Diary of a Masquerade 2

Chapter 2


[Antonio describes the first meeting between him and Roberto Policarpio]

I needed to bury the corpse of Roberto Policarpio. If I didn’t, the horror—violent, unrelenting—would keep clawing at my visions, staining every hour I tried to survive. Bury him fast. But how? And where the hell would I find two thousand pesos? I cursed the day I met him. I wished I never had. That night, for the first time in my life, I felt something deeper than fear. Something close to damnation.

I came from barrio Concepcion, a sleepy patch of land in the forgotten town of Bilbao, Pampanga. Three years ago, I left home with two things in my back pocket: a dream of finishing college—no matter the cost—and the desperation to make a living in Manila. I arrived young, broke, and invisible. The city didn't open its arms. It made me drift—first through slums and bus terminals, then through shadows of neon lights until I found myself hustling along Manila Bay. That was my world now. I had no shame, no guilt. As long as I moved through life like a car gliding on a bump-less road, I could pretend I was headed somewhere. Maybe even toward success.

That illusion shattered three weeks ago.

That’s when I met Roberto Policarpio—known in elite circles as *The Faceless Adonis*. From that moment, he changed everything in me: the way I spoke, the ideas I held, my perception of beauty, the texture of my dreams. He crept into my sleep, rearranged the furniture of my mind. Hell. The first mistake was seeing his real face. The second was losing the cardboard box filled with my family’s keepsakes—my last link to who I once was. Since then, I’d been spiraling. Lost.

The horror began like this:

Roberto looked to be in his mid-twenties when I first saw him. He had just stepped out of a taxi and walked toward the seawall like he was gliding through a film. He didn’t even glance down at the slick pavement. Mud clung to his faded denim jeans, and his once-brown moccasins had turned grey with dust and travel. He pulled off his light sweater and crisscrossed it over his chest, revealing a lean, muscular torso that shimmered under the bay mist and the moon’s dim yellow reflection.

And then we met.

“Are you familiar with Tennessee Williams' *A Streetcar Named Desire*?” he asked, his voice polished with a flawless Filipino-English accent.

It caught me off guard. “Yeah,” I said. “Didn’t they show that on TV last month?” I had a knack for sizing people up fast—education, motive, experience, even how much money they might be carrying. It came with the job. From that one sentence, I pegged him: upper class, likely college-educated, probably owned theater season tickets. I instantly classified him as a prime prospect.

At least he wasn’t like the usual creeps—the ones who sauntered up pretending they needed a light, like I ran the BIC factory. Or the pathetic ones who leaned in with sour breath asking, “Got a cigarette?” Do I look like I run Philip Morris? And then the classic idiots with the recycled pick-up lines: “Haven’t we met before?” Sure. Maybe on one of the 7,107 islands in this country. What a joke.

“Can you recall Blanche’s last line?” he asked.

“How should I know?” I snapped. “The only line I’ve memorized is from *Gone with the Wind*—‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.’”

He laughed—too loud, too sudden—but his face quickly sobered. “‘Whoever you are,’” he said, locking eyes with mine, “‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.’”

I paused. This theater talk was leading nowhere. I had clients to find, not monologues to hear.

“You…” I started, distracted. There was something familiar about his face. I couldn’t quite place it, but I had definitely seen it before. His voice echoed in my ears, and the way he moved—graceful to the point of surreal—he didn’t seem to walk so much as float.

“Are you a playwright or something?” I asked.

He shook his head quickly, eyes scanning the bay. “God forbid.”

His tone put me on guard. I once dreamed of becoming a playwright, back when dreams were still affordable.

“What’s wrong with being a playwright?”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said, a little too smooth. “My college course is just far from anything artistic.”

“What course is that?”

“It’s not relevant,” he said curtly, and gestured for me to follow him toward the winding sidewalk of Roxas Boulevard.

I was about to grab my stuff when it hit me.

Three years ago. His face. Flashing across the country on TV. That’s it.

“Wait a minute—weren’t you that model… from that contest… what was it? *Search for the Model Philippines* back in ’89?”

He nodded faintly.

“What happened after that? One minute your face was everywhere, then—poof—you vanished.”

“As you said, I simply vanished.”

“And now you’ve reappeared in Manila Bay, of all places?”

“Is there something wrong with that? Don’t I have the right to be here?”

My stomach dropped. If he was planning to hustle in my territory, I was finished. He was… devastatingly beautiful. The kind of beauty that made people stop breathing. If the Faceless Adonis decided to become a hooker at Manila Bay, it would cause riots. Pandemonium. No one would look at the rest of us again. He was too polished, too elegant, too clean. He didn’t belong in this trashy world.

I looked at him again, hard. Should I warn him? Should I disappear before he took my clients? Something in me stirred—intuition or dread, maybe both. Maybe he wanted something from me. Maybe *Desire* was the clue.

“You’re not… trying to pick me up, are you?”

He burst out laughing, wild and uncontrolled, to the point he couldn’t speak. I flushed with embarrassment. God, I’d misread the moment. In this line of work, you don’t talk bluntly. We had codes, gestures, signs. Scratch your head with one finger—that meant a hundred pesos. Two fingers? Two hundred. Five fingers? Five hundred. No words needed. Just silent negotiation: pesos divided by twenty for dollars, multiplied by twenty for yen.

“Are you a call boy?” he asked.

I liked that term better than “hustler.” Sounded more refined. I didn’t answer.

“That figures,” he said, as if it confirmed something he'd already guessed.

Since the game was up, I leaned in, trying to get the upper hand. “I’m cheap,” I said with a smirk. “Unless you’re planning to get into the business yourself. If so, I can train you. Teach you the tricks. Introduce you to some of my clients.”

He raised an eyebrow. “What kind of clients do you have?”

“Only the big shots,” I lied through my teeth.

Truth was, I took whoever had enough for a night and didn’t stink of beer and regrets. But I'd been around long enough to meet every kind of client—quiet ones, theatrical ones, rich old men, desperate tourists, lonely souls. And I’d become something of a teacher to the new kids—the boys just starting out, eager and scared. They came to me for tips: how to seduce, how to ask without asking, how to make a client fall in love for one night, two nights, enough to keep coming back.

They thought I was some kind of legend. But I was just surviving. Day by day. Peso by peso.

And now, here was Roberto Policarpio—beautiful, broken, mysterious. And maybe more dangerous than I realized.
2025-04-06 13:51:57
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