Francisco Jose - Three Filipino Women

She came to Mabini almost every night after that and sometimes she would stay till morning. One early dawn, we woke up to fire engines wailing in the rain-drenched street below and looking out of the window, we saw our district turning red; the Filipinas Hotel was burning, the flames leaping up the starless sky. Many who were trapped in the building died of asphyxiation. Some jumped out of their windows, some into the pool below. Those who fell into the pool were saved, but many could not jump that far and their battered bodies lined the pool edge. Many of those who died were companions of tourists for the night and about them little was known. Who would miss five dozen prostitutes? They would be nothing but statistics and their relatives might not even go to the authorities to claim their bodies or even identify them.

I would take her out for breakfast at Taza de Oro and on the way, we would meet them — the girls with oversized handbags coming out of the Aurelio, the Bay View and the other hotels in the area where they had spent the night. They would wait for taxis at the hotel fronts, their Japanese companions waving good-bye to them. Pedro at the Taza soon knew what she always ordered, waffles with bacon and a slice of papaya.

Sometimes, she would decide to return to Cubao past midnight and I would drive her there, wait in the car while she fumbled at the gate with her keys. I did not leave till she was safely inside.

I told her of what I learned in one of my trips to Bangkok: how girls from a barren part of that country — the Northeast — went to Bangkok to sell themselves and once they had earned enough money, they would return home to get married, raise a family.

“There is no stigma to them,” I said.

“I wish I were Thai,” she said quietly.

She wanted a baby but was afraid she would not be able to have one anymore. “I will not mind what people will say. I will love him so much he will never regret that I was his mother …”

I asked her if she had such regrets and she told me that all she remembered of her childhood were those days in the orphanage in Quezon City where she grew up. I wanted to know more but she clammed up.

We were in my apartment drinking the coffee that she had brewed that morning. Outside, Ermita was beginning to stir; already the jeepneys were snorting down below the window and farther up the bay, the sun was glinting on the calm, glasslike sea.

“If it is a boy, you will be the godfather.”

“I’d rather be the father,” I said, wondering if there was any man lurking in the shadows about whom I did not know. It had been that way, my mind riled by questions, by doubts. How would one distinguish, for instance, the sincerity of her embrace? She had told me she had faked it many times with her men so how different then was it with me? I wanted to exact from her the promise that she would never leave me although I knew that she would someday. How does one measure truth? There was only one way by which I would be able to know. And I hesitated to tell her for fear that, just by telling her, I would lose her.

“I know some girls in Camarin,” she said. “At the opening of the school year, or when their children get sick, they don’t know what to do.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “This apartment, or this district, is not even the place to rear children. But one thing sure, I will not run away from my responsibilities. I can set up a trust fund for him so that when he grows up, he will not be in want.”

“Replay. That is an old tune,” she said, pinching my arm.

“But it is still true.”

“Think of your own circle, your friends. Oh, I know you mean it and you can live with what I am. But they will sneer at you, your settling down after all these years with a prostitute from Camarin. Do you think you can endure that? And if we go out to some dinner and there is a man, or two men, whom I know, how would you take it?”

I could not answer. It had not occurred to me that she would put it that way, so neatly, so clearly.

“Maybe,” I said, “we can go somewhere and live by ourselves.”

“And how long can that be? We cannot really run away.” I thought that if she were constantly with me, my anxieties would be banished, that her presence would be the balm to ease my mind and I would finally settle into comfortable domesticity. But the new relationship was soon battered and awry. We were both to blame, I guess — she for her volatile temper and hypersensitivity to things I said, and me for my candor and openness. There were now bickerings between us, sometimes bitter and long-drawn. It was better if I kept my mouth taped, afraid that I would say something that would make her cross.

Now her presence seemed unreal; when she was gone, it would seem as if she had not been with me at all. There was no lingering trace of her although I always remembered what she said. I was so insecure with her, I was afraid she would even walk out on me in the middle of the night when she was in one of her unexplainable moods.

During one quarrel I was so exasperated with her tempestuousness, I told her perhaps it was best if she became an actress. We had driven sullenly to Cubao and even when she reached her gate, there was none of the joyous reconciliation that I had expected. I spent the night in turmoil, my chest tightened like a vise, and sleep would not come. I had to see her the following day, wait humbly at her gate till she came out.

Her new belligerence confounded me; I suspected that she did this so that she could dominate me and I took pains explaining to her that our relationship should not be one of superiority or inferiority; I had no intention of changing her personality, I took her for what she was. But even a remark like this was enough to send her into a dark and sulking mood.

Often, in those anxious moments of silence, I raked the past and asked myself what wrong I had done. I searched my conscience — the innermost recesses of myself — and there was nothing I could remember which I did wrong. There was one evening when she simply said it was time for good-bye. She did not want to see me anymore. I was caressing her face when she drew away. I was amassing memories, and God, many of them were bitter. I know that whatever it was I had told her, I was just being myself, I was expressing my nagging fears and nothing else. I concluded then that she was either playing with me or had finally gotten tired because I had nothing to give, nothing but this shriveled self.

We rarely talked about Andrew Meadows now. I knew he would soon leave. Then, by early April, she called and said she wanted me to visit her in Cubao. It was the first time she would let me in, the first man, she said, whom she had ever invited there. We were going to be alone, she was going to send her “family” out to see a movie or to shop at Ali Mall nearby.

She met me gravely at the gate and when a maid lingered, she told her briskly to go out to the garden and water the palmettos, among them, I am sure, the palmetto I had bought for her in Calamba. She was pale and drawn and her eyes seemed glazed. She led me to her house. Though not large it was tastefully decorated. I was happily surprised to see myself everywhere, the knickknacks I had given her, the lacquered trays, the flower vases, the art books. She led me to her bedroom and for a moment, I thought we would make love.

“I am sorry that I had to get you out of your office in the middle of the afternoon,” she said. “But I want you to know — to be the first to know that I have made a decision.”

I thought she had finally decided to live with me.

“I am going to marry Andy,” she said.

The news sank into me with such truculence, my knees felt weak and a deadening sense of loss engulfed me. I had felt this sorrow only once before, when Lydia and the children left me.