Three Filipino Women Read online

  Copyright © 1983, 1992 by F. Sionil José

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  The three novellas in this work were previously published in the Philippines. “Cadena de Amor” (copyright © 1979 by F. Sionil José) and “Obession” (copyright © 1980 by F. Sionil José) were originally published by Mr. & Mrs. Both these novellas were included in a work entitled Two Filipino Women, published by New Day Publishers, Quezon City, Philippines, in 1981. Copyright © 1981 by F. Sionil José and New Day Publishers. “Platinum” was originally published in Platinum and Ten Filipino Stories published by Solidaridad Publishing House, Manila, Philippines. Copyright © 1983 by F. Sionil José.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  José, F. Sionil (Francisco Sionil)

  Three Filipino women/F. Sionil José.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Contents: Cadena de amor—Obsession—Platinum.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83028-9

  Women—Philippines—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9550.9.J67A6 1992

  823 dc20 92-4096

  All events and characters in this book are fictitious.

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  CADENA DE AMOR Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  OBSESSION Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  PLATINUM Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  CADENA DE AMOR

  ONE

  In the preparation of my study on Narita Reyes, I am indebted to my colleagues, particularly to my former teachers, Professors Alejo Orina and M. D. Guerzon who read the manuscript and gave valuable advice. I am also grateful to my typist and secretary, T. Jovel, who transcribed most of the tapes, changed my “alright” to “all right,” and kept the door closed to all sorts of noise. And last but not least, I am grateful to the Narita Reyes Foundation for its generous support that allowed me a trip to the United States for research and interviews, and provided for the publication of the political biography of a woman whose personality has considerably altered our view of domestic politics during the last decade.

  When I started this project, I was faced with the problem of objectivity. I had known Narita all my life and if I just hewed closely to what is observable data and behavior, I would do injustice to a woman who was far more complex than those personality profiles that the mass media presented. There was much more in what Narita did as compared to what she said; she was sparing in her words and let her actions speak instead.

  This much shorter narrative is a spin-off, different from the lengthier and documented original. Nevertheless, with this format, I hope to present one of the most unusual personalities in contemporary Filipino society, in all her scintillating uniqueness.

  I have always admired Narita Reyes even though at times it had to be from a distance. As is often said, Ligaw tingin, kantot hangin (courtship by looking, fucking the wind). One reason for this is that she made me feel inferior, a result I think of the fact that when we were in grade school, though we were of the same age, she was taller than I was. It was a feeling which persisted through the years, vanquished only in those rare instances when I could physically express my fondness for her.

  Narita was an only child and she lived with her mestizo (half-breed) parents in a small house roofed with rusting tin across the street from ours. Their house which had a brick wall was once the kitchen—all that was left of a much more substantial house that had burned down. The ruins still stood in the wide lot fenced with brick that had fallen apart in places. Her grandfather was once a wealthy landlord but had lost his lands because of gambling and women; all that remained was the wide lot overgrown with weeds, with pomelo and guava trees which hid their house from view. Narita’s father clerked in the municipal building while her mother sold meat in the market, and when Narita was not in school, she helped her mother run the stall.

  Narita and I were both Sagittarians; we were born almost to the minute, in the wee hours of the morning of November 30, 1933. Father, who made the deliveries, said it was a hectic dawn—what with him having to rush from our house to theirs and back.

  Narita was often in our house for, like me, she liked to read. Father’s library included a set of The Book of Knowledge, some novels, back issues of The National Geographic and other magazines. I was always playing in their wide, weed-choked yard, too, particularly when the guava and pomelo trees started bearing fruit. During the early days of the war, in 1942, her family evacuated with us to our farm in Bogo which was about three kilometers from the town. We did not stay there long; we need not have left town for the Japanese never came to Santa Ana in force except for occasional patrols. As a matter of fact, Santa Ana is quite isolated from the rest of the country and progress really never seemed to have touched it—till Narita came and blazed through in a way Santa Ana will never see again.

  For one, the land in our part of the island is rocky and the mountains always seemed to loom closer as the irrevocable margin beyond which our cane fields could not encroach. We depended on the rain for irrigation and sometimes, it was niggardly. And because the land is poor, we never had the largesse that the Silay and Bacolod people enjoyed. In fact, Bacolod could seem as distant as Manila although it is only sixty kilometers away and the only people who went there regularly were men like Father who had business at the provincial hospital or with the drug companies.

  Narita could be very quiet. We could be with those books without speaking for hours; yet afterwards, people thought she was a compulsive talker. This was unfair for in later years she could be a patient listener even to the loudest braggart, as if she were hearing words of pure wisdom when they were pretentious drivel—as they often were when most of the politicians she knew wanted to be identified as pious nationalists.

  She was in Grade II when she became champion declaimer with her tearful rendition of “The boy stood on the burning deck …” When she was in Grade VI, she was chosen the best singer with her “Lahat ng Araw” (“All of My Days”)—a song she made very popular later. Her voice was scarcely trained but she could render a song better than most of the young singers on radio and TV today because Narita had style.

  Even when we were still in school, it was already obvious that she was beautiful and talented but because we were neighbors, I took her for granted. We played a lot, in whatever season. When the rains came and brought green to the fields, we would be there, catching grasshoppers. And at dusk, we looked for spiders in the bushes, in the profusion of cadena de amor that clambered over the brick walls and bloomed in white and pink. There was a particular species of spider that we found among the vines, the one with long limbs and a very small body. It was a good fighter. We would position the spiders on each end of a coconut midrib, watch them inch towards the center and once there, they would grapple and bite each other. The loser was soon rendered immobile and coated with the silky strands that trailed from them. Never was defeat so complete and final.

  Narita’s mother supplied us with meat and Mother said she was trustworthy; she gave us the best sections and told us if it was carabao or beef unlike other butchers who cheated their customers. I took this as a matter of course; after all, Father did not charge them for his services.

  Their house was alw
ays in disarray—a characteristic that Narita did not bring with her later: their clothes all over the place, the bamboo floor already rotting in places, the dishes unwashed in the basin in the kitchen. But there were plants everywhere for Narita loved to grow them, even the weeds in the yard, I think. It was as if by some arcadian magic, she could transform an ordinary place into lush green. She had the touch of life.

  When we were in Grade VI, I made a “mark” on Narita. We were playing that Saturday morning in their wide yard. She was then tomboyish and it was not unusual for her to beat me in running, jumping and that morning, basketball. She had rigged up a hoop on one side of their house, up the brick wall. I accidentally pushed her and she stumbled and banged her chin against a rusty piece of iron in the woodwork. When she turned to me, although she was laughing, there was blood on her chin. It turned out to be an ugly wound and, with her handkerchief staunching it, we went to Father who was in his clinic in the ground floor of our house. He looked at the wound, gave her anaesthesia, then sewed it in two stitches all the while asking how it had happened. Narita did not cry, wince or scream as I would have done with all that pain and blood.

  “Brave girl,” Father said.

  He wanted to see what it was that had cut her so we went back to their yard and when Father saw it, he said, “I’d better give you anti-tetanus serum.”

  A general practitioner, Father tried to make do without the sophisticated equipment of hospitals but he was always careful. I remember him telling me that about eighty percent of human ailments could be naturally cured by the body without the assistance of either medicines or doctors. But tetanus is tetanus. He decided to have an allergy test first, just giving Narita a bit of injection under the skin. Within seconds she had turned bluish, her eyes dilated and she fell into a faint.

  Father blanched. Fortunately, he was prepared for such emergencies. He immediately gave her an anti-allergy shot and when she revived she described how strange she felt and how suddenly everything started to blur and turn black.

  “You are allergic to anti-tetanus serum,” Father said gravely. “I hope you will not forget that …”

  I felt guilty and sad for her because her face was disfigured but she just laughed. When the wound healed, there was an indention where the scab had lifted and, in time, the scar itself disappeared. She has had that cleft chin since and, as she herself said, she looked prettier with it.

  As an only child, Narita had plenty of time to be alone and it was only later that I learned how much of this time was spent in reverie, daydreams about going away, far away from Santa Ana and its numbing constrictions.

  She did not have pets except a big, white cat. She starved the animal once when she came upon a nest of mice in their yard. She placed the hungry cat in a wire-mesh cage where once her father kept his fighting cocks. Then she brought out two of the grown-up mice and put them in the cage. I shudder every time I recall how she sat before that cage, her eyes impassive but alert, watching the cat pounce on the poor, shrieking rodents.

  “It is the way of the world, Eddie,” she told me years later when I recalled this. “The strong tearing apart the weak …”

  As a boy, I was wary of some of the things Narita wanted me to do no matter how easy or innocuous they seemed. One April afternoon we were in the weedy section of their wide yard. The pomelo trees were laden with ripening fruit and she pointed to a rise in the ground as the best place for me to stand so that I could reach the big oranges that dangled over our heads. I went up the low mound without question only to run from it immediately for a host of giant red ants were all over my legs and biting me. It was an anthill that she had told me to stand on. I was on the verge of tears and she broke out laughing at my misery. I forgave her for this.

  We were together again from first year to senior year in the local high school. I cannot say honestly that I did not have any feelings for Narita other than those shared by two childhood friends. Such feelings, however, were dampened by the fact that she had grown taller than I.

  By this time, too, she started to confide to me those things which even my sisters did not tell me: how it was when she had her first menstruation, how it felt when her breasts started growing, how itchy they were that she had to put plaster bands on them, personal things which, in retrospect, seem to have been the basis of our relationship.

  I remember that day the girls wore their gala uniform—white with blue collar—the school colors. It was the school’s Foundation Day and, as usual, it was Narita who led the singing of the national anthem. When she got up from her seat, there it was for all to see, the red smudge on her behind. There was twittering among the girls and I had a good mind to go tell her that the menstrual blood had dripped right through. And that was what I did when we filed out of the hall. But she whispered into my ear, her eyes filled with laughter, “I am not due till the fifteenth—as if you didn’t know! That’s just pig blood—I sat on it early this morning in Mama’s stall.”

  When we were in our senior year, as everyone expected, she became the queen during our High School Day. She had bloomed. I am sure there were men in town who went to her mother’s stall just to look at her. She also sang in the church choir regularly and one could always pick out that rich, mellow voice; she did not linger long in the high notes but she could maintain her voice in the higher reaches. I beat her in literature and history but she was better than I was in math, in philosophy and physics, “the subjects that mattered.”

  Before she became high school queen, her father, who had by then taken to drinking and gambling, became very ill and would have died had not Father taken him to the provincial hospital; it was a rather complicated move. Knowing how government was, Father got a letter from Senator Reyes, builder of the hospital and one of the richest and most powerful men in the country. The senator came from our province and Father knew him.

  In a way, we had always been entwined with their lives. Don Carlos—her father loved being called that though there was nothing affluent or distinguished about him—stayed for quite a time in the hospital with all sorts of complications of the liver, the heart, and whatever else can ravage a man who has indulged and abused himself.

  “All the meat in the market and all the money in the municipal treasury,” my mother used to say, “cannot pay for the bills.”

  We wondered where they would get the money but as luck would have it, Senator Reyes stood by them and for a very good reason. When he came to Santa Ana to crown our high school queen, he had brought along his youngest and only living son, Lopito, who was then in his early thirties. Lopito looked at Narita once and did not care for anything after that but to have the beautiful virgin as his wife. Senator Reyes was more circumspect. The girl’s personality satisfied him but he wanted to know more about her and her background. This was readily supplied by Father and others in the town whom he had questioned. It was no secret then that when Narita finished high school, great things would be in store for her.

  I did not like it: Lopito barging into our street in his fancy sports car, with his driver honking before the old battered house, and Narita coming out all smiles; and their driving together, raising billows of dust as they went to the beach or wherever their fancy took them while her father lay dying in the hospital and her mother toiled in the meat stall. It would have been better if they married but Senator Reyes had other ideas—they would not marry till she finished college.

  I left for Manila in a black mood one April morning, a week after we had graduated from high school. Narita was valedictorian. She had delivered the graduation address with feeling, saying it was time for all of us to part, and Senator Reyes who had come again to give the commencement address had looked at her with pride. In the audience, all of us knew what would happen, that she would go to Manila, too, and be his daughter-in-law. And, years later, I was to realize why Senator Reyes had banked so much on her. Of his four sons only the youngest, Lopito, was alive; two had died and one, an artist, had disappeared in Europe. His two g
irls had married badly in spite of the fact that their husbands were handpicked by the old man. From all appearances, Senator Reyes had wanted to build a dynasty, as was the practice of most politicians, but had failed. He was not a great believer in heredity. After all, he had often said that it was brains that determined survival and triumph, and he unerringly saw all the virtues that he sought in Narita.

  I could not leave without saying good-bye. She was in the yard sweeping the dry leaves of the pomelo trees and she asked me to stay a while. I felt very depressed.

  I demurred.

  “Well,” she said, her eyes crinkling in a smile. “Aren’t we friends anymore?”

  “I wouldn’t want Lopito to say I am using some of your time,” I said finally. “I have already said good-bye.”

  She pulled me to the bamboo bench by the gate and we sat there. She had on a cheap, printed blue dress and wooden shoes. I could glory forever in her nearness.

  “If I didn’t know you, I’d think you were jealous.”

  “Of course not.” I glared at her. “How can I be jealous? How can …”

  She caressed my face with her hand. I brushed it away.

  “You are in love with me!” she exclaimed. “Eduardo Cortez. You—in love with me!”

  “And if I am,” I said, “is that something to despise?”

  She caressed my face again and this time, I let her, feeling her rough palm, all resentment gone. Then she held my hand. “But Eddie—you know it cannot be. I will not permit it. We grew up together. Remember how we used to run naked in the rain?” She was looking at me, her big, bright eyes brighter yet, the mischief in them coming through. “And remember this?” She pointed to the cleft in her chin. I smiled with memory and this warm, aching desire to hold her.

  “You should be happy that you won’t be stuck with me,” she continued. “There is no mystery about me. I am open to you as you are to yourself. And marriage is something else—a kind of discovery every day …”