Free Three Filipino Women by F. Sionil Jose Page B

her new Mercedes 300. I was having breakfast when I saw the car park in front of the gate. I rushed to my room upstairs and told my sisters to tell her that I was not in.
    I could hear her downstairs, her disbelief that I would leave so early on a Sunday morning. She said, “Well, I have nothing to do. I can wait the whole day if it comes to that. And I haven’t had breakfast yet.”
    There was a scramble to prepare for breakfast and I knew how embarrassed and uneasy my sisters were. Then she asked to go to my study. She wanted to look at my books and get something to read while waiting. My attempt at evasion had ended and I padded down the stairs. She grinned, shook a finger, and said, “Eddie—not on a Sunday morning …”
    She stood up and said she wanted to see my study or my room anyway and before I could object, she was up the flight and holding on to my arm, my sisters looking at us with amusement.
    My room was a mess as usual, my rubber shoes in the doorway, my dirty underwear under the desk, my books all over the place, my diploma still unframed and stuck on the wall with pins. As soon as we went in, she turned the latch. Then Narita kissed me deeply, passionately, murmuring, “I am sorry, darling, about yesterday. I hurt you, didn’t I? I’m here now to apologize and make up.”
    And what could I say when drowning in her sweetness?
    We fell on my bed. She had taken off her dress and tossed it on the floor. My sisters were probably listening in the other room so I made nonsensical small talk. The bed began to squeak and she said, “Damn!” She pulled me to the floor. It would have been uncomfortable but she rode me expertly and all the anxiety, all the anger were gone. There was only this woman as I had imagined her.
    For a while, I fantasized about us living together.
    We lay on the floor for a long time, talking, remembering New York, the campaign. We went over the few mistakes that were made and how they would be rectified next time. The challenge to her ambition was formidable when we finally came to it—the Presidency. She said it was within her grasp. She could convince the President not to run for reelection and perhaps jokingly, I am not sure now, she said: “If he will not accede to that, I will just put a few drops of cyanide in his coffee. He drinks it black so he won’t recognize the bitter taste.”
    “How can you talk so complacently and with such familiarity about him?” I asked, turning on my side to face her.
    She poked me in the ribs then. “Oh, Eddie, you were really born yesterday! Didn’t you know? The President and I—we became lovers during the campaign.”
    …
    At first, I had thought of limiting my interview with Senator Reyes to his comments about Narita, to his observations on national politics and the contribution his daughter-in-law had made. But I soon realized that this was a mistake for the senator—it’s obvious now—shadowed Narita all her life, not like some protective umbrella but as a pall, a fate that started on its course at the time the senator first came to Santa Ana and saw the young
mestiza.
    The interview with Senator Reyes, therefore, is not just central to this story but a document in itself about an era, of the thinking which shaped a generation and the future, and also made the new definition of nationalism and the new public morality. Senator Reyes knew all the prewar political figures from Quezon onwards. He himself had collaborated with the Japanese in World War II and like all the collaborators of that period, justified his acts in the larger interests of the people. He had seen how the same collaborators like him became rich.
    To the very end, when he was already approaching senility, he justified himself, what he had done with politics and his brand of self-seeking nationalism. He sometimes castigated the elite to which he belonged for its depradation of the country, for not bringing alternatives to the corrupt political system. But his