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  “We’ll try again,” Kap said, patiently. “Learning to fly is very difficult indeed.”

  —from Ay Naku!, Book Three of Crispin Salvador’s Kaputol trilogy

  *

  The 1960s proved to be a hard decade for Salvador. After his return from Europe, following the bitter falling-out with Oscurio over which would suit their country better, Maoism or Trotskyism, Salvador met Petra Chingson, a University of the Philippines political science student. This was to his parents’ chagrin, for she was well known as an activist opposed to foreign involvement in the country. Their disdain for his relationship with Petra, combined with Salvador’s disgust at Junior’s opposition to President Macapagal’s Land Reform Code, pushed the young man to cut ties with his parents for the first of what would be many times in his life. Salvador moved into a one-room apartment above an Ermita noodle house, where he lived penuriously but joyfully with Petra, though gossips talked constantly of how the couple was living in sin.

  The effect Petra had on Salvador became evident. As a cub reporter for The Philippine Gazette, his stories took on a decided bias. On January 22, 1965, Salvador covered the siege of the Philippine Central Bank building. On March 22 of the same year, he fearlessly reported on the Stonehill government scandal, exposing the Chicago businessman Harry Stonehill and his so-called black book, which listed all the Philippine politicians in his pocket (in Autoplagiarist, Salvador writes that his father asked him not to pursue the investigation, lest it implicate the Macapagal administration). Salvador, working for the first time with the young journalist Marcel Avellaneda, won acclaim for the best reportage on the elections in the following months, in which President Macapagal was defeated by the young Ferdinand E. Marcos. Their essay, “The Real Macoy,” supporting the new president, is an example of youthful optimism that history would prove overeager.

  Salvador hit his stride in 1966. His dispatches on the Culatingan Massacre of farmers by military and police garnered much praise, though for the first time the label of “communist sympathizer” was mentioned, with his detractors quick to cite his uncle Jason’s involvement with the Huks as a preclusion to his journalistic objectivity. Later that year, Salvador also reported on the Manila Summit on the Vietnam conflict, and was one of the reporters who broke the news that behind closed doors, U.S. president Lyndon Johnson had bullied leaders and representatives of member countries South Vietnam, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and the Philippines. Salvador’s ballsy coverage resulted in his dismissal from the staff of the Gazette. In December, with Avellaneda, photographer Miggy Jones-Matute, poet Mutya Dimatahimik, and cineaste Danilo de Borja, he cofounded the Cinco Bravos, launching what would be one of the most influential artist collectives in the country’s history.

  In January 1967, Salvador’s beloved Petra disappeared while on her way to an anti-U.S. rally outside Clark Airfield. Various rumors abounded, blaming Marcos, Macapagal, American soldiers, the communists, and random brigands for her disappearance. Her battered body was eventually found, its hands missing, but Salvador could not bring himself to identify it. He left their home above the noodle shop, unable to return even to pack his belongings, and moved into the home of his two best friends, Dimatahimik and Avellaneda.

  —from the biography in progress, Crispin Salvador:

  Eight Lives Lived, by Miguel Syjuco

  *

  On the way to the National Museum, the downpour makes me feel like Chicken Little. I’m soaked, it’s farther than I thought, and my insoles are starting to really hurt my feet for some reason. I dash from the shelter of one tree to another. A woman with a black garbage bag on her head passes, staring at me. She’s wearing a green surgical mask. I race to the next tree. These are strangler figs. Their branches drop long tendrils into the broken sidewalk. The bark looks like the flesh of wax figures. In curves and hollows, shadows pool like water. I see the faces of kapres, of dwendes, of tianaks. I blink. They are gone.

  Up the museum stairs I go, dripping and wet. People look. Two security guards eye me suspiciously. A group of schoolchildren are trying not to point. A man and a woman holding hands by the bag check tighten their grip on each other. They are both wearing surgical masks.

  Up the winding wooden stairs to the second level. Signs direct me. I stop by the bathroom to do a bump of coke off my key. I do another, and feel better. I haven’t been sleeping well. In the viewing room, tourists take turns reading a notice: Juan Luna’s obra maestra is “currently unavailable to the public during restoration.”

  On the big blank wall, the curators have provided a concise history of the painting’s creation, significance, and ongoing resurrection, as well as a small facsimile. It’s the same size as the print that hung in Crispin’s office.

  I study the tableau.

  In a chamber beneath a coliseum, two corpses of gladiators are dragged across the flagstones by bare-chested servants, who are angled forty-five degrees to the ground from the effort. In the darkness, a pile awaits these still-warm bodies. A heap of dented helmets and armor sits in a corner. A gray-haired man bends over, bony back exposed, sharpening something, presumably a blade, on a stone that sparks. A young woman collapses, exhausted, on the floor. Her pose echoes that of the old man, though her bedraggled hair over her face and her robe slipped from her shoulder attest to a sudden buckling from either overwhelming hopelessness or a seizure of grief. Because the woman sits in the foreground, within the light, she is, in her robes of white and greenish blue, the brightest figure in the painting—a beacon of despair.

  I wonder if the painting haunts its restorers.

  On the left side of the image, an elderly couple, thin and breakable, hold each other’s arms and stare, faces shattered, at a corpse being pulled by a rope looped around his wrist, his head lolling backward, his lifeless body just moments ago godlike with youth. Beside them, a man is being pushed aside by a servant dragging yet another corpse as if it were trash for Monday morning pickup. The man being shoved has recoiled in terror, at once stepping back while his head moves down in recognition and disbelief.

  Inch by inch, figure by figure, the restorers must go mad.

  Behind these figures, a dim stairway is crowded with innumerable faces, some merely curious, others expectant. The ways they fight their own expressions remind me of the famous mirror in the Van Eyck painting of the Arnolfini marriage: what is reflected is the key to what is really happening.

  These are the faces that must follow the restorers home. Appearing in the dim jeepneys on the dark streets, or in the steam of the rice boiling for dinner, or in the void behind closed eyes before sleep comes.

  Then I spot her face in the crowd: the woman in the red robe. Her garment is hooded around her head to cover her mouth. She seems to stare at me. Expressionless or serene. Waiting. Hiding or defiant. Patient. The only thing I’m certain of is that she possesses an answer.

  *

  INTERVIEWER:

  Then what do you think must, or can, be done?

  CS:

  Activism, revolution, violence, even death, will be acceptable, if we are expected to condone the government’s neglect and oppression of the people. Because every action will eventually have an equal and opposite reaction. It is a moral balance. Of course, I speak from a country whose systems were imported from other nations. So what is sacrosanct here [in the United States] is not necessarily so where I come from. We’re told to trust in the abstract absolutes of faith, politically and religiously. Good in theory. But an abstract like truth is always incomplete truth. Freedom would be wonderful if it was available to all. And democracy is but an experimental system complete with its flaws. Capitalism is the most suspect of these abstracts, made absolute only because of its stamina. Since when has a system of private vice made for public virtue? A lack of options should never force the acceptance of one particular option. Humanity should be more imaginative, more responsible, than that.

  INTERVIEWER:

  But you yourself came from a pri
vileged background. Some say you are a traitor to your kind.

  CS:

  Traitor to my class, but faithful to a broad humanity. Ugh, I sound falsely heroic. But heroism and sainthood aren’t lofty things. They’re usually formed out of self-disgust, opportunism, sublimated fears—which we recognize in ourselves and therefore see, emphasized, in others. When who you are includes what you hate, you carry around your neck a daily reminder of what must be changed in the world. Every good is married to the threat of something bad. Our current president, Corazon Aquino, however saintly she may seem, is married to the threat of what preceded her, the Marcos dictatorship. To exist in the good alone is to suffer from self-delusion and self-righteousness. Concupiscence is part of who we are. Orwell said of Gandhi that saints should be presumed guilty until proven innocent. Just because I was presumed guilty by my countrymen doesn’t mean I was or am or will ever be a saint. But it says much about those who make such accusations.

  —from a 1988 interview in The Paris Review

  *

  Our naive protagonist runs through the rain, from museum to tree, from tree to bus station. Dripping wet, he takes his notebook from his backpack. Unscrews his pen and curls over the page. The boy writes.

  For Eight Lives Lived: Salvador once wrote of it as a . . .

  He slows. Watches the black ink flow from the nib of the Parker Vacumatic. It’s like a river through snow, he thinks. Like necromancy. The words run across the page.

  . . . metaphor for the condition of the Philippines under Imperial Spain. The Spoliarium is considered a paragon . . .

  The boy pauses. He crosses out “paragon.”

  . . . a sine qua non . . .

  He stops, thinks. Reminds himself to check whether he’s using the phrase correctly. Resumes.

  . . . of Philippineness, though most Filipinos, including myself, have not seen it in person, with it either in Spanish custody or hidden away in our own National Museum . . .

  Sculptural letters land in quick succession, the blur of type bars, an old pair of veinous hands move, like a conjurer’s, over the keys, the carriage reaches its limit. A bell sounds.

  . . . Indeed, the Spoliarium is an icon whose inscrutability most Filipinos do not care for or truly understand. Its success is its insolence: the thirteen-by-twenty-two-foot painting won the gold medal in the 1884 Exposición Nacional de Bellas Artes in Madrid, beating the Spaniards at their own game—they who considered us indios and savages . . .

  The ink flow lessens and he shakes his pen. It runs smoothly again.

  . . . This morbid view of the depths of a lost civilization is our great keeping-up-with-the-Joneses. In this—its historicity, its infamy, the blank wall where it should be hanging, the blurry facsimile and ungrammatical accompanying blurb—within these, in toto, one sees the allegory for the current state of Salvador’s nation. Yet in its center, there stands a quiet figure that may have been of profound meaning to the Panther in exile.

  A bell sounds again. The letters continue their staccato pace and on the page appears an asterisk.

  *

  I hop on a bus heading toward the Lupas Place Mall. I want to find an Internet cafe to check my e-mail before meeting with Avellaneda. My spam box has been filled with crap and I still haven’t received an answer from [email protected].

  The bus is crowded and smells like soggy trouser hems. A pudgy young man holds a handkerchief over his mouth and nose and stares at his high-tech cell phone. It goes boing-boing. He presses a button and the screen lights up. The man starts making squeaking noises, bubbles over, and shouts: “Hoy! Listen to this!” He reads from his phone. “Breaking news. Arrests at Lakandula siege. Be the good Lord’s vessels for change and stand with brothers and sisters. Tune to AM stations for unfolding events.” Somebody calls out, “A radio, who has a radio?” We all turn to the bus driver, who shrugs and points at a brand-new six-disc CD changer duct-taped to the dashboard. The pudgy young man holds up his phone like the Statue of Liberty. It’s switched to speaker and a radio commentator says something about the Changco couple. Passengers shush each other until the bus is so filled with shushes that nobody can hear the radio.

  Finally, silence, and the reporter’s tinny baritone rings loudly: “. . . crowd erupted after a young woman ran in front of the battering ram and was the third person forcibly detained by authorities. During the commotion, shots were heard from within the house. We are awaiting word of any casualties. It is believed Mr. Lakandula still controls the hostages. Police have done their best to calm the crowd. In other news, the Chinese influenza continu—”

  The passengers moan in unison and a woman begins to cry hysterically: “My God, my Jesus, my Mary, have pity on poor Wigbertito!” An old office worker in a Christmas-themed Bart Simpson necktie pats her shoulders. A meticulously dressed man shouts: “But he’s so handsome!” Another fellow up front tells the driver to let him off at the curb. Five others stand to join him. One raises his arms and cries: “Free Lakandula!” The whole bus cheers as the six of them run into the storm, their hands placed atop their heads in utter futility.

  *

  When Boy Bastos was still a sperm in Erning’s testicle, he was already precocious. One day, he tells his fellow sperms to get ready because he feels the current moving them forward. Boy Bastos, being Boy Bastos, leads the pack. As he is about to shoot forth from Erning’s shaft, he shouts, “Go back, go back, it’s only tonsils!” The next day, he feels the current moving again and leads the pack once more, this time imbued with an exuberant sense of purpose. At the last instant, he shouts again, “Go back, go back! It’s only condom!” The following day, the current flows, and Boy swims forward with temerity, convinced this must be his time to fly forth. Suddenly, he turns back, shouting desperately, “Go back, go back! It’s shit!”

  *

  Overheard on the bus:

  “Pare, have you heard the latest news?”

  “Jellyfish ate Vita Nova?”

  “No! Nuredin Bansamoro met with President Estregan.”

  “Are you kidding? They’re sworn nemeses.”

  “Well, Bansamoro says to him: Mr. President, please accept this Mercedes-Benz as a peace offering. I hope you’ll make me your vice president in the coming election.”

  “And?”

  “Estregan says: Sorry, I don’t accept bribes.”

  “No way!”

  “And Senator Bansamoro says: Okay. Then I’ll just sell it to you for one peso.”

  “Wait! Wait! I can guess the punch line! Estregan tells Bansamoro: Fine. At that price, I’ll take two!”

  *

  Thanks for the e-mails guys. Things are well, though lots of rain, and the Christmas season’s made the traffic nightmarish. I’m safe and sound, so quit worrying about the bombings. Thanks, Charlotte, for cc’ing everyone re the advice about my feet. I’m pretty sure it has something to do with my insoles getting wet. I appreciate your suggestion, but I can’t believe peeing on my feet in the shower will make them smell better. I’ll let you know how that goes. (This better not be a prank!)

  Honestly, I don’t give a sheezy about what’s going on with Grapes. It figures that he would get caught up in something like this Philippines First crap. (BTW, did you see his picture with Reverend Martin?) His link to PhilFirst isn’t in the papers yet (bet he’s paying a shedload to keep it out), but we all know his allegiance with Dinkdong Changco runs deep—PhilFirstCorp’s biggest factory is in his province, for pete’s sake. Yeah, I know politics shouldn’t surprise me. But sometimes I still hope—sometimes when I write about a grandfather (or any father figure) based on Grapes and his crazy ways, I try, for the sake of creating a three-dimensional character, to see things his way. I see him as a patriarch who funded his children and their children (sure, sometimes grudgingly) in anything they wanted to study, become, and do. I see the man whom I played with when I was a child, who was proud of me and wanted the best for me (despite all our differences, that was never in doubt). I see
someone who, no matter what we did, took us back in the end (sure, he screamed, of course he screamed). I see a man who had big dreams but failed in most through his own hubris. I find myself crying when I write those fictitious father figures into life on the page, and yet I’ve never been able to allow myself to cry for Grapes. And when I’m done writing, I’m surprised I feel compassion for him, and yes, even sympathy.

  Sorry I’m rambling. Thing is, while I try to disconnect myself (as I have), while I try to forget that fight in the hotel room when they kicked me out, and forget my hate, and turn it into empowering disinterest, I find that what returns with the sympathy is this odd feeling of hope. I try to disconnect myself, but I know that when I one day earn my PhD, instead of being proud (though he’ll say he is), he’ll instead remark: “Oh, I have four,” even if they are all honoris causa from provincial schools. I know that when I write my book, instead of being proud of my years of hard work (though he’ll say he is), he’ll remark: “Oh, I’ve written five,” even if someone ghostwrote them and public funds were used to publish them. I know that it’s not a competition—and if it was, I’d win by default by simply not caring. And so I try not to care. How can someone try not to care?

  I’d rather see our grandfather fail with dignity than succeed with such toadying. My view of politics and the opportunities he extended to me would be very different had he ever made a public stand for something nobler than his vested interest and good intentions. Seeing him dragged into this PhilFirst stuff, seeing him drag Granma into politics by making her take over the governorship when none of us wanted it, seeing him drag our good name through the mud by allying one year with Estregan and Changco and the next year with Reverend Martin and Bansamoro, or whoever the revolving door has connected him with over the decades—it all makes me doubt him even more. I think his helping the country is just a way to satisfy his own view of self (Is a selfless act ever unselfish? Can a selfish man never be selfless?). Sure, he’s rich enough not to steal, so Granma says. But still. Once, Grapes was a just man of promise. Now, he’s just a man of compromise.