She saw her bedroom as an abode of infinite space in which sight and touch were suggestive in ways that a mundane psyche could comprehend. It was in this room of the evening where the Lady’s sensually expressive abilities reached their apex.
No warm-blooded male could look at this room with any contempt, derision, or disappointment. The room could either be pleasurable heaven or pleasurable hell on earth depending on how lamentable one’s sense of life was.
For many years in this room, the Lady uninhibited some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the country. These men may have maintained pride in their affluence and in their narcissistic credibility in being able to make others do their bidding, but there was an imaginary line between the conviction of their external world and the carnal luminosity of their inner world, the inner world in which their natural—-as well as unnatural—-desires and fantasies escaped the snares of stifling reason and morality.
There were corporate executives, well-bred property owners, venture capitalists, ambitious politicians, nostalgic grandfathers, declarative granduncles, and spoiled brat manchilds among the Lady’s clientele. In other words, cornerstones of society. In seeking to hide from the neurosis of modern existence, every one of them returned again and again into her waiting arms. Whatever their values, beliefs, emotions, perceptions, and knowledge were these men would surrender themselves into the same pattern of channeling away their pent-up repressions and anxieties. In the serene environment of the Lady’s room, all patrons achieved a tottering, hormonal release like no other. She made sure of that. Discreetly. Satisfactorily. Readily.
Of course, every story has a beginning, or to be more precise, a cause. For the Lady, her path towards what was along the lines of what the 19th century Japanese poetically called the “floating world” began in the most ironic of origins. Her story would become one of invention and collaboration, omission and commission.
In any life-project that is intended to impress others in the hope of many happy returns, there comes the image-making process. Then comes the will to culpability. When I say culpability in the case of the Lady, I mean coming to terms with a sensibility that is sordid, inherently shameful, scandalous. Contextually, I speak of sensibility that is a tragic reflection of life in the Philippines.
The Lady’s story attested to the power of circumstances in a country laden with outstanding debts both of a pecuniary and interiorized nature. Hers was a story in a country that was more worthy of its unrealized potential than deserving of its heartbreaking reality. Under a scorching sky and on a porous earth, Filipinos have been living in a parallax---they deceptively appear to have at once been amongst the most adored and the most wretched people on the planet. But Filipinos’ lives were everything and anything between those two poles.
By the time she reached the age of 18, the Lady was being groomed to leave her place in her family. The youngest of five, it was not a foregone conclusion that the demoiselle would turn into the Lady she was to become. At 18 she was the picture of María Clara innocence, humility, and obedience. Hardly the makings of a blossoming beauty blessed with milky-white mestiza looks, looks that developed and matured into the figure of a stunningly beautiful woman. These were looks that would transform her into a cultured, genteel, assertive, jet-setting, cosmopolitan female.
A prime factor underpinning the Lady’s evolution was her marriage to an ambitious international banker. Her union with Andres Bersamin opened the doors of high society for her. Gone were the days of predictable and imposed behavior under the blinding gaze of her overbearing family. The Lady would never turn back. She would make sure of that. At 21, she was well on her way. But what she was still too young to know was that with the highest of highs there were bound to be the lowest of lows.
The Lady’s mastery of a lifestyle that was disproportionate to that of the majority of Philippine society led one to assume that it came naturally to her. But the Lady had to work hard to make it believable. More than that, she worked hard to make it a reality.
The Lady labored mightily to digest how to assimilate and mimic the rich’s mannerisms, speech patterns, even their sense of entitlement. In time, she learned how to blend into their surroundings, how to avoid spontaneous (unseemly) behavior, how to process and react to events and situations as a person of her socio-economic station was expected to, and how to win the confidence of individuals whose confidence was otherwise impossible to win.
Before long the Lady established her pride of place within the circle of blue ladies who were married to the top percentile of the one percent that owned the vast majority of wealth in the Philippines. In the course of lunch and dinner conversations, poker games, sauna treatments, and drinking sessions, these married cronies couldn’t help whispering amongst each other about their conclusions about this singular woman. Each one secretly wanted her for himself. So much so that they would risk opprobrium to their professional and social identities to get the Lady into bed. But as a married woman, it was not proper in Philippine society to wittingly or unwittingly encourage in the slightest their advances. So their desires were routinely thwarted.
However, this did not stop one of these amoral confederates from exploiting an advantageous situation for his own personal ends. One David Vergoza dressed himself as a respectable, traditional, deferential, and devoted husband and as a law-abiding, hard-working businessman.
But as if often the case, the artifice shrouded the real person. Pull away the façade from Daniel Vergoza the man and you get an egotistical, lying, sexist son-of-a-bitch. Women, young and older, were nothing but sex or status objects to him. Vergoza juggled them like so many cards in a deck.
One might wonder if his marriage ever hung in the balance as a result of his plethora of affairs. Here was the most flabbergasting aspect to Vergoza’s footworn path of infidelity. It was traveled in full view and knowledge of his wife.
Vergoza’s wife went by the name of “Isadora.” Her family was identified as one the few in the Philippines “suffering” from an embarrassment of riches. The Mondragon family benefited from a socio-economic structure that had been in place for decades. This inequitable structure released monumental economic and political forces that made a tiny minority wealthy beyond belief and left a vast majority to die in destitution.
When David married Isadora in the 1950’s, he dedicated himself to taking advantage of his wife’s money. David accomplished this by way of sound and prudent investments. For Vergoza, marrying Isadora Mondragon was a once-in-a-lifetime windfall that he thanked the lord above for giving him. As it happened, David came from a everyday middle-class background where money was tighter than a virgin’s opening. So meeting and marrying above his social station was truly a stroke of luck that only a benevolent deity could grant.
The telling of how David managed to be in the same room with Isadora in order to introduce himself to her is for another time. What is important for now is that David, Isadora, and the Lady would form a triumvirate of friendship at first, then of sexual consensuality. David would act as an advocate and guide to both Andres Bersamin and the Lady. He used his business acumen and connections to bring Andres’ career along. David also used his captivating charm and sharp wit to thrust his way into the Lady’s heart, mind, and yes, her erogenous zones.
The three of them (really the four of them) formed a dynamic filled with rhymed moral ambivalence, covert acquiescence and unbridled ambition. If ever the metaphor of making a deal with the devil was applicable, it was with this quartet of self-aggrandizement and expediency.
Theirs was a power relationship assemblage that was a combination of a Harold Pinter play and the 1969 film “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.” They always kept up appearances but one blind spot that all four shared was an irresistible attraction to bold, extraordinary individuals. Along that theme, a major event in Philippine history would skyrocket them above the clouds. If the effect was material and social ascension, the cause was the rise to the presidency of Ferdinand Marcos.
ALLEN GABORRO
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