Alex Maskara
Thoughts, Stories, Imagination of Filipino American Alex Maskara
Welcome
Diary of A Masquerade
~
Chapter 7
(The second meeting between Antonio and Roberto. Antonio wanted to earn rent money while Roberto wanted a listening friend.)
He arrived in khaki shorts and a silk shirt—too bright even for the night.
“You look like you’ve just been to Hawaii,” I quipped.
I noticed his smooth, shaved legs—shapely—and, damn, he had a good ass. But tonight, he wasn’t as enthusiastic as he’d been last night. He seemed serious, leaning against the trunk of a coconut tree, looking at me calmly with a hazy, empty gaze and shiny brown eyes. I hoped he wouldn’t pull another joke on me tonight. I needed money for rent.
“Hey, pretty boy. You heard me? What are you thinking?” I nudged him.
He inhaled smoke from his cigarette and stared at me until I felt uncomfortable. There was something not right about that stare—his pupils were abnormally wide, like a cat’s in the dark. A few strands of hair fell over his face, and he slowly brushed them back before turning to face the bay.
What the hell is he up to now?
“I failed to ask your name last night,” he said pensively. “I came home in high spirits, thanking the angels for finding me a friend, recalling the brief moment we had—but when I thought of your name, I realized I didn’t even know it. It was so stupid of me not to have asked.”
This is getting weird.
“Big deal,” I said. How many people even know my real name? My dead parents, my creditors, the registrar at my school… come to think of it, hardly anyone.
In my profession, revealing your true identity is a big no-no.
“What is your name?” he asked.
Just like in the movies, I’d learned to adopt different screen names for different situations. Tonight, I felt young, playful, monosyllabic, adventurous, bold, sexy, ready for action—and for money.
“Jeff,” I answered.
“No. Your true name.”
“Jeff,” I repeated, grinning.
“Okay, Jeff. My name is Roberto Policarpio.”
Damn. “You know, Nameless Adonis sounded much better.” I’d rather he kept his name secret like I did. But some people are just too honest, I guess. In this hustling game, sharing your name is risky. He needs to watch *Gigolo* and *Cruising* to learn that lesson.
He ignored my comment, dropped his cigarette, and crushed it under his shoe.
“Our wonderful conversation was abruptly curtailed by your hasty departure last night.”
His language tonight was formal—completely different from last night’s. Old-school, almost Elizabethan. It made me want to puke. He even sounded accusing.
“I told you, I had studying to do.”
“Now you tell me, what else is there on the other side of hustling?”
This son of a bitch is really dead set on knowing the secrets of me—and of Manila Bay.
“Roberto Policarpio, a person of your status need not see them. They’re just… how would I say it… animalistic.”
“The better,” he said.
“If I were you, I’d stay away from asking about hustling. Sometimes, even talking about it is depressing.”
“Why?”
I wished he would stop. “Because it makes a person sad.”
“No difference to me… Jeff, are you happy?”
“Happiness is relative. It depends on one’s point of view.”
“That’s what they all say. I want your explanation.”
“What explanation?” Damn. I’m here to hustle, and who am I talking to now—Socrates?
He turned his eyes to the bay. “Another explanation about life… explanations as to why I still linger in the night while the rest of the world is sleeping. Why, when I’m about to start a friendship, I’m abandoned.”
“Because you’re gay,” I said, trying to cut the melodrama quickly.
He was silent for a long time. Then he spoke again. “Last night, I remembered the runner who followed me, offering me a light even when I didn’t ask for it—following me from behind, begging for a little attention, a little sex. Will that be my future when I turn old and gray? Is that a punishment for being gay?”
“I said you’re gay. I didn’t say you’d become that runner when you get old.”
“I don’t want to be gay!” he screamed.
“Hey, hey. No yelling, please. You ask questions, I answer. If you don’t want my opinions, then go fuck yourself.” I kept my tone mild.
He calmed down but remained fidgety. Crazy fellow. He obviously had a personality problem. I wasn’t intimidated by his outbursts, though. In my job, surprises don’t surprise me.
“All I want is to understand more about myself,” he said, beginning to cry.
Oh boy. This is super-schizophrenia.
“Well, come and follow me.”
---
At night on Manila Bay, heterosexuals dominate the seawall, but after midnight another kind of gender appears—homosexuals borrowing passions and obsessions from one another. I had seen them before wearing masks of imaginary identities, as if trying to fool even God. This is the place where they do it all.
It was now after midnight.
We kept walking along the seawall. I stayed quiet. The squared rooms of the Holiday Inn surrendered to the sallow evening, their square lights switching off one by one. I slapped at the mosquitoes biting my skin.
“This is the other view of Manila Bay,” I said as we reached the road at Lawton. It’s a strip about two miles long, lined with herbs and vines crawling along a barbed wire fence. On the left are the old executive buildings of Congress and the Supreme Court. On the right, an expansive greenery being converted into a golf course. Along its way are entrances to universities and bus stops. It merges with Roxas Boulevard after passing through Luneta. Roxas Boulevard is the main coastline of Manila, leading up to the Cultural Center of the Philippines. It spreads arteries toward Mabini, noted as the red-light district of the sex capital of Asia.
“Jeff,” he said, grave-eyed. “I can’t stand being alone. I wanna die.”
I stopped. I’d had enough of this.
“Robert, I hate it when someone so good-looking and muscular like you says he’s so lonesome he wants to die. With all the starving, homeless, helpless people surrounding you, you still wanna die? Get a life! Join the Mother Teresa way. That Saint is my hero. Look—she was lonesome, old, loveless at forty. So she formed the Sisters of Charity or something. Now she’s the most popular spinster in the modern world.”
Hearing this, he smiled.
I continued. “Hmm. On the other hand, you wouldn’t look good as a Saint. You need to call somebody like that ‘toning guy’ on the late-night radio talk show—the one who tells you to prepare water he blesses via radio before you drink it. What about following my solution? What I do when I’m lonesome is write. I have this hidden notebook full of horrible entries. When I hear bad news—like a friend raped, a hooker killed in an accident, or another murdered by a serial killer—I jot it down. Every time I get depressed, I re-read my entries and say to myself, Damn, I’m still lucky. Though I had a night without a customer, John was hit by a truck. Then I feel blessed.”
He started laughing hard.
But by now, I was getting desperate for an income. I had to go. Bullshit. Why couldn’t he just do whatever he intended to do, then go to his business and I to mine?
“I don’t want to be gay,” he said again.
I blurted out, “Then go find a girlfriend.”
He looked at me with frightened eyes. “I don’t know if I could do it with a girl again after what I’ve gone through.”
Oh man, I’m really stuck with this guy.
“What happened? Were you gang-raped? Did you rape someone? Some people can’t handle such traumas, you know. Not me. I’m paid to do those. Nowadays nobody gets a bloody hand-shit or a blow-shit for free. I’m no nymphomaniac.”
“Nothing… I am not gay—anymore.”
He was going too far.
“As I said, since you’re so sure of your masculinity, just drop it all down here, you see, and hit the road. Along the way, if you find a nice-looking pussy, just grab it good. Simple.”
“No,” he answered.
I breathed deeply. Okay. For this last time, I’d try to help this wretched soul. I might not earn my rent money, but for the sake of humanity, I’d direct him to the right path of self-fulfillment—or whatever gays achieve when they finally accept themselves. I wondered if he even had money to pay me for this.
“Please, Robert, I’m not here to blackmail you. Just say it and I’ll find anything or anyone you want. It won’t be difficult with your good looks. I know the moves in the city. For a small fee, I can match you even with Queen Nefertiti. But first, tell me what you want.”
“The only thing I want is to talk with you. Will you quit these sexual innuendoes and listen?”
I’m telling you! These people come acting stupid at first and, in no time, turn into some big shit—insulting and ordering you around. The nerve! And they don’t even pay!
I sat down to keep my cool. I wished he were a politician’s son so I could at least add him to my list of connections as a consolation. Not that I needed it. Believe me, I have a long list of connections.
“Billie Holiday once sang,” I said, thinking of her—the favorite singer of all Manila hookers with her beautiful gardenia; some argue it was Eartha Kitt—
‘If I take the notion to jump right into the ocean,
It ain’t nobody’s business if I do…’
“You see, Roberto, I can offer nothing but sexual solutions. It ain’t my business if your dick atrophied, dehydrated, wrinkled, and fell off—as I’m now tempted to believe. All I want is to know what happened so I can help.”
Alex Maskara is Pinoy.
2025-10-06 15:52:15
masquerade
In Lerma
Sonny’s first sight of Lerma was not the romantic, intellectual enclave he had once imagined. Instead, he found himself in a cramped neighborhood that was merely an extension of Maliwalan University life—but stripped bare of any pretense.
He sighed at the scene before him. Lodging houses were built like fragile toy blocks, their thin lawànit walls shaking whenever someone shut a door too hard. Tin roofs absorbed the afternoon heat, turning each room into a metal oven. Inside, makeshift carton boards served as dividers, granting the illusion—but not the reality—of privacy.
In the narrow alleyways, students squatted beside public faucets, slapping laundry against cement, struggling with the meager water trickling out. The air was heavy with the mingled smell of soap suds, cigarette smoke, and frying oil from a nearby carinderia. A group of young men hunched over a table in the shade, poker cards in one hand and cigarettes dangling from their lips. The sharp click of billiard balls echoed from the half-dozen pool halls scattered around the block. Occasionally, the sound of a bouncing basketball rose from a cramped court wedged between two crumbling buildings—its backboard made of warped plywood.
Here, Sonny realized, education was not only learned in the classroom; it was soaked in poverty, pressed between thin walls, and seasoned by street noise.
---
The Philosophy of Lola Sabel
Sonny’s parents—staunchly Americanized—had always insisted he study Medicine. To them, a son in the medical field was both a point of prestige and a practical investment. If Sonny could practice in America, they believed, future medical bills could be drastically reduced.
The 1980s had been the golden decade for Maliwalu families with relatives abroad. The peso-dollar exchange rate had soared, and anyone with a direct connection to “Uncle Sam” was envied. Dollar bills—bearing the solemn face of George Washington—were as good as gold. A single remittance from Illinois could make a family’s monthly budget feel like a feast.
One did not need millions to be regarded as wealthy in those days. A pair of Nike sneakers, a Levi’s jacket, a Japanese cassette player—these were enough to mark a person as 'sosyal'. Local items were dismissed as 'baduy' or 'bakya', unworthy of anyone with aspirations. Ironically, the same activists railing against foreign imperialism strutted around in imported jeans and branded shoes.
But Lola Sabel refused to let Sonny inherit such values. One humid night, she called him into the *sari-sari* store for one of her long, sermon-like conversations.
---
“Sonny,” she began, leaning over the wooden counter, “our time today is more painful than the last world war—thanks to this post-war generation who bowed to a dictator that rewrote the Constitution for his own ends. During the Japanese Occupation, I could endure inflation because we were helpless under their Mickey Mouse money. But today?” She slapped a pack of powdered milk on the counter. “Every time a mother counts her coins here, searching her pockets for a lost centavo, only to look up at me and whisper for utang… I can’t bear it.”
She spoke of a woman who often tapped quietly at the store’s door near midnight. Elena—neatly dressed, hair tied back, eyes sunken—came to borrow a kilo of rice. She carried her two-year-old daughter on her hip and once told Lola Sabel, “I can see it in her eyes, Lola. Someday she’ll pull us out of poverty.”
“How will that be,” Lola Sabel replied, handing over the rice, “if you can’t feed her properly now?”
Elena smiled faintly. “She might be like Indang Monang’s daughter, Sonia. Started as a maid at twelve, went to Japan at sixteen, now sends dollars home.”
Lola watched her disappear into the night, the child asleep in her arms, pride flickering in her step despite the hunger.
---
Elena’s husband, Ramon, had been abducted months earlier by armed men—rumored to be former comrades from the underground movement. Once a child scout for the guerillas, he had later betrayed them to the authorities. His disappearance left Elena penniless and jobless. Lola secretly helped her, careful to avoid being publicly linked to an outlaw’s family.
One evening, finding Sonny under the acacia tree beside their house, Lola settled beside him. “I’m eighty years old, Sonny, and still strong. I want to live long enough to see our country rise from this mess. Look at Elena—reduced to skin and bone. And Ramon… used, condemned, brutalized by fellow Maliwalans.”
She spoke of her youth in Banqueruan, of nights when the barrio was alive with laughter, fiestas under the moonlight, and open doors unbarred by fear. “During the Japanese Occupation, we had a common enemy. We were united. Today? Each family locks itself away.”
When Sonny pointed out that the population had exploded to fifty-six million, she shot back, “Crimes don’t come from numbers, Sonny. They come from deprivation. Hunger makes the poor envious, the rich arrogant. That’s when morals decay.”
Her eyes shone with conviction as she leaned forward. “There’s still hope. All it takes is one person’s courage to unlock the hidden goodness in the Maliwalan heart. I’ve seen it happen—one act of selflessness inspiring thousands. That is why I cannot die yet. I must see our people transformed.”
---
The Other Lodgers
Banqueruan still heavy in his thoughts, Sonny returned to his boarding house and pushed the door open—only to be confronted by a naked man pulling on his trousers.
“Excuse me,” Sonny muttered, averting his eyes.
The man grinned, offering a handshake. “You must be one of my roommates. Name’s Rene—freshman, Economics.”
Sonny noted that Rene was too old to be a freshman. His sharp, almond-shaped eyes were rimmed red, either from cigarettes or something stronger. His bucked teeth gave his smile a mischievous, almost defiant look.
Rene lit a Marlboro without asking, then asked anyway, “Do you mind if I smoke?”
“I… I’d rather not smell it.”
Rene barked a laugh. “Do you think I care?”
The flippant reply stung, but Sonny swallowed his irritation. He imagined the explosion if Rene had tried that with Lola Sabel—she would have turned the boarding house into a battlefield.
Her words echoed in his head: They live in a permissive, un-Maliwalan culture. They’ve forgotten their Asian simplicity and European religiosity.
2025-08-15 17:47:21
masquerade
diary of a Masquerade 7
Chapter 7
(The second meeting between Antonio and Roberto. Antonio wanted to earn rent money while Roberto wanted a listening friend.)
He arrived in khaki shorts and a silk shirt—too bright even for the night.
“You look like you’ve just been to Hawaii,” I quipped.
I noticed his smooth, shaved legs—shapely—and, damn, he had a good ass. But tonight, he wasn’t as enthusiastic as he’d been last night. He seemed serious, leaning against the trunk of a coconut tree, looking at me calmly with a hazy, empty gaze and shiny brown eyes. I hoped he wouldn’t pull another joke on me tonight. I needed money for rent.
“Hey, pretty boy. You heard me? What are you thinking?” I nudged him.
He inhaled smoke from his cigarette and stared at me until I felt uncomfortable. There was something not right about that stare—his pupils were abnormally wide, like a cat’s in the dark. A few strands of hair fell over his face, and he slowly brushed them back before turning to face the bay.
What the hell is he up to now?
“I failed to ask your name last night,” he said pensively. “I came home in high spirits, thanking the angels for finding me a friend, recalling the brief moment we had—but when I thought of your name, I realized I didn’t even know it. It was so stupid of me not to have asked.”
This is getting weird.
“Big deal,” I said. How many people even know my real name? My dead parents, my creditors, the registrar at my school… come to think of it, hardly anyone.
In my profession, revealing your true identity is a big no-no.
“What is your name?” he asked.
Just like in the movies, I’d learned to adopt different screen names for different situations. Tonight, I felt young, playful, monosyllabic, adventurous, bold, sexy, ready for action—and for money.
“Jeff,” I answered.
“No. Your true name.”
“Jeff,” I repeated, grinning.
“Okay, Jeff. My name is Roberto Policarpio.”
Damn. “You know, Nameless Adonis sounded much better.” I’d rather he kept his name secret like I did. But some people are just too honest, I guess. In this hustling game, sharing your name is risky. He needs to watch *Gigolo* and *Cruising* to learn that lesson.
He ignored my comment, dropped his cigarette, and crushed it under his shoe.
“Our wonderful conversation was abruptly curtailed by your hasty departure last night.”
His language tonight was formal—completely different from last night’s. Old-school, almost Elizabethan. It made me want to puke. He even sounded accusing.
“I told you, I had studying to do.”
“Now you tell me, what else is there on the other side of hustling?”
This son of a bitch is really dead set on knowing the secrets of me—and of Manila Bay.
“Roberto Policarpio, a person of your status need not see them. They’re just… how would I say it… animalistic.”
“The better,” he said.
“If I were you, I’d stay away from asking about hustling. Sometimes, even talking about it is depressing.”
“Why?”
I wished he would stop. “Because it makes a person sad.”
“No difference to me… Jeff, are you happy?”
“Happiness is relative. It depends on one’s point of view.”
“That’s what they all say. I want your explanation.”
“What explanation?” Damn. I’m here to hustle, and who am I talking to now—Socrates?
He turned his eyes to the bay. “Another explanation about life… explanations as to why I still linger in the night while the rest of the world is sleeping. Why, when I’m about to start a friendship, I’m abandoned.”
“Because you’re gay,” I said, trying to cut the melodrama quickly.
He was silent for a long time. Then he spoke again. “Last night, I remembered the runner who followed me, offering me a light even when I didn’t ask for it—following me from behind, begging for a little attention, a little sex. Will that be my future when I turn old and gray? Is that a punishment for being gay?”
“I said you’re gay. I didn’t say you’d become that runner when you get old.”
“I don’t want to be gay!” he screamed.
“Hey, hey. No yelling, please. You ask questions, I answer. If you don’t want my opinions, then go fuck yourself.” I kept my tone mild.
He calmed down but remained fidgety. Crazy fellow. He obviously had a personality problem. I wasn’t intimidated by his outbursts, though. In my job, surprises don’t surprise me.
“All I want is to understand more about myself,” he said, beginning to cry.
Oh boy. This is super-schizophrenia.
“Well, come and follow me.”
---
At night on Manila Bay, heterosexuals dominate the seawall, but after midnight another kind of gender appears—homosexuals borrowing passions and obsessions from one another. I had seen them before wearing masks of imaginary identities, as if trying to fool even God. This is the place where they do it all.
It was now after midnight.
We kept walking along the seawall. I stayed quiet. The squared rooms of the Holiday Inn surrendered to the sallow evening, their square lights switching off one by one. I slapped at the mosquitoes biting my skin.
“This is the other view of Manila Bay,” I said as we reached the road at Lawton. It’s a strip about two miles long, lined with herbs and vines crawling along a barbed wire fence. On the left are the old executive buildings of Congress and the Supreme Court. On the right, an expansive greenery being converted into a golf course. Along its way are entrances to universities and bus stops. It merges with Roxas Boulevard after passing through Luneta. Roxas Boulevard is the main coastline of Manila, leading up to the Cultural Center of the Philippines. It spreads arteries toward Mabini, noted as the red-light district of the sex capital of Asia.
“Jeff,” he said, grave-eyed. “I can’t stand being alone. I wanna die.”
I stopped. I’d had enough of this.
“Robert, I hate it when someone so good-looking and muscular like you says he’s so lonesome he wants to die. With all the starving, homeless, helpless people surrounding you, you still wanna die? Get a life! Join the Mother Teresa way. That Saint is my hero. Look—she was lonesome, old, loveless at forty. So she formed the Sisters of Charity or something. Now she’s the most popular spinster in the modern world.”
Hearing this, he smiled.
I continued. “Hmm. On the other hand, you wouldn’t look good as a Saint. You need to call somebody like that ‘toning guy’ on the late-night radio talk show—the one who tells you to prepare water he blesses via radio before you drink it. What about following my solution? What I do when I’m lonesome is write. I have this hidden notebook full of horrible entries. When I hear bad news—like a friend raped, a hooker killed in an accident, or another murdered by a serial killer—I jot it down. Every time I get depressed, I re-read my entries and say to myself, Damn, I’m still lucky. Though I had a night without a customer, John was hit by a truck. Then I feel blessed.”
He started laughing hard.
But by now, I was getting desperate for an income. I had to go. Bullshit. Why couldn’t he just do whatever he intended to do, then go to his business and I to mine?
“I don’t want to be gay,” he said again.
I blurted out, “Then go find a girlfriend.”
He looked at me with frightened eyes. “I don’t know if I could do it with a girl again after what I’ve gone through.”
Oh man, I’m really stuck with this guy.
“What happened? Were you gang-raped? Did you rape someone? Some people can’t handle such traumas, you know. Not me. I’m paid to do those. Nowadays nobody gets a bloody hand-shit or a blow-shit for free. I’m no nymphomaniac.”
“Nothing… I am not gay—anymore.”
He was going too far.
“As I said, since you’re so sure of your masculinity, just drop it all down here, you see, and hit the road. Along the way, if you find a nice-looking pussy, just grab it good. Simple.”
“No,” he answered.
I breathed deeply. Okay. For this last time, I’d try to help this wretched soul. I might not earn my rent money, but for the sake of humanity, I’d direct him to the right path of self-fulfillment—or whatever gays achieve when they finally accept themselves. I wondered if he even had money to pay me for this.
“Please, Robert, I’m not here to blackmail you. Just say it and I’ll find anything or anyone you want. It won’t be difficult with your good looks. I know the moves in the city. For a small fee, I can match you even with Queen Nefertiti. But first, tell me what you want.”
“The only thing I want is to talk with you. Will you quit these sexual innuendoes and listen?”
I’m telling you! These people come acting stupid at first and, in no time, turn into some big shit—insulting and ordering you around. The nerve! And they don’t even pay!
I sat down to keep my cool. I wished he were a politician’s son so I could at least add him to my list of connections as a consolation. Not that I needed it. Believe me, I have a long list of connections.
“Billie Holiday once sang,” I said, thinking of her—the favorite singer of all Manila hookers with her beautiful gardenia; some argue it was Eartha Kitt—
‘If I take the notion to jump right into the ocean,
It ain’t nobody’s business if I do…’
“You see, Roberto, I can offer nothing but sexual solutions. It ain’t my business if your dick atrophied, dehydrated, wrinkled, and fell off—as I’m now tempted to believe. All I want is to know what happened so I can help.”
Alex Maskara is Pinoy.
2025-10-06 15:52:15
masquerade
Diary of a Masquerade 6
In Lerma
Sonny’s first sight of Lerma was not the romantic, intellectual enclave he had once imagined. Instead, he found himself in a cramped neighborhood that was merely an extension of Maliwalan University life—but stripped bare of any pretense.
He sighed at the scene before him. Lodging houses were built like fragile toy blocks, their thin lawànit walls shaking whenever someone shut a door too hard. Tin roofs absorbed the afternoon heat, turning each room into a metal oven. Inside, makeshift carton boards served as dividers, granting the illusion—but not the reality—of privacy.
In the narrow alleyways, students squatted beside public faucets, slapping laundry against cement, struggling with the meager water trickling out. The air was heavy with the mingled smell of soap suds, cigarette smoke, and frying oil from a nearby carinderia. A group of young men hunched over a table in the shade, poker cards in one hand and cigarettes dangling from their lips. The sharp click of billiard balls echoed from the half-dozen pool halls scattered around the block. Occasionally, the sound of a bouncing basketball rose from a cramped court wedged between two crumbling buildings—its backboard made of warped plywood.
Here, Sonny realized, education was not only learned in the classroom; it was soaked in poverty, pressed between thin walls, and seasoned by street noise.
---
The Philosophy of Lola Sabel
Sonny’s parents—staunchly Americanized—had always insisted he study Medicine. To them, a son in the medical field was both a point of prestige and a practical investment. If Sonny could practice in America, they believed, future medical bills could be drastically reduced.
The 1980s had been the golden decade for Maliwalu families with relatives abroad. The peso-dollar exchange rate had soared, and anyone with a direct connection to “Uncle Sam” was envied. Dollar bills—bearing the solemn face of George Washington—were as good as gold. A single remittance from Illinois could make a family’s monthly budget feel like a feast.
One did not need millions to be regarded as wealthy in those days. A pair of Nike sneakers, a Levi’s jacket, a Japanese cassette player—these were enough to mark a person as 'sosyal'. Local items were dismissed as 'baduy' or 'bakya', unworthy of anyone with aspirations. Ironically, the same activists railing against foreign imperialism strutted around in imported jeans and branded shoes.
But Lola Sabel refused to let Sonny inherit such values. One humid night, she called him into the *sari-sari* store for one of her long, sermon-like conversations.
---
“Sonny,” she began, leaning over the wooden counter, “our time today is more painful than the last world war—thanks to this post-war generation who bowed to a dictator that rewrote the Constitution for his own ends. During the Japanese Occupation, I could endure inflation because we were helpless under their Mickey Mouse money. But today?” She slapped a pack of powdered milk on the counter. “Every time a mother counts her coins here, searching her pockets for a lost centavo, only to look up at me and whisper for utang… I can’t bear it.”
She spoke of a woman who often tapped quietly at the store’s door near midnight. Elena—neatly dressed, hair tied back, eyes sunken—came to borrow a kilo of rice. She carried her two-year-old daughter on her hip and once told Lola Sabel, “I can see it in her eyes, Lola. Someday she’ll pull us out of poverty.”
“How will that be,” Lola Sabel replied, handing over the rice, “if you can’t feed her properly now?”
Elena smiled faintly. “She might be like Indang Monang’s daughter, Sonia. Started as a maid at twelve, went to Japan at sixteen, now sends dollars home.”
Lola watched her disappear into the night, the child asleep in her arms, pride flickering in her step despite the hunger.
---
Elena’s husband, Ramon, had been abducted months earlier by armed men—rumored to be former comrades from the underground movement. Once a child scout for the guerillas, he had later betrayed them to the authorities. His disappearance left Elena penniless and jobless. Lola secretly helped her, careful to avoid being publicly linked to an outlaw’s family.
One evening, finding Sonny under the acacia tree beside their house, Lola settled beside him. “I’m eighty years old, Sonny, and still strong. I want to live long enough to see our country rise from this mess. Look at Elena—reduced to skin and bone. And Ramon… used, condemned, brutalized by fellow Maliwalans.”
She spoke of her youth in Banqueruan, of nights when the barrio was alive with laughter, fiestas under the moonlight, and open doors unbarred by fear. “During the Japanese Occupation, we had a common enemy. We were united. Today? Each family locks itself away.”
When Sonny pointed out that the population had exploded to fifty-six million, she shot back, “Crimes don’t come from numbers, Sonny. They come from deprivation. Hunger makes the poor envious, the rich arrogant. That’s when morals decay.”
Her eyes shone with conviction as she leaned forward. “There’s still hope. All it takes is one person’s courage to unlock the hidden goodness in the Maliwalan heart. I’ve seen it happen—one act of selflessness inspiring thousands. That is why I cannot die yet. I must see our people transformed.”
---
The Other Lodgers
Banqueruan still heavy in his thoughts, Sonny returned to his boarding house and pushed the door open—only to be confronted by a naked man pulling on his trousers.
“Excuse me,” Sonny muttered, averting his eyes.
The man grinned, offering a handshake. “You must be one of my roommates. Name’s Rene—freshman, Economics.”
Sonny noted that Rene was too old to be a freshman. His sharp, almond-shaped eyes were rimmed red, either from cigarettes or something stronger. His bucked teeth gave his smile a mischievous, almost defiant look.
Rene lit a Marlboro without asking, then asked anyway, “Do you mind if I smoke?”
“I… I’d rather not smell it.”
Rene barked a laugh. “Do you think I care?”
The flippant reply stung, but Sonny swallowed his irritation. He imagined the explosion if Rene had tried that with Lola Sabel—she would have turned the boarding house into a battlefield.
Her words echoed in his head: They live in a permissive, un-Maliwalan culture. They’ve forgotten their Asian simplicity and European religiosity.
2025-08-15 17:47:21
masquerade