In the preparation of my study on Narita Reyes, I am indebted to my colleagues, particularly to my former teachers, Professors Alejo Orina and M. D. Guerzon who read the manuscript and gave valuable advice. I am also grateful to my typist and secretary, T. Jovel, who transcribed most of the tapes, changed my “alright” to “all right,” and kept the door closed to all sorts of noise. And last but not least, I am grateful to the Narita Reyes Foundation for its generous support that allowed me a trip to the United States for research and interviews, and provided for the publication of the political biography of a woman whose personality has considerably altered our view of domestic politics during the last decade.
When I started this project, I was faced with the problem of objectivity. I had known Narita all my life and if I just hewed closely to what is observable data and behavior, I would do injustice to a woman who was far more complex than those personality profiles that the mass media presented. There was much more in what Narita did as compared to what she said; she was sparing in her words and let her actions speak instead.
This much shorter narrative is a spin-off, different from the lengthier and documented original. Nevertheless, with this format, I hope to present one of the most unusual personalities in contemporary Filipino society, in all her scintillating uniqueness.
I have always admired Narita Reyes even though at times it had to be from a distance. As is often said, Ligaw tingin, kantot hangin (courtship by looking, fucking the wind). One reason for this is that she made me feel inferior, a result I think of the fact that when we were in grade school, though we were of the same age, she was taller than I was. It was a feeling which persisted through the years, vanquished only in those rare instances when I could physically express my fondness for her.
Narita was an only child and she lived with her mestizo (half-breed) parents in a small house roofed with rusting tin across the street from ours. Their house which had a brick wall was once the kitchen—all that was left of a much more substantial house that had burned down. The ruins still stood in the wide lot fenced with brick that had fallen apart in places. Her grandfather was once a wealthy landlord but had lost his lands because of gambling and women; all that remained was the wide lot overgrown with weeds, with pomelo and guava trees which hid their house from view. Narita’s father clerked in the municipal building while her mother sold meat in the market, and when Narita was not in school, she helped her mother run the stall.
Narita and I were both Sagittarians; we were born almost to the minute, in the wee hours of the morning of November 30, 1933. Father, who made the deliveries, said it was a hectic dawn—what with him having to rush from our house to theirs and back.
Narita was often in our house for, like me, she liked to read. Father’s library included a set of The Book of Knowledge, some novels, back issues of The National Geographic and other magazines. I was always playing in their wide, weed-choked yard, too, particularly when the guava and pomelo trees started bearing fruit. During the early days of the war, in 1942, her family evacuated with us to our farm in Bogo which was about three kilometers from the town. We did not stay there long; we need not have left town for the Japanese never came to Santa Ana in force except for occasional patrols. As a matter of fact, Santa Ana is quite isolated from the rest of the country and progress really never seemed to have touched it—till Narita came and blazed through in a way Santa Ana will never see again.
For one, the land in our part of the island is rocky and the mountains always seemed to loom closer as the irrevocable margin beyond which our cane fields could not encroach. We depended on the rain for irrigation and sometimes, it was niggardly. And because the land is poor, we never had the largesse that the Silay and Bacolod people enjoyed. In fact, Bacolod could seem as distant as Manila although it is only sixty kilometers away and the only people who went there regularly were men like Father who had business at the provincial hospital or with the drug companies.
Narita could be very quiet. We could be with those books without speaking for hours; yet afterwards, people thought she was a compulsive talker. This was unfair for in later years she could be a patient listener even to the loudest braggart, as if she were hearing words of pure wisdom when they were pretentious drivel—as they often were when most of the politicians she knew wanted to be identified as pious nationalists.
She was in Grade II when she became champion declaimer with her tearful rendition of “The boy stood on the burning deck …” When she was in Grade VI, she was chosen the best singer with her “Lahat ng Araw” (“All of My Days”)—a song she made very popular later. Her voice was scarcely trained but she could render a song better than most of the young singers on radio and TV today because Narita had style.
Even when we were still in school, it was already obvious that she was beautiful and talented but because we were neighbors, I took her for granted. We played a lot, in whatever season. When the rains came and brought green to the fields, we would be there, catching grasshoppers. And at dusk, we looked for spiders in the bushes, in the profusion of cadena de amor that clambered over the brick walls and bloomed in white and pink. There was a particular species of spider that we found among the vines, the one with long limbs and a very small body. It was a good fighter. We would position the spiders on each end of a coconut midrib, watch them inch towards the center and once there, they would grapple and bite each other. The loser was soon rendered immobile and coated with the silky strands that trailed from them. Never was defeat so complete and final.
Narita’s mother supplied us with meat and Mother said she was trustworthy; she gave us the best sections and told us if it was carabao or beef unlike other butchers who cheated their customers. I took this as a matter of course; after all, Father did not charge them for his services.
Their house was always in disarray—a characteristic that Narita did not bring with her later: their clothes all over the place, the bamboo floor already rotting in places, the dishes unwashed in the basin in the kitchen. But there were plants everywhere for Narita loved to grow them, even the weeds in the yard, I think. It was as if by some arcadian magic, she could transform an ordinary place into lush green. She had the touch of life.
When we were in Grade VI, I made a “mark” on Narita. We were playing that Saturday morning in their wide yard. She was then tomboyish and it was not unusual for her to beat me in running, jumping and that morning, basketball. She had rigged up a hoop on one side of their house, up the brick wall. I accidentally pushed her and she stumbled and banged her chin against a rusty piece of iron in the woodwork. When she turned to me, although she was laughing, there was blood on her chin. It turned out to be an ugly wound and, with her handkerchief staunching it, we went to Father who was in his clinic in the ground floor of our house. He looked at the wound, gave her anaesthesia, then sewed it in two stitches all the while asking how it had happened. Narita did not cry, wince or scream as I would have done with all that pain and blood.
“Brave girl,” Father said.
He wanted to see what it was that had cut her so we went back to their yard and when Father saw it, he said, “I’d better give you anti-tetanus serum.”
A general practitioner, Father tried to make do without the sophisticated equipment of hospitals but he was always careful. I remember him telling me that about eighty percent of human ailments could be naturally cured by the body without the assistance of either medicines or doctors. But tetanus is tetanus. He decided to have an allergy test first, just giving Narita a bit of injection under the skin. Within seconds she had turned bluish, her eyes dilated and she fell into a faint.
Father blanched. Fortunately, he was prepared for such emergencies. He immediately gave her an anti-allergy shot and when she revived she described how strange she felt and how suddenly everything started to blur and turn black.
“You are allergic to anti-tetanus serum,” Father said gravely. “I hope you will not forget that …”
I felt guilty and sad for her because her face was disfigured but she just laughed. When the wound healed, there was an indention where the scab had lifted and, in time, the scar itself disappeared. She has had that cleft chin since and, as she herself said, she looked prettier with it.
As an only child, Narita had plenty of time to be alone and it was only later that I learned how much of this time was spent in reverie, daydreams about going away, far away from Santa Ana and its numbing constrictions.
She did not have pets except a big, white cat. She starved the animal once when she came upon a nest of mice in their yard. She placed the hungry cat in a wire-mesh cage where once her father kept his fighting cocks. Then she brought out two of the grown-up mice and put them in the cage. I shudder every time I recall how she sat before that cage, her eyes impassive but alert, watching the cat pounce on the poor, shrieking rodents.
“It is the way of the world, Eddie,” she told me years later when I recalled this. “The strong tearing apart the weak …”
As a boy, I was wary of some of the things Narita wanted me to do no matter how easy or innocuous they seemed. One April afternoon we were in the weedy section of their wide yard. The pomelo trees were laden with ripening fruit and she pointed to a rise in the ground as the best place for me to stand so that I could reach the big oranges that dangled over our heads. I went up the low mound without question only to run from it immediately for a host of giant red ants were all over my legs and biting me. It was an anthill that she had told me to stand on. I was on the verge of tears and she broke out laughing at my misery. I forgave her for this.
We were together again from first year to senior year in the local high school. I cannot say honestly that I did not have any feelings for Narita other than those shared by two childhood friends. Such feelings, however, were dampened by the fact that she had grown taller than I.
By this time, too, she started to confide to me those things which even my sisters did not tell me: how it was when she had her first menstruation, how it felt when her breasts started growing, how itchy they were that she had to put plaster bands on them, personal things which, in retrospect, seem to have been the basis of our relationship.
I remember that day the girls wore their gala uniform—white with blue collar—the school colors. It was the school’s Foundation Day and, as usual, it was Narita who led the singing of the national anthem. When she got up from her seat, there it was for all to see, the red smudge on her behind. There was twittering among the girls and I had a good mind to go tell her that the menstrual blood had dripped right through. And that was what I did when we filed out of the hall. But she whispered into my ear, her eyes filled with laughter, “I am not due till the fifteenth—as if you didn’t know! That’s just pig blood—I sat on it early this morning in Mama’s stall.”
When we were in our senior year, as everyone expected, she became the queen during our High School Day. She had bloomed. I am sure there were men in town who went to her mother’s stall just to look at her. She also sang in the church choir regularly and one could always pick out that rich, mellow voice; she did not linger long in the high notes but she could maintain her voice in the higher reaches. I beat her in literature and history but she was better than I was in math, in philosophy and physics, “the subjects that mattered.”
Before she became high school queen, her father, who had by then taken to drinking and gambling, became very ill and would have died had not Father taken him to the provincial hospital; it was a rather complicated move. Knowing how government was, Father got a letter from Senator Reyes, builder of the hospital and one of the richest and most powerful men in the country. The senator came from our province and Father knew him.
In a way, we had always been entwined with their lives. Don Carlos—her father loved being called that though there was nothing affluent or distinguished about him—stayed for quite a time in the hospital with all sorts of complications of the liver, the heart, and whatever else can ravage a man who has indulged and abused himself.
“All the meat in the market and all the money in the municipal treasury,” my mother used to say, “cannot pay for the bills.”
We wondered where they would get the money but as luck would have it, Senator Reyes stood by them and for a very good reason. When he came to Santa Ana to crown our high school queen, he had brought along his youngest and only living son, Lopito, who was then in his early thirties. Lopito looked at Narita once and did not care for anything after that but to have the beautiful virgin as his wife. Senator Reyes was more circumspect. The girl’s personality satisfied him but he wanted to know more about her and her background. This was readily supplied by Father and others in the town whom he had questioned. It was no secret then that when Narita finished high school, great things would be in store for her.
I did not like it: Lopito barging into our street in his fancy sports car, with his driver honking before the old battered house, and Narita coming out all smiles; and their driving together, raising billows of dust as they went to the beach or wherever their fancy took them while her father lay dying in the hospital and her mother toiled in the meat stall. It would have been better if they married but Senator Reyes had other ideas—they would not marry till she finished college.
I left for Manila in a black mood one April morning, a week after we had graduated from high school. Narita was valedictorian. She had delivered the graduation address with feeling, saying it was time for all of us to part, and Senator Reyes who had come again to give the commencement address had looked at her with pride. In the audience, all of us knew what would happen, that she would go to Manila, too, and be his daughter-in-law. And, years later, I was to realize why Senator Reyes had banked so much on her. Of his four sons only the youngest, Lopito, was alive; two had died and one, an artist, had disappeared in Europe. His two girls had married badly in spite of the fact that their husbands were handpicked by the old man. From all appearances, Senator Reyes had wanted to build a dynasty, as was the practice of most politicians, but had failed. He was not a great believer in heredity. After all, he had often said that it was brains that determined survival and triumph, and he unerringly saw all the virtues that he sought in Narita.
I could not leave without saying good-bye. She was in the yard sweeping the dry leaves of the pomelo trees and she asked me to stay a while. I felt very depressed.
I demurred.
“Well,” she said, her eyes crinkling in a smile. “Aren’t we friends anymore?”
“I wouldn’t want Lopito to say I am using some of your time,” I said finally. “I have already said good-bye.”
She pulled me to the bamboo bench by the gate and we sat there. She had on a cheap, printed blue dress and wooden shoes. I could glory forever in her nearness.
“If I didn’t know you, I’d think you were jealous.”
“Of course not.” I glared at her. “How can I be jealous? How can …”
She caressed my face with her hand. I brushed it away.
“You are in love with me!” she exclaimed. “Eduardo Cortez. You—in love with me!”
“And if I am,” I said, “is that something to despise?”
She caressed my face again and this time, I let her, feeling her rough palm, all resentment gone. Then she held my hand. “But Eddie—you know it cannot be. I will not permit it. We grew up together. Remember how we used to run naked in the rain?” She was looking at me, her big, bright eyes brighter yet, the mischief in them coming through. “And remember this?” She pointed to the cleft in her chin. I smiled with memory and this warm, aching desire to hold her.
“You should be happy that you won’t be stuck with me,” she continued. “There is no mystery about me. I am open to you as you are to yourself. And marriage is something else—a kind of discovery every day …”
“Bullshit,” I said. “What is so mysterious about Lopito and his millions?”
The moment I said it, I was sorry, but Narita did not look away and her expression did not change.
“Eddie—you are so unfair. But I forgive you because you are in love with me. Look at it this way. We are in debt to them. Without Lopito, I would be stuck with this.” She cast a glance around her, at the bedraggled yard, the dilapidated house, the cadena de amor dying and brown on the brick wall.
Mother visited me at the dorm in Diliman a week after school opened. She brought the news that Narita’s father had died, that her mother was now alone in the house together with a niece and still minding the meat stall and that Narita was in Manila, staying at the Assumption Convent to finish college as arranged by Senator Reyes. She had asked where I was, Mother said, and was given my dorm address.
Sure enough, within the week, a note from her arrived. I knew her penmanship, the strong crosses of the t’s, the forceful upsweep of the last letter. I had developed early enough habits of the collector and the scholar and I kept that note as well as the other notes that she passed on to me.
Hello Eddie,
You were not with us when Papa died, but I forgive you because you did not know. You did not have to hurry to Manila so early, whatever your reason, but I also understand that. I promised myself I would not be jealous of your girlfriend. I will major in political science and economics, but I don’t know if this school has the right teachers for me. I would like to be in your campus, but I should be here for this is a wicked city and I need protection. Please come and see me. I want someone to talk with. The girls here know nothing and I am bored most of the time. Will you do this as a favor?
Affectionately,
N
She always signed her letters to close friends with her initial. I did visit her once at Assumption but that was to escort my sisters there when they finally came to Manila. She did come twice to my dorm and my roommate and acquaintances were agog over the prettiest girl they had ever seen coming to visit wretched me.
My parents came to see me every so often and when my two younger sisters started going to college, Father thought it best to build a house in Manila which, in the long run, would save us money and also be a good investment. He bought a lot in Quezon City and we moved to the house within six months, with Mother commuting to Manila to keep two households. She brought back stories of home, of Narita’s mother finally closing her stall and just staying home, of Narita going to the old hometown with Lopito.
Narita visited us and stayed in the house for a night but I was out doing a field survey in Bulacan. When I returned, my sisters told me that when she arrived she was in tears. She had gotten a full scholarship, was tops in her class and would probably graduate summa, was taking singing lessons besides, and acting in the musical which the school was presenting. But these were not enough. Her schoolmates from Negros ignored her and did not even ask her to participate in the annual Kahirup Ball—the sugar bloc’s most lavish social event of the year.
Senator Reyes did not have enough empathy to see to it that his prospective daughter-in-law should be in it and Narita was too proud to ask. She had, perhaps, thought that simply being pretty and talented would be enough to get her accepted into the snootiest Negros circle.
She did not want to stay in the college dorm that night. She had an “important social engagement,” too, even if it meant sulking in an anonymous middle-class home in Quezon City.
Narita must have gloated when, shortly after the Kahirup snub, she appeared on the cover of the Women’s Week and was described as “sugarland’s prettiest, with a skin as clear as sunlight and eyes that sparkled like jewels …” It was a comeuppance that should have made her forget the slight, but she would never forget. She came again in December in our last year in college, not to wish us Merry Christmas, but to hand carry an invitation to her wedding. I opened the door and outside was the black Mercedes 220 SE of Senator Reyes with its khaki-uniformed driver. It was such a long time—more than two years—since I had seen her and though I often ached to catch a glimpse of that face, I thought it best to dampen the desire, to let things be. She wore no makeup, her brownish hair shining in the morning sun, her skin glowing. She walked up to me, saying, “Eddie, Eddie—” then she embraced and kissed me—a wet, warm kiss of affection, the scent of her, her hair swirling around me. I was glad to see her and gladder that I was finally as tall as she.
I led her to the house saying inanities while she plied me with questions about school, my career as a sociologist. I asked about her politics, starring in the school musical that was plastered in the society pages, and her singing so well that a bright career was foreseen for her. She waved them all aside, saying she just wanted to be alive, to do nothing if that was possible, and raise a dozen children.
That really brought me back to earth for those children that she would raise would certainly not be mine. Her wedding would be in two weeks.
I had a very good excuse for not going: My major term paper was due and I had to go to my village again to observe the farmers there and see how they were responding to the innovations in rural credit. So I was away when she got married in the Forbes Park church but there were pictures all over, including one in which she was being carried by Lopito over the threshold of the new house that Senator Reyes had built for them.
My sisters where pleased to go; it was their first “society” wedding. Mother and Father were also there, perhaps Narita’s “closest relatives.” Their presence was imperative for it was Mother who was the madrina and I ascribed that to Narita’s innate good sense. She was now my “sister” and I often laughed at how ridiculous it seemed afterwards.
By the time I finished college, I met a junior in the Department of Anthropology, a charming Cebuana with a slim figure and a cheerful disposition and, with her, it was easy to forget Narita. After graduation, too, I had a graduate assistantship in the department and before the end of the year, a scholarship to Harvard. I grabbed it although it meant some financial difficulty for my father who still had three other children to send to college.
I did not see Narita again for about three years until I started working for my doctorate. For these lapses in the story, I relied on interviews, on remembered bits of conversation, on clippings of that period but mostly on her, for I never hesitated to ask her the frankest questions.
Mrs. Cornelia Cruz, cook:
(I have edited out the questions and repetitions so that this transcript is almost verbatim.)
My name is Cornelia Cruz, widow. I am fifty-eight years old and I was born in Bacolod. I have worked for Senator Reyes and his family for forty years, first as maid then as cook. I am a high school graduate and I learned to cook from Mrs. Reyes who also sent me to study at the Cordon Bleu school every afternoon for six months. I can prepare a European-style meal, Chinese, Indian, at least forty dishes—and even an Ilokano pinakbet (vegetable stew) if I were asked to. The Señorita’s favorite was pinakbet, with lots of prawns in it, instead of pork. She also liked half-ripe mangoes with the special sauce I prepare for it. And yes, salted eggs for breakfast, with tomatoes, and fried rice without lard—but with garlic and onions fried before mixing them with the rice. She always liked her meals hot and never cared much for cold cuts, sandwiches, except yogurt. When she went out, and it was possible, she always had a thermos bottle with her for soup, or tea and, of course, she always liked eating at home. She was a good cook herself and that was why I always tried my best. And yes, she knew meats. She could tell whether it was fresh, whether it was the best part of pork or beef. She even told me of the tricks that those women in the market play on their customers.
I was transferred to the new house of Señorito Lopito a week before they moved in. It was empty then—actually empty, and they lived in the Manila Hotel for two months while Señorita furnished it. She was very meticulous and her decorator was very exasperated, but the Señorita knew what she wanted. It was such a beautiful house and the garden—it was much better than the senator’s. But then, from the very beginning, it was not a happy home. They were always quarreling, from the first day they moved into it. Señorita tried, I think, to be a good housewife, seeing to it that the Señorito’s meals were ready when he came home, and she never left home without asking his permission. She never went places—I know because I sometimes accompanied her to Christian’s—her dress shop in Malate, to the supermarket, or to parties with former college friends. And of course, the driver always took her there. Señorito always asked him to report where she went. Me, I had to tell him who called at the house, what she said. He was not the best husband, that I can say. But he never beat her although he could have done it for Señorito easily got violent. All his sports had something to do with violence and death—archery, shooting, fencing. Señorita Narita knew how to handle him, I suppose, for though she seldom raised her voice, from their silences, I knew that there was a lot of quarreling going on. Sometimes late in the night, I would hear them arguing. And, you know, our quarters are separate from the house but still I could hear. But then, when there was a party, it was as if she was the happiest girl in the world. And parties, we had them almost every day. I was never so tired and never before had I worked so hard as when I was in that house; but it was also good for I was able to apply what I learned. The Señorito was meticulous. He ordered the flowers, supervised the seating arrangements. I think he was showing off his wife all the time and he was really proud of her—brilliant, a good singer, a good actress—she was everything a man would be proud to marry or possess. Yes, I think it was that way—the Señorito wanted to possess her as if she were some property which, of course, the Señorita was not. She had a mind of her own and a very good mind, too. Sometimes, when I heard them talking, it was she who had a head on her shoulders. The Señorito would just sit quietly while his wife lectured to him. He really loved her. He bought her clothes and always tried to select materials for them. He bought her jewels, too, lots of them, and whenever they went to Hong Kong, you can be sure they always returned with something very expensive. And paintings, the Señorita introduced them to him, and santos and prints; they bought so many there is one room full of them for there is no place to hang them. And antiques, too—well, you see so many shops now selling them but when they started collecting, there was not a single shop where you could really get them. But Señorita Narita had a way and soon—other collectors were coming to the house, showing her things. She had taste, that is what Lopito always said and he felt very proud because he thought it was he who developed her taste. But that is not true; with her, taste was instinctive.
She was also clever. She convinced her father-in-law—that old, scheming man—to divide his property before he died so that there would be no squabbling among his children. And there were only three of them left, you know, so you can imagine how happy the Señorito was to have money of his own, lots of it. But wait, knowing how much of a spendthrift Lopito was, the Old Man saw to it that he could not spend the money without the approval of his wife or of the Old Man himself. And the Señorita—she was always visiting the senator, bringing him cakes which she baked, calling him up, inquiring about his health. And it was all very sincere so that even after they had separated, she continued seeing him and regarding him as a dutiful daughter should. It was a miracle, really, how the marriage could have lasted five years. Five years! It should not have lasted more than a year but that just shows you how patient she was, how she made herself the martyr which she was and this many people do not know. It was all his fault—that I can assure you. From the very beginning. I once heard Señorita telling him, and these were her exact words—“You are not only a liar, you are a coward. You should have told me, from the start …” To which Lopito screamed, for he was drunk that night, “So you would have gone out and gotten yourself a dozen men.” And the Señorita said, “Not while I am married to you, Lopito. Not while I am your wife. But I will do that the moment I leave this house.” I am not too sure about what he was lying about. Or being a coward for. But you must have noticed, there was something effeminate about him. It really started when the Señorito began bringing those boys to the house. Some of them riffraff, you know. The first time it happened, the Señorita transferred to the second floor guest room. They were sleeping separately in the second year of their marriage and in the third, they were hardly talking; the Señorito still held parties as if nothing had happened. He tried to win her back but it was impossible. Those boys, you know. Then they had this big quarrel, right after a party, for Lopito was flirting with one of the male guests and the Señorita was so embarrassed. That was when she left him—she went to live with her father-in-law. He followed her there and the senator did not know a thing about the boys, you know, and that was when he disowned his son. The Señorita refused to go back to Forbes Park and he really must have missed her, loved her in his own way. Well, you know, he collected guns. It was a shotgun which he used, stuck it into his mouth. It was no accident the way it was made to appear in the newspapers. When he died, the Señorita returned to Forbes Park and redecorated the house, changed everything, sold all the things that belonged to Lopito so that there would be no trace of him: There were less parties—maybe just once a month and I really looked forward to them for by then, I had become a very good cook. Why, I could apply anytime at any of the hotels or first-class restaurants. I have polished my French cooking so much, we had a guest once from Paris and he said he thought it was a French chef who prepared the meal.
END OF TAPE
I had been thorough in the interviews, of which I conducted literally more than a hundred, and I also visited and revisited the places where Narita had been and which were relevant to this story. I was always welcome in the Forbes Park residence and her two boys called me Tito. I knew their housekeeper, a distant aunt from back home in Santa Ana. It is a Spanish-type house, whitewashed, with a red-tile roof and ornately grilled windows. Tiles all over the place, in the balcony, the kitchen, and the trees planted there—the guava and the pomelo are now bearing fruit. Narita never seemed to have forgotten the old house in Santa Ana. And yes, the cadena de amor scrambles over the walls, not too profusely or wildly.
I had often mused about how it must feel to have someone commit suicide over you. I remember distinctly that afternoon we were having coffee in her library and she reminisced about her marriage to Lopito. I had just finished her major speech on the restructuring of Filipino cultural values and we were as a matter of fact, engaged in a discussion on the subject which had fascinated us in the think tank as well. She could have written it herself but, like me, she had taken up too many chores. By then, she had wanted me to leave the university so that I could be on her staff full-time, but I was never sold on politics as a career and, in hindsight, I was, of course, right.
She was in comfortable jeans, denim jacket, her hair in a ponytail. She was the mother of two but she could have easily been one of the juniors on the campus. She was holding a glass of Campari and soda which she herself had mixed and she had given me a glass of Southern Comfort, an affectation I had picked up in Cambridge. We had the house all to ourselves; the maids were asleep in their quarters, and the boys were vacationing with their grandfather in Baguio. She asked me why, at the very old age of thirty-four—which she also was—I had not yet gotten married.
“I suppose I have always been in love with you,” I said, at which she laughed aloud, that kind of joking, insinuating laughter which meant that while she appreciated the thought, she also automatically rejected it. She was already one of the most popular women in the country and vastly wealthy, the extent of which I had only started to realize.
“Well, at least you are not a homo,” she said, merriment in her eyes. Then it came—sudden, precise, and without any warning. “That was what Lopito was—oh, everyone knew it. Didn’t you?”
I nodded.
“He was what you call AC/DC,” she said, her face all seriousness now. “We had such fun in the beginning when he was going to Santa Ana—remember? And here in Manila, too, when he was parading me around. I was good camouflage for him. But I think that in his own way, he sincerely loved me.” She paused. Her eyes had misted. “He was so kind, so good to me. He did all that I wanted and I promised myself that I would really be true to him, be an old-fashioned Filipino wife. Do you still see the likes of her?”
“Are you asking me as a sociologist?”
“Yes,” she said.
“The society is changing, Narita. Look at you and you understand how times have changed.”
She nodded. “It was not the boys that Lopito brought home,” she said, “although that aggravated it. It was not his putting me on a pedestal to show off to his friends, to his society crowd. I liked that. I had more beauty, more brains than any of them.” Then it all came through again how the girls at Assumption had snubbed her because she had such lowly origins.
“Lopito, we could have been just friends, you know. As two people can be very good friends, the way we are …” She leaned over and pinched me on the thigh. It was more of a caress and it sent delightful shivers through me. “But after we had gotten married, that was when we really had body contact, you know, the kissing and the petting. Man-wife relations. But that was all there was to it. I would be all heated up and anxious and ready—and he could not do it. He could not do it!” She was pounding the throw pillow viciously, her face wrought up in anger, her eyes blazing. I had never seen Narita in such a mood before and I was shocked and frightened.
After Lopito’s death, Narita went into mourning, wore the black dress of widows and—as an informant told me of this period—she was if anything more chic in her black dresses. But her grief was real. You cannot live with a person for five years and not have the slightest attachment to him. She retained her married name and preferred to be addressed as Mrs. Reyes even when she went into politics. And her children, too, though they were not Lopito’s—she gave them her husband’s name. Senator Reyes knew this and it is perhaps for this reason why the Old Man is happy with her children, too.
What would a young, beautiful widow in the Philippines do if she had brains and money as well? The world is wide open and it was at this point that Colonel Antonio Cunio came in. But first, may I point out one basic problem that I also encountered when I started this study.
I had wanted to do a survey of women in politics and we have many examples that date back to the earliest days of suffrage or, if you will, to the revolution against Spain when our women played a vital role. But by zeroing in on a particular subject, a woman I knew very well, I could detail the personal incidents, pry into motivation—all of which cannot be quantified, but which are important in any study. This would, probably, be termed as psychohistory or psychosociology. But I am not one to bother the general reader with obtuse jargon that is often the mumbo jumbo of muddled thinking or which is simply bad writing.
At first, Colonel Cunio, who is now retired, did not want to talk. I had to rely on the usual tricks of the interviewer to thaw out his reserve. I told him that I need not mention his name in the study but afterwards, he gave me blanket authority to use all the “facts” with his name if I wanted to.
As it turned out, he was loquacious, proud of his Korean War record, proud of his machismo.
All that he described happened during the time I was at Cambridge. I had not seen Narita since I left for the United States although in my third year there, I learned that she was in New York. Colonel Cunio was a Philippine Military Academy graduate; he prided himself on his knowledge of Philippine politics and grudgingly admitted that Narita was bright, particularly when she analyzed the Far East. “I don’t know where she got that smattering of Japanese,” he said wryly, “but when she started talking about periods in Japanese history, and Korea, too, she really had the field to herself.”
TAPE TWO
Colonel Antonio Cunio, retired:
I got my commission in 1947 and that same year, I commanded a platoon in the Huk campaign in Central Luzon. I was a junior at the PMA during the war and could have gotten my commission in the field … Nothing spectacular about World War II; we were disbanded in Cagayan and there was some guerrilla work. I was in several operations, including Four Roses—that was when William Pomeroy, the American communist, was captured. I also saw action in the Korean War, I suppose you have read about that although you may have been quite young then. Our battalion figured in the Imjin campaign and that was where I got this Distinguished Service medal. Well, actually, it was a retreat, for the Chinese were coming at us wave after wave and I led a company through a pincer movement. We lost five in that encounter, but I can assure you the Chinese lost many more. They were so close, we were fighting with fixed bayonets. We did no hand-to-hand fighting, but we were lobbing grenades. The barrels of the automatic rifles were hot and still they came, blowing their bugles. I had a flesh wound in the thigh—I did not even know it till one of the men pointed to my bleeding leg and they bandaged it to stop the flow. I was weak but you can rely on this old Tagalog blood to carry me through.
After the Korean War, I was sent to command schools in the United States and that was where I had my first white woman. It was quite an experience, you know. She was the wife of a lieutenant who was assigned to Germany and while she was waiting for her transfer, she came around and provided me company. There was this Korean girl, too, in Pusan. But you know how war is, how things come and go. When I returned after a year at Fort Benning and Fort Leavenworth, I was assigned to Camp Murphy—called Camp Aguinaldo now—to a desk job that had me bored as all desk jobs do. So I started looking around for patronage—you know, the old Filipino standby. And that was when I saw Senator Reyes who had known my father when my father was still active in Bulacan politics. It was the senator who got me as his aide and, later, when he became Senate President—one step to the Presidency—you know what that means! It was as an aide that I met Narita. I used to deliver messages from the Old Man to her, carry parcels, her blasted cakes, the special gifts that she bought for him when she went abroad, those Dutch cigars in special tinfoil. She was always hanging around the Old Man, attending to him more than his daughters ever did, and Senator Reyes was really eating off her palm. Yes, I think the senator became some sort of father to her. And what a father he turned out to be—more generous than any father would be. And I don’t blame him—the way his own children had been treating him as if he did not exist or that he existed only to give them money. I was drawn to her from the beginning, I suppose, although I am ten years older or more. But there is nothing like a younger woman for a middle-aged man. Good and tight, you know what I mean. Then her husband died. It was then that I felt I was free to attend to her. But not before. I still have some sense of ethics left, even when it came to sex. Besides, what would the Old Man say if he found out that I was shacking up with his daughter-in-law? I first dated her a full month after the death of Lopito. She was not a hypocrite. When I asked her if I could take her out nightclubbing at the Amihan, she said yes outright. I told her that it was not one of those high-class places, the food was awful, there were hostesses and she might feel insulted. But I knew she loved good music and there was an excellent band playing there. And she said, yes, don’t lecture me about what is decent and indecent; I can decide that for myself. We went in her Mercedes; she said it was better that way because she felt more independent. Damn it—that was what was wrong with her. She always wanted to be independent. To feel independent. To act independent. She did not give much of a chance for even a man like me to be her master. Or at least be on top. Do you know that even when we were doing it, she wanted to be on top? Well, I couldn’t do much about that. After all, I really needed her and loved her. I tried to keep it a secret but was not successful. My wife, who is also a very clever woman, got to know of it. But there was my career and I was close to one of the most powerful men in the country. She tried to accept it and keep quiet. Narita, too, wanted to keep up appearances and in a way, she was a very moral person. And that was when she thought she should go to the United States so she could be freer and less inhibited than she was in Manila. The Old Man was also very glad to have her go, to improve herself. And he knew of the relationship—he saw to it that I got an assignment in New York as attaché to the Mission there. I really enjoyed New York—that one year of freedom from the duties in Manila. Narita bought this apartment—or house, rather, in the East Sixties. Ah, you know about it. It cost a fortune then and it certainly must be a very expensive piece of property now. I hope that the radiator in her bedroom is already fixed. It was always squeaking, you know, and was often a bother. You know what I mean. Well, we had a son—her older boy, you know that. And I will never forgive her for giving him Lopito’s name. Everyone knew he was not Lopito’s. He was mine. And she told the boy it was Lopito who was his father. ot me. I cannot even visit him or tell him he is mine. That woman—she thought of everything. It could be blackmail, of course. But what could I do? I am a government servant and her father-in-law is one of the most powerful men in government. You know what I mean.
And then, she met Ambassador Iturralde. That was my mistake—I introduced her to him at one of those receptions where I thought I would show her off. You know, in any crowd, she would stand out. But you know something? I had one over all of them, over all of the men that she went with afterwards. Yes, no one can get this distinction from me. And I am very proud. It happened finally on our second date. I did not take advantage of her on the first. Just dancing, cheek to cheek, and a simple good-night kiss. Although I knew that she was waiting for me to make the move, I did not want to play it fast. Experience has taught me never to rush, just play it cool and slow. A week afterwards, I asked her if she wanted to go that Sunday for a drive to Bulacan where I grew up. There was this special restaurant along the highway which served wonderful crabs and snipes when they were in season. And she said yes. Of course, I had already made plans on how to seduce her—if seduction is the word. It is all very clear to me, the first time with her, and it was unforgettable, I suppose, also for her. It was a bright Sunday morning and we drove off towards Calumpit and had lunch at this roadside restaurant. She was game. It was not a fancy place and she seemed to enjoy it. Then I asked her if she wanted to see the fish ponds where the crabs and the milkfish were caught, and have a breath of fresh air besides and she said, yes. So we drove off towards the bay where my family had owned this fish pond for years. You pass this village before reaching it—and the villagers worked for my family, you know, and they knew why I was there. I suppose Narita also suspected. We got off at the village and I pointed out to her the ponds that lay beyond the clump of acacia trees at the turn of the river and said, those are ours. There was this hut alone in the expanse of dikes and water where the workers rest and I asked her if she wanted to go out there and take a closer look and she said, of course, and so we went. We were finally there, alone by ourselves. I took her inside the hut and kissed her. She responded with a passion that surprised me, considering that it was the first time I had really kissed her. At first, she was a bit apprehensive when I started taking off her dress, but I said I would keep watch, and that no one from the village would dare come and interrupt us. After all, this was not the first time I had taken a girl to the hut. Assured thus, she gave herself to me with an abandon that was almost anger. I know—and you know something? Damn it—goddamn it! I was the first. The first! All those years that she was married to Lopito, nothing had happened. I have the proof, damn it. I kept it. She was looking around for some tissue paper, but there was none and I had this white, spotless handkerchief which she used. It was all red, all red! I tell you, that is something no one can take away from me!
END OF TAPE