Ilustrado Page 10

  My next older sister, Charlotte, the handful, impressed me with her notorious hairstyles and varsity volleyball jacket. She’d bring Jerald and me to Baskin-Robbins for pineapple sundaes, picking up her forbidden sweetheart on the way, to see him for just ten minutes. From her I learned that my life could be my own.

  And of course, my baby brother, Jerald, who had me just as I had him, until I became a preteen and he was still a kid—when he saved for me the cookies he got in class, I refused to eat them, because they were iced with clown faces and were for immature babies. Even then, we stayed best friends.

  And always, the parents of us all, the succession of yayas my grandparents imported from home, who’d arrived as Pinay provincials, learned the ways of the West, then left to start the sorts of lives they’d never dared dream of: Sula, who raised each of us, who ran barefoot in the snow to carry me to the emergency room to stop my convulsions, who broke my heart by getting married; Estellita, skinny, severe, and elegant, she cared for us without knowing how to play; Juanita, who shared with us the games and songs of her still-recent childhood, whom we mocked for her accent and her foreign rhymes; the sisters Bing and Ning, equally patient, equally loving, equally underappreciated.

  These were my days: gray rain; rides over Lion’s Gate Bridge; sitting in the backseat, windows down, Level 42, Huey Lewis, Steve Winwood coming to us from CFOX; O-Pee-Chee hockey cards; knees burning on the Last Sorrowful Mystery of one Glory Be and Ten Hail Marys; my purple school sweater and tie; rumors of the Brothers who taught other grades molesting boys in New Brunswick or Ontario residential schools; pissing myself at a pep rally because I was too shy to ask to go to the restroom, then claiming I’d sat on something spilled; the ice on my back and my heart in my ears and the sky in my eyes as I tried to ignore the skating teacher calling my name. Then, puberty: the first odd hair; the unfathomable urges; the relentless turgidity; the desperate experiments against the wall or within cardboard toilet paper rolls; stealing Mario’s lemon-fresh Right Guard deodorant to slick down the new fuzz in my armpits; breathlessly molesting with my eyes the perfectly drawn European girls in the Heavy Metal comics Jesu kept beneath his bed; then, the discovery of release thanks to the back massager Grapes kept plugged in beside his La-Z-Boy armchair—the glorious synchronicity of a Hitachi Magic Wand strategically applied during Madonna or Alannah Myles videos on MuchMusic. I heard my voice deepening, I saw contact lenses fitted into place, I watched Arsenio Hall each night, called the New Kids on the Block rad, wore mock turtlenecks and pinned the hem of my baggy trousers, hairsprayed my hair as high as it could go, danced the Running Man and Roger Rabbit, hung out in the mall with my friends, called the New Kids on the Block hosers, went to school dances, during “Stairway to Heaven” had a chick move my hands up from her ass until Page, Plant, Jones, and Bonham started rocking and she and I were forced to part and look at each other one last time before they turned on the lights.

  Just when things were getting good, Grapes and Granma sat us six kids down and spoke seriously. “It’s time,” Grapes said, “for us all to return to the Philippines.”

  *

  From Crispin’s 1990 short story “Noblesse Oblige”: “Efren Del Pais is a gentleman farmer with good intentions.” He willingly, if not eagerly, submits to the CARP laws, the controversial agrarian reform legislation that appropriates plots of private land to distribute among the tenants who tend them. Most landowners resist the reforms—often violently, with militias intimidating the poor farmers and local officials. The smarter landowners take to exploiting a loophole, buying back the land from tenants who can’t afford its upkeep. Del Pais, however, hopes to serve as a good example. The aging haciendero, educated by Jesuits, informed by the likes of John Locke and Thomas More, sacrifices his sprawling farm, keeping for himself only the ancestral home in which he and his children were born. His wife is dead, his son moved to England, his daughters well married, and Del Pais finds fulfillment in giving “sound advice and loans with pious terms” to the tenants who have taken over his land. After all, he’s known many of them most of his life. “Del Pais, in his fading years and with an eye toward his soul, puts his trust in God and man’s laws.”

  I remember the story for two reasons. First, in the story, Crispin gives the best account of Swanee (the two balete trees by the garden, the house’s narra floors “polished as if to intimidate women in skirts,” the carved relief-work ceiling in the dining room, the Persian carpets “musked by the mold thriving in the humidity,” the card table with “ridges worn into its surface by elbows, worry, hope, luck,” where his mother hosted games of mahjong and tsikitsa). Second, the story presents a moral conundrum regarding changing codes of conduct and the hard realities of the neofeudal society. It ends with the land Del Pais had passed on, so willingly, being bought up by neighboring landlords, who themselves have just repurchased their own estates. Del Pais is left with only his home and the interest from his limited fortune, “his father’s father’s land lost and he surrounded on all sides by a siege of greed by men who were to him once his equals, though now suddenly in one way more and in many ways less.” The last scene describes the old man standing in his garden, staring at his house “as if it is on fire.”

  *

  Our vernal protagonist is surprised by Lena’s appearance—“Crispin in drag,” he will later write, “an unsuccessful scarecrow, in a chintz muumuu”—and disappointed by Swanee’s. Yes, it remains verdant—the balete trees monstrous, the lawn still manicured like a putting green. The tall stone tower, long ruined by artillery, now refurbished as a cellular site for telecom companies. But the house itself is dour, flaking, patched—the air-con units rusting and dripping, the capiz shell panes in the wooden window screens cracked or missing, the lost roof tiles replaced with swatches of metal GI sheets. Interviewer and interviewee sit outside. He is vaguely disappointed, too, in the sister herself. She fiddles nervously with her walking stick. Reading Walt Whitman, she says, was perfect for her brother’s funeral, a good choice for a dead atheist who believed in the divinity of all things.

  *

  “Where?” Dulcé asked.

  “That one,” Gardener told the girl, “over there, the one with roots for branches. If we’re not careful, we’ll return there before our time.”

  Thick branches drooped sinewy tendrils around its trunk and deep into the ground. Its hanging limbs reminded Dulcé of curtains, its roots like Gardener’s knotty toes. A teacher at school had taught Dulcé the native names for the trees in their region—narra, bakawan, almaciga, kamagong, molave—as well as their foreign names. This tree was the balete, or moraceae, also known as the strangler tree. The name alone sent shivers down Dulcé’s spine.

  “If you sleep at its base,” Gardener said, “you will awaken trapped inside it. Nobody will find you. Once, at night, I saw the branches part to reveal a glowing door.”

  “What’s in the door?” Dulcé said, suspiciously.

  “Where we came from and where we’re going.”

  Dulcé was skeptical. “My stepdad told me we originally came from Spain,” she said.

  Gardener spat dismissively on the soil. “All I know,” he said, “is that tree is where we’re all headed.”

  —from Kapatid, Book One of Crispin Salvador’s Kaputol trilogy

  *

  My regard for my grandfather first started to dismantle in a church, years after we moved back to Manila. It was the day of my uncle Marcelo’s funeral. Or maybe it was long before. Who knows? Maybe Tito Marcelo’s funeral was merely a day of formal finality. Or the last slope before the bottom of my relationship with my grandfather.

  Grapes had me write the eulogy he would read. It was not something I felt right doing, as if I were being drawn into a private argument in which I did not belong. I still don’t understand it. Sure, we’d grown up with Grapes’s stories of how Marcelo was given the best of educations only to become a struggling artist who chose to be, of all things, a security guard—one of the low
est rungs in our society—because it allowed him to write and sketch while on duty. (Granma said he shamed the good name of our family.) Or how Marcelo would secretly take Granma’s paintings by National Artists, canvases worth a mint, and substitute copies he had made himself, selling the originals for far less than they were worth. (Granma said that as a boy he’d often come home from boarding school with items stolen from residence mates.) Or how Marcelo had written an unflattering novel about Grapes and Granma, even though the book was set at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, and was about an Igorot native whom the Americans had exhibited like an animal. (Granma was convinced the characters of the exhibit organizers were based on her and Grapes.) Or how Marcelo had made amends with my grandparents just five years earlier, coming to them with news he had rectal cancer and needed money for chemotherapy, but had really just spent the money they gave him on gambling and whores. (Of the alleged fraud, Grapes said my uncle would “get it in the end.”) Though Tito Marcelo really did end up dying of rectal cancer, all those stories only made us love our grandparents more, and love even less the aunts and uncles we did not grow up with and would not get to know. And now I had to summon elegiac phrases to describe what I could only imagine of perfect paternal love.

  Grapes stood at the altar and read what I had written, orating as if to a crowd of hungry voters made captive by a meal promised afterward. The words were my best estimate of what Grapes should have been feeling at his own son’s death. Perhaps, unknown to me, his sense of loss had been so profound he’d been rendered speechless. Perhaps, after having to bury my father, the favored, and then my uncle, the intractable, perhaps it was too much for Grapes to lose his two boys. Who knows? So I tried my best to write a good speech. For gravitas, I’d put in a couple of quotes from King Lear. Something about how it is the stars, the stars that govern our conditions. And how when we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools. It wasn’t because I thought Grapes anything like Lear. Maybe, in retrospect, his tragic relationship with rage did resonate. Anyway, I’d got the lines from a book of quotes, because I didn’t know what else to add to a eulogy that deserved to contain more. After, my cousin sang a beautiful song she’d written for her father; when she was done we started to clap, but Granma grabbed my and my brother’s hands sternly.

  The honor guard from the national security guards’ union, who’d shown up suddenly at my uncle’s wake to stand sleepless vigil beside his casket—despite his having fallen out with them years ago over money—now took their places by his coffin, pallbearers to their longtime treasurer. “Go!” Granma urged us brothers. We went and took the handles from the guards, elbowing them roughly aside. The coffin dipped and almost fell.

  At the gravesite, the lid was opened for one last time. My Tita Natty, Tito Marcelo’s third wife, held his hand and wailed at the sky. I took his other hand, hoping to find a connection I’d not known in life. I had never touched a dead person before. I’ve never since.

  I skipped the reception after. I was afraid Grapes would clap me on the shoulder proudly and tell everyone that I’d written the eulogy.

  When I got home, I could hear Granma weeping in her room.

  *

  Erning has trouble getting a good tech job because the Americans are wary of accepting his foreign qualifications. So he hits the job listings in the classified ads and finds this: “Wanted—Porch Painter.” Erning, excited, says to himself: Wow. This is great! In the Philippines, I’ve painted many things. The walls of our old house. My uncle’s chicken coop. My niece’s bicycle. I’m very qualified!

  So Erning applies and shows up bright and early at the employer’s house. The burly blond fellow explains to him, speaking slowly and loudly: “Okay, buddy. I don’t know how you folks do it where you come from, but I want you to paint my porch in one day. First, scrape all the paint off to the bare surface. Then apply a coat of primer. When that dries, I want you to do two coats of this pink paint. Can you do that?”

  Erning thinks it a strange request. Pink doesn’t seem like a good color at all. But Erning figures this is California. Besides, it’s no use understanding Americans. Especially rich ones. “Yes, sir,” Erning says eagerly. “I can remove paint and apply paint very well thank you very much!”

  “Okay, buddy,” the American says. “You’ve got the job. All the material’s already been unloaded from the trunk of the car.”

  Only two hours later, the American hears a knock on his front door. When he opens it, Erning’s there, standing proudly, flecked with pink paint. “Sir, the job is finished!”

  “Far out, bro,” says the American. “Only took you two hours! Are you sure you scraped the paint to the bare surface?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m positively!”

  “And you let the primer dry first?”

  Erning nods.

  “And then you put on two coats of pink?”

  “You betcha by golly wow,” Erning says. He’s thrilled at being impressive. He thinks: If Americans are this taken by our work ethic, I’ll have a high-paying tech job in no time.

  The American is indeed impressed. “Wow, you Mexicans sure work well. Okay, buddy. You deserve a bonus. Here’s another ten bucks!”

  Erning is delighted. “Sir, thank you, sir!” Relishing this feeling of being a star employee, Erning adds: “But I have to tell you, sir, ’cause maybe you don’t know much about these things. You don’t own a Porch. Your car’s a Ferrari.”

  *

  In addition to Latin, Spanish, Ancient Greek, and French, young Salvador also learned basic Nippongo, though from Yataro, the family’s Japanese gardener, who, Salvador recalled, “had a phobic aversion to having his photograph taken.” The phrases the boy learned would later prove vital during the war. But for many years prior, “the funny little Yataro” oversaw the cosmetic upkeep of the estates. Yataro was remembered as “very learned” and introduced Salvador to bonsai by allowing him to “watch him at work, while impatiently explaining the virtue of patience.” Yataro also had him repeat haiku verses by Basho, Buson, and Issa, “laughing with delight” at the boy’s eventual success. Yataro, with his “military bearing and plodding reliability,” was very respected by the family and was given responsibility over three Visayan gardeners. As a result, following completion of various improvement projects, his requests for vacations were usually granted and he traveled widely around the Philippines, “trusty Leica III hanging from his neck,” always bringing back for the Salvador children small souvenirs and delicacies from distant provinces—a mortar and pestle of Romblon marble, “gooey sweet rice paste in sealed coconut husks” from Bohol, a kris from Mindanao with a sinuously curved blade, a conch from Leyte, a carved wooden fertility god from Ilocos Norte. It was because of Yataro that Salvador “first learned how vast and varied are the cultures of our islands. Little did I know, in addition to changing my life, Yataro would also save it.”

  —from the biography in progress, Crispin Salvador:

  Eight Lives Lived, by Miguel Syjuco

  *

  Lena looked to me like Crispin in drag, like an unsuccessful scarecrow. Her voice wispy, but without the tremolo of the aged. Her handshake surprisingly firm. A surfeit of talcum and Provençal lavender was like an invisible aura around her. Her hair, dyed such a bad brown it was orange, was pulled severely into a bun on her head like a tangerine. She wore a rainbow chintz muumuu, leather clogs, sunglasses with diamantes, and many jingling bangles.

  We sat outside on the shady veranda. Tea and plates of sliced guava and papaya had been laid out. A maid in a mint-green uniform materialized to cool us with a large straw fan, like something out of a Rudolph Valentino film. From the house came the reedy serenade of “Misty,” the volume much too loud. When Lena saw me look inside, she sent the maid to fetch the CD cover. “Superlative, no? I so love it. Much more preferable to Richard Clayderman.” The maid returned and Lena gestured her toward me with a movement like throwing a Frisbee. I studied the cover appreciatively: Rom
ance of the Oboe.

  When Lena recited Whitman, she closed her eyes, as her brother had been wont to do. “‘And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, the smallest sprout shows there is really no death, and if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it. And ceas’d the moment life appear’d. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, and to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.’”

  I take out my pad and my pen and start the interview by asking about Crispin’s death.

  “I know nothing about his vest,” she says.

  “No, I meant how do you think he died?”

  “Do I think he’d mind what?”

  “I’m sorry, um—let me get my list—er, did you two keep up correspondence when he was in New York?”

  “No. I never did get to visit him in New York. I wanted to, but I never had the chance.”

  “Did you write him letters there?”

  “I’m sorry. Would you mind speaking up?”

  “I said, did you write him letters often?”

  “Yes. Every week. We’d done it since the fifties, when I was sent to receive my schooling at King George V, in Hong Kong. About ten years ago, we stopped writing. It was like quitting smoking, not receiving a weekly dispatch from him. But I was far too peeved by him.”

  “For what?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I said, for what?”

  “His memoirs.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Indeed! They were mean! Mercenary, in fact. He may have waited for Mama to die, but what of the rest of us? My brother’s response was: ‘But it’s art! It’s the truth!’ As if that made it acceptable. You think these people in this country understand art? Half can’t write their names. Still we let them vote. The other half, they can read about us in his book. No good can come from that. I used to blame that book for our brother Narcisito’s mental troubles. I’d even given Crispy my childhood diaries beforehand, hoping they’d help him write honestly.”