Ilustrado (19 page)

*

Cristo keeps silent as Maria Clara bids the guests farewell. When he and Aniceto shake hands, the latter looks at him meaningfully, clasps his hand in both of his. Juan tilts his hat and strides down the steps with such pride Cristo can’t help but smile. Only Martin is also pensive and doesn’t say a word or offer a gesture as he steps into his carriage. His wife reaches over him to wave a final farewell, but Martin is oblivious.

Maria Clara touches Cristo’s shoulder, then goes inside. He stands in front of the house until the clatter of the horses and the hiss of the carriages on the gravel fade completely. Then he goes to his room to consider his decision.

Only a few days later, on November 6, does Cristo find out what transpired without him. While merienda is being served, a man from the Claparol estate comes running breathlessly to Swanee, asking the servants to summon their master. “Don Cristo,” he says, “Don Martin has tasked me with this message. The Spaniards have signed an Act of Capitulation. There was no blood lost.”

Cristo presses the man, who tells him the details of the story, complete with embellishments. Yesterday, fortified by the successes in nearby towns, Aniceto and Juan joined the others to lead their men on Bacolod. Poorly armed against the enemy, the men prepared whatever weapons they could—bolos, knives, a few guns. Their arsenal had been smaller than they’d hoped, and they’d taken black paint to carved nipa sticks and rolled bamboo mats. These they piled conspicuously on open carts. From a distance, they did look like rifles and canons. The two groups of revolucionarios took positions on the Lupit and Mandalagan rivers, in a pincerlike maneuver on the city. The Spanish commandant, Coronel de Castro y Cisneros, whose scouts reported the Filipinos comprised a large, well-armed force, surrendered with little delay.

Stuttering, Cristo thanks the messenger. When the visitor closes the door behind him, Cristo sways, then stumbles into his chair. Spanish rule is ended! The revolution is a success! Three hundred seventy-seven years of occupation are finished. Cristo locks the door and pours himself a brandy. He dispatches this quickly, then pours one more. He takes the bottle with him to his seat.

That evening, when Maria Clara has the door forced open, she finds her husband drunk, shirtless, weeping. “I am not a man,” he says to her. “How could I have done nothing?”

“Cristo,” she says, holding his face to look him square in the eye. Her voice is urgent and strong. “Cristo. Listen. Cristo. Let me dress you. You and I must go to the Claparol estate. Martin has tried to take his own life.”

—from
The Enlightened
(page 198), by Crispin Salvador

*

Our nostalgic protagonist sits on the bed and leafs one more time through the photo album of his dead mentor. His spirits fall with every page he turns.

Where did my own life go? he thinks. What became of all the friends I had, the jobs I was offered, the little family I was starting? What happened to the promising young phenom to whom words came so willingly? My plans to be the youngest, the best, snorted away in some Lower East Side bathroom cubicle with a sticky floor. My confidence flowing and ebbing with the high and the comedown. What about my grandparents’ stacks of millions of pesos converted, at great loss, into a piddling wad of greenbacks, for my foreign, sentimental, “superior” education? What did those dollars buy? So many unfinished
story collections. Epic novels that reached chapter two. And those damn confusing experiments with style. The thing is to write a straight narrative. That’s the trick: no trickery. Go back to basics. Emulate
A Passage to India.
Write Crispin’s biography. Spin the yarn, follow it home. You’ll never be the youngest, but we’ll see about the rest. He closes the album.

Maybe maturity—he thinks—is merely accepting the tally of all the disappearing options of life.

But who says he’s accepted anything?

*

INTERVIEWER:

And how do you feel about it now, after the fall of the Soviet Union?

CS:

The Soviet Union sold out the working class. Tyrants hide behind the noblest ideals. “Je ne suis pas marxiste,” said Marx. That’s exactly how I feel. If anything, je suis un Groucho Marxist. But listen, just because an ideology dies doesn’t mean the value of its ideas is nullified. I felt at the time that communism was the way because it was the only viable means to real progress in my country. I no longer believe it can work. We’re simply not that noble. I still believe revolutionary change is the only remedy, but it will be through something far more primitive. A populist coup d’état, perhaps. A military strongman with his roots in the dirt and the decency of knowing how much is enough. The ideology of communism was an enticing potentiality in a society whose continuous attempts at renewal merely overlaid the old structure with fresh inequalities. Call communism my youthful reaction to the garish conservatism of an entrenched elite. What repressed young man, absolutely priapic with patriotism, wouldn’t follow a bare-breasted Liberty leading the people? I was a fool. All revolutionaries are. Thank goodness for that.

—from a 1991 interview in
The Paris Review

*

The most difficult moment of the war for us was neither the occupation nor the liberation, though the nightmare of the latter, with its destruction of Manila, was in many ways harder to take than the heartbreak of the former. The most difficult moment for our family was the conquest.

After waiting hours in the hot crowded plaza where we queued to register, like common criminals, my father lost his infamous temper and marched my mother and us three children to the front. He wanted us to watch him berate the little Japanese clerk recording names at a desk, typing slowly with two fingers and peering over his thick spectacles, like some caricature in a postwar Hollywood film. One of the guards, swollen with the arrogance characteristic of the invaders during the first year, put his hand on his samurai sword and came forward with the intention of slicing my father in half. I knew we would be next. As he drew the blade—what a sound it made, like metal being torn—a shout rang out. The soldier froze, his weapon held high above his shoulder. Through the crowd pushed a Japanese officer, sinewy and straight. It was Yataro, our ingenious gardener. It turns out he was, and had been all along, a Kempeitai intelligence officer. In this way, he came to repay my family for the kindnesses we had showed him. His friendship would prove invaluable.

—from
Autoplagiarist
(page 992), by Crispin Salvador

*

Erning returns from his vacation in the Philippines and meets a pretty girl at a friend’s pool party in San Jose. Her name is Rocky Bastos and she hails from the same province he’s from back home. Unlike the other Filipina girls at the party, she wears a two-piece swimsuit. The men gather at the barbecue and talk about her flat stomach. To get her attention, Erning continuously does the “cannonball” dive into the pool. She looks over at him each time he does it. He takes that as promising. Rubbing a towel suggestively over his chest, he sidles up to her and asks her out. To his joy, she accepts.

They go to dinner at Red Lobster, because Erning has been saving coupons for such an occasion. Afterward, she asks him up to her place for some Red Passion Alizé. It’s become a red-themed evening, and they blush simultaneously when they eye each other in the elevator. Erning is sure he could be with her forever. Upstairs, they sit shyly on the couch, as if waiting for the same bus. The cognac–passion fruit cocktail clouds their heads. Rocky, however, has lived in America for some time, and has already taken to American values.

Rocky: “Let’s play hide-and-seek. If you find me, I’ll let you have sex with me.”

Erning: “Eh, and what if I don’t find you?”

Rocky: “I’ll only be upstairs, behind the bathroom door!”

*

In the last months of the relationship, Madison kept asking me what I was still hiding. What was I doing when I locked the door of the room where I wrote? She didn’t believe I was working. “You sound like you’re crying in there,” she said. “Why can’t you let me get close to you?” So I told her.

I told her that I was watching pornography. But I made it sound fun. I tried to show her, tried to share, what I found stimulating. Madison had, after all, come to like the other predilections I’d shared with her earlier in the relationship. She took easily to sneaking tokes with me beside the reflecting pool at Lincoln Center, then slipping in at intermission to find vacant seats as the Philharmonic played Schumann’s
Kreisleriana
or Vinteuil’s Septet; though at first she cringed at the possibility of getting caught. She grew to love discovering, despite having initially mocked me as “nerdly,” the crown-crested and color-breasted birds in the Ramble in Central Park; though she refused to be seen carrying the folding chairs and binoculars on the street. Pornography, I’d hoped, would be one more of these quirky delectations.

Madison smiled an unsure smile. She was trying to be game. Like a connoisseur pointing out the levers, gears, and jewels that fascinate within clockworks, I showed her the top-shelf videos on my hard drive. I introduced her to my favorite strumpets: Jenna Haze, Belladonna, and the Filipina-American Charmane Star. I told her my dream of writing about them in a book that would get published by a major literary house. She nodded from time to time, conceding, grudgingly, Yeah, Jenna’s hot. Yeah, Bella’s got skills. Then Madison turned to me and asked why she wasn’t enough.

In fairness, in the following weeks, she tried, with her feather ticklers, her riding crop, her latex French maid’s uniform. In the end, though, she grew disgusted, accusatory. Then came her paranoia: whenever I locked the door (even if I’d actually been working), whenever she went to bed before me and I didn’t follow right away (even if I often suffer from insomnia).

The few times after that when we tried to make love, she looked at me strangely. Like I was somebody she loved less.

It’s foolish to believe that we should be entirely honest.

*

“Ready?” Dulcé whispered.

Jacob whispered back: “Uh, yeah. Hours ago.”

The dwendes’ eyes came closer and closer. Their teeth were so sharp they glinted even in the half-darkness.

“Now!” shouted Dulcé, pulling the rope, slamming the door of the shed shut so that the interior was as black as black could be. The red eyes gazed around, looked up maniacally. Six little voices gave off strange, strangulated cries, and the eyes went from red to orange to yellow until they finally faded and disappeared.

“What did you do?” Jacob asked, obviously relieved. He flicked on the light. Except for its hum and the tapping of moths on the fluorescent bulb, the kids were completely alone. On the ground were six tiny hats, which disappeared into thin air right before the pair’s eyes.

“When I was a kid,” Dulcé said, “my stepdad told me all about dwendes. Remember, he researches folklore at the university.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“A long time ago, when I was really young, he told me that dwendes are so dumb that if they find themselves in complete darkness, without even the light of the stars, they’ll just fade away. They’ll stop existing. They mistake darkness for death.”

“Your stepdad told you that? Then why didn’t he believe us earlier when we told him about the magic tree?”

“I don’t know,” Dulcé said, looking visibly perplexed. “I really don’t know.”

—from
QC Nights
, Book Two of Crispin Salvador’s
Kaputol
trilogy

*

I put Crispin’s photo album aside and get up to flop into the vinyl couch. It squeals with my weight. Opening a can of San Miguel beer from the minibar, I switch on the television. They have cable! I channel surf.

A basketball game is on, between the San Miguel Beermen and the Lupas Land Mallers. Two African-American imports post up
against each other beneath the ring, the clock in final digits. The diminutive Filipino point guard tries for three points. I change the channel.

A commercial. An orchestral rendition of “Joy to the World” plays while images of mutilated hands, missing fingers, amputated limbs flash on the screen. “This holiday season,” a man’s voice says soberly, “please be safe when using firecrackers and fireworks. This has been a public service announcement from the Philippines First Corporation.” I change the channel.

News headline emblazons the screen:
JELLYFISH ATTACK!!!
The reporter says an underwater earthquake in the Celebes Sea caused a massive movement of jellyfish upriver, which clogged a Mindanao hydroelectric plant and plunged the island group into a sudden blackout. Camera cuts to the scene. A colonel on location at the Rajah Tuwaang power plant explains, in broken but adamant English, that the blackout had nothing to do with Moro rebels. Behind him, soldiers shovel jellyfish into dump trucks. One heap towers at least eight feet. I change the channel.

A crowd surrounds the besieged Changco home. Some look up at the news helicopter and shout unheard. A male voice-over reports that more than a thousand people with candles and sampaguita leis are singing songs and waving signs proclaiming their support for Wigberto Lakandula. One banner says:
PYRAMID-SCHEME VICTIMS 4 LAKANDULA
. Another:
WIGGY, WE
YOU, MARRY US!
—
ASSUMPTION H.S. CLASS OF 2004
. Riot police have been called in to keep order. I change the channel.