Emmanuel was a young man from the windblown island of K______. After graduating valedictorian of the student body at the provincial high school, where he edited the student organ called The Mighty Sword (subtitle: the pen is mightier . . .), he applied for a Journalism scholarship at the Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas. He was accepted.

Now the Dominicans had not yet fully recovered from the routing of Spanish clergy at the turn of the century. Still they walked about the sprawling grounds of the university as if they bustled about the old hacienda: everything, everything as far as the eyes could see, was theirs. Still they hewed closely to the rigors of the old Vatican, closely monitoring the books their students were reading, making sure that the student body did not read any book proscribed in the Index. They grudgingly admitted women into the university, because of dipping finances: the Dominican Orders’ central office in the Vatican had been complaining—in official meetings only, of course, with all the heavy, baroque doors closed—that the remittances from the Philippine Province had been dwindling every year.
But what struck close to bone is the fact that they could no longer drink the finest Beaujolais. The women, of course, were separated from the men. Thus, you had one university with two wings, for him and her, and a strict old Indian from Bombay had been tasked with ensuring no one talked to the women.
Why an Indian?

Perhaps in the weird psychology of the dominant, er, Dominican Order, the men and women now strolling the university grounds were still just boys and girls who had grown up. In their minds they still feared the Bombay—tall, dark, hairy; a beard and moustache around the lips; eyes sunk in silence; a turban wound around the head. The old Bombay of childhood memory, whom the housemaids said kidnapped children, put them inside sacks, and then sold them to the pirates.

And into the vortex of that world the young Emmanuel plunged, finding the city as if it were another world. But soon he grew tired of school: of teachers who constantly asked you to parrot their answers, who completely—and uncouthly—ignored questions in class, who gossiped scandalously about their neighbors one moment and stood still as saints in Mass the next.

Moreover, the scholarship only paid for tuition, miscellaneous fees and books, and he still had to ask for an allowance from his mother in K____. His father had died when he was five, swept upriver by the typhoon on his way home, and his mother, a public schoolteacher, brought him up alone. Even if she had only one child to raise, still she felt that every payday, her pockets were holes into which her salary fell. She could only scrounge around enough money for the young Emmanuel by denying herself the basic things: she went to school in her old shoes, the patent leather beginning to crack; she ate vegetables she herself grew in her backyard, sometimes mixing them with hibe, small dried shrimps in plastic bags she bought in the market; she had no television set and only listened to the radio for the announcement of another typhoon blowing in from the Pacific, learning this lesson after her husband’s death.

The minister had an appetite for sex matched only by his incredible diction. on t.v. he was quoted to have said, “we should wage a nationwide campaign against smut and all forms of pornography.” he pronounced smut as “smooth.”

The young Emmanuel knew this, and so one day he turned up at the office of the Evening Express, the country’s most-read newspaper, and asked to see the Editor in Chief.
Mr. Nilo Perez was small, brown, and rotund. When he looked up from his papers, he reminded Emmanuel of a rat. In between his words, he constantly sniffed. Emmanuel showed him an essay he had written in school, which he scribbled off ten minutes before class began and which got a flat 1.0 from his teacher, to his great elation and dismay.
Flanked by the photos of the President and the First Lady, the editor read the essay, his fingers flying over the page, then looked at the young Emmanuel with rapturous eyes: “I like it! You know how to write. You begin with a quotation. And you end with another.”

The young Emmanuel fidgeted in his seat (God, the world is full of morons), and smiled his PR smile, the one he had practiced every day before the mirror: his lips curving into a wide smile, showing white teeth, a smile without meaning. Ngiting aso, the smile of a dog.

Posthaste, the young Emmanuel was hired, and the next day began churning up “think pieces” for the Express. “What Makes the Filipino Tick?” is counterweighed the next day with a burning essay called “The Ungovernability of our Race.”

Letters began pouring to the Express, in praise of this wunderkid. The young Emmanuel was promoted to Editorial Writer and Assistant Editor (much to the chagrin and envy of the senior staff), and was thus able to buy long-sleeved shirts no longer from Quiapo’s bazaars but from the Escolta, and remit money every month to his mother.

One day, the President’s Information Minister, Gorgonio Rodriguez died. The minister had an appetite for sex matched only by his incredible diction. On nationwide TV he was quoted to have said, “We should wage a nationwide campaign against smut and all forms of pornography.” He pronounced smut as “smooth.” His ghostwriters, a group of highly-paid brats from Manila’s most exclusive universities, had a grand time concocting polysyllables for the Boss. Asterisks became “Asterix,” labyrinthine became something else, and by the time the minister had reached “anthropomorphism” (delivered before a group of society matrons who raised tiger orchids for a hobby and whose mission-vision was to “Exterminate All Aphids”), he was hopelessly lost.

But his ghostwriters were of the Social Register themselves, and thus could not be fired.

And so he just vented all frustrations on his sex life. His latest mistress was the movie heroine in that hit called Nympha. Her earlier hits included Saging ni Pacing (The Banana of Pacing), and Eva Fonda, 16. Yvonne Ysmael, or Dobol Y, had long black hair that streamed down her body like a caress, and she ruled the dark movie houses of Manila with her voice. Low, throaty, a voice perfect for the bedroom. A voice that purred, licked, nibbled, bit. And when the Empire of her voice began to moan, the men of Manila tugged at their zippers, pulled out their dicks, and the world began to shudder.
The President exploded when he heard how the minister had died. The minister was in Tagaytay City, inside the villa he owned, which had an unforgettable view of Taal Volcano, a volcano within a lake within a volcano within a lake. Yvonne Ysmael was astride the Minister, doing the helicopter, her lips grinding and grinding, slowly, excruciatingly, her hair falling on her breasts like a black waterfall, when suddenly the minister’s eyes bulged. Dobol Y put it to her mastery of the 1001 ways of love, and ground her hips again. She only stopped when the minister grabbed his chest, and his eyes popped out of their sockets.

“At least he died happy,” the wags said, buying tabloids and going home to the slums like a swarm of ants.
 And so the vacancy. The shortlisted candidates included Mr. Juan Gabuna, who was the Editor in Chief of Asian Magazine, the continent’s finest; Professor Justiniani Culiculi, who taught at the Opus Dei University and continually reminded you with his bloody accent that he took the M.Phil from Cambridge; and the young Emmanuel, who was the dark horse.
Mr. Gabuna politely turned down the offer, saying he had just signed another contract with Asian Magazine for five years. Pundits proclaimed that Mr. Gabuna, who used to write prizewinning fiction in his youth, would rather shepherd Asia’s most elegant magazine than write fiction for the regime.

Professor Culiculi said no, thank you, after the Palace ruled that if he were chosen for the post, he could not bring his pet poodle Fifi into the office.
And so the mantle, as the speakers say on graduation memories, fell on the young Emmanuel’s shoulders.

He took to it, like a diver plunging into cool, clear depths. He resuscitated a dying office. At least the press releases  now spelt occasion correctly, and the secretaries no longer padded around the place in their cheap Baclaran slippers. He also changed the ministry’s logo (an orange loudspeaker) into something more decent—a blue quill aslant in the air.

But then, the President declared martial law, and it was the young Emmanuel’s task to become an anti-perspirant and anti-deodorant rolled into one.

“Ehem,” he said in solemn tones over a nationwide radio and TV hook-up. But he was a letdown. He just repeated the President’s words a day before, his eyes like the eyes of a statue. Then he produced a list. “Here are the names of the undesirable elements in our society, and to protect the interests of the State, they had been put into detention.” And he proceeded to read the names of 70,000 people, deep into the night, down into dawn, and early into the next morning. Like a zombie talking. But every so often, he would bend down and pull up his socks (a tic, someone said, because the young Emmanuel used to go to school with rubber bands around the loose bands of his socks). And sometimes, one could see a dagger of fear in those big, intelligent eyes—or could it be sleepiness?—as his voice filled the archipelago. After I had heard the name of the ten thousandth detainee—the brilliant Tagalog writer Ricky Lee—I turned off the TV set. The young Emmanuel disappeared into the world of the idiot box, had vanished into the point of a small white dot as the people turned off their TV sets one by one, and braced themselves for a long night.