Free Three Filipino Women by F. Sionil Jose Page A

anything to improve the lives of the rural poor. She listened for a few minutes while I mapped out the parameters of legislative action, but soon I could see that she was not concentrating.
    “You are not interested,” I said with irritation.
    “Because I know everything you are saying, Eddie, and right now, I am not really interested.”
    I never felt as futile and as helpless as I did then, to be told that I was talking to a stone. I gathered the folders and dumped them into my briefcase. Then, more in sadness than in anger: “I had hoped you would remember not just Santa Ana but the things you told me. Am I wrong in hoping you won’t be like the rest? There should be conscience in politics, else we would be nothing but pigs …”
    “Then let us be pigs,” she said with a vehemence that startled me. “Conscience, duty—all those virtues that you hear bandied about—my duty is not to God and country. It is to me—myself first, because without myself, what would there be? And look at you, you and your … genteel morality—what is it that you look forward to first? Your career, no less. I’m not here to clean thestables, to change tradition—the tradition in corruption. I am part of the herd although very much above the herd. Who can say this with the honesty that I am saying it?”
    I could not speak.
    She went on. “Listen, Eddie. In these four years, I will do what I can. Only a bit—for my image, for patronage. I am aiming beyond the Senate. Nothing but the top, the Presidency. You understand that? And when I’m there, that’s when we can go to town, do all the things you want to do. You think Papa is all that powerful? No, and neither will I be. I would be very pleased if you boys paid some attention to that. Focus on the next election because that’s where I’m headed. And I will use everything I can to get there.”
    “Power has gone to your head,” I said. “You’re using people as if they were things. Objects. I thought you didn’t like America because it is like that.”
    “I pay them well. I pay you very well. No one can top what I am giving them, or you.”
    “I’ll go back there. To hell with your money.”
    “You will rot there,” she said, trying to be conciliatory.
    “That is where I prefer to be. I am a scholar.”
    “What is scholarship if it is not used?”
    “The search for truth is sometimes without use from your point of view. But truth is always useful to humanity at large.”
    “The hell with humanity. You can love humanity without loving one single individual.”
    “Are you describing yourself? Remember the Caesars.
Sic transit gloria mundi
, all that sort of thing.”
    “I am not building an empire.”
    “There is no difference. You are in love with power. Caesar, when he was paraded in Rome, there was always this man following him, whispering, chanting: ‘Remember, thou art mortal.’ So Narita, remember—you are full of shit.”
    “I will have you fired,” she said under her breath.
    “You will have me flogged. But does that destroy the truth? And the truth is that you’re no different from the politicians you despise, from those girls at Assumption who snubbed you. You are snubbing man—and you cannot do that unless you resign from the human race.”
    “Get out of my sight,” she shouted.
    “Gladly,” I said.
    She did not stop me.
    Driving on the highway, I was so angry, so frustrated, I started to cry. I decided then that I would not have anything more to do with her. The four-thousand-peso loss would be a real sacrifice. It had helped with the mortgage on the house. There would also be less money for my sisters who were still in school. To help them was one of my duties as the eldest.
    I also got frightened. She could very well carry out her threat to have me kicked out of the university. I had tenure but what was tenure if people with no compassion were in power?
    I need not have worried. The following day, bright and early, there she was in