Francisco Jose - Three Filipino Women

No woman had ever spoken to me before as frankly as she did, and for the first time, I felt uneasy with her and something akin to apprehension. But it went away quickly for she laughed then and asked about my latest girlfriend.

I was dating a Radcliffe girl at the time, a sweet Southerner from Memphis who often came to my place to bake corn bread and cook that slightly hot Southern dish with lots of okra, prawns and tomatoes in it, it almost tasted Filipino. I described Anne, her vices and her virtues, but not our lovemaking.

It was just five o’clock but already it was dark and she got up and switched on the lamps. There was no doubt in my mind that I desired her. In my younger days, I often fantasized about how she would look in the nude. I remembered those times when we were ten or eleven and we raced in the rain and bathed in the creek beyond their house. Her breasts were just beginning to shape and her nipples, small pinkish dots showed beneath her cotton chemise as she rose from the water.

I had finished a plateful of California rice and some of the vegetable stew. She stood up to put away the dishes for the maid to wash in the morning. In a minute, she called from the kitchen. “So, how often do you have it now that Anne has gone home for the holidays?”

“I can be a celibate till she returns,” I said. “And how about you? You said he won’t be back in Washington till February.”

She returned and led me to the sofa in the living room. “It’s no problem,” she said, laughing.

“Without Anne, it is a problem,” I said. “You have to spend a bit on a girl, take her out to dinner, buy her some candy — all those preliminaries that most American girls seem unable to do without.”

“I have dildos,” she said.

“Isn’t that rather boring and automatic?”

Again, that tinkling laughter. “Not if they are live ones.”

Then she looked at me with that kind of knowing, inquiring look I couldn’t mistake.

“I am no dildo, Narita,” I said.

She pressed close to me. “I know,” she said, rising; she took me down the corridor to her room. “We will take a bath together,” she said matter-of-factly.

I marveled at the clearness of her skin, as she let me look at her, her breasts, still firm though she had two boys, the flat stomach, unusually unmarked by childbirth. “You must be careful now,” she said, “or else I may have to go back to the hospital. After all, it’s only been a month — and this is the first …”

I was only half-listening; I was too engrossed with her beauty. She was telling me that men never had a sense of responsibility — it was the women all the time who had to be responsible, but that was fully taken care of now. She told the doctor who delivered her baby that she did not want another, ever, and the doctor had seen to that.

I would have been creation’s most exultant being and there was no hardship I would not have dared; but in that moment when I thought earth and high heaven were finally mine, she pushed me, not brusquely, but certainly with enough force to let me know, to remind me that I should be careful and in that businesslike voice that was a chill change from her caress, she said, “You are messing my hair, Eddie, and I still have that dinner tonight …”

She woke me when she returned a little before midnight and she slipped into bed, cuddling close, her breath smelling a little of wine, her hands wandering all over me. I desired her still but it was her comment about the human dildo that bothered me and would always continue to bother me. I was passive throughout. If she noticed it, she did not say anything. She had her pleasure, more perhaps than the ambassador could give her, and when she was finally tired, she lay beside me.

“I really have no one to talk to here,” she said. “The Americans can be very good friends but they seem so superficial and their view of the world is really limited, not so much by their experience but by what the media tells them. They lack intuition, the passion to see things not just as objects, the way we can do it—”

I asked her to put it simply.

“I thought I was explicit,” she said. “I’m tired of America. I want to return home. I have been here too long. Papa is getting senile. I’d like to go into politics when I return …”

I had to get used to her calling Senator Reyes “Papa.”

“You’ll botch it all up,” I said. “You have too much candor, too much openness.”

“Only with people I really know,” she said.

“What does the ambassador say?”

“I will leave him soon — he doesn’t know it yet. But that is a sure thing.”

“Just as you left that colonel?”

She pressed my hand and was silent.

“I want you to help me when I go into politics. You don’t have to worry about your job in the university. I know that you will command a very high price — but Eddie, I will make it all up to you. On your terms.”

“But why me?”

“Because you know me,” she said with feeling. “My weaknesses. You will protect me, and you will be loyal to me — just as I will be loyal to you, in my own way.”

“But what can I do?”

She was silent again for a while; then she started: “It is really time that we had more brains in our politics, not the old backslapping, vote-buying kind. Magsaysay thought he had all the answers, but actually, he was old-fashioned, buying off the journalists the way he did. No, we can be more scientific than that. If you know what I mean. We should have constant polls, quantify, analyze trends. These are sophisticated approaches. This doesn’t mean that we will abandon the old methods — the guns and goons, the bribery, the innuendo and the false rhetoric — the way Papa had done. And the Old Man, you must admit, has gone very far …”

“But politics is just an instrument, Narita,” I said, annoyed at the brazen implications of what she was saying. “There must be something behind it. Meaning: What is power to you?”

For a while, she did not speak. In the soft light, her face was grim until she broke into a smile. “I will show them,” she said. “I will show them …”

“Show whom?”

“Those nitwits in Assumption. I was the only girl from Santa Ana. They came from Silay, Bacolod, Iloilo — you know, with their twelve-hectare haciendas , acting like princesses. And they had nothing between their dirty ears.”

I remembered Father’s few hectares from which he made so little, barely enough to pay for the mortgage of the house in Diliman, for our education and I reminded her we had only a few hectares.

“But you never snubbed me, Eddie — not till recently, and I had to go to you on bended knees. I will take care of you, too,” she laughed. “In fact, I have already done that.” She pressed her warm breasts to me.

“You can’t embark on something like this, nursing an old hurt. That was years ago, Narita. You have to live and work beyond it. If you become a congressman …”

She drew away. “You must be kidding. I won’t start that low. Nothing less than the Senate for me. Let me tell you this: I know much more than all those asses in the Senate, including my father-in-law. Five years in the United States, I know how power works here, in New York, in Washington. I know all the important House and Senate members, the Ways and Means Committee, the Foreign Relations Committee. And their aides — mind you, never forget the aides. Why, the ambassador often relies on me for advice. Do you know what I am trying to say? For as long as we are an American colony, we should know how our colonial masters operate. And, brother, this is where it starts.”

Her brief exposition on Washington politics was impressive; she had not gone to Columbia for nothing.