Isagani R. Cruz

LONG AFTER CORY AQUINO had broken the gender barrier in Malacañan Palace, Cory Fernandez became President of the Republic of the Philippines. 

                        Cory Fernandez reminded everybody of Cory Aquino.  She was rich, fair-skinned, English-speaking, and single.  

                        Cory was not as rich as her famous namesake and predecessor.  Nobody in the country was, by the time the IMF had finally sequestered all the top one thousand corporations and installed American managers in all of them.  But her family still had enough land in Batanes to qualify her as a member of the New Kahirup Club, recently recanonized by Manila’s society columnists as the club to beat for elegance and extravagance. 

                        Cory’s skin was, by age-old Philippine standards, white.  Her Chinese ancestry had given her the privilege of not looking like her household maid, who was from the slums called Forbes Park, right in the inner city of Makati.  Her family’s wealth had paved the way for a grammar school scholarship in Scotland, where her skin had become sun-starved and, therefore, less tropical.  Careful diet and a chauffered limousine had done the rest.  She had become, unlike most Filipinos, uncolored. 

                        Her English did not retain any traces of her Scot education.  Instead, she had acquired a Harvard accent, thanks to a speech clinic set up in Manila by a mute who wanted to compensate for his disability.  Buying all the newfangled technological speech aids from Olongapo, the nearby New Hongkong set up by refugees from Chinese Hong Kong, was no problem for Cory’s parents.  She had all the help she could get, and being a bright kid, she had quickly removed from her tongue all clues to her being a Filipino.  Fortunately, she had hardly any problem finding people to speak English with.  There were the thousands of American managers in Tagaytay, the crowded commercial center of the country, as well as her family’s clubmates in the New Kahirup.  The rich, after all, still spoke English, despite its having disappeared from the rest of the country, having been outlawed from schools as early as the era of Grinning Martial Law II. 

                        Cory was, of course, a single parent, with two children who could always be counted on to sing and dance whenever she put in an appearance in some foreign country.  Unlike the mythical Cory, however, Cory still had to experience being a widow.  Her three former husbands were still very much alive.  She had divorced the first one in sensational fashion, catching him in flagrante in the Marcos suite in the Asiaworld Plaza, during the second intermission of Rolando Tinio the Fifth’s production of the classic opera EDSA.  She had brought all of the reporters covering the opening night of the opera with her in her triple-decker personal bus from the New Metropolitan Theater to Asiaworld, and she had opened the suite door for them herself, making sure it was her good side that faced all the television cameras.  It was a good night for her:  she had shown herself wearing the latest mini-midi skirtpants, and she had ensured that she would get at least a million pesos a week as alimony from her American husband.  Naturally, there were ugly rumors about how she had herself arranged for her husband to meet the other woman, but because she was rich, such rumors were quickly hushed up by family money. 

                        Cory’s second husband was a Filipino.  He was the last of the Zobels, once a powerful clan in the country.  Although his family wealth had been frittered away in real estate and banking, superstitious practices in the past, he had enough gold bars in Beijing to make him a member of the New Kahirup.  Cory loved him, despite everything they said about him, but she could not stand being a mere housewife, and quickly divorced him.  Under the New Philippine Family Law, it was very easy to get a divorce.  All she had to do was to send a form through computer mail to the Central Divorce Authority, and that was that.  Her second husband, that is, her second ex-husband, was the last to know. 

                        Cory’s third was a marriage of convenience.  At the time, Cory had already made up her mind to become President of the Philippines.  She chose the only son of the political boss of the time, an old-timer who had married into American money by writing a Valentine song for an aging American duchess, who had promptly fallen in love with him.  Their divorce gave him exclusive rights to the million-dollar uranium reserves in Cotabato, and he used his money wisely to buy off all the American managers and all the registered voters in the 72nd district of New Davao.  With enough money even to buy off Asiaworld City, he had succeeded in getting himself elected to Congress, which quickly made him Speaker.  From that post, he was able to manipulate all levels of elections, from national to barangay.  His son was a practising homosexual, but that did not bother Cory, who did not want his body nor even his money, but only his father’s political machinery.  

                        By the time Cory was nominated and elected to the presidency, she had already two children.  Her daughter by the first marriage had managed to remain single and now managed all the small family corporations, but not, of course, the huge beer bottling company which was now managed by an American.  Cory’s son by her second marriage was still in graduate school.  He was trying to write a thesis proving that Diliman existed, but even with all the family money, he was having difficulty locating documents not burnt during the Accident at the nuclear reactor.  He could always be relied on to sing and dance every time Cory went on a state mission to some other country.  State visits were frequent, occurring at least once a month.  Cory felt that international presence was essential to keep the Philippines from being completely forgotten despite its mythical past as the Country of People Power.  Everywhere Cory travelled, of course, she wore orange, which was as close to twentieth-century yellow as modern fabric coloration could get.

                      All of this, naturally, anybody can read from any standard Philippine history book.  This is the Cory that everybody knew. 

                        I knew better.  I knew Cory better, much, much better.  I was Cory’s lover. 
 

IT ALL STARTED WITH a social French kiss at a dinner party hosted by the American governor of Metro Luzon.  Cory was a little drunk, and careful not to show herself in such a state, had repaired to the library of the governor.  I was in the library, trying to complete a footnote I was going to use in my next scholarly paper at my next weekly international conference.  I had misplaced my copy of the Reuter book on People Power, and my computer files had been hit by the IBM virus concocted by the IBM corporation to sabotage all Davao-made clones.  I knew that the governor had a copy of the rare book in his library, because I had given it to him for Good Friday.  Not enjoying the food and drinks, I had myself stolen away from the party of ten thousand diplomats to search for a book. 

                        I thought I was the only one who still read books, I said to myself when I heard the library door creak open.  Everyone I knew, certainly everyone in the governor’s kind of dinner party, had never seen, much less touched, a book.  The computerization of knowledge, having occurred more than two decades ago, had rendered all libraries useless.  The governor, being an American of rather nostalgic tastes, was one of the very few people in the country who still used up precious space for a library.  That was the reason I gave him the Reuter book; I knew he took special pride in his library. 

                        Cory came into the library with a glass of wine still in her hand.  I immediately showed myself to her and gave her the customary polite lifting of the chin.  

                        “Ms. President,” I said. 

                        “Oh, hello there,” she said.  “I didn’t realize there was anybody else here.” 

                        I realized that Dolphy’s Book of Etiquette required that I show respect to the President by giving her a social French kiss. I immediately put down my precious People Power book and gave her the amenities.  

                        “You’re the writer, aren’t you?” she asked, after I had kissed her. 

                        “Yes, Ms.” 

                        “Are you here to reminisce about the good old days?” 

                        The thought had never entered my mind.  Yes, they were indeed good old days, the days of the printed books.  You could actually pick up a novel, stop in the middle, place a paper bookmark where you stopped, and continue after taking lunch or a shower or a lover out on a date.  Today, all novels were sold in digital discs, which you fed into your portable mental input machine.  In less than three seconds, you had the entire novel in your head, to be recalled when necessary at dinner parties like the governor’s.  

                        “No, Ms.  I was looking for a footnote.” 

                        “A note for your head, I presume.  I heard that your writing computer was state of the art.” 

                        My computer.  It may be state of the art, but IBM had found its Achilles heel.  Now, it could not write a novel if its life depended on it. 

                        “The bug got it,” I said.  On occasions like this, with a tipsy woman in a dark room, I normally speak in longer sentences, mostly designed to keep the woman’s mind occupied while I fiddled around with her Portable Orgasm Machine or POM if she had one, or while I attached the one I always keep in my hip pocket.  Instinctively, I touched my hip pocket.  Damn.  I had forgotten it at home, thinking that I would never need it in the governor’s library. 

                        That was when she lurched forward.  I caught her, as well as her glass, and she laughed as she pressed me against the PN section.  I knew she was a woman, but I also knew she was President of the Philippines and likely to have me arrested if I made any inappropriate moves.  I stopped myself from groping for her POM. 

                        “No, I don’t have a POM,” she whispered. 

                        Frankly, I didn’t know what to say, how to behave, who I was, where I was.  In other words, I fell in love with her right there and then. 

                        She knew it, I’m sure, because she groped for my POM.  

                        “You don’t have one, either, I see.” 

                        I nodded, for lack of anything better to do. 

                        “In that case, let’s just sit down and exchange footnotes,” she said. 

                        She walked unsteadily to the only sofa in the library and motioned me to join her.  I did, but stiffly, like a teenager. 

                        “What’s your footnote about?” she said. 

                        That’s how it all started.  I soon got all involved in the thesis sentence of my latest paper -- which had something to do with the deconstructive effect of feminist materialism on the newly-discovered Cordillera archives. 

SOME YEARS FROM NOW some enterprising young masculinist is going to discover the “truth” -- to use an obsolete word that only theology majors now use in their do-it-yourself dissertations -- about Cory Fernandez.  She wasn’t frigid -- no, that was not it.  Our later long “lunches” at the EDSA Plaza proved that she could handle a POM as well as anybody else.  

                        It was the way she mishandled the POM.  

                        Our civilization prides itself on having discovered or invented just about everything that can possibly be discovered or invented.  The POM is just one, albeit the most pleasurable one, of millions of little gadgets that practically everyone has, either at hand or within easy reach at corner supermarkets.  

                        In order for the system to work, everyone must follow The Three Simple Rules  -- acquire, use, and discard.  

                        Everyone has acquired, in fact most are given during their tenth birthday, a personal POM.  One of the few complex gadgets not discarded after each use (although modern experts claim that using it for more than four decades may lead to degenerative anti-immunity), the POM is very easy to use:  just pop in an instant orgasm cube, which evaporates ten seconds after climax.  No mess, no washing, no traces.  There isn’t even anything to discard afterwards, not even feelings, which became unfashionable after the Accident.  

                        As expected, young people tend to overuse the POM, sometimes getting together in the middle of an exam or a subway.  They also display their POMs in outrageous New Fashion pendants that make some of us more experienced POM-users cringe.  Part of the pleasure of using someone else’s POM is groping for it, and if it is displayed the way a young man puts his on his nose or a young woman puts hers on her chin, there is no longer any excuse for groping. But young people will be young people, and they soon grow up to be more circumspect, not to mention less impatient. 

                        Cory, in keeping with her status as our President, always hid her POM somewhere under her official uniform, out of sight of the foreign journalists who tended to ambush her after every official meeting.  In each of these diplomatic events, Cory always behaved as she was expected to, groping in the prescribed Dolphy manner, expressing appreciation in time-honored formulas, smiling at appropriate intervals.  Practically everything about her sex life as President was properly documented and audited. 

                        But because we did not let anyone, not even her security robot, know about our lunches, no one was ever around to photograph her groping for my POM.  Since nobody nowadays ever bothers about the President anyway -- except, of course, for Cory herself, who still thinks there is some symbolic value in keeping the title alive, although the country fairly runs itself on modern technology -- no rumors have ever been started about us.  I have, in short, remained a non-entity, politically speaking, though I must immodestly mention that my lectures on immaterialism do have some kind of a following among antiquarians. 

                        Contrary to proper etiquette, Cory was always trying not to use her POM. 

                        She had this desire to return to the pre-Accident days, when men and women had to spend precious energy working up to a climax.  Despite all medical evidence that such loss of energy shortened life considerably, sometimes leading to massive loss of blood or of something that smelled like blood (the nature of the fluid said to be associated with sex is one of the few mysteries pathology has not yet unlocked), she was determined to explore the intricacies of sex without POMs. 

                        The first hundred times we used our POMS, she kept to the prescribed routine, but after she became more at ease with me, having discovered that I preferred books and other pre-tech artifacts to today’s conveniences, she let her hair down, or rather, she kept her POM down to minimal level.  Instead, at the crucial moments when the big bang would come simultaneously for both of us, she would suddenly simultaneously switch off our two POMS -- not an easy thing to do, considering the acrobatics involved -- and do the rest with her fingers. 

                        Yes, her fingers!  It sounds almost like blasphemy, if you know what that word used to mean in the days when people still believed in immortals and things of that sort.  She used her fingers to play around with my urination appendage! 

                        Let me tell you:  she was not President for nothing. 

I COULD GO ON KISSING AND TELLING LIKE THIS FOREVER, but the climax of my story has nothing to do with the climaxes I reached during our pre-tech sessions. 

                        The climax of my story has to do with something even more shocking for modern sensibilities, if future historians ever find out about us. 

                        Sometime between our three-thousandth and four- thousandth joint orgasms, Cory was asked to neutralize sex. 

                        Cory never discussed politics with me, not only because she knew that, despite my antiquarian leanings, I was not interested in such counterproductive remnants from the past, but also because there was hardly anything to talk about as far as her role in politics was concerned.  The institutionalized Cordon Sanitaire was very efficient in keeping all management problems from her.  She did not have to make any decision of any kind.  Her Personal Identification Number was now the common property of all her Department Secretaries, even of her sisters and brothers and sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law, and she did not have to sign anything.  All anybody had to do was key in her Number and whatever it was that had to be approved was approved.  Anyway, no harm could come out of anything she signed, because nobody paid any attention to government anyway except the Traditional Politicians, who were not even inputted into the Big Machine created by the Americans to run the everyday affairs of the Republic. 

                        The controversy about sex, however, was different.  The proposal had come from the Americans, who never proposed anything, because they simply went ahead and did what they wanted to do.  The fact that they proposed the neutralization of sex meant that something fishy was going on.  Nobody asked Cory to decide on anything, and her being asked to decide meant that there was probably some major difference of opinion among the Americans. 

                        The issue was simple enough:  should sex be neutralized, or as the personal media put it, should POMs be illegalized?  Cory did not know exactly who was for what, who wanted which, or when whoever was going to be where.  All she knew was that someone had beeped her workstation with the query:  “Neutralize sex.  Y / N ?”  

                        She would have had no problem pressing the N key, had it not been for me, or rather, us.  Neutralizing sex would have meant shutting off the main Sex Terminal, which would have automatically rendered all POMs useless.  Millions of people would then have been sex-starved.  According to Imelda’s Theory, the one patterned after the philosophy of Sigmund Freud, sex starvation leads to political unrest, something long accepted since the First Dictatorship forced people to see sex films in order to deaden their political desires during pre-Accident days.   Cory’s proper response, as indicated in her President’s Manual, would have been to press N. 

                        But she also wanted to get other people to share the joys of using fingers instead of POMs.  She knew -- she told me as she was recounting her indecision -- that shutting off POMs may force people to start depending on their bodies, rather than on machines, for their happiness.  But then -- and this made her indecisive -- what guarantee did anybody have that the displaced sexual energies would not be misplaced in politics? 

                        Not being President, I could not offer her any advice.  All I could do was to remind her of the old books, which probably contained some advice about such a dilemma.  After all, I said, ancient philosophers earned their living working on dilemmas.  This dilemma might be similar to one of the millions listed in philosophy indexes. 

                        It wasn’t so simple, she replied, obviously aware of my stupidity in such matters beyond my narrow field of antiquarian philosophy and history.  This was a matter that involved a conflict between Technology and Individuality, Science and Humanism, Sex and Politics, Government and People, Woman and Man, Good and Evil.  

                        Good and evil?  I was amazed at such extrapolation. 

                        Yes, she said, Good and Evil, the primordial greatest good for the greatest number and the archetypal greatest evil of Faust and Faustus and all the President’s brothers and sisters and in-laws.  This was going to be a decision that would change the lives of everybody in the country, and probably the world, unless the National Invention Center would come up in a day with a Natural Generic Sex Manual that would immediately replace the POM.  Since the Center had not invented anything since the POM, that avenue was obviously not going to work. 

                        I must admit that I could not follow Cory’s logic, especially since we talked about all this while she was trying out her latest discovery about sex:  actually removing our clothes while in bed.  Despite everything I had read about primitve practices, I was not at ease showing my entire body to someone else, even if she was the President.  I could not concentrate on what she was talking about, even if I could tell very plainly that this was something major that she had to think about and that anything she decided to do might actually be listened to by her Cordon Sanitaire.

IN THE END, all that indecision and distraction and aggravation went for naught, to use a quaint if antiquated word.  Having waited a full twenty-four hours for someone to press Y or N, Cory’s terminal automatically made the decision for her.  Since everybody knows what the decision was, there is no need for me to recount it here.  It would just take up space. 

                        This story, after all, is about Cory as a person, as my lover, as my secret friend.  This story is not about politics, nor about the history of the Philippines, nor about anything else but her.  

                        Cory Fernandez was the greatest President the Philippines ever had, if you know what I mean.

What I did last summer was sleep with B.T. Max. 

He was the most boring person I had ever met. 

You see, he was the most intelligent. 

My book My Favorite Films, he once said to me, as he fiddled with my bra one moonless night at Smokey Mountain Pleasure Palace, is not about my favorite films at all.  Rather, it is about the favorite films of one Victoria H. Smith (V.H.S., for short), whose undated and privately published book entitled My Favourite Films I found in a bookshop at the Chiang Kai Shek Airport in Taiwan on my way to Seoul.  I was then touring the world clockwise, and her book tells of the way she toured the world counterclockwise.  I thought it a jarring coincidence that she and I had the same favorite films, though the sequence in which she saw them was the exact opposite of the sequence in which I saw them.  Having never met her, I cannot say what she was like, though I have a pretty good idea of how her mind worked.  In fact, I have a very good idea of what she was really like inside, where it matters, because she apparently put down on paper, in a kind of stream of consciousness or protocol analysis, everything that went on in her imagination as she was watching her favorite films. 

That was about as much as I could take, considering that he took forever to get me down to my panties.  We had just come from a party with Marcos’ favorite assassin, who had just completed another mission at the University of the Philippines campus, and B.T., as usual, had spoiled the party by claiming that the unknown quantity called Cory Aquino was actually a pure figment of the imagination of the C.I.A., which had concocted the entire M.I.A. [Manila International Airport] plot right at its headquarters in Virginia.  Everyone at the party turned out to have signed the one-million-signature campaign paper being passed around by Imelda, who had thought the whole thing to be a joke. 

That may very well be true, I said, giggling despite not being turned on, but you’re still the person who wrote your book, not she.  Critics have raved over your insights into film, not hers. 

I claim no credit at all – B.T. whispered, as he finally got his forefinger on my clitoris – for her startling insights nor for her serendipitous choice of films.  I do claim credit, however, for having bought what must have been the only surviving copy of her book, because no matter how many film buffs I ask about her, no one seems to have yet heard of her or her book.  I sent the copy to the Library of Congress, where it is now lost in its labyrinthine passages or borrowed forever by some senator eager to appear educated at cocktail parties.  I made one and only one photocopy of the book, since I had barely enough coins at that time for the photocopying machine in the Columbus public library where I sat for five hours, reading the book in breathless fascination.  I sent that photocopy to the Bodleian Library, but the librarian, or whoever receives donations there, sent me back the photocopy, saying that their centuries-old library stocks only originals and certainly not photocopies of books sold in airport bookstores. 

B.T. was always like that, talking of things that didn’t matter as he absentmindedly fooled around with things that did.  My insides were all wound up, like those women in Mills and Boon novels, though unlike them, I had nothing on outside.  I couldn’t even claim to be a Ninotchka Rosca character, since I had absolutely no pretensions to being a terrorist or mistress of any kind.  I certainly wasn’t a rabid feminist out to seek equality with the Other.  All I wanted was to get laid, and B.T., as he always did after having had more glasses of Taiwanese grape wine than anyone else in a party where wine was considered more sophisticated than mixed drinks, was behaving like an Ernest Hemingway or N.V.M. Gonzalez character, talking his way out of the qualms of his conscience. 

I could have snipped off his cock. 

I ran out of typing paper – he continued, as he continued licking what he thought was the heart of my vaginal matter – as I was writing my own book on my own favorite films, and I had to use the back side of the photocopies returned by the Bodleain in order not to have to run out to the chemist to get more paper and thus disrupt the precious flow of my own thoughts.  The printing shop, naturally, threw away my manuscript as soon as they had proofread their typeset pages, and as a result, I am now unable to produce a copy of the book by V.H.S.  There is, of course, the copy at the Library of Congress, but I now no longer have access to it, having returned to roost in my native Davao City in the Philippines.  Less pressured to earn a living and wiser for having travelled around the world, I can now only look at my own book itself and console myself with the thought that I have rendered the world a service by trying to annotate and, in the process, to set down from memory, unreliable though mine might be, the best book ever written on film in any language and in any country – the book entitled My Favourite Films, by that great film critic V.H.S. 

That was what I did last summer – have sex with the one person who knew exactly when to enter me and when to leave, when to smoke and when to snore, when to talk shop and when to shop around for matters to talk about. 

On the other hand, he was always infuriating, always talking about film, always making up films in his mind, even when he was almost there, almost in the throes of ecstasy – as Valentine Romances would put it, if only they had used English rather than that upstart and non-existent language politically called Filipino.  He once confided to Cory (the real one – my neighbor – rather than the myth concocted by the C.I.A.), who confided it immediately to me, that he talked about film in order to get his mind off his erection.  He had read in Penthouse that men could delay ejaculation by using their minds as distractors. 

“If Tom Baxter had stepped out of The Purple Rose of Cairo and met, instead of the romantic Cecilia, the sex-starved Elizabeth, and if he had spent nine and a half weeks with her, he would have organized a screenworkers’ union and agitated for the abolition of all fade-outs.”  That’s how V.H.S. starts her book, and I know she must have been particularly randy when she wrote that.  Nobody sees Nine and a Half Weeks without getting horny.  I can almost picture V.H.S., looking at the gorgeous Malay gentleman who ushered her into the theater in Kuala Lumpur, wondering what it would be like to taste human meat that did not eat animal meat.  V.H.S. saw Deep Throat, The Realm of the Senses, and Scorpio Nights, films in the same genre, and Adrian Lyne’s soft porn appealed most to her. 

Can you imagine such gall, talking of porn while performing? 

Without showing any real skin, except for very, very brief shots of Kim Basinger’s breasts, Nine and a Half Weeks manages to simulate the romance of sex without referring to its everyday physical difficulties and impossibilities.  Mickey Rourke as the John and Bassinger as Elizabeth run through the acrobatic positions found only in the Kama Sutra and as conventional motifs in hardcore porn.  There is spontaneity in the sexual madness, unlike in the methodical positions assumed by the porn stars in Boatman. 

What really got to me – and this is the real reason I finally stopped seeing him – was B.T.’s being absolutely right all the time.  Feminists talk about male chauvinists and masculinists talk about feminist chauvinists, but nobody, but nobody, has ever met anyone as absolutely correct as B.T.  I once tried to see all the films he was always talking about.  I went to a Betamax shop at the corner of Estrada and Taft, the one that does not pay homage to the V.R.B. [Video Regulatory Board], and I borrowed all the Woody Allen films that they had.  I actually sat through each film at least twice (“sat through” is, of course, a self-deconstructing metaphor of some kind, since I actually slept through most of the films), and I confirmed all my worst suspicions:  B.T. always knew what he was talking about. 

Tom Baxter (that’s B.T. spelled backwards, B.T. would always point out to me) would indeed have had a very different off-screen experience, if we can call on-screen America an off-screen reality.  In typical Woody Allen fashion, the film The Purple Rose of Cairo, taking off from the film-within-a-film The Purple Rose of Cairo, talks about film and facts, illusion and reality.  Gil Shephard the actor, at second remove from Jeff Daniels the real actor, plays Tom Baxter like a heel, missing a good sex romp in the brothel when he has the chance.  V.H.S. is right:  Tom Baxter needs Elizabeth to show him the reel facts of real life. 

The party.  I will never forget that party. 

It was one of those dress-down affairs.  Imelda had just come from the Plaza, where she had had a quick shower with that latest beau of hers.  She had gotten her shoes wet, and had gone quickly to Rustan’s at H.P. [Harrison Plaza] to get a few dozen new pairs.  The jackal (God, now I’m talking like B.T.!), I mean the assassin, was celebrating his twentieth anniversary as the country’s most-hated torturer.  He had brought out his old U.P.  R.O.T.C. identification card, where he had, at the beginning of his illustrous career, etched a cross every time he had killed someone in his safehouse right across his own house.  The card was almost shredded.  “I’ve lost count,” he boasted to no one in particular, but B.T., being the closet homosexual that he was, quickly went to him and kissed him on the lips.  That’s right, the European way.  The world could have lost B.T. right there, but the assassin had to be good-natured about the whole thing, Imelda being right there and B. T. having been one of her lovers, right before she discovered an aging Hollywood actor. 

Thinking back, I shudder at who else was in that party. 

Practically everyone who is now in Cory’s cabinet, or should I say heterosexual closet. 

V.H.S. does not miss a trick, B.T. said between huffs and puffs.  She writes about Stephanie Farrow playing Cecilia’s sister, related actresses playing related parts.  Speaking of relations, V.H.S. also refers in her appendix to the convoluted relationships between Puck the implied character in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy and the lover-swapping couples in the film.  Andrew invents Puck, in a sense, though it is Puck who invents him and Ariel, whose engagement to Leopold the pedant gives nurse Dulcy a sex fever that even internist Maxwell cannot cure.  Strangely enough to me, V.H.S. prefers to see Adrian as the protagonist of the film.  Perhaps it is only Adrian’s sudden outburts of sexual energy that endears her to V.H.S., who talks about Elizabeth as though she were her roommate.  It is certainly not Adrian’s frigidity, which is more appropriate for Cecilia, despite the latter’s finding herself caught between two lovers, not to mention her impotent husband Monk. 

I finally came. 

I always came.  That was the one thing about being with B.T. that I could not give up. 

For a few seconds, at least, whether in some roach-infested motel with a love seat and shower strap – the works, in other words – or whether in some five-star hotel room courtesy of Imelda’s ever-permissive social secretary, I could forget about politics and concentrate on my cunt. 

B.T. finally came, too. 

As he always did, he gave me a lecture while I smoked. 

Reading V.H.S.’s book, I feel like Joe Morton, playing The Brother from Another Planet.  Any time soon, two men in black will appear at my back, ready to ferry me back to the real world of black and white, sex and romance, reality and illusion.  V.H.S. puts it another way in her chapter on Woody Allen. She feels that it is Humphrey Bogart we should all be wary about, what with his singularly inappropriate bits of ersatz wisdom dished out to the unsuspecting Allen in Play It Again, Sam.  Bogart should have stuck to giving advice to Danny Rose in Broadway Danny Rose.  At least, Danny Rose would have had compassion on him, perhaps forgiving him as he forgives Tina in the contrived ending of that film.  Or it might be William of Baskerville I’m really worried about, since it was he who came out of the screen like Tom Baxter and accosted V.H.S. in Bangkok, where she was quietly munching a banana after having gone to Patpong to catch a Thai version of Bilitis, that thoroughly valueless piece of infantile porn.  The Thai version was not much better, apparently, for V.H.S. dismisses it in one line as “not even mildly erotic.” 

At that point, I lost interest.  The room was starting to get cold again – I had forgotten, as usual, to adjust the thermostat on the airconditioner – and the comforter was in no shape to give comfort.  The damage our acrobatics had wrought on the sheets would amaze the cleaning boys again. 

I got up and went to the bathroom.  It was not gaudy like Imelda’s bathroom at the C.C.P. or Cultural Center of the Philippines, the one Nick Tiongson used to show to his friends after he had become one of Rolando Tinio’s ‘Tions.  There were no lightbulbs around the mirror, no disco lights on the ceiling, no empty perfume bottles around the bathtub.  It was your regulation bathroom, with a small bar of used soap and a scraggly towel.  Through the sound of the water, I could still hear B.T.’s babbling on the bed. 

Speaking of Woody Allen, V.H.S. recalls her first experience of Take the Money and Run in a film theater in Jakarta, where the film was shown as a filler for one of the Superman films that had not yet arrived from the airport customs office.  The theater owner was apparently an impulsive collector of films, having grabbed a copy of Allen’s film without knowing what it was.  The film started out looking like a documentary, and the owner thought that it would be a nice break from the cartoons that he had shown 87 times before in similar circumstances.  The film, of course, as V.H.S. soon surmised after the first sequence, was not a documentary at all, but was a brilliant attempt by Allen to spoof the television series on the F.B.I. then running for the nth time on daytime TV.  V.H.S. had to wait until her return to Chicago before she could finish the story of Virgil Stockwell and Louise, but that did not stop her from writing in her notes in Jakarta her initial impressions of the film.  “Tragic,” she wrote, “is the only way to describe the attempt of Woody Allen to talk about tragedy.  Anybody with eyes to see can see that Virgil is a fit subject for a documentary, which only goes to show that comedy cannot be made out of comic material.”  The depth of that argument I still have to fathom. 

“I won’t see you again, B.T.,” I shouted through the bathroom door. 

He didn’t hear me.  He never did.  He was so wrapped up in his reminiscences and his theorizing and his delaying tactics and his erection that he never noticed that I hated film, hated it so much that I even saw five Lino Brocka films once as mortification during Holy Week, those days in high school when the sisters would force us to do penance for our sins, which they thought were no worse than being disrespectful to our parents and coming to church after the epistle. 

I hate film because it never approximates real life, which is always more cinematic than fiction. 

Who could have thought that the assassin was going to pull off the greatest magic act in history, getting away with his shooting Ninoy Aquino in the head while a thousand troops, all meant to act like the bikini-clad girl in a carnival sideshow, to distract the audience from the real action, were stationed right around a simple, undistinguished, but oh so memorable staircase?  He even boasted about it during that party, despite the presence of practically everyone in the media then. 

Everyone in the newspapers then had been paid off by Imelda. 

The same people are still in the newspaper business.  And I mean business. 

The same people are still in the government business.  And I mean business. 

The same people are still killing and fucking and dancing and killing and partying and killing and politicking and travelling and killing and praying and singing and killing and –   

It never stops. 

My favorite Woody Allen film – and coincidentally also the favorite of V.H.S., who saw it thirteen times, the last time in an empty theater in Israel on a Saturday afternoon – is Hannah and Her Sisters, where Elliot’s sleeping with Lee, who has been sleeping with a megalomaniac but failed painter, echoes Mickey’s eventual sleeping with Holly, whose unfulfilled need to sleep around catches even Hannah sleeping or should I say wide awake but not quite.  V.H.S. was not too impressed with Mickey’s didactic scenes, particularly since she had just come from several airports where Hare Krishna thrives and, in Israel, had seen how Catholics had made a Jewish country their shrine.  I myself like Woody Allen, despite his mannerism of using his hands too much in every film he makes, no matter what the character is, and despite his using self-references all the time, as in the Rabbi image in Broadway Danny Rose and Zellig.  I think he is the greatest film director who ever lived, just as V.H.S. is the greatest film critic who ever lived.  V.H.S. does not think as highly of Woody Allen, apparently having met him in person and seeing what he is really like. 

Perhaps B.T. is right.  Talk about illusion all the time.  Do not let reality enter your thoughts.  It was the only way he knew, he said, to keep from killing himself. 

It was just too painful to realize that the Filipino had been, would always be, was doomed to be, a sycophant, a victim, a sucker for all the feudal lords and imperialists and bureaucrats and capitalists and multinationals and banks of the world. 

There is no more hope for this country. 

Take the money and run, said Woody Allen, said B.T. Or did he say it?  Or did he pretend to say it in order not to say it?  Or did saying it actually prevent it from being said? 

But there is hope for me. 

I can write a short story. 

I have written a short story. 

I’ve finally exorcised the ghost of B.T.  I’ve done him in.  By writing this short story, I’ve made him look like the fool he really was. 

My name isn’t V.H.S. for nothing.