Ilustrado Read online

  Raqel: “Good. Now you can go.”

  Spooky Lolo: “Serve from the right with the right hand, remove plates from the left with the left hand.”

  Effy: “You know, Miguel, my cousin is in Congress. Maybe your grandfather is his friend? Manoleto Gonzales, second district of Ilocos Norte.”

  Me: “I’m sorry, sir, doesn’t ring a bell.”

  Effy: “Grew up in Bacolod, but his wife is Ilocana. Changco is her maiden name, from the tycoon family there. Dingdong’s second cousin, I think.”

  Sadie: “Mom, Miguel was just in Bacolod, researching Salvador’s life for his book.”

  Raqel: “Ah, yes, he was from there. But what a modern-day ilustrado, no? From the cane fields of Bacolod all the way to Europe and America! How romantic!”

  Sadie: “And Miguel found out that—”

  Effy: “My cousin was from one of those rich Bacolod families. Like the Salvadors. All incestuous, everyone related, to keep the money and fair skin in the family. Bad teeth, lazy. He had a third nipple or something. Spoiled as a prince. What kind of kingdom do you inherit there, anyway? Did you like Bacolod, Miguel?”

  Sadie: “So, Mom, Miguel met Salvador’s sister. Didn’t you know her?”

  Me: “Bacolod was fine, sir. Quite peaceful, actually.”

  Effy (leaning onto the table): “See? This cousin, he and his brothers enjoyed guns, and they’d get so bored they used to bring their bodyguards and go with the military and police to hunt. He used to tell me what it was like, waking up while it was still dark, going into the mists before the heat of day arrived. They’d crack Boy Bastos jokes and chew Wrigley’s spearmint gum open-mouthed. Just like the movies.”

  Toofy: “Caricatures of men.”

  Spooky Lolo: “And Boy Bastos’s daughter says, ‘The future swims in shit’!” (Spooky Lolo snickers to himself.)

  Effy: “My cousin was a bona fide weirdo. He boasted that he loved the smell of gun oil and armpit odor. They were hunting communist guerrillas. Shooting down NPAs like animals.”

  Raqel: “Oh, Effy, you’re so dramatic.”

  Sadie: “Mom. Wasn’t Lena Salvador your choirmaster when you were in college?”

  Toofy: “Which ones were the animals?”

  Raqel: “Sadie. Darling, stop making chismis like that. Only boors talk about other people, because they have nothing else interesting to say. Why, what happened to her?”

  (Toofy takes out his phone from his pocket and starts text-messaging.)

  Raqel: “Toofy, please. Don’t text at the table. Miguel, please excuse my son, ha? He has cellulitis.”

  Effy: “I’m telling you, it’s true, since he was thirteen. All dressed up with bandoliers and sidearm. I’ve seen pictures of him as a youngster, like Rambo or something.”

  Raqel: “As if you don’t like guns, Effy. You even have your children shooting with you.”

  Sadie: “Mom. Lena said that Salvador had a daughter. She was named Dulcinea. An artist, apparently.”

  (Toofy starts texting again, this time under the table. He’s obvious, but nobody notices but me.)

  Spooky Lolo (raising his voice to be heard): “When you go shopping, please buy me a Ped-Egg. You keep forgetting.”

  Raqel: “Pa, if you don’t keep quiet we’ll have the maids bring you upstairs.”

  Effy: “I don’t know why you’re still against guns. The bad guys have them. Self-defense is important and guns teach you the value of peace. Shooting is like wielding thunder. You think twice before losing your temper. Anyway, my cousin the oddball . . . now he’s in government. You know, when he gets new shoes, he makes his bodyguard wear them for a week, so that the leather gets broken in and the shoes don’t hurt. It’s a good idea, actually. I wonder if Imelda used that trick. Six thousand pairs are a lot of shoes to break in.”

  Spooky Lolo (mumbling almost inaudibly): “. . . don’t know why you didn’t enjoy martial law . . . the streets were peaceful again . . . they stole, but at least they gave back.”

  Raqel: “Effy, that’s disgusting. Would you want Ricardo wearing your shoes? You don’t even let him park the Porsche for you. Besides, I wouldn’t want you bringing your feet into the bed after wearing shoes he’s worn.”

  Toofy: “You’ll get Chinese Foot Flu.”

  Sadie: “So, Mom. Mom. Mom, Miguel’s now looking for Dulcinea. She probably has the missing manuscript everyone was talking about.”

  Effy: “I don’t know why it should matter, Raqy, whether my feet are clean or not. It’s not as if we share the same bed. You don’t even care when I don’t come home.”

  Raqel: “More mangoes, Miguel? Let me ring the bell for you.”

  (Mrs. Gonzales rings her little bell.)

  Sadie: “Mom, are you listening to me? Mom?”

  Toofy: “May I be excused? Are we done?”

  (Mrs. Gonzales rings her little bell.)

  Spooky Lolo: “There’s no need for any of this. We’re family.” Effy: “You pretend not to notice, pretending to be already sleeping . . .”

  (Mrs. Gonzales rings her little bell.)

  Effy: “. . . your rosary wrapped around your fist. How many years has it been since we made—”

  Raqel (shouting for the maid): “Inday! You bitch, where are you?”

  Sadie: “Do you want me to get her for you, Mom?”

  Toofy: “Are we goddamned finished?”

  (Raqel stands suddenly and goes upstairs. Effy turns the lazy Susan to get more food. Sadie looks to be on the verge of tears. Toofy’s cell phone vibrates, signaling a new text message; he holds it blatantly above the table, his thumbs clicking the keys in rapid response. A maid comes out of the kitchen and leads Spooky Lolo by the elbow for his next spoonful.)

  *

  The year after my Tito Marcelo died was when the fighting began over the fortune. Grapes had sold the zipper company, YKK Philippines, which he’d inherited from his father, both because liquidity was needed for his imminent senatorial campaign and because the business had just settled a costly counterfeiting case with the real U.S. company. (YKK Philippines was sold to Dingdong Changco III, for a record billion pesos, and its name was later changed to TKK Philippines. It is still the largest manufacturer of zippers in eastern Southeast Asia.)

  The sale was not as straightforward as Grapes would have liked. He had put the corporation in the names of each of his children—ostensibly to rescue them from inheritance taxes, but more likely to hide his assets from the scrutiny of political opponents. This allowed my aunts to contest the clause that let Grapes administer the company on their behalf. What followed was internecine squabbling, secret meetings to shift allegiance, and round-robin backstabbing. Each sibling sued Grapes. Tito Marcelo’s wife sued my aunts. One aunt, convinced the stress would soon kill my grandfather, launched a preemptive case against Granma. Even we grandchildren estimated how much everyone would be receiving (though because my parents were dead, my father’s name was absent from the articles of incorporation, and my five siblings and I were exempt from the chaos).

  In the end, having funded the appointment of a Supreme Court justice years earlier, Grapes won every suit. The fortune remained his. His children stopped talking to him and Granma, despite living across the street in houses he’d given them when they started their own families. When Grapes was away campaigning, we grand-cousins were encouraged to keep Granma company. “She’ll probably give us money,” we said to each other, though the thought of her sitting alone was what sent us knocking at her bedroom door. She rarely took out her wallet. Usually she told us to choose one thing from the suitcase brimming with fake Rolexes and Omegas she’d brought back from her latest Hong Kong shopping spree. I’d stand in front of the open suitcase, observing the hundreds of second hands ticking out of sync, thinking about how distant I’d become from my grandparents. At first I attributed it to my growing up. But after about a dozen times sitting with Granma, I started avoiding her again. When she knocked on my bedroom door, I didn’t answer. I was disc
omfited by her stories about how rotten her children were.

  It even got to the point where, when we saw our titos and titas in public, we weren’t sure whether we should greet them. Whose side were we supposed to take in all this? I sometimes wonder if that was what Grapes intended.

  One afternoon I saw my cousin Esmie on the elliptical trainer in the gym at the Polo Club. We’d been close once. “Oh my God,” she exclaimed. “We just got back from Bangkok with Granma. She treated me and my mom. Grapes doesn’t know!”

  “I didn’t even know Granma was away,” I said.

  “A hotel maid caught her stealing pens and soaps from her trolley. It was crazy embarrassing. Security was called, and Granma was escorted down to talk to the manager in the lobby. When we came home, Granma came back with like fourteen suitcases, filled with shitty bargain junk. She paid like four thousand dollars in over-weight baggage fees. And guess who I saw recently? Tita Baby, last week. She just arrived from L.A. We celebrated her fiftieth at our house. I know, she and my mom are friends now. They both made up with Grapes and he gave them each a small ‘pre-inheritance.’ Look what I got!”

  Esmie held up her wrist to show off a sparkling tennis bracelet.

  “Cartier. Anyways, after dinner, we were in the powder room—me, my mom, and Tita Baby—and Tita suddenly unbuttons her blouse and holds it open. And she’s like, ‘Girls! Don’t I look beautiful?’”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t want to look.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She’d gone to Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon!”

  “You’re kidding. Grapes said she was super in debt.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “So did she look beautiful?”

  “Oh yeah. She did. She really did.”

  *

  Sadie is like another person when she drops him off at his hotel. They drive wordlessly through the rain. Our stalwart protagonist doesn’t know what to say, so he doesn’t say anything. They listen to the radio. Suddenly, she switches it off. Asks him, very seriously, when he’ll be returning to New York.

  “Soon,” he says. “Maybe.”

  “Is it really like in Sex and the City?”

  “It’s better.”

  Sadie begins to cry.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks. Sadie shakes her head, bangs the steering wheel, looks away. They arrive outside his hotel. “Come on. What’s the matter?”

  “I wish you didn’t have to see that, you know? Why do they do shit like that, if they really love us?”

  “All families are alike,” he says. He takes her hand for the first time. She lets him. “Hey,” he says. She looks at him. “Later, if you, you know, end up talking to your mom, do you think you could press her about Dulcinea?”

  Sadie wrests her hand from his. “Please leave,” she says. He gets out of the car and stands in the rain, waiting for her to ask him back in. Sadie rockets off, spraying water and splashing some of the GROs huddled in the doorways of the massage parlors. They curse like stevedores.

  The boy enters the lobby and shakes the rain off. He knows he should call her cell phone, that he should have acted more sympathetically. But dinner with her family makes him wonder if even his own parents’ famous love would have soured. And if it was better to die as they did, before the decline. He thinks of Spooky Lolo surrounded by his family. And the vacancy of Crispin’s life lived solely by himself.

  In the elevator, a couple is talking as if he isn’t there. The man says, “I’m telling you, it was a hoax. Those jellyfish were rubber. The background was staged.” The woman replies, “You think it’s related to the bombings?” The man says, “To drum up support for you-know-who. They’re backing PhilFirst, who is backing President Friendly-Ho Estregan.” The woman says, “I think everyone should lay off PhilFirst. They’re the country’s largest employer, and they drive our economy.” The man replies, “That’s because they put food on your table. Did you know that the Americans—” The woman says, “I wonder if you can eat them.” The man replies, peevishly, “The Americans?” The woman continues, “Feed the poor with them. Jellyfish, I mean.” The man looks at her. “I give up,” he says. “You’re useless!” Then the couple turns to our protagonist and looks at him angrily.

  When he gets to bed, all he can do is toss and turn. Finally, he cannot feel his body.

  He is washing his hands very carefully, enjoying the ritual. A woman in a headset comes and runs an adhesive roller over his black polo shirt and blue jeans. She leads him down a hall. He is on a Latin American talk show, sitting on an Eames lounge. The host is perfectly tanned and tells him he’s much cooler than Pablo Neruda. The boy demurs. The host turns to the crowd and says in Spanish, “Who knew Blanc Neige was so nice?” The crowd erupts in applause. The lights are bright and he can hardly see the audience. Except for Madison, who is in the front row, looking angry. The host stands and goes to an ironing board. He starts pressing a black polo shirt. “Blanc Neige is an international star!” the host says, while turning the shirt over to iron the back. The crowd laughs cruelly. The host goes offstage and returns, dressed in a black polo and blue jeans. The crowd cheers. “Look, all you people,” the host says in funny English. “I’m Blanc Neige!” The crowd hoots. After the show, he searches for Madison. The woman with the headset says, “Oye, Blanc Neige, she went with the host into a Toyota LiteAce van.” Outside, it is raining hard. The van is in a forest clearing and it is rocking. He goes back into the studio and flirts with a Hong Kong Chinese girl with rabbitlike feet in strappy sandals. She gives him a blow job in a cave by the beach. He goes home to find Madison not there, though Crispin is at the typewriter. He says to Crispin, “Aren’t you busy being dead?” The author replies, “Can’t die yet. I’m busy writing your story.” He leaves Crispin and goes through the blue door into the restaurant he owns with Madison. There she is. She looks beautiful. He helps her clean the shed out back. They bring the summer plates into the restaurant, as well as sangria pitchers. He thinks of what to say to her but doesn’t know. He goes outside to smoke a cigarette. When he comes back in, Madison is hanging by her neck from her belt. It’s tied to the rack in the kitchen. She gently swings and hits the pans suspended beside her. They sound like church bells after a wedding. No, he says. No, Madison. No. He hugs her legs, buries his face in the space behind her knees. He has nothing left. He knows what’s next. His belt will compress the carotid arteries in his neck, cutting off blood to his brain. His brain will swell and plug the top of his spinal column, pinching the vagal nerve and arresting his heart. His eyes will bulge and his sphincter will release. He will suffer. But he will have to do it. He can hear Crispin upstairs. Outside, the metal slugs of type bang like bullets into the white sky, leaving black letters suspended. “Dear Sire/Madame,” they say. “First, I request your stricst confidence in this transaction. I am the granddaughter of the statesman and finance minister of the Philippine. I need help from you as a man of God. After the deth of my father, who perished in mysterious circumstance and was found in a flood, 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 accounts. Your heroic assist is required in repleneshing my father’s legacy and masticating his despicable murderers. More information TBA.” The typewriter continues its banging. “I am looking for an overseas partner who will assist me in transferring $21,230,000, of which 20% will be given to you, the account owner. Please send your bank details . . .”

  Our slumbering protagonist awakens. Someone is pounding on the door of his room. The glowing hands of the clock say it’s four in the morning. The knocking stops. He rushes, bleary-eyed, to answer it. Nobody is there. As soon as he lies down and shuts his eyes, he starts dreaming again.

  *
>
  It cannot be doubted that my father, the great Junior Salvador—may he rest in peace—always knew exactly what his purpose was, politically speaking. Thus, he could be slotted anywhere in any administration. Congressman, senator, cabinet minister, consigliere. His skill wasn’t making something out of nothing—others were paid to do that. My father’s skill was making nothing out of something. This was what he tried to teach me when, newly returned from Europe, my university studies complete, I took to his side in the sixties. And this is what turned me off on politics. His specialty, you see, was engineering consent, intuitively taking a page out of the book of Edward Bernays—as you know, Freud’s nephew and the father of PR—but twisting it, using localized threats and fear. Martial law, communism, violent social instability, loss of foreign investment, all were used to distract the public from its valid protestations, second thoughts, and objections. Concerns like empty larders, pillaged coffers, debauched leaders, all became third priority to bombs in the streets and guns in the hands of the godless commies or the godfueled Muslims. With the country watching, not knowing what they were and weren’t seeing, my father the political plastic surgeon made himself indispensable to each president. Not by covering things up, mind you, but by sleight of hand, which is always more of a distraction job than a disappearing act. His legacy is that these tactics are still very much employed today. And though he and I had our differences, as I grew to discover his traits developing in me, I both fought those characteristics and used them as a road map in attempting to understand who he was, and therefore who I am and could be if I wasn’t careful. For that alone, I owe him everything.

  —Crispin Salvador, in a 1997 interview for The Nation magazine, on the occasion of his father’s passing

  *

  With the deepening recession, and with Erning saving for an engagement ring for Rocky, he and Cousin Bobby get jobs as security guards at Wal-Mart. Erning, having already learned a lot in life, tries to start a union. But when he finds out that the company would rather shut down a store than allow a union to form, he backs down. Being Filipino, he is eager to keep the status quo. Plus, his life in America has saddled him with debt on four credit cards and layaway payments at Costco. Besides, he enjoys the responsibility of protecting people and their property.