Ilustrado (24 page)

Joe looks at me sympathetically. “Don’t be afraid, pare,” he says. “BMW. Big Mama Whale. People like that, they’re more afraid of us. They’re just swimming in the river. You know, de-Nile.” He starts cracking himself up and shoves the gear into place. With a proud roar, the car leaps forward into the lane left in the convoy’s wake.

“No!” I shout, surprising myself. Joe ignores me, pleased to exhibit his taxi driver guile. We fly along, following the convoy as it wedges its way through traffic. It passes unhindered through a
roadblock of soldiers and disappears in the distance, like an apparition from my past.

*

The other night, in the club, when I went to get a couple of fingers of Lagavulin, I saw Sara, an old college friend. I don’t know why I’m admitting this. We’d stopped talking years ago, when I’d reinvented myself after my breakup with Anais. Sara had a new buzz cut and I wasn’t even sure it was her. She’d been part of Anais’s group. I guess I’m ashamed that I rarely admit to myself how often I think of my daughter. Sara approached me warmly. We reminisced quietly. “Hey, did you hear,” she said casually, and proceeded to tell me that Anais had gotten married and that their new little family was moving to another city. My child wanted to see me beforehand. A new school, a fresh start, a chance to fill my absence and leave it buried in her past. It was my little girl’s idea. I’ve always been pretty sure that it was never a matter of
if
we would meet, but
when
. But Anais said it was better that we didn’t.

Sara asked me: “If your daughter wants to get in touch, what’s the best way?” I didn’t know what to say. I said: “E-mail’s good.” It sounded odd, wrong. E-mail? When Sara left, I thought of hundreds of better replies. I left my scotch and went back to the hotel and just lay there. I couldn’t sleep for some reason. A cock crowed and the sky lightened. My heart kept time with the cheap alarm clock by the bed.

I’m paralyzed, I know, by the multiplicity of new beginnings with my daughter. I’ve thought each through, exploring them in my mind like fingers rubbing their way along old rosary beads. She and I will be in a cafe, standing in her living room, in the parking lot outside her school, by chance on an opposite escalator in the mall, across a table at a book signing, in an ostentatious restaurant of my choosing, on the musty bed on which I am dying. She will hug me, or she will hit me, or she will cry tears that mean the death of my hope, or she will sob a breath that signifies the birth of my fresh chance. I’ll be called, coldly, father, or Miguel, or, precisely, asshole. My child will stare at the gift I brought her and speak of the hate she has for me. My daughter will look away and say she wants to try
to forgive me. My girl will play with her coffee spoon and express nothing. My little one will look me in the eye and ask: Why? How could you? Didn’t you love me? And despite all my rehearsals, I won’t know what to say. If she flees, do I chase her through the crowd, or let her be free? If she says fuck off, shall I bow my head and slink away to weep in the men’s room, or should I plant myself before her, arms akimbo, to show that, this time, I mean to stay? Can I tell her that I love her, even if my past actions will always shade future promises with doubt?

I’m petrified, I admit, by the multiplicity of endings for my absence. Should I call her now? Next month? Or when I’m finally a person she can be proud of? Should I post a letter? Compose an e-mail to her mother? I don’t know how such simple actions can be part of a choice so complicated. Should I send a present on her sixteenth birthday? Should I write a book, with a hidden message, telling her that I was wrong, that I’m sorry, telling her I’m here for her, whenever she is ready?

*

Yataro came to our rescue a second time, in the final month, albeit indirectly. As the Japs retreated, dishonored, leaving behind a scorched country, our family had chosen the relative safety of Swanee. One night, three Japanese infantrymen, amputated from the withdrawing main force, found their way to our house, attracted by the light and the sound of silverware on plates, which must have beckoned amid the sizzle of insects and ponderous twilight. The orchestra of crickets at dusk always reminds me of this scene. It was my mother who faced the soldiers as they walked up the driveway. She had heard of the atrocities in other towns, of babies thrown upon bayonets, of women shot where they’d just been raped. The intruders’ timing could not have been worse: my father was in the fields with the men, digging up the guns he’d had buried before the occupation.

The soldiers stopped in their tracks when they saw my mother step outside with the best weapon she could find, my grandfather’s ancient Holland & Holland double-barrel .450-caliber elephant gun. She raised it and took aim. It jammed and the soldiers laughed. They approached her, one lowering his bayonet, another drawing his sword, the other unbuckling his belt. As Lena and Narcisito watched from the front door, I leaped forward to thrust myself,
my nine-year-old body, between the Japs and my mother. I cried out, in Nippongo, words I didn’t know I knew: “Yagate shini / keshiki ha miezu / semi no koe!” Two of the men laughed. They moved closer. But the one with the sword, suddenly pensive, barked something to the others. They all turned and walked away, disappearing into the forest behind the house. Only years later did I remember the words as a haiku by Basho, taught to me in childhood by Yataro. “Nothing in the cry / of cicadas suggests they / are about to die.”

—from
Autoplagiarist
(page 1063), by Crispin Salvador

*

Consider the epic singer. He alone knew the secret beginnings and endings of his tribe: when his children moved to the cities to become janitors and key grips and hotel crooners, he grew hoarse and eventually faded, silently, in his hut. When the singer died, one version of everything was lost.

—from the 1988 essay
Tao
(
People
), by Crispin Salvador

*

Someone is singing badly from upstairs. “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” I join the people trickling in to the University of the Philippines’s Balay Kalinaw. The two-story multipurpose building, in a pseudo-traditional style, is abuzz with congratulations and congenial laughter. The rain is heavy and loud and everyone yells to compensate. At the top of the stairs, tables are piled with newly minted copies of
And Then the Locusts Came: The Socio-political Relevance of Melodrama in Philippine Literature in English.
The singer ends her song to sparse applause and breezy electronica music is played in the background. Knots of people stay close to the walls, scarfing down greasy pansit noodles. They joke, chat, squirrel away food in cheeks so as not to miss an opportunity for an interjection, opinion, or punch line. These are the literati of the Philippines: the merry, mellowed, stalwartly middle-class practitioners of the luxury of literature in the language of the privileged. Many are former Maoists. I’m hoping the critic Avellaneda will be here.

By the dais set up in a corner, I spot a writer who had years ago, at my first workshop in college, dismissed my story as “bourgeois angst”; she is sipping a glass of the free sparkling wine donated by, a banner says, the Lupas Landcorp Book Fund. The florid old author
of the volume being launched holds court by a big palm plant, young students listening and nodding as if his ideas were originally theirs. “Of course, we must be read by the world,” he declares. “If they think we’re exotic, give them exotic. But don’t forget the responsibility to portray the realities of our society . . .” He flicks absently at a palm frond that tickles his ear. “. . . and the brutal archetypes from life. For example, the richness of our poverty. Boy who loses girl because he cannot win bread for them. Beloved water buffalo dying of inexplicable disease or sometimes run down by the cars of the rich. Every year, floods destroy everything. And then . . .”—he raises his hands like a priest announcing transubstantiation—“and then, the locusts came.”

I say hello to a group of writers who remember me. They are clustered in a corner of the room, like the last few Cheerios in a bowl of milk. It’s been a lifetime! one exclaims. How long are you here for? asks a second. I tell them a week. Only? says a third. What have you been up to all these years? asks a fourth. I tell them I’m writing a book. They raise their eyebrows and paste on smiles. What’s it about? a fifth one inquires. I tell them, to throw them off: “It’s a novel about a young writer’s death in a flood and how his teacher is moved to redeem the senseless loss by writing about the what-ifs.” Fascinating! a sixth one condescends. Where’s it set? I reply: “The Philippines.” A seventh one asks: How can
you
write about the Philippines?

A pimply young woman saves me from the awkwardness by bounding onto the plywood dais. She barks, “Test, test,” into a microphone attached to one of those huge old portable karaoke machines, itself attached to a hand truck by red and green octopus straps. The woman looks like an ugly version of Alice B. Toklas. She wears a white shirt with a stylized Philippine flag and AF
EM
A
SIAN
silkscreened on it. Shrugging off a backpack made of rattan, she takes out a notebook. She regales us with verse, every word spoken slowly and dragged out at the end, as if the incantation was truly alchemical. Some people listen, most only pretend to while scanning the room, a few groups impolitely continue conversations in politely hushed voices. I float toward the refreshments.

In a corner near the drinks and the cubed cheese and folded
ham on toothpicks, I talk with a pair of writers with whom I once had casual mentor-mentee relationships. Furio Almondo is a jack-of-all-trades scribbler with a perfectly burnished pate, an enduring ambition to be the country’s alpha male, and a proletarian pride in his pugnacious body odor; his fiction is consistently infused with Magical Realism and a seventies bravura of one who survived being imprisoned by Marcos. My favorite of his works is a recent prose poem, written as a news report, titled “Borges Disappointed by the Internet.” Beside Almondo, at an olfactory-safe distance, is Rita Rajah, the Muslim poetess from Mindanao; her eyebrows are as thin and carefully drawn as her verse, her makeup applied in the generous manner of one who was nearly a great beauty and still savors wistful memories of being so darned close. Her literary fame is based on five poems she wrote in 1972, ’73, and ’79.

I question the two about Crispin.

“Crispin who?” Furio says, giving me a bewildered look.

“You’re so bad,” Rita says, laughing and slapping him on the shoulder.

Furio chuckles. “Anyone in this room would have liked to have screwed a tap into his gut and turned it on,” he says. “As the saying goes.”

“But who had the courage or the means?” Rita says. “Or inclination, really. Let me tell you,” she whispers conspiratorially, “most of these people here were just jealous of him.”

“Not me,” says Furio. “What do I have to be jealous of?”

Rita: “We just wanted the most visible Filipino writer in the world to be more authentically Filipino.”

Furio: “Writing in Tagalog, or one of the dialects.”

Me: “But Crispin wasn’t anything but Filipino.”

Furio: “Well, you know . . .”

Rita: “Things were never the same after his autobiography.”

Me: “Was it jealousy that caused that scene in the CCP?”

Rita: “No. If we’re honest with ourselves, complaining is our national sport. It was just Crispin’s turn to complain. We’re all crabs pulling each other back into the pot. But Crispy, he thought he was a lobster.”

Me: “So you don’t think someone boiled him, so to speak?”

Furio: “Not anyone here.” (He waggles his fingers in front of him.)

Rita: “Don’t look at me.”

Me: “Haha. Me neither. But maybe one of the subjects of that book . . .”

Furio: “The mythical
Bridges Ablaze
! Don’t you get it, pare?
Nobody
cared about Crispin. He wasn’t fucking relevant.”

Rita: “What my colleague is trying to gently convey is the sad fact this country doesn’t care much about writers.”

Furio: “No. What I’m trying to say is nobody cared about that gilded asshole.”

Rita: “Crispin and Avellaneda were maybe the only ones who believed that a writer could transform this country . . .”

Furio: “Then a woman came between them. Typical.”

Rita (glaring at Furio): “I hate to be the one to put it so bluntly, but those two were the last advocates. I shudder hearing myself say it. But sitting at home, writing stories . . .” (She raises her eyebrow.) “. . . that’s a luxury! And to write in English . . .” (She shakes her head dismissively.) “. . . that’s the height of luxuriating arrogance! But to sit at home in your Greenwich Village penthouse, living off the Salvador family inheritance, writing in English about the Philippines for the entertainment of foreigners . . .” (She rolls her eyes.) “. . . well, even the young writers here haven’t yet invented a slur for someone as heinous as that.”

Furio: “It’s the height of heinousness.”

Me: “But Crispin didn’t have an inheritance, and he didn’t live in a—”

Furio: “Heinosity, even.”

The poet on the stage ends her reading and everyone applauds. I clap, too. I’m glad she stopped. She leaves the dais and is replaced by a fat man wearing the exact same outfit as she. He clasps his hands to his chest and recites a prose poem in the same heightened enunciation as she did, like taffy being made. It’s about a welder in Abu Dhabi who sells his soul to a Yemenese fortune-teller in exchange for being able to sing beautifully. The welder sings for his comrades in the workers’ barracks and his songs are about the home they are all sick for. His lyrics are so heartbreaking that his comrades slit the singer’s throat. The poet bows his head like his throat’s been
cut. A trio to the side, each wearing
AFEMASIAN
shirts, claps enthusiastically. In the back of the crowd, a cell phone goes
chirp-chirp
, signaling a text message. The poet looks at the ceiling and begins another poem, snapping his fingers in time to himself. It’s a jazzy piece about cruising for lovers.