Ilustrado Page 24

  One day, while they are on duty, they hear their supervisor’s voice calling frantically over their walkie-talkies: “Guards, a bag snatcher is on the premises. Block all the exits!”

  Later, Bobby and Erning sheepishly approach their supervisor.

  Bobby (bashfully massaging his triceps): “Eh, sir, the thief escaped.”

  Supervisor: “How could that have happened?”

  Erning (bashfully scratching his head): “Eh, sir, he left via the entrance.”

  *

  “That’s a hard question,” Crispin said.

  We were hiking along the Hudson’s edge in Riverside Park, in the heights of Manhattan, where the footpath is set away from the shore. We picked our way over the large stones, like crabs. I could imagine Crispin’s answer, and I expected him to go off scandalously about his Filipino peers. I held my breath.

  Instead, he fell serious. He stopped on a boulder and took off his spectacles (perfectly round, black plastic frames, usually seen on purposefully hip doctors and Asian architects). Crispin wiped them meticulously. I waited. He replaced them, fished a pocket comb from his overcoat, and ran it through his brilliantined salt-and-pepper hair. Had I upset him? The last edge of the sun slid into New Jersey. The Hudson was slightly aflame, silhouetting his face in shadow. He continued over the rocks. As if the conversation hadn’t paused, he began to lecture.

  “The beautiful poet Mutya Dimatahimik lay down in front of an advancing tank. She was five months pregnant. The tank led a column of military vehicles going to blockade Malacañang Palace from a march of students, laborers, communists. It was January 1970 and we had our fists raised against Marcos. When you’re like that, you observe yourself from outside your body, enjoying the sight of you engaged in heroism among a crowd of fellow heroes. Mutya just went and lay down on the street. I wanted to stop her, but I was being pinned by a cop. The tank pushed toward her. The street shook. The tank didn’t slow. A few feet from her small body, it stopped. All of us watching nearly became Catholic again. Three soldiers got out. They dragged her, screaming, to the side. I should say, it was they who were screaming. Mutya didn’t say a word. They beat her. She lost her teeth, and nearly lost her child. It was then that we found out that the baby was a girl. In the hospital, I stood by Mutya’s side, crying, and asked her what had gotten into her head to do such a thing. She said she’d been thinking of the dedication José Rizal wrote for Noli Me Tangere. Imagine?! That part about sacrificing to the truth everything. Death was nothing if her country was dying.”

  Crispin paused and looked very sad.

  “Truly, romantic bullshit, in retrospect,” he said. “And yet . . .” He wagged his finger. “And yet, ‘No lyric has ever stopped a tank,’ so said Seamus Heaney. Auden said that ‘poetry makes nothing happen.’ Bullshit! I reject all that wholeheartedly! What do they know about the mechanics of tanks? How can anyone estimate the ballistic qualities of words? Invisible things happen in intangible moments. What should keep us writing is precisely that possibility of explosions. If not, what then? A century and a decade ago, Rizal’s prose kindled revolution. They didn’t have tanks during that time, see? But when he wrote both his great Noli and El Filibusterismo, he was more concerned about the present than the future, and far more concerned with both those than about the past. An important clue to writers like you. Rizal’s books were good, but their lyrics on the page were most certainly futile against the Guardia Civil, not to mention tanks. But their lyrics in the hot head and swelling heart of a young reader, well, Mr. Heaney, there by the grace of God goes your tank buster.

  “Now, a hundred and ten years into the future, our present, it’s as if nothing else has been written in our sunburned isles since. Oh sure, they broke the mold with Rizal, Mr. Malay Renaissance Man himself. Like China’s Sun Yat-sen. Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh. Rizal’s books are the literary and historical touchstone, so we still like to crow about our revolution, the first democratic republic in Asia. How it was stolen by American backstabbing and imperialism. We talk as if we were actually there! Aiming our Remingtons. Pow! Planting our machetes in Spanish cabezas. Shhlock! These are our greatest accomplishments and saddest tragedies. Since then, has nothing else happened?”

  The sun had disappeared. The footpath’s lampposts were far away, remote, like moons fractured by the branches of the trees. Leaves and twigs brushed our faces. The city seemed but a rumor. His silence pressed me to take his question as more than rhetorical. “Well, what about—”

  “Truly!” he said, wagging his finger again. “Don’t let’s forget Ferdinand Marcos! His iron butterfly, Imelda! Don’t omit her shoes. How many? One thousand? Three thousand? Six thousand? Does it matter? Fifteen years ago that story ended. Fifteen years! Truly, Miguel, as a nation we’re overly concerned with the past. Even engaged in the present we lean slightly backward as time forces us forward. We’re like a probinsyano learning English. You know? Before saying anything, we form in our heads the things we’re sure we’ve learned in class. Aaaapple, b-oy, ca-pi-tul-ism, duh-mock-racy. That’s the problem, we’ve written one book, and it’s been re-bound again and again. So many re-presentations of the war, the struggle of the haves and have-nots, People Power Revolutions on Edsa, whatever. All those Pinoy writers industriously criticizing. All those critics tirelessly writing. About unsuccessful 1970s rebellions, 1990s domestic dramas. Or the Filipino-Americans, eagerly roosting in pigeonholes, writing about the cultural losses that come with being raised in a foreign country, or being not only brown, but a woman, and a lesbian, or half-blind, or lower-middle-class, or whatever. Oh my, what a crime against humanity that the world doesn’t read Filipino writing! This is the tradition you will inherit. Simon Leys, writing about D. H. Lawrence, pointed out that ‘often our imagination cannot fully absorb the truth of a city or of a land unless a poet’—was it a poet that he said, or a writer?—anyway, ‘unless a writer first invents it for us.’ So, we realize ourselves in someone else’s words. Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness. Then we wallow in the fact that we, as a people, are not yet whole. Nothing to be done, Pozzo.”

  I heard elusive voices in the shadows that I’d taken to be plants, ferns, trees whose names I didn’t know. A lightning bug flickered across our path and then disappeared. It didn’t light up again. The whispers continued. I feigned nonchalance. I prodded Crispin out of his silence. “When you used to write—”

  “Used to? I still do write. Don’t slip on Dr. Freud’s banana peel. You might fall into the river. What was it I was saying? Oh, yes, I was saying, it’s a global conspiracy. That’s why my books are out of print, no? Right out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A colonial conspiracy against the Philippines. Poor us. Yeah, truly. Listen, you—we—shouldn’t foster a tradition of nostalgia, as we have. A retrospective of all the past frustrations. Forget it—it’s gone, it’s history. Pun intended. Haha! We have to change our country by changing its representation. What is Filipino writing? Living on the margins, a bygone era, loss, exile, poor-me angst, postcolonial identity theft. Tagalog words intermittently scattered around for local color, exotically italicized. Run-on sentences and facsimiles of Magical Realism, hiding behind the disclaimer that we Pinoys were doing it years before the South Americans. You know I once found one of my books in the Latin America section of a reputable bookstore? I even had a Filipino student who italicized ‘fiesta’ in one of his stories. Fiesta? There you go. León María Guerrero once told me, ‘We Filipinos owe our faults to others, but our virtues are our own.’ At first I wasn’t sure whether he was being sincere or sarcastic. It can only be the latter. Our heartache for home is so profound we can’t get over it, even when we’re home and never left. Our imaginations grow moss. So every Filipino novel has a scene about the glory of cooking rice, or the sensuality of tropical fruit. And every short story seems to end with misery or redemptive epiphanies. And variations thereof. An underlying cultural faith in deus ex
machina. God coming from the sky to make things right or more wrong.

  “First step, get over it, man. I forget which jazz man said that it takes a long time before you can play like yourself. Be an international writer, who happens to be Filipino, and learn to live with the criticisms of being a Twinkie. Anyway, your real home country will be that common ground your work plows between you and your reader. Truly, who wants to read about the angst of a remote tropical nation? Everyone’s got enough of their own, thank you very much. Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get. Write what you know exists beyond that limited obsession. For now that may include the diaspora, the Great Filipino Floorshow. Fine. But listen, of all those things we Pinoys try so hard to remember, what are those other things that we’ve tried successfully to forget? Figure that out and write about that. Quit hiding behind our strengths and stand beside our weaknesses and say, These are mine! These are what I’m working to fix! Learn to be completely honest. Then your work will transcend calendars and borders. Goethe called it World Literature. He said, ‘National literature no longer means much these days, we are entering the era of Weltliteratur.’ He said it’s up to each of us to hasten this development. How long ago was that? Or, coming full circle, now take Mr. Auden’s advice: be ‘like some valley cheese, local but prized every where.’”

  We left the river and turned back toward the footpath in the park. We pushed our elbows through the branches, out of the wilderness.

  “It’s odd, yeah, that I tell you all this? Don’t forget, Miguel, wise men are simply those who’ve made all the mistakes. Oh, I understand now, understand enough for my new book. The evils of one society are all of humanity’s evils. I truly wish I could tell you more about TBA. I can’t. Not yet. I can tell you only this. It’s a necessary work. Because it will implicate them all. All those people who said hope was hopeless, and so instead took to begging with their eyes a portion of the booty. Or shuttered their homes, huddled inside, read scripture, and waited, not knowing that God will judge more harshly the sin of omission than the sin of commission.

  “I promise you, I’m not as bitter as I seem. Well, perhaps only the truly bitter say that. But let me tell you one last thing. And this is important. I made a mistake. When I was young, I spent my days and nights trying to impress future generations. I spent them. They’re gone. All because I was deathly afraid of being forgotten. And then came the regret. The worst thing among all worst things. But from that I gained a small fragment of wisdom. Purpose. Because the past will weigh a lot more once your future becomes shorter. And so, now I’m bargaining, begging, for just one last chance to bequeath a book about all the lessons I’ve learned painfully over the course of my life. Because it might just make everyone else’s that tiny bit easier.

  “I once thought The Bridges Ablaze would be that masterpiece. I’m not so sure it matters much anymore. You must learn this while you are still young. Live in the crux of the present. And write to explain the world to yourself and to others. Look forward only to the summer of your first convertible. Look forward only if what’s in front of you is a mirror. Because one day you’ll be so busy looking backward, and everything will feel like winter. If you still don’t get it, pare, let me make it abundantly clear. Just write, and write justly. Ezra Pound be damned. Poets lie, though beautifully. Don’t make things new, make them whole.”

  7

  It will arrive in the post

  in weighty packages, tightly wrapped

  in knotted twine.

  No return address.

  Opened, they are empty.

  You are already filled

  with what it was,

  secrets from an old you

  to a future self. Regret

  is only realizing

  the truth too late.

  —from the 1982 poem “Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope,” by Crispin Salvador

  *

  Rocky marries Erning in a small ceremony at the Iglesia ni Kristo church in San Jose, California, with only two hundred friends and relatives attending. Rocky is radiant in the gown she resourcefully picked up from the specialty secondhand shop called Left at the Alter, in Haight-Ashbury. Erning wears the green barong he wore only once before, for his graduation. It is too tight, but he is so happy his smile is contagious. They honeymoon at Disneyland. The picture they have taken of them kissing in front of Cinderella’s castle is framed and put on their mantel. A year passes. One night, they sit on the couch watching the Filipino channel.

  Rocky: “Honey. I have something to ask. But don’t get mad. Okay? Darling, why didn’t you give me anything for our anniversary?”

  Erning: “Eh, you told me to surprise you!”

  *

  The little things, you know, eventually become everything. That last week, I was driven nuts by Madison’s habitual promiscuity with the mirrors she’d happen across. When I mentioned it, she said she only wanted to look good for me. But I hated her pouting-lipped, three-quarter pose, like some Paris Hilton wannabe. It made me swear that when we made love later that night—my hands choking off her air just as she liked it—I’d lean too heavily and too long, just to see her eyes go wide with panic as she had no more breath to call out our safeword, “Bananas!”

  During those final days, we dismissed, once and for all, and completely, each other’s finer points for the few nettlesome constancies. We repeated our I-love-yous in the hope they would do something, anything. I think we knew we said those three words less because we believed them and more because we wanted to hear what the other would respond.

  That morning—a Monday I think, after a strained weekend alone at the Liebling “beach shack” by an endearing inlet near East Egg—we simultaneously realized we were trying to convince ourselves of nothing. While waiting for the tea to boil, Madison talked about how much she loved being out in the country. How much we needed its space. How much she loved the mornings before I awoke because the peace made her yoga sessions “transcendent.”

  When the kettle screamed, it was I who admitted defeat. It was I who spoke up. I expected her to cry again, to beg me to reconsider. But she just sat there, shaking Kokopelli Summer Mist tea leaves into her stainless tea ball. She poured tea into her mug and none into mine. Madison remained as quiet as a victim in a courtroom, the spurned and righteous and therefore the one who’d get our rent-controlled apartment with working fireplace. I said a few more things, then walked to Middle Neck Road to thumb a ride to the city. I kept looking over my shoulder, just in case she tried to follow.

  At our home, I packed my things. I was slowed by having to separate our CDs and books. The task took me through the day and into the evening. When I was done, I memorized how the nighttime shadows journeyed across our bedroom and faded on the far wall into morning. When the day came, quietly then loudly, I looked out the window but saw no one. I made lunch, ate it, then gathered my bags. They were fewer than I expected. I double-checked that I wasn’t leaving anything important and then I saw it on her pillow. Madison liked to wear my T-shirts to bed after I’d worn them, and my favorite Led Zeppelin shirt was folded where she’d left it after sleeping in it. It smelled of her and me. I put it back on her pillow. Maybe it would make her miss me. Then I pissed all over the toilet seat, kissed our two cats goodbye, and placed my keys on the bookshelf by the entrance. The door clicked behind me. “Don’t,” it seemed to say.

  The next two weeks, Madison didn’t call once, and I spent them couch-surfing from one benevolent friend’s living room to many sympathetic others’. Then I heard a rumor that despite her need for space, Madison immediately gave up our apartment and moved in with our landlord, who lived directly above us, this goth guy who was rumored to be the son of Cat Stevens and had yellow contact lenses and fake vampire fangs. I had conversed with him once at a party in the building (he explained he’d had a dentist cement ceramic prosthetics to his canine teeth) and I discovered the fucktard was an aspiring African-wildlif
e-documentary filmmaker (at the party, he told a group of girls: “The Masai believe elephants are the only other animals with souls. How can we be here in Brooklyn, lounging on our Poäng couches, watching reality TV, while poachers are defiling our besouled brethren?”). I can almost hear Madison’s explanation: he understands me, he fills that emptiness, that hole I’ve had inside me all my life.

  I bet.

  Yeah. She let us go, easy as that.

  *

  The next morning, Sadie won’t answer my telephone calls. Outside, there is a strange absence of taxis. I walk to the bus stop. I’m going to be late for my interview with Miss Florentina. A vendor selling barbecued bananas has a radio blaring on the busy corner of Buendia and Makati Avenues.

  An American’s voice, with its now familiar Brooklyn accent, rings out.

  “They will only say that this cowardly act will be punished . . . ,” he exclaims; then he calls democracy a pile of bullshit. His vitriol is astounding. He goes on about how the American population will rise up against the Jews. Then he goes on about how the whites should leave and the blacks will return to Africa and how the Native Americans were the stewards of nature and . . .

  My cell phone goes buzz-buzz in my pocket and I take it out. A text message. Finally, a response from Marcel Avellaneda: Apologies for tardy reply. Been busy directing movie. I’ll be pleased to meet. Am free the time you specified. See you at the Metropolitan Theater. I’ll show you exactly what Crispin did to make me, and everyone, angry. I put my phone away.

  The man’s voice on the radio continues.

  “Death to the U.S.,” he declares. “They are the worst liars and bastards. This is a wonderful day.”

  Station break. A woman sings the familiar cigarette jingle: “There’s a light of hope, when you light a Hope.”