THE TRUTH was, to confess to you journalists now the truth, the white figure was really actually a young girl of thirteen with a plaster of paris or synthetic thing mask who emerged from the corn leaves carrying sacks from the foundry. She was simply eager for Adelaida's opinion on her work, not knowing her teacher had a visitor. But her emergence was helpful; the situation now was that since the workers had been made aware that she had a visitor, they would never again imagine themselves disturbing Adelaida with any emerging presences, till they have all been informed of the visitor's having gone. That is the reason, my envious readers (if you could only see my present situation, though!), why she had the courage to afterwards make love to me right there. She was that kind of woman, then, very `officed'-like with her protocol, gifted too with a confidence for this protocol that she had applied to a rustic environ (isn't confidence always a gift?).
    She was a civil engineering graduate who became a sculptor and was dabbling in literature. If you think I'm going to tell you more about her family background you're imagining things, because I'm neither a gossip nor a novelist. Suffice to say that she brought with her here her all-female staff of foundry workers, helpers, etc., and then looked for young women around the barrio to tend to her farm and to the other necessities of her other occupations. (For security, she brought along an ample collection of licensed guns.) Now, it was only coincidental that the former sole tenant was a thirty-ish woman with three teenaged daughters. Adelaida retained them on the land, especially after hearing of rumors her father had a thing going with one of the daughters, even at his old age and up to his deathbed. Adelaida trained the other barrio entries, and that took a long time because she had to teach them what all this was about. This was going to be a venture not limited to farming. She was building a community of women, doing farmwork, crafts, and many other things. Profits to go to a loan fund for women in the barrio, in the town, the nearby city, perhaps even in Manila. And to get them to feel the work, Adelaida taught them the necessary philosophies, in understandable language, she said. It all seemed like a feminist program looking for the ideal yin/yang balance in a group. Oddly, despite her systematic ways, she's wont to regard all this power as due to an accidental sudden wealth or success. Like winning in some lottery. Thus molding her modesty.
    "Why do the politicians in town think you are what the other barrio folk think you are?" I asked.
    "Shouldn't you know that?" she said. "You're the journalist. Name me one politician there who can explain to us on the blackboard what the whole democratic design is. In plain words, what democracy is all about. As far as I can tell, democracy here is when a person wants the freedom to speak, without that person's willingness to share that freedom so that others may speak."
    "There is tolerance." I was defending my field.
    "There is the patience, that's different. Tolerance? No. Walk in uniform with the 'village,' that had always been the program. Unity, not unity in plurality.
    "So, if I were poor, everybody'd probably be calling me crazy. But I'm rich. Oh of course they're still calling me crazy, or a witch, or a bitch. But I can at least do anything I want. Still, one must walk like a Catholic. One must act like a woman when she is. And you're to fight like a man when you're a man, do this work instead of that work. And when you come out different . . . the 'village' sneers. You're trying to act like a Westerner, when you're not, they might say. You're ambitious! You want what the mestizos and the rich only are entitled to. You're a 'trying-hard' personality, that's the phrase they have for you. So tell me democracy. I thought ambition was considered a virtue in free societies. No, sir, not here. Just announce your ambition when you've already attained it. Especially when you're a woman."
    "It's not only the politicians who feel threatened," I tried to add.
    "Of course. The politicians are emanations of the people."
    "Uhuh. Do you hate the people, then?" I was suddenly feeling like a Time/Newsweek correspondent, asking these big questions.
    "No, because I am not a missionary. I'm just living my life, helping others only as a habit. And if I am to think of becoming a leader, my sweet lover, Adolfo, I don't have to move up with rancor, nor with strategic grace."
    How, then? Then I added: "For you to be believed."
    "I don't have to be believed."
    "You think too low of our people."
    "You think too highly of them."
    "So you'll ram what you believe in down their throats? Is that what you want?" This was beginning to sound like a typical lovers' quarrel.
    First she put her panty in her pocket, then said:
    "I'll just move up with a usual reverence. . . . For when you're reverent, Adolfo, modest, even in conflict, . . . you leave your fate, sir, even your popularity, to the law of Nature."

SHE GAVE me readings in Chinese philosophy. None of which I could wholly grasp. Every now and then as I progressed in my series of articles about 1.) the town, 2.) the sculptress and her project, and 3.) the insurgency, we made love in her bedroom, in total submission to changes taking place.
    In the city I went to the library and hoarded books on literature writing, my way of keeping her in my heart always. The puzzle still ringing in my head since she told me once, "what you're interested in in your story tells more about you than the books you've read."
    And, in the confusion of writing a successful short story, when almost everything becomes symbolic, when unnecessary-but-necessary phrases have to be played down to become totally non-significative, and in the confusion too of writing journalistic reports alongside my new creative works; furthermore, in the confusion then of the house without my wife, now returned to her mother's house near the city harbor after I confessed my affair, and in the final confusion of the separation in direct relation to our daughter's future, . . . I truly have learned to become still. Oh, okay. I have learned to plead . . . guilty. Is that not being unusual?
    But perhaps all this too is to confess (typing this story ending) I am only actually learning the science of approach, the deceptiveness of retreats, the art of war. So do I really thank you, Adelaida, my noble friend? Friend, even as I may only use your influence, some of it, for selfish ends?

[V]