then and kissed her with passion. For a while she clung to me, thrusting a leg forward so she could feel my manhood audaciously, unashamedly proclaiming itself. Then she pushed me away, gently. Her voice was tinged with sorrow and regret when she said, “I am sorry, Charlie. But I want to be faithful to my husband.”

I did not persist; I understood.

That evening, after I had delivered Choonja to her husband, her virtue intact, I returned in haste to the penthouse and worked frenziedly in the darkroom till long past midnight. First, I developed the negatives with utmost care, dried them, then made contact prints. I have always been partial to the Hasselblad; its square format simplified composition. The negative is also sharper. The Leica’s has more depth. I then enlarged the portraits—this took the longest; I made fourteen-by-nineteen enlargements, a dozen of them. Eagerly, I waited for the images to form in the developer. There was Choonja, finally, the shy smile, the lips half parted as if she were teasing me, the eyes brilliant as usual.

It occurred to me then to bring out the other portraits of the women I was most attracted to—half a dozen who had graced my bed, and half a dozen more who would have done the same had I persevered beyond disrobing and photographing them. I ranged the portraits around the studio, against the walls, perched them on the sofa, on the writing desk. Then I turned on all the floodlights and, slowly, like a gourmet surveying a splendid buffet table, I regaled myself with that luscious variety. I studied all the faces, mostly Asian with a bit of Caucasian mix. A black-and-white photograph is more exacting, more precise in character delineation because it is bereft of the cloying exaggeration of color. The starkness of truth prevails, probes through the fine gloss of the lens and beauty glitters in its purest essence as expressed by the eyes. The eyes! I went around again and finally came to Choonja, and nostalgia suddenly came crashing over me like a mighty surf; poignant tears started to mist my vision. The eyes, yes, the eyes! These were what had attracted me to all of them and all had magic—mysterious, brooding, deep—in their eyes, the same eyes as Severina’s that had beckoned to me through all the years. I knew then it was not these women, and in the future, not Ann or Yoshiko, loved though they were, for whom I had pined and ached and truly cherished. It was Severina all along, the girl of my youth whom I had wronged!

Thus endeth another melancholy chapter of my life.

I started visiting Japan in the fifties as my enterprises developed. Indeed, Japan was poor, its population hungry and with the peso at two to a dollar, the exchange rate being 360 yen to the dollar, every Filipino who went to Tokyo at the time was a profligate prince. I stayed at a hotel near the Imperial Palace, the Nikkatsu and, sometimes, in the afternoons, when General MacArthur left his office nearby, I went there to watch him, as did many Japanese who wanted a glimpse of the man who now ruled them. He had been to our Sta. Mesa house several times and had even talked with me; had I greeted him and reminded him of those dinners in Sta. Mesa I am sure he would have remembered. After all, it was also he who signed the commendation that made my father a colonel in the U.S. Army! But I contented myself with one of his senior aides whom I had also met in Sta. Mesa and, once, the general did pause when we met in the corridor by his office and said hello, but he was too big to bother with a young businessman from Manila.

To millions of Filipinos and to the now docile Japanese, he was more than ten feet tall; indeed, he was physically impressive—that stern jaw, that wide brow, that heroic stance—they were theatrical, they endowed him with glamor and charisma. But looking back, he was an ordinary mortal, loyal to his friends in Manila. I would not be surprised to find out that Father had introduced him to a couple, maybe a dozen even, of beautiful Manila mestizas while he lived in the Manila Hotel. If all those guerrilla records were to be believed, then Father had served his country well in spite of his pimping for the Japanese and serving in the Laurel government. He was never brought to trial for collaboration, unlike the others—that was their luck, a result of their inability to understand the primordial rule for survival: create personal bonds with those in power; pander to them. Human beings that they are, they will reciprocate.

I was to hear soon after the war the reason for MacArthur’s cozy relationship with the mestizo elite. Quezon gave him half a million dollars in 1942, when the dollar was still so highly valued. How much would that be worth today? This rumor, which percolated widely, would soon be confirmed by historians. Indeed, we Filipinos are not only grateful and hospitable to our friends—we are also very liberal with our spending of the people’s money. Collaboration then, and its stigma, was not perceived as a moral issue, only political. But that was soon settled when many of the collaborators ran for public office and got deluged with so many votes, when men like my father—bless him for his wisdom and his prescience—and my grandfather, too, not only maintained their social status but also strengthened it vastly. I was absolutely sure, therefore, that when the dictatorship would end, those of us who pandered to the Leader would remain anointed with power and social position.

Soon enough, those bleeding hearts who believed in American justice would ask why MacArthur decreed land reform in Japan and not in the Philippines. Simple! He had no friends among the zaibatsus, the Japanese financial conglomerates. In the Philippines, we surrounded him, pampered him, then smothered him.

Ah, the Tokyo of my youth! There were no jets then except in the military, and the four-engine, double-deck Boeing Stratocruiser took almost the whole night to reach Haneda. On my first trip, I left Manila close to midnight and reached Haneda in the early morning. There was no airport building in Manila then—just a simple shed at the end of the runway. Outside the airport in Haneda were mudflats, wide open spaces. Tokyo was still very much a city of the low wooden buildings that had survived the fire bombing by the Americans. The Korean War was winding down to a stalemate and the P’anmunjŏm peace talks had started. Tramcars clattered in the main avenues and soba boys, one hand supporting a tray of noodles, raced through the crowded streets with miraculous agility. Most of the nightclubs were provided with music by Filipino bands. In fact, Filipino musicians were in many Asian cities before World War II. I have told this story often, how I entered the nightclubs in Tokyo in the fifties with eyes closed, ears keenly tuned to the music and, after a minute or so, I would know for certain if it was a Filipino band playing. The Japanese played Western music perfectly, cleanly, each note in place. But their music, though precise, was cold, without feeling. Not the Filipino bands. They played with that deft human touch that showed that not just the intellect and the hands were making music, but the heart was, too.

These sorties into the nightlife were the major attraction of Tokyo to me then; I was young, virile, with all the lust for living. Yoshiwara, that old and famous red-light district of Tokyo, was still open, the brothels lining the streets, wooden houses with their young women, some of them newly arrived from the rural areas, seated in their fronts and flaunting their youth and innocence. There were more tourists than guests.

Yoshiko was not from Yoshiwara. She worked at the information booth of Takashimaya, one of the department stores at the Ginza—a huge stone building that seemed to have survived the war. She spoke passable English at a time when there were very few who could speak the language. I had asked her to escort me when she was off duty and she had agreed, primarily, I think, because I had offered her quite a sum for a day’s work. She was tall, but not as tall as me, and slim. In her store uniform, with her hat and all, she looked trim, and prim.

It was much, much later that I developed temple and museum fatigue. But in my youth, I visited them all avidly, noted every curio and all minutiae; the manicured gardens, the architecture, the use of wood and beams—the major characteristics of Japanese architecture.

I should see Nikko then, Yoshiko suggested.

Japanese department stores even then were well stocked and a delight—I learned it was at Takashimaya that the Emperor’s family shopped, so I concluded it must be loaded with quality goods. Indeed, even at this time, when Japan was poor, imported consumer goods were already available in specially designated places; one could easily recognize these places because their floors were carpeted. I had bought a brand-new Nikon from the tax-free shop across the street and had left it at the stationery counter where I had purchased some handmade paper. I did not even realize I had left the camera there until I heard the announcement over the speaker system that it was waiting for me at the information booth on the ground floor. Talk about honesty and service; even to this day, I am sure, both are not in short supply.

That was where I met Yoshiko. When I presented myself, she looked me over, then, after a while, she smiled. “Yes, you are the owner.”

She told me later that the salesgirl at the stationery section had described me as tall, fair-skinned, about twenty-five or so and very handsome.

She was off at seven when the store closed. I did not tell her I wanted a date, but five minutes before seven, I was at her counter, asking where the best steak house was. She said she knew of one in the next street that served Kobe beef, very expensive and frequented only by businessmen. Would she like to have dinner with me? She demurred at first. Just dinner, I asked in my best pleading manner, and she finally agreed.

It was fall, the lights of the Ginza were on, the drooping leaves of the willow trees that lined the street shimmering and silver. It was cool, and not used to the cool weather, I had a topcoat on. She had a thick black sweater over her uniform, her cap now in her bag. She was, of course, made up as all the salesgirls in the department stores were made up, but it was easy to see that Yoshiko was beautiful even without all the powder, rouge and lipstick.

You must remember, this was in the early fifties, when a pack of Camels was enough to obtain a lay. Oh, those were the days when Japan was a playground for many Filipinos, and glib as we are and used to flattering our women, the Japanese woman who had always been regarded as inferior was so easy to seduce. Besides, then as now, they suffered no moral inhibitions about fucking—they would gladly do it for the sheer pleasure.

Yoshiko turned out to be different, indifferent to the best seduction techniques I knew. After dinner, we went to one of the nightclubs along the Ginza where a Filipino band was playing and where Bimbo Danao, a mestizo, was singing. I had known Bimbo when he was in Manila crooning during the war in one of the Escolta theaters. Shortly after Liberation, he had migrated to Japan, where he was getting much more money and attention from the women. I sought him out to impress Yoshiko, and for her he sang a Japanese love song.

I took Yoshiko to the Nikkatsu, where we had hot soba. I tried to get her upstairs to my room, but she said she had to hurry and catch the last Yamanote train to her home in Ikebukuro.

It was my first experience of being rejected by a Japanese girl at a time when they were easy conquests, and I was baffled and, for the first time, too, doubted my capabilities. I looked at myself in the mirror—a tall man with patrician features, a noble brow, a sensual mouth. I wondered if she did not like my hotel. It was not as classy as the Imperial nearby, which I did not like. Although designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, a famous American architect, its lobby was tiny and dim and certainly did not conform to the Japanese architectural dictum. I decided to move there to let her know that I had means. I also decided to stay a few more days—I was not worried about my business; at the time, I had already learned certain basics, like selecting good people, paying them well, delegating authority and axing them if they fumbled.

On the day that Takashimaya was closed, I don’t recall now which weekday it was, Yoshiko consented to take me to Nikko, this fabled shrine up in the mountains near Tokyo. We took a train at Asakusa station and, in a couple of hours, we reached the town, then up a zigzag road to the temple itself. She was no longer in her store uniform. She was wearing a blue wool suit and, over it, an old black leather coat. Patches of snow lay on the ground and I made a couple of snowballs and threw them at her; she did the same. We were enjoying ourselves and laughing. She had explained to me on the train that she had studied American literature in a Jesuit school, which explained her knowledge of English. I missed it all, the ancient cedars that lined one of the narrow roads that led to the shrine, the gorgeous temple bedecked with a surfeit of gold filigree, much more elaborate than any church altar I have seen. Everything simply flitted by my vision although I was not in a daze. On that perfect autumn day, alive with sunshine and the dazzling colors of leaves, I could only look at this splendid girl. How I longed to possess her.

I was prepared to spend that day and night in Nikko—there was no shortage of hotels; in fact, some of them were precisely for couples on a binge—but it would not be. She said we had to return to Tokyo. At the Asakusa station, she refused to go to the Imperial, chiding me for having transferred from a very good hotel to this snobby place frequented only by Americans. No amount of pleading could convince her to have dinner with me, but she did kiss me, almost as an afterthought, when she left me there, dumbfounded, mystified and horribly frustrated. I stood bewildered on the platform long after her train had left.

The riddle of Yoshiko was settled a year later, but this is going ahead of the story. I was back in the Ginza soon enough, and hoping to see her, I went to the department store at closing time. She did not see me, and it was just as well. She was walking out of the store with a big black American woman in uniform—probably a WAC—and they were holding hands.