Francisco Jose - Three Filipino Women

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.

Ihesitate to put down some of the details in this story because they are so intensely personal, they are bound to be misunderstood by friends who know me for my objectivity and detachment, qualities that have made me quite successful in a field crowded by charlatans. Not that my hands are impeccably clean — if we define integrity narrowly, if we polarize the world in black and white, then, certainly, I have not been morally upright. I must avoid euphemisms and say outright that I have been a pimp; for what else is procuring some of the most expensive call girls in town to service clients who have flown in from Wall Street or from Marunouchi? That is precisely what I had done, proceeded to find out who in Didi’s stable was available for the evening.

In a way, I am afraid of women. When I was ten, my mother left my father to live with another man. I am now certain that this was the single, most traumatic incident in my life. I worshipped my father and I could not imagine my mother in the arms of another man.

Looking back at what had happened to my marriage I am not surprised that Lydia left me, too, although not for another man, but to flee from the implacable demands of my office, my erratic behavior — as she called it. She had wanted to raise our three children in an atmosphere free from tension and I suppose she succeeded. The kids are grown up now and they seem very normal and happy. Sometimes though, they wonder aloud why Lydia and I never got together again.

My father was not too good at providing for us — he had to work doubly hard at being a surrogate mother and tried to give us a good education, knowing his money would not be wasted. He knew I would be able to make it on my own, from the days of World War II when I was one of the youngest guerrilla officers to fight in the Yamashita campaign. I bore no wounds from that war, other than what scabbed in the mind and heart. I still have the forty-five caliber automatic which I carried then and never used after the war was over. I have not been vicious except, perhaps, once, but this story is not about my war experiences, nor about Media Consultants which I manage, but about my obsession with Ermi.

How could this happen to me at the late age of fifty-five? I have traveled and wallowed in the pleasures of one Babylon or another. I thought I knew all the pitfalls, yet I was shorn of my pride and became naked as the day I was born.

And all because Ermi Rojo was a prostitute.

Ever since the breakup of my marriage in the early sixties, I have lived in an apartment in Mabini, near Padre Faura. In the early evenings, if I don’t jog at the Luneta, I often take a walk along the district’s darkened streets. Mabini itself is swept clean for the tourists, as with all of Manila’s major avenues, but the narrow sidestreets are awash with the stench of uncollected garbage and human waste oozing out of clogged sewers. Sometimes, I am apprehensive knowing that I may be accosted by hoodlums, beaten up and stabbed. I take a walk just the same almost as a matter of habit, a kind of ceremony with which I welcome the night.

My favorite bar-restaurant, the Camarin — the classiest call girl establishment of them all — has undergone several changes since it was set up in the fifties. It used to serve native cooking, nothing exceptional; then, shortly after martial law was declared in 1972, it became a discreet beer house with first class pulutan , including marinated raw fish with generous slices of onions.

The Japanese brought the latest fad to Camarin — the open grill where fresh fish, eggplant and what-have-you are roasted right before the customer. Now, it has a dozen go-go dancers, all young and curvy, who prance about on a narrow stage, in very brief costumes.

I join the night crowd there, the smoke densely floating around, the smell of beer and mankind gone sour comingled with the heat of day. A chubby girl ambles up the stage, her flanks tawny in the yellow light and on her rear the name Gloria. What glory can she possibly bring to these jaded lechers like myself? She gyrates her broad hips, thrusts them towards her audience lasciviously to the rhythm of “Saturday Night Fever,” her face without expression. The men talk on, barely giving her a glance.

Didi, my lesbian friend who manages the Camarin, sits at one corner. For more than a decade, she had watched over the place, showing an album of stabled girls only to customers of long standing. She is stouter now than when I first met her. She still regards men as competitors and her eye for feminine beauty is as sharp as ever. It was she who introduced Ermi Rojo to me and that night I met Ermi is permanently etched in my mind.

Two years after I set up Media Consultants, I began to have a bit of time on my hands, time which, I thought, I could use to write. I had set up my Makati office in recognition of that old saying that if you can’t lick them, join them. Nationalism is edifying for conversation, editorials, etc., but not profitable in actual practice for as long as the Philippines remains an American colony. This was my experience in the ten years that I worked for B.G. Collas’ advertising agency; I saw his outfit dwindle, his accounts taken over by American firms because these accounts were, in the first place, also American.

But I had the right credentials and luck was on my side. Steve Williams, a former classmate at Yale, came to Manila. He was then head of the economic research department of one of the major Wall Street financing houses and he wanted ties with a Filipino firm that would give his company economic intelligence as well as an “in” with Filipino media. There was no such firm in Manila and there and then, he said he would help me start up Media Consultants, in partnership with the New York firm which had worldwide affiliations and whose president happened to also be a Yale man. A rush trip to New York finalized the arrangement and before long, I had several American and Japanese financial institutions as clients. I had always believed that management made more practical sense than book-learned knowledge and in two years, my outfit was efficiently functioning.

I reread my dissertation on the Filipino entrepreneurial elite and realized that it was empty of the insights that I had now. The dissertation never touched on the social vices of this elite, the function of sexuality in determining not just status but, in a far more significant way, how sex influences corporate mobility, the rise and even downfall of businesses through excesses in the ancient querida system. This lack led me to delve deeper into Filipino sexuality, from the time of Pigafetta to the present, not just as historical fact but as an expression of our culture.