The interviewer was Boy Miranda. He was a bald man in his mid-forties with black horn-rimmed non-prescription glasses, which he bought out of impulse when he was struggling with a mid-life crisis. He asked her, “Was it painful? Was it pleasurable?” which might have been the dumbest question to be asked on national television since the previous month’s special when Boy Miranda asked Piloto Pocholo, “Who do you like more: Sunshine Dambuhala,” an overweight, pock-faced, female comedian, “or Sammy Bui?” an Adonis of a man with a ripped body and a size 12 shoes. Whether her loss of virginity was painful to her was highly irrelevant, because, for one, Katja is part of the ever-increasing Philippine sex trade industry and people from the sex trade industry may have a different standard for what could be considered “pleasurable” or “painful.” For a person like Katja, pain could be defined on several emotional and physical spectrums that range from having to withstand a foreign object being inserted into her anal cavity to performing a lap dance for a person over forty-seven years of age, or from being made to swallow a stranger’s cum to having another abortion. Losing one’s virginity, to say the most, is a minor inconvenience for Katja. It has long since lost its romantic or symbolic glamor or its subconscious association with love and making love. So, when asked about her first sexual experience, she responded with a blank stare, as if the word “devirginized” was foreign to her and no matter how skilled the interviewer was in extracting the most outrageous monologues from his guests, he was still, even after two hours, unable to extort either a verbal declaration from Katja that could provoke the live audience to gasp, or a veneer of bittersweet nostalgic contemplation that could provoke the audience to sigh audibly as they usually sigh audibly when a guest says something that they could pretend to be affected by in a positive way, even if they really didn’t give a shit. Upon Katja’s utterance of the words “the sound of a 2x1 inch bus ticket torn inside my crotch,” the audiences’ mouths opened but there was neither a gasp nor an audible sigh since they couldn’t decide which of these reactions to express. They looked at each other with eyes and mouths wide open with expressions on their faces as neutral as Katja’s face; Katja who might have felt for her hymen what a circumcised man might feel for his foreskin, what a middle-class woman might feel about her liposuction fat, or what a newborn baby might feel about his umbilical cord. Her complete indifference to this particular issue stumped the audience who then, with mouths and eyes still wide open, began to turn their heads and point their noses in the general direction of Carlito Sicat, Katja’s domestic partner, waiting for a legitimate reaction they could mimic. But, Carlito, too, looked stumped and had only a very ambiguous furrowed brow whose creases intensified as he watched the sea of noses aim for him like an orchestra of rifles. He might have been so disarmed
Likhaan 17