As Ermi had bitterly suggested, that evening, I went to the mirror—this pallid face, the lines beginning to form around the nose, the wrinkles deepening on the forehead, the graying around the temples more pronounced. I had thought of dyeing my hair but I was just too egoistical to do it, assuring myself that a man is as young as he feels. I asked this man in the mirror, now in the inevitable grasp of middle age, if he was a prostitute, too, and I scanned the bleak terrain of his past, the years with B.G. Collas when he used to sell everything, including soft drinks, with the habiliments of nationalism. So then, Rolando Cruz, Ph.D. in history, do you recall how you composed advertising copy embellished with your knowledge of your country’s past? The hortatory speeches you wrote for corporate and government hierarchs who did not really know, much less believe, what you put in their mouths? I justified these as providing my family a home, a good education for the children, a future that would not be wracked by the dismal insecurity and unhappiness that I had known as a boy.
I was now humbled, devastated even by what Ermi had told me. As my conscience, I must see her again. Now, she was behind my mind, insinuating herself, a nagging, unsettling subconscious. I could not concentrate on what was important at hand. I had a staff of about thirty but I had to read all the final reports and correct them if necessary. I initiated research. My foreign clients wanted background on labor conditions, availability of raw materials, political leaders and options for influencing them, loopholes in government procedures and investment laws, taxes—all the information they needed to make profits without sweating.
What had Ermi cast over me? A net? Perhaps a medieval spell, or an aswang talisman which would cripple me if I did not run or persevere in cutting myself away from all that reminded me of her. This was, of course, impossible. Everywhere I turned were new restaurants, bars, massage parlors which had started to proliferate and, later on, the new hotels.
Indeed, how Ermita had changed! Marcelo H. del Pilar Street—what would that self-effacing, courageous propagandist say now if he saw that the street named after him had become “sin avenue” festooned with the glitter and shine of pick-up bars. My own Mabini, named after that stubborn and unswerving ideologue of the revolution, has become a raucous arcade of souvenir shops and that genre painting for tourists which portrayed the Philippines as a land of pouring sunlight, elegiac harvestime, wide-eyed children and forever enchanting village girls.
Once upon a time, the whole Ermita area was the precinct of the mestizo elite. Plaza Militar and its environs, which I could see from my window, were the compounds of the American aristocracy. These streets were lined with acacias then and behind the high walls of ivy, in the august mansions, was a sybaritic life devoid of the anxieties of colonialism. Then the war came and Ermita was leveled; the mestizos and the colonialists left it to form another ilustrado enclave in a former grassland called Makati. And their abandoned mansions which were spared, now decrepit and ill preserved, had become tawdry love motels.
How could I ignore Ermi? How could I stop breathing? She was now embedded in my mind, a part of me. I could no longer think. My job demanded a mind free from all these impediments that made it impossible to relate cause and effect.
Cause and effect! There was nothing I did which excluded her. If I went to an appointment in the afternoon or in the evening, would it enable me to pass by Camarin so that I could see her before someone took her out? She had by now a good clientele. There were many offers, she told me, to make her a full-time mistress, to be “garaged” as the expression went, but she was familiar with the liabilities that arose from such arrangements. But what really vexed me was the fact that though she could afford to quit, she still persisted.
I started taking meditation lessons. Indeed, after a half hour of contemplating my feet, my mind would be rid of junk and all thoughts of Ermi that bedeviled me. But only for a while. Soon enough she intruded again. I realized then that I would have to leave Manila—even just for a few weeks—time enough to flee the single subject that had begun to canker me.
The first stop was Honolulu. Lolling on the beach at Ala Moana enabled me to think soberly not only of her but of Manila. It was beginning to wobble under the accretion of ancient problems, a radicalized youth movement battering at the hoary walls of privilege, including the multinationals which I represented and defended. I had sympathized with the demands for change but my bread did not come from kids who massed at the American embassy and rampaged in the streets of Ermita, smashing shop windows and splattering their vaulting slogans on the walls.
I had brought my notes on sexuality and began to work on them, particularly those about the lesbians and transvestites with whom Didi had put me in touch. I was amused, remembering an “international fashion show” by the transvestites at a UN Avenue auditorium the week I left. They were all dolled up and even under those lights, no one would have thought they were men.
Honolulu was, of course, wide open to the changes in sexual mores that had transformed much of American society, perhaps fundamentally. More so was San Francisco which had become the gay capital of America. But my interests were centered on home. America eddied around me, distant, impermeable. I was not involved.
A month in the United States, a month in South America which pitched me up the heights of Machu Picchu, and also one month in Europe—with the exotic food, one-night stands—and I instead—continued to marvel at what had happened in Manila. Had I procrastinated, I would have been enslaved by emotions I could no longer control. Now, I wanted to find something I could latch on to, not just history which had fired me in the past, but something equally immaterial, some ideal that would sustain me in this solitary middle age.
The pleasant deviations in New York, the cherry stone clams at Nathan’s, the juiciest steaks at Gallaghers, all the sensual pleasures of Babylon did not, however, waylay memory. I had hoped it would be easy to forget Ermi but the distance only served to heighten my loneliness, my desire to be with her again. What did I recall of our talks? She did tell me she was good at math. Yes, she loved chocolates although sometimes too lazy even just to take the tinsel wrapping off Hershey’s Kisses before putting them into her mouth. I began to suspect that, perhaps, I was a masochist, that I was getting satisfaction from the agony that I was undergoing. It was when I slept that I should have had some peace but she obtruded in my dreams.
Then, the three months were over. Back in Manila, I wanted to rush to Camarin but I must test my will. For weeks I did not go although twice in that period, one of my staffers called up Didi for her girls. In the third week, my determination collapsed.
Didi was at her usual table and she asked why I had kept away so long. A business trip, I explained. And Ermi?
“She left about two weeks ago,” she said.
I regretted my foolishness. I damned myself.
“For the United States,” Didi continued. “You must have missed her a lot.”
I nodded. “Will she stay there long?”
“Maybe two months, maybe two years.”
It was just as well then, I consoled myself. Her protracted absence, about which I could do nothing, would be my final cure.
Martial law came and for the first time in my operation, everything went awry as the rules were changed. The media targets were more easily defined for there was no longer a free press and all the owners of media were either friends or relatives of the occupant of Malacañang. Gathering economic data was both easy and difficult. All that one had to know was the pattern of new elite relationships, the regions where the entrepreneurs came from. But now, government information sources were very secretive and what were once normal public documents were regarded as state secrets. One clear pattern emerged—the centralization of corruption and a thrust towards the building of infrastructures for export that depressed wages and gave new and dazzling capital sources to a favored few. I had heavily invested in the construction of a modest office building in Makati and put money in blue chip stocks. I was a segurista—I was not going to gamble with the little money I had made. Although more multinationals were coming, there was much less work for us now and I was forced to let some of my top people go along with a third of the work force. I also had to sell the office building to meet not just current obligations but the growing inflation. My mistake was not in forging the right connections early enough. In retrospect, even if I had, I would not have been able to do much for I was never really that close to the new oligarchs. They set up a similar company which naturally got all the new businesses plus a lot of what I used to have.
I should not complain too much; I was not badly off in the end, unlike some of my friends in media who lost their franchises, their newspapers and the positions of prestige they once held.
I was soon to see some acquaintances who were virtual paupers in 1966 become multimillionaires in 1976, with newspapers, ranches in Mindoro and timberlands in Palawan, all of them rich enough to buy majority holdings in established companies which the new dispensation wanted to take over.
How easily fortunes have changed, I thought, even for Ermi who had disappeared in the gilded vastness of America. I sometimes called Didi to ask if she had returned, only to learn that she never even sent a card to her madam. Perhaps, by now, she had dropped out of the trade; perhaps I would never see her again. I thought that time and distance would obliterate memories of her; these were the simplest tools with which to drain or cleanse the mind. But these were not enough.
It was a warm March afternoon and I was browsing in my favorite bookshop on Padre Faura when I sensed, when I knew, she was there. She did not see me at the far corner, among the history books, but I saw her at once. Now I realized with a pang both of sorrow and exaltation that I had never stopped caring. I crouched low before the Philippine shelves and moved towards the Asian shelves so I could have a better look. She was going through the samples of wrapping paper for which the bookshop was noted and was admiring a sheet with a big cartoon rendition of an elephant. She was in a green print dress with small yellow flowers, her hair almost brownish in the light. She had slimmed, perhaps by ten pounds. I have never been fond of voluptuous women anyway, leaving those to Rubens or Boticelli. Looking at her, how could I keep away? How could I deny myself again? To be with her was a compulsion, a mesmeric force. The moth flew at the flame.
She was asking the salesgirl how much the sheet cost. I stood up then and went to her, my heart thrashing wildly, my throat as dry as a riverbed in April. I did not speak. She turned, recognized me at once.
“Roly, this is a surprise …”
“I am here almost every Saturday afternoon,” I said. “I live close by.”
“I have not forgotten.”
I asked where she was going from the bookshop. She was evasive as usual. I must not lose track of her ever again so I asked if I could take her home but she said no—no one ever took her home.
“I’d like to be your friend, Ermi,” I said. I had told her that once before and she had said it was impossible for a man to be a real friend of a woman like her. That friendship would surely end in bed and the relationship would then be irrevocably altered.
She smiled and shook her head.
“Please, I would like to see you again.”
“You can always get in touch with me at Camarin.”
I was surprised; I had thought she had given up the trade.
“No, I would like to take you out. Tomorrow, Sunday. Anytime you want, anywhere you please …”
I went out with her to the street. Her manner was abrupt. “Don’t follow me,” she said. “I have an appointment. But tomorrow …” She seemed to give the idea some thought. “Ten o’clock at the east entrance to Rustan’s in Cubao. Do you know the place?”
I nodded. She shook my hand then turned towards Mabini where she hailed a cab.
Ten o’clock. The night before, I barely slept thinking how it would be, the important things I would tell her. She was prompt. She was in blue jeans and a white blouse with red flowers, her face lightly made up. The day was unusually muggy and warm and was, so I learned the day after, the hottest day of the year. Her brow was moist so I let her use my handkerchief.
“Let’s go see a movie,” she said tentatively. “But I can see one any time. Why don’t we go somewhere else instead?”
My whole day was for her. “Let’s go to Calamba,” I said.
She did not know much about Rizal or his novels, and she had not even visited Fort Santiago though she had lived in Manila much of her life.
“Shame on you,” I said. “You have no sense of history.”
“The past be damned,” she said with a viciousness which surprised me.
I asked why she chose Cubao as our meeting place and she said she lived in the area.
“And what about your house in Forbes Park?”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “How can I ever live there? I am renting the house out and I have bought a much smaller one.”
I knew then that she would not end up selling sweepstakes tickets and said so.
“And what makes you think that I will end up that way?”
“Many of the girls do,” I said. “You are good for only a few years. Then you start getting old, wrinkles on the face, the breasts sag. It is then that you get loved for what you are … if you are loved.”
She was silent and that was when I said: “You will find that it will only be one man who will care for you then.”
She did not speak, as if she did not hear.
“Ermi,” I said, “before you left, I almost went crazy over you. I went away, too, for three months. What did you do in the States?”
“I saw my mother,” she said quickly. It was the first thing about her life which she had told me.
“Tell me about her.”
Her eyes were imploring. “Roly, please don’t ask questions about my family, my past. I don’t want to talk about them. It hurts, just remembering …”
I did not ask her again.
“I have had many nasty experiences,” she said. “I don’t want them repeated.”
“I promise not to embarrass you.”
“I know that. But in the future, I am sure to meet these men again and there will be phony explanations to make.”
“I am not ashamed to be seen with you,” I said and meant it.
She pinched my arm. We were now on the highway to Calamba, bright and wide and hot. “I am sorry,” I said. “This ten-year-old Mercedes is not air-conditioned. I am not rich and martial law has been very unkind to me.”
“You need not apologize,” she said. “Just don’t take me to those ritzy places where there are many people. I am ill at ease there. I would rather go out at night, with no one seeing me, knowing me. I am tired having to look down, always avoiding the eyes of people.”
It all came back, the darkness being kind, hiding as it does almost everyone. I never knew and perhaps will never know what got her started in Camarin. But I do know that if money was the reason for her having started, it was not valid now as the cause for her return. “I am disturbed but glad because I can see you again. Why did you go back, Ermi? I thought that with your success with the Great Leader, the house in Forbes Park …”
“Are you going to give me a sermon again?”
“You are too old for that and I am too tired to give one. Besides, who am I to make judgments?”
“But you don’t approve of my going back, I know. Well, no one forced me in the beginning. And no one forced me to return, if that is what you want to know. I did it by myself.”
I told her that relationships in Camarin had a certain attraction, a magnetic pull to those who were there. Friendships, very strong bonds at that, were created. Her return was certainly welcomed by the girls there for it confirmed, it justified them.
“You are right,” she said. “But it was still my decision and I am answerable to no one but myself.”
The old highway was clogged with traffic and in the midday heat, she looked fatigued. I was relieved when we reached Calamba and parked in the acacia-shaded yard of the church where we went before visiting the old Rizal house. I told her about the ilustrados and Rizal’s Sisa and her two sons. The old house, how it was designed and maintained, fascinated her. She marveled at the number of fruit trees in the yard. She was interested in house-plants and on the way back, we stopped on the highway and I bought her a potted palmetto which I placed in the back of the car.
It was almost four in the afternoon and still hot. “I can drop you off in Cubao where you can get a taxi,” I said. “I know you don’t want me to bring you to your gate.”
She was quiet again for a time. We were now in Cubao and I turned to the right, to the Farmers Market parking area.
“You can take me home,” she said. “But promise not to get out of the car when we get there.”
Her house was in a small side street. It had high walls and a black, iron gate with a lock. She had a key and in a while, a boy came out and took the plant. I caught a glimpse of her bungalow and its yard green with plants.
“When will I see you again?”
“Next Sunday, late in the afternoon, if you are free,” she said. “I want to see Fort Santiago.”
I returned to Mabini convinced that I could not now free myself of her. Now, I wanted a definition of love not circumscribed by the sexual act for it had become mundane, a commerce bereft of those nuances for which a man would commit murder or suicide. Copulation was no longer an expression of love. While it was not sordid, it had become a measure of one’s wealth. The more I needed it, the more I had to pay. With Ermi, how then should I express myself? There are, of course, more profound ways of saying it, the immersion of the self in compassion. Love which is true after all demands no rewards, no favors. How easily I understood now that it is better to give than to receive.
But what could I give her? It was money she wanted most, which led her to Camarin and that commodity was not now easily available to me.
I took her to the old fort that Sunday evening shortly after nightfall. The walls were bathed with light and in the expanse before the entrance were people enjoying the cool night air. Some excavation was being done where the old moat was and they had dug up World War II relics, helmets of Japanese soldiers, bones. The Rizal cell was closed so we meandered to the top of the fort where I showed her the section of the Pasig where the galleons used to set sail for Acapulco. I pointed out the old Parian across the river and close by, the landmarks of Spanish sovereignty, the Manila Cathedral, the Archbishop’s Palace, the Ayuntamiento—where these used to stand. Then we went down the broad stone steps to where this solitary cross stands, a marker for the hundreds of Filipinos who were killed by the Japanese in the fort. She read the inscription intently and for a time, seemed engrossed in her own thoughts, then she asked, “Were the Japanese really all that bad during the war?”
Her question startled me. I had thought all along that Japanese brutality in World War II was taken for granted. But she was not old enough to have known the Occupation so I told her how it was, my own experiences, the campaign against Yamashita. Quickly, it came hurtling back, those iron cold, rainy nights in the mountains beyond Kiangan, the ribbons of mist that clung to the floor of the valleys in the mornings, and the Japanese—cornered, starved, demoralized—but still fighting viciously where we found them.
It was now thirty years after Yamashita had surrendered but the Japanese never really lost that war. They are back in full force, with their transistors, their lusts. And what had happened to the brave men who had stood up to them once upon a time? The survivors have all become obsequious clerks, and I was among them.
I almost did not get out of that valley; one night, they came down the mountain, slithering on the grass and tossing grenades all over the place. “I was lucky,” I said aloud. “Thanks to an old forty-five which I still keep …”
I’ve had this unlicensed gun for years and almost shot an American advertising client with it. When martial law was declared and the government demanded the surrender of all guns of high caliber, I hid it instead in a more secure place—under the panel, close to the floor, of my bookshelf.
“Now, you know it,” I told her. “I hope you will not report me to the Constabulary.”
“I can blackmail you,” she said brightly. Then her face clouded and she seemed pensive. “Each one of your generation seems to have a Japanese horror story,” she said. “Will you believe it, will you be horrified if I told you that my father was a Japanese soldier?”
I gazed at the bright brown eyes, the serene face, and briefly, there came to mind, the faces of the Japanese dead which we had left at the Pass, their bodies bloated, their uniforms rotted. I remembered, too, the neatly uniformed officers—in gold braid, swords by their sides, brown leather boots shiny in the sun—and here she was, claiming kinship with them. If this was 1945, I don’t know how I would have reacted—perhaps with more than loathing. But this was 1974—and for many of us, the war was no more than a memory. What was done was done.
Still, I was more than surprised. “Looking at you, and being with you like this—it is difficult to believe,” I said.
I knew so little of her past and every bit about it that she revealed had an aura of fiction. Could this be one of them? I did not know where she was born, or anything about her education, but because she spoke French and Spanish, I was sure she was not educated in some diploma mill or cheap public school. If her father was a Japanese soldier, how come then that her family was Rojo, not Yamamoto or some such? However, I had no choice but to believe her for I was certain she was not lying or making up a story.
On our way out, we passed couples necking in the dark, behind abutments in the old wall, on the grass, almost everywhere and she said it was the first time she had seen such sights.
“They have no money,” I said. “Perhaps, they are students or office workers. If they had money, they would go to the motels.”
“Would you like to take me to one?” she asked, holding on to my arm.
“Of course,” I said. “But I cannot afford you. Only my clients can and they can write it off their income tax as entertainment. I am heavily in debt.”
“Coward,” she whispered as she pulled me to an empty bench near the fountain. And it was then that she asked, “Roly, do I look like a prostitute?”
It was a question I least expected from her, this girl who was brash, who was rich now and who made playthings of men. She had always dressed with simplicity, she was bright, she talked intelligently. It was an instant wherein her life, the sorrow she had to bear, suddenly became luminous and clear. I wanted to embrace her, protect her; it was a feeling completely shorn of desire. It was truly, sincerely love.
“No, Ermi,” I said. “You don’t look like a whore. You will make a man very happy one day …”
“I want to get out,” she said. “Start a new life. I know how to cook a bit, and bake. One day, you should taste my chocolate cake. It is my favorite. I will open a small restaurant, I don’t know where. I will make a different kind of living.”
Her dream gladdened me. She had a future mapped out and it would not be in Ermita. She had started there, she would not end there. I had talked with bar girls, sauna parlor attendants along M.H. del Pilar Street and all of them went into prostitution with the same squalid story, of having been left by their husbands or boyfriends to care for their babies, of having to support brothers and sisters or parents who were no longer capable of earning a living. There was no one I met who went into the trade out of a strong psychological need or for the love of sensuality itself.
I returned to Padre Faura and bought a dozen cookbooks, the best recipes as concocted by the outstanding chefs of Europe. I also got books on how to make canapés, desserts, salads. Now, all she needed for her restaurant was the staff. I was sure that she already had the money to start a modest one. I drove over to Cubao with the bundle and knocked on the iron gate. Her maid recognized me and opened it. I did not linger as if waiting for an invitation to come in.
That night, while I was working on my notes on sexuality in our folk songs, the phone rang.
“Thank you for the books,” Ermi said gaily. “When I start that restaurant, you will be my official taster.”
“Thanks for the job,” I said. “I wish you would assign me something less meaningful. After all, I cannot be your sugar daddy …”
Before Christmas that year, there was another influx of inquiries from American financing institutions and one of my visitors included Andrew Meadows from Atlanta, a clean-cut type with teeth good enough for a toothpaste ad, and reddish hair. He was in his late forties. One evening, while we were having dinner at Bon Vivant in Ermita, he was musing aloud about how he was put off by one of the girls he had brought to his room at the Hilton. That same evening, I sent him to Camarin. It was obvious that he was extremely pleased after the Camarin introductions for he never bothered me again about his asinine evenings.
We did talk, however, about how different Filipino hookers were compared to those in the United States. “There is always something very feminine about them,” he said. “Most of those in America are just plain hustlers. They never give men a chance at either illusion or romance …”
He was also amused by the government campaign against “indecent” publications, pornographic movies which were really tame compared to what was shown in New York. And it struck him as outrageously foolish—having to blot out the shapes of guns, knives and other weapons in movie ads when these were recognizable anyway. I told him such campaigns were often a camouflage for the insincerity and insecurity of our highest officials. We have always been earthy like all people in feudal, agrarian societies. We who are close to the land regard sex and procreation as natural as eating. Take any village boy; he will recite limericks that are obscene by middle-class standards. All the folk songs I learned when I was young were obscene but no one objected to them, least of all government officials.
In prewar Manila, the highest officials lived graciously, visiting houses of pleasure that offered them relaxation otherwise not available in their own bedrooms.
There is something revolting about photographs of people doing what they should in the privacy of their bedrooms. What is objectionable is not a matter of morality but of taste and, in this sense, the public display of private parts and functions. Magazines like Playboy are sold openly in Manila’s plush hotels, in Angeles. Porno shops in Tokyo, London, in Scandinavia and, of course, New York’s Forty-second Street operate for adults. They are seen not as evil but as aesthetic nuisances which, in truth, they are.
The obscenities in this country are not girls like Ermi, either. It is the poverty which is obscene, and the criminal irresponsibility of the leaders who made this poverty a deadening reality. The obscenities in this country are the palaces of the rich, the new hotels made at the expense of the people, the hospitals where the poor die when they get sick because they don’t have the money either for medicines or services. It is only in this light that the real definition of obscenity should be made. There is so much dishonesty today, not just in government but in business. Perhaps, sex is the only honest thing left.
I believed in these conclusions but, looking back, I realized that I had not really done anything to buttress my thinking with action. I served the Establishment, the multinationals—promoted their welfare, and they held no responsibilities at all towards the banishment of our poverty. They were here to make money and nothing else. It was to their advantage that we remained poor, but since I was working for them, I had become comfortable.
In any case, I finally had three thousand pesos. I missed a few luncheon dates, scrimped on supplies, cut corners. I had a meeting in Baguio and I asked Ermi to go with me. “It will cost you a little bit,” she said, half mockingly.
I seldom drove to Baguio by then not only because the price of gasoline had soared but because I no longer trusted the old Mercedes to go that far without breaking down. She had told me that she would be at the bus station at seven-thirty and it was the longest thirty minutes of my life, waiting in that narrow room. She did not arrive and ruefully I went up the bus alone. When I arrived at the Pines that afternoon, the first thing I did was to place a call to her house—something I never did before because she told me never to call the number which I had inveigled from Didi.
“I overslept, Roly,” she said apologetically.
“Can you catch the three o’clock bus this afternoon?” I asked. “I will be at the station to meet you.”
“I will be there.”
It was only seven but I was already at the station, braced by the coolness of the mountains. What had attracted me to Ermi? I had asked this of myself every so often. Perhaps, it was her eyes—vibrant and clear and yet holding so much melancholy. I prided myself in the magnitude of my experience. I had told her that it was just as well that I was emotionally and intellectually mature so I could accept the reality of what she was. But if I had been twenty or so, without the understanding which only age and experience can create, I would probably have gone mad just thinking about the men she had. Or, being unable to accept this, I would probably commit suicide.
It began to drizzle; waiting for her in the rain-washed station, these thoughts rankled again. Then it was eight and still no bus. I began to wonder, a clamminess in my hands even as I crossed my fingers. Had the bus fallen off one of those ravines? Had she taken it at all? Other buses arrived, their headlights bright on the pavement, disgorging their passengers into the night. One finally drew in. I saw her as she came down, trim in her blue jeans and white silk blouse, her plastic high-heeled shoes gleaming momentarily in the glare of headlights. She held on to me with the cozy familiarity of a wife and we walked to the Pines close by. She just had an overnight bag which contained an extra pair of jeans, a couple of T-shirts and over her shoulder, a brown leatherette jacket.
I was going to take her first to the coffee shop so she could have something warm in her stomach but she said she was full, she had eaten a sandwich in Tarlac and wanted to go to bed immediately because she was tired.
The room had twin beds. I was not too sure that she would want to share a wider bed because I snored, but she would have none of that so I pushed the two beds together. Then she said: “Don’t leave me alone. I am afraid.”
I thought she was just making a professional gesture, a commercial caress, but she added quickly that she could get into a panic in this strange room if left alone. Even as she spoke, she started to breathe heavily. I wondered if she was doing this to turn me into manageable putty in her hands, if there was some reason in her clever mind that I did not know or could not know. I was quite alarmed when she said that if she fainted or went into hysteria, I should give her a glass of water immediately. I held her close, felt her body tremble.
It was sometime before she really calmed down. But by then, she had become sullen. She went to the bathroom and then came out in her pajamas, her breasts showing through the transparent blouse. She sat on the edge of the bed, and did not move. I went to her and explained that I just did not know how to react to her. She just sat there, motionless, a block of wood. Then she turned, a smile breaking on her face, and kissed me.
It was our first and I let it pass like a whiff of wind upon a desert.
“Roly, please don’t think I am trying to be difficult,” she said after a while. “But I am like this—when I am angry, or very sad, or very frightened. I remember, when I was a child, I’d just keep silent when I was angry—and then, everything would turn black. Even now, at home, my family pampers me and everyone tries to protect me. Still, it sometimes happens—and then when I become conscious again, I realize that someone has bitten my thumb to revive me. My thumb would hurt after that. But what can I do? Will you remember that?”
“The world is too much with you,” I said. “I will keep problems away from you … if I can. But remember this: We cannot run away. We have to face them sometime. To live with ourselves …”
She lay beside me, her breathing now quiet and slow, and as she kissed me again on the cheek, somehow, I could not quite forget that I was just another hunk of flesh, no different from all the others who had loved her. I was determined to hold back, not because I did not want to spend the three thousand pesos—she had consented to come and that in itself was a binding contract. But by not possessing her, this was the only way I would be different; I was going to transcend the act which had, to her, become a common-place thing. It was difficult, of course. I desired her, this union, this fullest expression of affection. But what would it do for me?
I recalled a massage parlor attendant I had interviewed much earlier; she was building a house somewhere in Pasay and the house was not yet finished. Looking at the windows that lacked shutters, at the kitchen that still had to be tiled, she had told me that she wondered aloud how many more men she would serve before her house would be finished. I was not going to be either a tile or a shutter in her restaurant. I wanted Ermi to remember me as a man who loved her not with his money, of which I had little, but with his heart.
Perhaps it was masochism as well. I asked her to tell me about the lovers she remembered best and she started talking breezily about them. There was one customer she pitied afterwards for he had spent a sizable sum on her. His wife had hired a detective to trail him and succeeded in producing some photographs of Ermi getting into his car. The wife knew where they usually met and she went there ahead of her husband and talked with her, begged her rather to set him free. “Which I did,” Ermi said proudly, “but only because his wife was so nice and decent about it all …”
By midnight, we had not yet made love. Her head nestled in the crook of my arm and the warmth of her nearness drugged me into blissful silence. Then she said it, without warning, without the pretense that must have always accompanied her behavior with men. “I am so unhappy, Roly. Sometimes, I just sit by myself, wondering how I got into this …”
I gazed at the lustrous eyes, the finely molded face, the lips slightly parted. I never knew her as she was now, the belligerence drained from her, the mask finally torn away. At last she was herself, insecure and, I think, wracked by feelings of guilt. She was being honest with me the way I was always honest with her. I had told her of my unhappy childhood, which I never told anyone, the detestable things I had to do to make a comfortable living. I had also told her that if she could not love me, she could, at least, trust me. Did she trust me now? And why should she when I was a man of words? When I had used words as a veneer—shiny and brimming with guile—while underneath them was the dark intent?
I wanted to comfort her, to let her know that if all others would condemn her, I would not.
I had never expected a moment like this when it would come easily to me, the capacity to give shape to this seeking. I uttered the words hoarsely, surprised that I said them at all, that I meant them, that this woman whose body belonged to everyone who could afford it would now be the object of my faith.
“Ermi, I love you.”
I was sincere and knowing this sent a cold chill to my marrow. What has happened to me? Had I, in this one moment, forgotten what she was?
She did not stir; she seemed lost in some limbo.
“Ermi, I love you.”
She sighed. She had heard the words all too often and they must have lost their meaning. Turning, she kissed me on the chin. The gloom in her face vanished and in its place, this glow of contentment. Somehow, I had succeeded.
“Bola,” she said, smiling.
“With your experience, you know it is not bull.”
She did not speak for some time. “I have never loved anyone,” she said finally.
“I don’t expect anything from you,” I said. It would be that way. “I am not young anymore. I am not rich, I cannot give you anything. I am not handsome …”
“I was never impressed by handsome men,” she said pinching my shoulder. It had become a habit with her and though it hurt a bit, I let her.
“All that I am, all that I can give—it’s like rain fallen on stone.”
She did not understand, she asked me to explain.
“Rain which falls on the ground, on the parched earth, brings life. The seeds grow into plants, into harvests. But not rain which falls on stone. Nothing grows on it.”
She kissed me again, a wet kiss and I wondered about all the men to whom she had given that token of affection.
“You are my precious piece of rock,” I said. “But have you heard of the Chinese water torture?”
She was now an avid listener. “No, tell me.”
“Well, water has power, too. The Grand Canyon—you must have also seen those seashores with the stone cut and polished by the constant battering of waves. Erosion. Right on Kennon Road—those big rocks cut by water …”
“The Chinese water torture, does it operate on the same principle?”
“They strap a man to a seat and directly above him there is this pail of water with a tiny hole. Water drips slowly, drop by drop, on the man’s head, on the same spot …”
“It would take ages for that kind of water to break his skull,” she said.
“It is not that way,” I explained. “The drops come slowly, they make a sound inside the man’s brain. He waits for them. Waiting is agony, and when the next drop comes, it is an explosion which gets louder, louder, louder. He is driven insane …”
“Is that what you will do to me?”
“This does not work on stone,” I said.
She was surprised, of course, when I really refused to touch her.
For a moment, perhaps she suspected that I was impotent had she not felt a stirring in my loins when her hand had wandered there. I assured her I would not cheat her of her money and she laughed at this. Then turning on her side, she was soon breathing deeply, and then she snored, too, lightly.