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  Salvador, like other prolific writers of extraordinary breadth and reach, was well acquainted with such disappointments, as exemplified by the various publications that made the literati doubt his abilities. Critics consistently judged the less successful works to be long-winded, messianic, or derivative. (Avellaneda called his oeuvre “a dirty cistern filled with feces that has not been well formed. Objectively speaking, it’s the sort of crap that sparks fears of outbreaks of amoebic dysentery.”) The most memorable of these unmemorable works were: the 43,950-word essay Tao (People),‡ which Salvador meant as “a catalog and homage to the glorious diversity of our race, our rich customs, and our beautiful women”; Filipiniana,§ an ambitious but idiosyncratic survey of Philippine literature in English, which included most of Salvador’s short works, but only one each from other writers; and an early book-length epic poem about Magellan’s cartographer and translator, Antonio Pigafetta, entitled Scholarly Plunder.|| Attempts to justify the latter in 1982 by transforming it into All Around the World, a disco opera, resulted in bankrupting failure.

  What irked Salvador most—more even than Avellaneda calling his life abroad “a metaphor for an anonymous death”—was the critics’ claim that Because of You was his literary swan song. And so began whispers about an epic book that had been in the works since the early 1980s: The Bridges Ablaze. But what Salvador published next surprised the country, establishing him as a much-read writer but giving credence to what local books columnists called his “flimsy literary prowess.” Manila Noir,* the most popular of his crime novels, presented Antonio Astig, a swashbuckling mystery author investigating Jack the Ripper–style killings of pretty women from shantytowns (the real-life murders were a sensation in 1986 and ’87: the police investigation was regarded as a sham and the murderer rumored to be a prominent “confirmed bachelor” politician). The Bloody Sea,† a five-hundred-page rip-roaring nautical saga set in the Philippines of the 1500s, pitted the dastardly Chinese pirate Limahong against the dashing Spanish captain Juan de Salcedo, and proved to be amazingly successful at home and in Britain. (The book, along with rumors of a sequel and prequel, fueled, to Salvador’s delight, public disdain from Patrick O’Brian.) And aiming to reach younger Filipinos, Salvador wrote the Kaputol (Siblings) trilogy,‡ a magic-infused offshoot of the YA tradition of Franklin W. Dixon. Following the adventures and coming of age of Dulcé, the tomboyish leader of a group of young boys in martial law–era Quezon City, the trilogy became his most enduring work, remembered and loved by a new generation of readers.

  That period of his life, full of prolificacy but lacking in gravitas, plunged Salvador into a deep depression that made him lash out indiscriminately, though his behavior during both defeat and success had long elicited eager mockery. His mania for collecting subjected him to accusations of being “a closet bourgeois.” He famously wrote letters in purple ink, in grandiose longhand. With the advent of e-mail, to which he took early with extreme enthusiasm, he began sending long tirades to newspapers—intent on skirting the judgment of the editors of his column at The Manila Times—placing in his crosshairs such targets as our cultural crab mentality, or the hope that expatriate Filipinos will help rather than abandon their country, or the bad service at the Aristocrat restaurant and how in such an old institution it represented the passing of a more genteel society. The periodicals refused to run his missives, so he collected and self-published them in the book All the News the Papers Are Afraid to Print.* Salvador’s fastidiousness of manner also opened him to rumors of homosexuality, yet he was criticized for being a womanizer “with the lascivious energy usually found in defrocked clergymen.” And he could never live down his 1991 TV commercial which showed him being served lunch in a book-lined study, shaking a cruet over his food before turning to the camera to deliver the now immortal words: “Silver Swan Soy Sauce, the educated choice.”

  On June 2, 1994, Salvador held a book launch at La Solidaridad Bookstore in Manila. The event had been wrapped in secrecy, and excited literary watchers expected The Bridges Ablaze. Salvador instead unveiled Autoplagiarist, yet another self-published book, a memoir that refracted through his life’s story a history of the Philippines from the start of the Second World War to the end of the millennium. The 2,572-page volume, perhaps the most ambitious and certainly the most personal of his books, won him angry responses. One local critic said: “The Oedipal impulse was so ambrosial, [Salvador] fucked his father and killed his mother.” Another said: “Dear old Crispin might have done better had he put his money where his mouth is and cleaned up Smokey Mountain [garbage dump].” Abroad, Salvador’s literary agent could not sell Autoplagiarist to publishers, and even ultimately terminated their professional affiliation. Worst of all, the memoir’s frankness destroyed what had long been a tenuous relationship with his family and friends at home. Salvador was suddenly a true exile. “You’re lucky your parents are dead,” he once told me. “The people who love you,” he said, while moving his bishop to take my queen, “will only see their deficiencies in your work. That’s the strength of good writing and the weakness of the human ego. Love and honesty don’t mix. To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.”

  The cut ties saw Salvador settle permanently in New York, and inexorably into a period of deep silence. He dropped his newspaper column. He gave up writing. That he became well known as a teacher attests to his oh-so-very-Filipino resilience. As he said in “War & Piss” on many an occasion: “If life gives you lemons, have your maid make some lemonade.”

  Much of his life was apocryphal, so it may well be that this next bit was, too. Shortly after clipping the last review panning Autoplagiarist and pasting it into an album, Salvador went out by the Hudson River and burned the scrapbook, along with his diaries, in a public trash receptacle. It was in the wee hours of a summer night. Two policemen happened upon him while he was relieving himself into the conflagration. “I’m just trying to put it out,” he told them. Salvador was taken downtown and charged with misdemeanors for drunkenness and public urination. The event was somehow reported in the Manila papers and elicited the habitual snickers from those who remembered him.

  But it was in that fire, Salvador later told me, that he rediscovered what it is like to be intoxicated by your own anger, to find the solace of destruction. The following morning saw him returned to his desk with frightening intensity. He had retrieved, from a locked drawer, the three black cardboard boxes containing the unfinished manuscript of The Bridges Ablaze.

  *

  At the end of the first week of last February, Salvador left for home. The purpose of the visit, his first in years, was for him to accept the Dingdong Changco, Sr., Memorial National Literary Lifetime Recognition Prize, or, as it is widely known, the DCSMNLLR Prize. The afternoon he arrived in Manila, Salvador ate a late lunch at the Aristocrat restaurant before going to their comfort room to change clothes. In front of the mirror, he adjusted the collar of his formal barong and practiced his speech. Outside it was raining heavily, and he took a taxi to the Cultural Center of the Philippines. The audience was composed of the old guard, mostly members and officers of PALS, the Philippine Arts and Letters Society. They leaned back in their plastic monobloc chairs, smirking magnanimously, faces serene and satisfied, as if at a much-awaited funeral. (The DCSMNLLR Prize is historically given to writers at the end of their careers.) Salvador bounded up the steps onto the stage, shook hands, posed for a picture with PALS deputy vice president Furio Almondo, and stepped to the podium. He looked admiringly at his gold medal—an ornately filigreed circle made of sterling silver. He poured himself a glass of water and drank it. Finally, he spoke. “Literature,” he declared, “is an ethical leap. It is a moral decision. A perilous exercise in constant failure. Literature should have grievances, because there are so many grievances in the world. Let us speak frankly, because we’re all peers here. Your grievances with me are because you say I have failed. Though I only failed because I extended myself further t
han what any of you have ever attempted.” The boos and jeers came suddenly, then peaked savagely, as at a crucifixion. “I accept this award,” Salvador continued, shouting to be heard, “ahead of what I will achieve. Next year, I will publish my long-awaited book. Then you will see the truth of our shared guilt.” The boos and jeers turned into laughter. “History is changed by martyrs who tell the tru—” The microphone was disconnected.

  The author walked through the audience and out of the CCP building. When there was nobody to see him, he began to run, splashing headlong into the torrential rain. He caught a flight out that evening—just missing the unseasonable supertyphoon that would flood vast swaths of the city—and returned to New York via Narita, Detroit, and Newark. I saw him the morning of his arrival, the day before Valentine’s Day, when I rushed to his apartment on the pretense of dropping off a folderful of students’ essays from his missed classes. He was seated in his study, bedraggled but radiant, banging away at his typewriter. It sounded like machine-gun fire. He had not even bothered to change out of his ruined barong. Beside him, there it was: yesterday’s Philippine Sun, turned to the deaths and births page. Though the paper’s website had run an erratum, blaming an intern for accidentally running Crispin’s from their stock of prepared obituaries, you could almost hear the self-satisfied chuckles swooping in on the westerly tradewinds. I didn’t know how Crispin had taken it, so I asked if he’d had a good flight. And what had got him all fired up. Crispin smiled at me brightly. “Death,” he said, “in Manila. I apparently have nothing more to lose.”

  That was the second-to-the-last time I saw him.

  Then silence too soon for one whose most pernicious enemy was silence.

  If our greatest fear is to sink away alone and unremembered, the brutality that time will inflict upon each of us will always run stronger than any river’s murky waves. This book therefore shoulders the weighty onus of relocating a man’s lost life and explores the possible temptations that death will always present. The facts, shattered, are gathered, for your deliberation, like a broken mirror whose final piece has been forced into place.

  —Miguel Syjuco, en route to Manila, December 1, 2002

  * Natalia Diaz, “Filipino Footnote,” The New York Times, May 6, 2002.

  † Carla Lengellé, “Les guérilleros de Paris: de Hô Chi Minh à Pol Pot,” Le Monde, July 22, 2002.

  ‡ Anton Esteban, “Grand Central Terminus,” The Village Voice, August 15, 2002.

  * Lewis Jones, “The Salvador of Philippine Literature,” The Guardian, September 21, 1990.

  † Crispin Salvador, Autoplagiarist (Manila: Passepartout Publishing, 1994).

  * Lupang Pula (Manila: People’s Press, 1968).

  * The Enlightened (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1965).

  * The story is renowned as the first fiction published by a Filipino in the magazine since Carlos Bulosan’s “The End of War” in the September 2, 1944, issue. Marcel Avellaneda called “Matador” “over-earnest faux Ernest” and “a chapter edited judiciously from The Sun Also Rises.”

  * Jour, Night, Vida, and Amore (New York: Grove Press, 1977–1981).

  † My Philippine Islands (with 80 color plates) (New York: Macmillan, 1980).

  ‡ Phili-Where? (London: Faber and Faber, 1982).

  § Because of You (New York: Random House, 1987).

  * Dingdong Changco, Jr., sued for libel. Salvador famously told the court: “Whatever truths you find in my fiction are only universal ones.” The book was banned in the Philippines after only 928 copies were sold nationally.

  † Interview by Clinton Palanca, The Paris Review, winter 1991.

  ‡ Tao (People) (Manila: Passepartout Publishing, 1988).

  § Filipiniana (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1990).

  || Scholarly Plunder (Manila: Ars Poetika, 1981).

  *Manila Noir (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1990).

  † The Bloody Sea (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992).

  ‡ Kapatid, QC Nights, and Ay Naku! (Manila: Adarna House, 1987–1990).

  * Crispin Salvador, All the News the Papers Are Afraid to Print (Manila: Passepartout Publishing, 1993).

  1

  A battered wooden chest in the bedroom, its inlay shedding, its key finally found in a locked desk drawer. Inside: A recent diary (orange suede cover, hand-burnished a smooth caramel [inside: translations, riddles, jokes, poems, notes, other]). First editions (Autoplagiarist, Red Earth, The Collected Fictions, The Enlightened, et cetera). A dilapidated overnight suitcase (white Bakelite handle; stickers from hotels long shuttered [the lock is forced open with a table knife: the scent of pencil shavings and binding glue, a sheaf of photographs {slouching at the edges}, his sister’s childhood diaries held together by a crumbling rubber band, pregnant manila envelopes {transcripts, newspaper clippings, red-marked drafts of stories, official documents }, a canvas portfolio {charcoal, graphite, ink sketches }, a battered set of Russian nesting dolls {the innermost missing}, other assorted miscellany {a Parker Vacumatic fountain pen, inherited medals from the Second World War, a lock of amber hair, et cetera}]).

  *

  My friend and mentor was quite alive the night before. The door cracked open, only his nose and eye visible. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.” The blue door clicked shut, unapologetically. The dead bolt slid in with a finality I did not at the time recognize. I left and had a bacon cheeseburger without him, irritated by his uncharacteristic rudeness.

  What could I have said to him? Should I have forced open the door? Slapped him twice across the face and demanded he tell me what was wrong? Days, weeks later, all the fragments still would not click together. The events seemed unreal, confusing. Some nights I’d tiptoe quietly out of bed, cautious not to wake Madison and risk igniting her anger; I’d sit on the couch, deep in thought until the sky turned lilac. Both suicide and murder seemed like two sides of the same prime-time seduction. In retrospect, this was healthy for me to feel. Clichés remind and reassure us that we’re not alone, that others have trod this ground long ago. Still, I could not understand why the world chose to take the easy way out: to write him off simply, then go home to watch TV shows with complicated plots. Maybe that’s the habit of our age.

  Then, at four weeks after Crispin’s death, I was telephoned by his sister (her voice as thin and pale as a piece of string) and asked to divest his life’s possessions; I entered his musty apartment as if it were a crypt.

  At four months, I found myself unable to sleep at night; I’d sit and listen to Madison’s breathing, thinking, for some reason, of the parents I never got to know, and how I missed Crispin, with his stupid fedora and strong opinions.

  At six months, I began Crispin’s biography; the long hours in the library, the idea that his life could help me with mine, somehow kept me sane.

  At eight months and one week, Madison left me for good; I hoped she’d call but she didn’t.

  Late in the night of November 15, 2002, nine months to the day after Crispin’s death, I was watching my in box for any e-mail from Madison. With a bing, three new messages appeared. The first was from [email protected]. It said, in part: “Sharpen your love-sword rubadub soundess. Help that breeds arousal victories. How to last longer making love and have more feelings.” The second was from [email protected]. It said, in part: “GET DIPLOMA TODAY!If you’re looking for a fast way to next level,(non accredited) this is the way out for you.” The third e-mail was about to be trashed when I noticed who sent it. The message said, in part: “Dear Sire/Madame . . . I was informed by our lawyer, Clupea Rubra, that my daddy, who at the time was government whistleblower and head of family fortune, called him, Clupea Rubra, and conducted him round his flat and show to him three black cardboard boxes. Along the line, my daddy died mysteriously, and Government has been after us, molesting, policing, and freezing our bank accou
nts. Your heroic assist is required in replenishing my father’s legacy and masticating his despicable murderers. More information TBA.” The sender was [email protected]. I brought up a blank message to respond. I wrote: “Crispin?” The cursor winked at me. I hit “send” and waited.

  The next morning, I bought my plane ticket.

  *

  See the boy getting on an airplane. He’s not a young boy, but a boyish man, as he would describe himself. He sits in his middle seat, notebook open, pen in hand, en route to Manila (I almost wrote “home,” he thinks with a smile). It is a trip he hates, both the voyage and arrival. He writes at this moment, “the limbo between outposts of humanity.”

  As the airplane is towed backward, he thinks of what he is leaving. Thinks of his lost friend and mentor, seated at the typewriter, working away in a slow accrual of letters, words, sentences, puzzling together pieces shed like bread crumbs on the path behind him.

  The boy will return, heartbroken, lonely, dejected. His three brothers and two sisters are all abroad, free from home—atop a hill in San Francisco, washed under the big Vancouver sky, hidden amid the joyful noise of New York City. His parents, whom he cannot remember, are in graves he cannot bring himself to visit because he knows their bodies are not there. The grandparents, who raised him as best they could, are in Manila, though he no longer has contact with them because of the emotional violence of their last departure. He is coming home, though he doesn’t dare admit it. He knows well what empty houses are and the mischief memories can play when cast among unfamiliar echoes.

  In the long hours spent in the airplane, he tries not to think about how his parents died, and therefore that is all he can think of. He flips through the Philippine newspapers, obsessively. He studies his files of notes, clippings, drafts. He unscrews the fountain pen he took from his dead friend’s possessions. Tries to write the prologue for Eight Lives Lived, the biography he wants to write about his mentor. He fidgets. Thinks. Observes his fellow passengers. Judges everyone, in the traditional Filipino sport of justifying both personal and shared insecurities. He reads some more, searching for a point of reference in a world that has never felt entirely his. He writes some more, trying to explain things to himself. He scribbles an asterisk.