Three Filipino Women Read Online Free Page A

Park residence and her two boys called me Tito. I knew their housekeeper, a distant aunt from back home in Santa Ana. It is a Spanish-type house, whitewashed, with a red-tile roof and ornately grilled windows. Tiles all over the place, in the balcony, the kitchen, and the trees planted there—the guava and the pomelo are now bearing fruit. Narita never seemed to have forgotten the old house in Santa Ana. And yes, the cadena de amor scrambles over the walls, not too profusely or wildly.
    I had often mused about how it must feel to have someone commit suicide over you. I remember distinctly that afternoon we were having coffee in her library and she reminisced about her marriage to Lopito. I had just finished her major speech on the restructuring of Filipino cultural values and we were as a matter offact, engaged in a discussion on the subject which had fascinated us in the think tank as well. She could have written it herself but, like me, she had taken up too many chores. By then, she had wanted me to leave the university so that I could be on her staff full-time, but I was never sold on politics as a career and, in hindsight, I was, of course, right.
    She was in comfortable jeans, denim jacket, her hair in a ponytail. She was the mother of two but she could have easily been one of the juniors on the campus. She was holding a glass of Campari and soda which she herself had mixed and she had given me a glass of Southern Comfort, an affectation I had picked up in Cambridge. We had the house all to ourselves; the maids were asleep in their quarters, and the boys were vacationing with their grandfather in Baguio. She asked me why, at the very old age of thirty-four—which she also was—I had not yet gotten married.
    “I suppose I have always been in love with you,” I said, at which she laughed aloud, that kind of joking, insinuating laughter which meant that while she appreciated the thought, she also automatically rejected it. She was already one of the most popular women in the country and vastly wealthy, the extent of which I had only started to realize.
    “Well, at least you are not a homo,” she said, merriment in her eyes. Then it came—sudden, precise, and without any warning. “That was what Lopito was—oh, everyone knew it. Didn’t you?”
    I nodded.
    “He was what you call AC/DC,” she said, her face all seriousness now. “We had such fun in the beginning when he was going to Santa Ana—remember? And here in Manila, too, when he was parading me around. I was good camouflage for him. But I think that in his own way, he sincerely loved me.” She paused. Her eyes had misted. “He was so kind, so good to me. He did all that I wantedand I promised myself that I would really be true to him, be an old-fashioned Filipino wife. Do you still see the likes of her?”
    “Are you asking me as a sociologist?”
    “Yes,” she said.
    “The society is changing, Narita. Look at you and you understand how times have changed.”
    She nodded. “It was not the boys that Lopito brought home,” she said, “although that aggravated it. It was not his putting me on a pedestal to show off to his friends, to his society crowd. I liked that. I had more beauty, more brains than any of them.” Then it all came through again how the girls at Assumption had snubbed her because she had such lowly origins.
    “Lopito, we could have been just friends, you know. As two people can be very good friends, the way we are …” She leaned over and pinched me on the thigh. It was more of a caress and it sent delightful shivers through me. “But after we had gotten married, that was when we really had body contact, you know, the kissing and the petting. Man-wife relations. But that was all there was to it. I would be all heated up and anxious and ready—and he could not do it. He could not do it!” She was pounding the throw pillow viciously, her face wrought up in anger, her eyes blazing. I had never seen Narita in such a mood before