Francisco Jose - Three Filipino Women

“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.

TAPE FOUR

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?