I Was the President's Mistress!!
ALSO BY MIGUEL SYJUCO
Ilustrado
HAMISH HAMILTON
an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
Canada • USA • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China
Published in Hamish Hamilton hardcover by Penguin Canada, 2022
Simultaneously published in the United States of America by
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2022 by Miguel Syjuco
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Title: I was the president’s mistress!! / Miguel Syjuco.
Names: Syjuco, Miguel, 1976- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210236132 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210236159 | ISBN 9780670063949 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780143196495 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8637.Y38 I2 2022 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
Cover design by Kate Sinclair
Cover images: (eye) © CSA-Printstock, (texture background) © tomograf, (spirals) © filo, all Getty Images
a_prh_6.0_139656596_c1_r0
CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Miguel Syjuco
Title Page
Copyright
I Was the President’s Mistress!!
Dedication
Content Warning
Publisher’s Note
OCT 11, 11:23 P.M.: Vita Nova Transcript: 1 of 13.
OCT 14, 10:43 P.M.: President Fernando V. Estregan Transcript.
OCT 16, 12:34 P.M.: Vita Nova Transcript: 2 of 13.
OCT 16, 9:01 P.M.: Kingsley Belli Transcript.
OCT 23, 10:19 A.M.: Vita Nova Transcript: 3 of 13.
OCT 27, 7:46 P.M.: Deepak Roy Transcript.
OCT 29, 12:16 P.M.: Vita Nova Transcript: 4 of 13.
OCT 31, 8:32 A.M.: Senator Nuredin Bansamoro Transcript.
NOV 1, 5:14 P.M.: Vita Nova Transcript: 5 of 13.
NOV 4, 9:31 A.M.: Bishop Verdolagas Baccante, OP, Transcript.
NOV 9, 11:03 P.M.: Vita Nova Transcript: 6 of 13.
NOV 12, 2:10 P.M.: Steve “DJ RedCentre” Robert Transcript.
NOV 17, 10:42 A.M.: Vita Nova Transcript: 7 of 13.
NOV 19, 6:04 P.M.: Governor Rolex Aguirre Transcript.
NOV 21, 3:05 P.M.: Vita Nova Transcript: 8 of 13.
NOV 24, 9:48 P.M.: PO2 LeTrel Dyson Transcript.
NOV 28, 9:02 A.M.: Vita Nova Transcript: 9 of 13.
NOV 29, 4:11 P.M.: Furio Almondo, MFA, PhD, Transcript.
DEC 3, 3:52 P.M.: Vita Nova Transcript: 10 of 13.
DEC 4, 4:20 P.M.: Narciso “Cat” Jang-Salvador IV Transcript.
DEC 5, 3:52 P.M.: Vita Nova Transcript: 11 of 13.
DEC 7, 9:11 A.M.: Juan Miguel Sontua Transcript.
DEC 10, 8:48 A.M.: Vita Nova Transcript: 12 of 13.
DEC 11, 12:21 P.M.: Basilio “Loy” Bonifacio Transcript.
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Acclaim for Vita Nova’s
I Was the President’s Mistress!!
“Finally: the explosive exposé! Singer, dancer, movie star, philanthropist, former paramour to the most powerful man in the realm, the tragic Vita Nova puzzled together an uncompromising life lived with too many compromises…Beneath sundered bodice and heaving breasts beat a heart bolder than any beast’s on the skin of this earth—but to bare, on the temple’s steps, the truths of society’s malignant cancer, Vita had to touch the untouchable, and offer mankind the ultimate sacrifice: herself. That she did, like a kamikaze bomb blast.”
—Furio Almondo, author of Broadsides: The Collected Columns
* * *
!!
“A scandalous…kaleidoscopic…five-star…steaming…
cannonade…of brazen fabulism…and amalgamated ratfuckery.”
—Ambassador K. Sisboy Pansen, former host of Heds & Tales
* * *
!!
“I spy a certain determined darling…
turning our country inside out, like dirty laundry…
South is now North, West follows East…in this love letter to baduy.”
—Kitschy Katigbak, columnist, The One-Eyed Woman
* * *
!!
“The bridges are ablaze!
And the powerful reign from behind locked doors.
Within this unfinished labyrinth: a book of keys.”
—Crispin Salvador, author of Ilustrado
To my fans, my lovers, my haters, but especially to my Mama.
—VITA NOVA
For Clinton, Bryan, and Carlos, whom we lost too soon.
But most of all for Emma, whom I found, finally, forever.
—MIGUEL SYJUCO
Content Warning
This volume contains personalities expressing references to ableism, abortion, addiction, alcoholism, animal cruelty, anti-Semitism, blades, body-shaming, bullying, cancer, cults, death of a prominent character, deceased family members, depression, domestic abuse, eating disorders, foul language, genocide, gruesome descriptions, guns, hate speech, homophobia, incarceration, infertility, infidelity, injustice, intolerance, Islamophobia, kidnapping/abduction, mental illness, miscarriage, misogyny, murder, nonconsensual sexual activity, oppression, pedophilia, police brutality, prostitution, racist language and depictions, religious extremism, religious shaming, sexual assault, slavery and human trafficking, slut-shaming, suicide, torture, transphobia, vigilantes, violence, war, workplace harassment, xenophobia, and other content that may disturb some readers.
Specific to the Philippine context, this volume may contain opinions subjectively construed as expounding and proclaiming doctrines openly contrary to public morals; glorifying criminals and condoning crimes; serving to satisfy the market for violence, lust, and pornography; offending race and religion; tending to abet traffic in and use of prohibited drugs; and standing contrary to law, public order, morals, and good customs, established policies, lawful orders, decrees, and edicts.
This volume may also contain fair comment on matters of public interest misinterpreted by certain individuals as malicious imputations of crimes, vices, or defects, real or imaginary, or acts, omissions, conditions, statuses, or circumstances tending to cause the dishonor, discredit, or contempt of natural and juridical persons, or to blacken the memory of one who is dead.
We acknowledge that words—along with ideas, images, facts, and fictions—can be weapons just as they can be tools. This volume engages in discourse on vital subjects that elicit all manner of human emotions and may therefore be confronting. We expressly state that the perspectives contained herein are entirely those of the personalities presented and are neither those of their interlocutor nor those of
the publisher.
Publisher’s Note
On the afternoon before the bombing, an email was sent to us that included, as attachments, twenty-four voice recordings.
Versions of questionable veracity have since circulated on the internet before being repeatedly taken down.
We have therefore decided it is in the public’s interest for us to publish everything. At the time of printing, the raw MPEG-4 audio files could still be accessed here:
https://www.iwasthepresidentsmistress.com.
(Use of a virtual private network is strongly advised.)
For complete transparency, we have printed all twenty-four interviews verbatim, translated into English from the vernacular only where necessary for wider accessibility.
It is our responsibility to publish these materials unabridged.
It is yours to make sense of them.
from: Miguel Syjuco ██████
to: ██████████
date: 11 Dec, 13:43
subject: Update
Dear ██,
Happy holidays, old man! Hope your new bride kept you cozy during the blizzard. (Congrats again!) Been seeing photos on Facebook; I miss Manhattan mornings after snowfall--a world away from the decidedly exotic tropical craziness of the Pearl of the Orient (here, the Christmas season begins in August & our elections are an endless fiesta).
Am jammed in traffic en route to the storied Plaza Miranda, for VN’s final rally before polls open tomorrow.
I tried your advice, but she’s typically stubborn. I’ve explained journalistic responsibility, ad nauseam, yet she won’t budge on my interviewing her other friends or colleagues. I’ll give it one last college try after my closing powwow with her tomorrow (luck may yet be a lady, if VN’s in a victorious mood).
Meantime: am lobbing over what I’ve thus far. (See zip file attached.) Early: to give your poor fact-checkers a fighting chance, ere our deadline looms.
So here’s 12 (of 13) with VN. & another 12 (in total) from:
President Fernando V. Estregan;
Former Press Secretary and Special Assistant to the President Kingsley Belli;
Deepak Roy (who’s now in Canada);
Leader of the Opposition, Senator Nuredin Bansamoro;
Bishop Verdolagas Baccante, OP;
Steve “DJ RedCentre” Robert;
Governor Rolex Aguirre;
Petty Officer Second Class LeTrel Dyson, USN (Retired);
The journalist Furio Almondo;
Narciso Odyseo “Cat” Jang-Salvador IV;
Juan Miguel “One-Mig” Sontua;
Basilio “Loy” Bonifacio, whom I finished interviewing in jail moments ago.
One more to go with VN, post-elections. More anon.
Best, Miguel
PROVERBS 31:25
OCT 11, 11:23 P.M.
Vita Nova Transcript: 1 of 13.
(26:31.41—VN1.M4A)
I know you’re wondering—yes, it’s true: his birdie is thick, as he’s always saying, but like a thumb is to a finger, and hard to find beneath the paunch and hair that make a nest for it to rest on its two eggs—or repose, if metaphor’s more politically correct re: the pitutoys of powerful men. His is bigger than you’d guess, smaller than he thinks—and would prove his downfall, obviously. On his lap I’d lay my head and talk to it: Hello there, little sir, you look noble, endearing—why do you quiver with such rage? At attention it resembled a speechifying Mussolini, like in the photos in the biographies the president left by the toilet in my CR. Did you know that we spend a life’s total of ninety days on the can? He admired men so great we know them by their initials: JFK, LKY, FDR—the kind you’d never imagine on a porcelain throne—though most of all he respected Hitler, the brilliant and tragic, he said, whose one name was enough. But it was in my lover’s that I believed truly, coz he believed in me, and let me lead. Between two fingers I’d make little FVE march, and dance, and sing the national anthem—falsetto, vibrato—and peck it on the head, declaring: Viva il Duce! When the president laughed he looked like his dashing old self from the Technicolor screen. “Vita,” he’d whisper, “my life”—touching my face with fingers smelling of Marlboros and Brylcreem, caressing my closed eyes like a blind lover wishing a final farewell. And I’d sing: Viva President Fernando Valdes Estregan!
(Lighter click. Exhalation)
Sorry—TMI? Just thought you’d want me to start at the most intimate. Guys are the biggest gossips, don’t deny. Coz knowledge is power. Time the world knew every juicy detail—especially my side, instead of all that cyberbullying by the Nandotards, with their fake news: that I’m a tool of the Liberty Party, that I’m the lesbian lover of the lady senator Lucy Lontok, that we’re all in cahoots, adding oil to her old corruption accusations, orchestrating this impeachment together, because of course. I’ve never claimed to be the sharpest tool in the shed, but we all know I’m the shiniest—and that triggers them. Li’l ol’ me and my twenty-point-two million Instagram followers. If politics is showbiz for ugly people, then in politics my imperial beauty will change the motherlovin’ world. In a couple of weeks I, oh, you know, testify. And from the closet the skeletons will sashay. So keep that recorder pointed my way, coz here we go: Vita Nova, hashtag-no-filter. Welcome to her celebrity tell-all memoir. Our setting: a sweating, heaving country, where the future’s always promised, and men act like boys, and women are punished for not putting up with it. The time: ever now. The plot: a lost lass rises from the ashes; a desperate assassin brandishes a pistol; a government is set to fall to a scandal everyone calls Sexy-Sexygate. Among the players: a flawed dreamer who boxed and acted his way to the presidency; his Koran-toting nemesis in the Senate; a horny bishop; a cowboy turned warlord; an American naval officer offering a way out; a washed-up reporter redeemed by one last scoop; a poor little rich boy dying with his dynasty; and, of course, a high school sweetheart gone cray from decades of disappointment. Juicy enough for you? It’s got legs, right? Viewer discretion is advised. TBH, our nation’s dramedy started long before the lady senator Lontok pushed this latest impeachment, and even super before Mister President Nando caught me recording his conversations—about withdrawing police protection from certain troublesome you-know-whos. In fact, we could say it started thirtysomething years ago, when my father abandoned my pregnant mother and gave the world a new heroine for me to emulate. But history will write that the real unraveling started the first day of this month, on what the media’s dubbed Sizzle Saturday, the hottest date ever recorded, at the launch of my expanded Mustard Seed Foundation, in a covered basketball court slash multipurpose town hall in my old hood in Angeles—city of angels!—with Nando deciding it was too hot to wear his bulletproof vest, because anyway the crowd consisted mostly of battered women—“And what harm can they do?” he said, in that way I actually once found attractive. About men like him, Mama had warned me—but my beshie Jojie says I have a father complex, coz Daddy Dearest was actually Daddy Deadest. (And beshies know besh.) According to Jojie’s proven wisdom—from the University of Life and reality TV—I tend to romanticize my father’s absence, which makes me fall for dangerous dudes. But that afternoon, when my first love, Loy, stepped through the audience to point that shining pistol, and the presidential guard piled on Nando—leaving me and Loy the last ones standing among the cowering crowd—the first thought I thought was, maybe Jojie’s right, maybe I should rethink my terrible taste in men. Coz obviously.
(Laughter)
Then came the Fart that Shook the Nation. When Furio—good ol’ Furio, back in my life and back on the beat—when Furio encouraged me to use my responsibility as a social media influencer to bust that story wide open, and connected me to his old colleagues in mainstream media, and put me in touch with you to help ghostwrite my autobiography, there was no way for the president, and his Estregan’s
Everlasting Supporters, to put this Pandora back in her box. Those ’Tards were always too baduy—as in, capital B-A-D-U-Y, which spells: totally tacky to death. Like, who thought it would be so fetch to adopt the same initials as the Estregan Elimination Squads? Shameless, kinda; baduy, totally. And aren’t they all just überfugly? I was never one of them—they rode his coattails. Me, I actually loved the guy. Since before this presidential term, before even his first one he got ousted from, and way before he was even mayor. Loved him since those Betamax tapes my mother brought home from Tita Henny’s corner store slash beauty parlor slash video rental shop. Tita Henny was such a fan, back since Nando’s boxing days, which I’m too young to remember, naturellement. Back when Henny, the local entrepreneuse, was still Henry the regional welterweight champion, which I only discovered after being sent out to pay for her taxi one afternoon—she came to lunch, all in a huff of tattooed eyebrows raised like pleas to heaven, “Horribly insulted!” she declared, by the cabbie, who I found, head back and snoring, in the driver’s seat, a red bump on his forehead expanding like in the cartoons. That was my mother’s BFF—towering Tita Henny, her huge hugs all lavender, baby powder, and batik muumuu. “Hello, dear…,” she’d say, dabbing her brow with a lacy handkerchief, her voice a sultry baritone, just like this: “help me carry these to my shop”—bags of sample sachets of hair dye (Provençal Violet, Terra-Cotta Warrior, Angel’s Gold), which she’d take the bus to the city for every week. To me her ropy arms and monumental knuckles were normal, just who she was. At least until RJ, our neighborhood ngongo—since no community’s complete without a harelipped rumormonger; just saying—till he pointed at the knocked-out taxi driver and whispered in my ear, deadnaming Tita Henny, like an inside joke, though to me it was more like a superhero’s origin story. Apparently everyone knew, and nobody cared, coz why should they?