I have seen Narita in tears only once. By this time, she already had a suite in her father-in-law’s Makati building, the nerve center for her political future. She had an excellent clipping service. She had called me, I thought, about some urgent problem. When I arrived, she closed the door, told me to sit down and read an item in a weekly gossip column by Mita Guzman.
Narita never had much respect for Filipino journalists—an attitude she got from Senator Reyes who handed envelopes at the end of every month to a wide assortment of reporters. They covered the Senate and other trivia and passed themselves off as journalists. She had the long list and on it were editors, some of whom professed the highest moral motives.
Mita Guzman was a slight acquaintance; so was the husband, a small, henpecked man who was once my classmate in political science but who had dropped out to take a job as PR man for one of the congressmen. She was a woman to be feared both physically and otherwise for she had the face and the muscle of a sumo wrestler and the nastiness to skewer anything that crossed her path. Now, in her column: “She is young, pretty, and able. She has a Columbia degree and she sings well in a modern musical. Watch out for this girl now for though her father died a drunk and her mother sold meat (not rotten) in the old hometown, she has claims to royalty and will yet make it to the Senate next election …”
When I finished the item, which was encircled in red, Narita said: “Why can’t they forget where I came from? Did I commit a crime? We were poor, Eddie, but not starving. You know that …”
I went to her and held her shoulders. “You should expect these things. Remember, Narita, you’re in politics now. There will be more when you campaign. It will not stop.”
“I will get her, I tell you,” she said grimly, then quavered and tears ran from her eyes. I held her close and could feel her heart thrashing. She clung to me as if I were a raft and cried, the sobs stifled. I did not know whether it was in anger or grief. I said: “There is nothing to be ashamed of, Narita. How many Filipinos are poor? This is your capital, if you want to make it work for you. Cinderella story. Girl from the sticks makes it in New York. Is there a more romantic theme?”
She stopped crying abruptly and drew away, a look of surprise, of resentment, on her tear-washed face. “What?” her voice leaped. “Expose myself to more ridicule? That’s unthinkable! I’ll have none of it. Poverty is not something to be proud of. It is degrading and don’t ask me to think otherwise.”
She did get Mita Guzman, in her own way. One morning I came upon Guzman waiting in Narita’s Forbes Park living room, a bunch of red roses in her hand. When Narita came out, she attended to me first as if Mita did not exist. And only after she had put Mita in place did Narita go to her, kiss her on the cheek, and thank her for the flowers. Mita waited outside while Narita and I had coffee leisurely in the kitchen where she told me how she did it.
The Guzmans had hocked their house to the Philippine Bank to buy a small press. Having learned of this, Narita—through the Senate President—turned the screws and Mita had no alternative but to come a-visiting. Mita had been to see her more than a dozen times, enriching some florist with the roses she always brought.
To complete the noose, Narita suggested that with her help, the Guzmans should have a larger press capability and they should not worry about printing jobs. There was so much in the Senate that they could do. And then, there was this election campaign that was coming. And yes, she was such a good writer, it would be great if she did Narita’s official biography—and of course, Narita would pay for it all and reward their publishing company handsomely.
“She is also cuckolding her husband,” Narita said. “It’s all in the computer now. She is no different … the whole bunch …”
I wanted to say that her father-in-law and she made them that way, but by then, I had decided to keep such thoughts to myself.
If the Party convention was lutong makaw (prearranged), so was the election. I watched the campaign and sometimes helped distribute those envelopes with money in them. She had exhausted most of us just keeping up with her. I don’t know where her iron energy came from—it certainly was not the yogurt, nor the pills. She would be up mapping out the next meeting with her flip cards and notebooks while we were still asleep. I would have recorded more of her techniques and performance but my leave from the department was up.
She had all the handbills that she needed but there was one picture-poster of her, printed in Japan through the courtesy of Senator Reyes’ Japanese contacts, a big 16″ X 24″ in full color, a prim, almost Mona Lisa-like smile on her face, so elfin, yet so innocent like the Virgin Mary’s as well. There was no name on the picture but in those few months, it had become the most popular election material. She autographed it and it was displayed—just like a magazine cover—which it had been earlier for all the vernacular weekly magazines whose editors she had bought. I saw it inside sari-sari stores, in farm homes, in offices long after the campaign and I presume that to this day, there are rural houses adorned with it.
Those flip cards really helped. Before she went into a new territory, the team zeroed in on it, the important people, personal details—hobbies, deaths, birthdays, relatives—all these came in handy. She did not upstage the other candidates but sometimes the clamor for her was just too loud to be ignored. By now, they were calling, Manang, Narita! When it was her turn, she would start in the local language. She could converse passably in tongue twisters like Pangasinan and Zambal and she even picked up a bit of Tausug.
There was nothing intellectual or explosive about her speeches on the road. Soon, the audience would clamor for her to sing and she always gave them “Lahat ng Araw” which she included in her zarzuela. She even had different versions of it; a university poet whom she flattered wrote Ilokano lyrics and she had a journalist from Cebu do it in Cebuano as well. The song became a hit and look at all the record companies doing it in instrumental and vocals now.
But it was a case of overkill and I don’t know whose idea it was—Senator Reyes’ or Narita’s. Underneath the glossy exterior of that campaign, the music, the fanfare, there was something sinister. And that first meeting with Senator Reyes came to mind.
I am fully aware of course that to go deeper into this is to tread on dark, unfamiliar terra infirma. I can only guess her views on poverty developed because of her childhood; her rejection of the slums afterwards was based not on a sense of moral outrage but on aesthetics. She could not stand the unsightly around her, whether it was a man like me who did not comb his hair or a slum dweller’s barong-barong. Her view of the world was, therefore, cosmetic although she, herself, would not admit it.
The violence—and I had reports of it—was committed in many places, in our own town, mostly in our province. A former clerk in the municipio had dredged up the fact that her father had absconded with some money. The poor man was beaten up and Father had to treat him for lacerations. She was perhaps determined that in her homeground, she should be on top—which she was not only because Senator Reyes poured a lot of money but because she was the local girl who made good. The opposition mayor of Tubas, close to our town, was killed. It was a shooting “accident” and although people had come to Manila to say it was not, there was no mention of it in the papers. That was the extent to which the papers were manipulated. And vote-buying, bribery, dumping—I will not recite these. It is enough that I knew they happened not because she and her father-in-law were insecure but because they believed in overkill.
With both of them now in the Senate, I thought it was time to push through government programs such as those which we had worked so hard to shape. After the euphoria had died, I got the whole sheaf of proposals together one Saturday morning. It was a full two weeks after the election and I knew that the time was opportune to discuss them for soon the Senate sessions would start.
It was not that I personally was filled with love for the downtrodden, but in that small Negros town, Father had attended to the workers in the farm with free professional care. Mother taught school before she married Father and she tried her best to teach the children who did not attend public school the rudiments at least of writing and reading. Father had always hammered into us that the workers, though they were not as educated as we were, had the same blood. I was not about to organize them into a militant and radical labor union nor was I inclined to shout revolution like some of my colleagues at the university. I think I was too comfortable to do that, but I was not going to see them mired in either perpetual ignorance or poverty. I saw enough evidence in America to show that wealth—when spread around—would do everyone a bit of good.
Narita always called when she needed me, which was often. It was one of those few instances when I called her. “All right, Eddie. Come early enough so we can have lunch,” she said brightly.
I had already bought a Volks. Her money was useful and because she was happy with the group, she upped my consultancy fee as she called it to four thousand a month, much, much more than I was making at the university. I had difficulty convincing myself that I really earned it.
She was not yet up when I arrived and it was already past eleven. She had earlier gone horseback riding at the Polo Club then gone back to sleep. By noon, I was served coffee and a plateful of sandwiches and cold yogurt. I was halfway through when she came down in her dressing gown, a shimmery kind, her breasts showing through.
“That is a very sexy dress,” I said, thinking about New York again. In the almost three years since, we never had any kind of real intimacy and all the reward I got was an occasional kiss on the mouth, the pressing of bodies, a lingering handclasp. I was in a position where I couldn’t expect more.
She took the sandwiches away and told the cook to prepare the table at once. But I already had enough and I barely touched the Chateaubriand. It was a leisurely lunch and I could see that the arduous campaign had not ravaged her; she was as fresh and as lovely as ever. With our coffee, we went to the library. She noticed my bulky portfolio. “It is business then”, she smiled.
I recalled our first meeting with the senator in the same room, how we had talked about responsive government and that as she probably saw in her provincial sallies, the first priority was rural poverty, agrarian reform, anything to improve the lives of the rural poor. She listened for a few minutes while I mapped out the parameters of legislative action, but soon I could see that she was not concentrating.
“You are not interested,” I said with irritation.
“Because I know everything you are saying, Eddie, and right now, I am not really interested.”
I never felt as futile and as helpless as I did then, to be told that I was talking to a stone. I gathered the folders and dumped them into my briefcase. Then, more in sadness than in anger: “I had hoped you would remember not just Santa Ana but the things you told me. Am I wrong in hoping you won’t be like the rest? There should be conscience in politics, else we would be nothing but pigs …”
“Then let us be pigs,” she said with a vehemence that startled me. “Conscience, duty—all those virtues that you hear bandied about—my duty is not to God and country. It is to me—myself first, because without myself, what would there be? And look at you, you and your … genteel morality—what is it that you look forward to first? Your career, no less. I’m not here to clean the stables, to change tradition—the tradition in corruption. I am part of the herd although very much above the herd. Who can say this with the honesty that I am saying it?”
I could not speak.
She went on. “Listen, Eddie. In these four years, I will do what I can. Only a bit—for my image, for patronage. I am aiming beyond the Senate. Nothing but the top, the Presidency. You understand that? And when I’m there, that’s when we can go to town, do all the things you want to do. You think Papa is all that powerful? No, and neither will I be. I would be very pleased if you boys paid some attention to that. Focus on the next election because that’s where I’m headed. And I will use everything I can to get there.”
“Power has gone to your head,” I said. “You’re using people as if they were things. Objects. I thought you didn’t like America because it is like that.”
“I pay them well. I pay you very well. No one can top what I am giving them, or you.”
“I’ll go back there. To hell with your money.”
“You will rot there,” she said, trying to be conciliatory.
“That is where I prefer to be. I am a scholar.”
“What is scholarship if it is not used?”
“The search for truth is sometimes without use from your point of view. But truth is always useful to humanity at large.”
“The hell with humanity. You can love humanity without loving one single individual.”
“Are you describing yourself? Remember the Caesars. Sic transit gloria mundi, all that sort of thing.”
“I am not building an empire.”
“There is no difference. You are in love with power. Caesar, when he was paraded in Rome, there was always this man following him, whispering, chanting: ‘Remember, thou art mortal.’ So Narita, remember—you are full of shit.”
“I will have you fired,” she said under her breath.
“You will have me flogged. But does that destroy the truth? And the truth is that you’re no different from the politicians you despise, from those girls at Assumption who snubbed you. You are snubbing man—and you cannot do that unless you resign from the human race.”
“Get out of my sight,” she shouted.
“Gladly,” I said.
She did not stop me.
Driving on the highway, I was so angry, so frustrated, I started to cry. I decided then that I would not have anything more to do with her. The four-thousand-peso loss would be a real sacrifice. It had helped with the mortgage on the house. There would also be less money for my sisters who were still in school. To help them was one of my duties as the eldest.
I also got frightened. She could very well carry out her threat to have me kicked out of the university. I had tenure but what was tenure if people with no compassion were in power?
I need not have worried. The following day, bright and early, there she was in her new Mercedes 300. I was having breakfast when I saw the car park in front of the gate. I rushed to my room upstairs and told my sisters to tell her that I was not in.
I could hear her downstairs, her disbelief that I would leave so early on a Sunday morning. She said, “Well, I have nothing to do. I can wait the whole day if it comes to that. And I haven’t had breakfast yet.”
There was a scramble to prepare for breakfast and I knew how embarrassed and uneasy my sisters were. Then she asked to go to my study. She wanted to look at my books and get something to read while waiting. My attempt at evasion had ended and I padded down the stairs. She grinned, shook a finger, and said, “Eddie—not on a Sunday morning …”
She stood up and said she wanted to see my study or my room anyway and before I could object, she was up the flight and holding on to my arm, my sisters looking at us with amusement.
My room was a mess as usual, my rubber shoes in the doorway, my dirty underwear under the desk, my books all over the place, my diploma still unframed and stuck on the wall with pins. As soon as we went in, she turned the latch. Then Narita kissed me deeply, passionately, murmuring, “I am sorry, darling, about yesterday. I hurt you, didn’t I? I’m here now to apologize and make up.”
And what could I say when drowning in her sweetness?
We fell on my bed. She had taken off her dress and tossed it on the floor. My sisters were probably listening in the other room so I made nonsensical small talk. The bed began to squeak and she said, “Damn!” She pulled me to the floor. It would have been uncomfortable but she rode me expertly and all the anxiety, all the anger were gone. There was only this woman as I had imagined her.
For a while, I fantasized about us living together.
We lay on the floor for a long time, talking, remembering New York, the campaign. We went over the few mistakes that were made and how they would be rectified next time. The challenge to her ambition was formidable when we finally came to it—the Presidency. She said it was within her grasp. She could convince the President not to run for reelection and perhaps jokingly, I am not sure now, she said: “If he will not accede to that, I will just put a few drops of cyanide in his coffee. He drinks it black so he won’t recognize the bitter taste.”
“How can you talk so complacently and with such familiarity about him?” I asked, turning on my side to face her.
She poked me in the ribs then. “Oh, Eddie, you were really born yesterday! Didn’t you know? The President and I—we became lovers during the campaign.”
At first, I had thought of limiting my interview with Senator Reyes to his comments about Narita, to his observations on national politics and the contribution his daughter-in-law had made. But I soon realized that this was a mistake for the senator—it’s obvious now—shadowed Narita all her life, not like some protective umbrella but as a pall, a fate that started on its course at the time the senator first came to Santa Ana and saw the young mestiza.
The interview with Senator Reyes, therefore, is not just central to this story but a document in itself about an era, of the thinking which shaped a generation and the future, and also made the new definition of nationalism and the new public morality. Senator Reyes knew all the prewar political figures from Quezon onwards. He himself had collaborated with the Japanese in World War II and like all the collaborators of that period, justified his acts in the larger interests of the people. He had seen how the same collaborators like him became rich.
To the very end, when he was already approaching senility, he justified himself, what he had done with politics and his brand of self-seeking nationalism. He sometimes castigated the elite to which he belonged for its depradation of the country, for not bringing alternatives to the corrupt political system. But his criticisms were mild and they were not really intended to sink the boat, not even to rock it. He was for the status quo and nationalism would preserve it. But though it is easy to pass judgment on men like him now, Senator Reyes was elevated to his lofty niche in free elections. It was the people who made the likes of him possible and, perhaps, inevitable.
Senator Reyes:
I stand on top of a mountain—I know that you are perhaps thinking, on top of a heap—and you are not wrong, either. You will ask how does one get to the top? Well, it takes a lot of money to do that, and guts. And cleverness, one must never forget that. Those who profess a high degree of virtue, of morality as indicated in the holy writ have no business trying to be leaders or nation builders. They should work in cemeteries, among the dead who cannot complain. I did a lot of complaining, bitching, haranguing in my time. And I am still doing it.
They are all gone now—my children. Yes, I raised quite a good and handsome brood and I had hoped they would grow into princes and princesses, the heirs that I wanted, but this was not meant to be. Still, fate had been very kind to me, to have let me live to this nice old age to see some of my ideological handiwork take root in a country where anything grows. Perhaps it was wrong for me to have laid so much emphasis, or hope, on the family as the shaper of this country’s future. Yes, I’m an autocrat, a patriarch, and I saw to it that all those under my wing were protected and those outside—I will not say exterminated—although that is what my enemies thought I was doing. Ignored, that is the word. Ignored! I wanted all of them to go as fast and as far as my vision wanted. They were going to be pillars, not only of the clan. I had seen destiny—we the Reyeses—or kings—leading them. I am not His Majesty, although there is really little difference in a country where the family is the beginning and the end.
What is all this talk about revolution, the class struggle? All these I postulated thirty years ago. But how do you really remove the kings? By changing their names and calling them senators? Oligarchs? The intelligentsia agreed with me, they quoted me, they hovered around, partaking of the wisdom which I threw at them like crumbs. I told them nationalism is necessary and the kings themselves must profess it so that they will not lose their heads. It must not be just love of country, but love of people—and here, I mean the lower classes. And that is what I have done, loved the people, worked for them, gave them jobs, direction to their aspirations for dignity, upliftment from the morass in which they had been immersed and which they had come to accept. I raised them up a bit; and in the process, why shouldn’t I raise myself higher, too, higher than all of them, the way it had always been? What will happen to the people if they have no leaders?
History will judge me not for what I am, however, and not even for what I have done but for what I have said. This is what goes on the record, this is what is dished out to the masses to read. And there will be scholars in the future as there are today who do not question the documents they read, who do not go beyond the archival presentation of the bureaucracy.
Between the lines, that is where history has always been.
There will always be those, however, who will say that history is written by the strong, but that is not enough: history has to be believed if it is to have currency, and believers are what I have always tried to make. There are enough dolts and jackasses among our elite who believe that they are so anointed to rule merely because they have their own propagandists churning out praises for them which, in time, they come to accept as the truth. I was never one of them—I always knew the limitations of power. But at the same time, I was also aware of the cupidity of those men who exercised power … Politics has always been accommodation, not uncompromising idealism, although that could help camouflage the real intentions of politicians. This is what I have always told Narita and this, I think, she believed.
What can I say about her? She was my daughter, she was my pupil, she was my heir. All my children—it is not that they have failed me. It was never in their blood—I see that now—to give the nation the service, the thinking that it needed, the way I devoted my life to it. But Narita—from the beginning, I knew that she would do justice to the name she had taken.
If I were only younger … but it does not matter. She was some woman, better looking than all the women I have had, and there have been a few … She learned very fast, she should have been the first woman president. She got as high as the Senate but even there, look at what she had done, the many programs on nutrition, on culture, on science she had started, the many Centers that were built at her inspiration. Food production has increased, thanks to her, and the sugar workers—although I should not be talking like this—are better off now because of her untiring and unselfish devotion to their cause. Don’t laugh—you know that my life had always revolved around sugar, its problems, its world market and, of course, that beautiful quota from the United States. But we were willing to be pushed a bit, not by those mealy mouthed priests, not by those radical labor leaders, but by those whom we trust, who know our feelings, who are part of our constellation. If we give justice to people, we should do so without being prodded and, by God, that is what we did.
These and so many more are Narita’s achievements and no gossip monger, no vitriolic critic can take these away.
I knew Narita as a child, I watched her grow; her ideas on nationalism, she got them from me. I was instrumental in shaping them, guiding them. Not that she did not have a mind of her own. In fact she was so independent at times, she could even afford afterwards to antagonize my friends and taunt the whole system itself.
So she has left me two wonderful boys who will not forget their mother as the most heroic, the most unusual Filipina in our history. Gabriela Silang, Tandang Sora, all those revered Filipinas in our lineage—they are really nothing compared to her. The scholars should have no difficulty in confirming this …
END OF TAPE
Looking back, I have often wondered about the exact moment when I began to delude myself. I know now that it was done slowly, bit by bit, with my own circumstances and needs, pushing me, my desire to justify myself, that I was really earning the money that she paid me. I also began to believe, towards the latter part of the relationship, that nothing much could be done about our political malaise until she had real power, when she could dictate and no longer have to deal with slimy politicians and make compromises. I realize that this is a fallacy, that government is not a vacuum, that where there are human relationships, compromises are inevitable and that, precisely speaking, the statesman is also a superb politician.
During the first year of her term, I worked hard and there were heated arguments within the think tank for the others were never told—and I never told them—that she was aiming for the Presidency. Of course, that did occur to them. The programs that we shaped always kept her in the public eye. She was a national figure now and well beyond the narrow partisan confines of bloc, of party. She had taken on, too, the nationalist mantle that the aging senator bestowed on her.
It was in the second year of her term that she went to this small college in our province to deliver a commencement address. It was a request she could not deny; besides, it afforded her a chance to see again the old hometown and, perhaps, renew ties. And as the newspapers related it, after she had finished her extemporaneous address on social justice as an ideal she wanted the young to promote, there was a standing and thunderous ovation. It was at this instance, too, that the young graduates all rushed to the stage to congratulate her. It was a mob scene and the stage suddenly swayed and then collapsed.
She had been knocked against a rusty iron truss, there was a gash on her arm—nothing serious, and she was moving around with a sling when she got to the provincial hospital her father-in-law had built.
It was the ultimate irony; a doctor decided to give her an anti-tetanus shot, just to be sure. In seconds, she was gasping in a massive anaphylactoid attack. There was no resuscitator, no anti-allergy shot available at that instance. In less than five minutes, she was dead.
These details were ignored by the papers. It was more dramatic to say it was the people’s enthusiasm which killed her, that she died in her home ground, defending the rights of the poor sacadas against the rich sugar oligarchs, the applause of the youth her lasting epitaph.
The mythmakers, particularly the PR staff of Senator Reyes, had more than a kernel to start with: The Narita Reyes Foundation immediately came into being purportedly to perpetuate the ideals for which Narita gave her life. Nowhere was it mentioned that the young people had rushed and crowded that flimsy stage for at the end of her speech Narita started handing out those envelopes that were, by then, a familiar gimmick in her public appearances and her campaign …
In a couple of years, there floated around variations of her last moments, perhaps to fit the temper of the times. Now, the CIA was responsible. She had been vocal in her anti-Americanism, in her espousal—like her father-in-law—of the removal of the American bases. The CIA saw to it that the stage would collapse!
I knew her well enough to see through her, that like Senator Reyes whose sugar interests survived on American largesse, Narita’s anti-Americanism was for the galleries, for the pseudointellectuals of the campuses.
The aides of Senator Reyes woke me up at three o’clock that morning and the senator and I flew to Bacolod in his Cessna, with the casket on board in the back. He was silent during the flight, his crumpled face grown darker with his grief. When we got to the hospital at daybreak, he thundered and raged and said he would have every doctor there forbidden to practice and jailed. We went to the room where Narita lay and at the sight of her, he broke down, the sobs torn out of him in gusts.
They brought the casket in and he forbade them to touch her; only the two of us could. I did not realize till then how light she was. Looking at the quiet face, the eyes closed as if in sleep, the cleft chin, it all came back—the little girl I had played with in Santa Ana, the splashing rain, the ripe guavas and the green cascade of cadena de amor in bloom. I did not want the Old Man to see me cry so I let the tears burn and fall without my wiping them.
She was buried in Manila. Her mother, my parents, and some of our hometown friends who could afford the trip were there. It was a hot April day and we sweated in the hall of the Senate as we listened to the lengthy eulogies.
It was vacation time anyway so after the funeral, I decided to go home with Father and Mother. Our house looked shabby, its wooden sidings in need of paint. I walked over to Narita’s new house. It was much more substantial, the biggest house in Santa Ana, bigger than the municipio. The guava and pomelo trees had not been cut but they could not now hide the big house with wooden balustrades and red-painted roof as they had the old house roofed with rusting tin. I don’t know if it was on Narita’s instructions, but they did not tear down the old brick wall that enclosed the yard and the cadena de amor—now scraggly brown and shorn of leaves—clambered over it. Sometime soon, when the rains shall have started, the vines would be green again.
Sei Thomas Gakuin
Kyoto, April 6, 1979.