Ilustrado Read online

  —from Manila Noir (page 57), by Crispin Salvador

  *

  A woman cries out from the rear of the plane, silencing the applause. Seat belts click, click, click. Passengers rush to the windows on the right. Over someone’s head I can see, beyond the gleaming new terminal, rain clouds, dark and heavy. Two pillars of evil black smoke, clambering up in the distance, seem to hold the heavens up. At their feet, fire.

  2

  These are the broad themes: enigmas, dreams, mythologies, the tyranny of absence, the shortcomings of language, deciduous memories, endings as beginnings.

  —from Autoplagiarist (page 188), by Crispin Salvador

  *

  That part about my seatmate in the plane and his wad of falling money didn’t happen exactly as I recounted. That last bit about his coming home for his children, that wasn’t accurate, either. If I had spoken to him, I reckon that’s what he’d have said. In a way, I wrote that part for him. He became more than the guy beside me with annoying manners. What I said that he said to me, I could see that in him. But no, I didn’t talk to him. When he tried to strike up a conversation, I closed my eyes and pretended to be dreaming.

  From this point on, I should promise to tell the truth.

  *

  During Crispin’s last months we became closer than I expected. I even reached the point of being able to cuss in his company. The friendship started with me doing a profile on him for my class with Lis Harris. Crispin and I would sit stiffly formal, a tape recorder like a string of barbed wire between us, always at some coffee shop or restaurant. Usually Tom’s Restaurant on Broadway, the one they always used in Seinfeld. I finished the semester and turned in the profile. I had a feeling Crispin wanted to see it, though he didn’t ask and I didn’t offer. A couple of weeks after our last interview I was finally invited into his office for a cup of Lapsang souchong and some madeleines. He was visibly more at ease now that he was no longer under scrutiny. His smile, I noticed, was unexpectedly shy. We sat and nibbled and talked about stuff. I don’t remember what. Books, probably. Writing. Crumbs clung to the front of his argyle sweater. When I saw him the next day they were still there.

  I don’t know if it was from need or whether he actually liked me, but we started to hang out often. In the beginning I felt uncomfortable, the way one does when first spending time with the obviously lonely. Crispin was a fixture on the busy campus, and his solitude was as familiar to everyone as the bronze Alma Mater statue. Every morning and afternoon he would lope up and down the steps between Butler Library and his office in Philosophy Hall—his countenance rueful, his attire that of a flaneur with tenure. He reminded me of the way a Tokyoite looks in a cowboy hat, though Crispin somehow almost succeeded with his affectation of brown tweeds and a wilting red fedora with a green feather in its band. Always a variation of that outfit, no matter what the weather; always a notebook covered in orange suede tucked under his arm. Usually he’d be staring into an open book; I watched with a mix of anxiety and guilty anticipation to see whether he’d trip or be hit on the head with a football or Frisbee.

  During our interviews, however, he was lucid and confident. He held court on such subjects as the primacy of literature as “the art, the record, of the human condition”; or the “arbitrary scrim” between fiction and nonfiction; or the ailments of our national literature; or the challenges of literary bricolage as a narrative structure. I learned much from Crispin, though a lot of the things he went on about passed over my head. But he was one of those teachers who, by a kind of osmosis, helped you discover the quantity of areas in your life in which you are still so ignorant as not to have even considered forming a wrong opinion.

  In his mind, the trivial shared equal prestige with the academic, and his sudden flaring intensities, set off by a word, an image, a private thought, made his conversation unpredictable. Listening, you lived vicariously within the corners of a kind of universal mind, the near and far reaches of the universe, the infinite expanses of the ages. An idle conversation could, for example, and did once, stretch elegantly from fractals to the complex etymologies of Filipino slang to the honest agonies of self-doubt in Steinbeck’s diaries, then onward to the intimate but epic histories of Herodotus and the challenge of fitting reality “into the lacy corset of language,” to the shortcomings of Rousseau’s ideal of the noble savage, and then forward to José Rizal’s reversal of the Spanish derogatory indio into a mark of pride as “Los Indios Bravos,” and comparing such self-conscious flippings of meaning to African-Americans’ exclusive appropriation of the word “nigger”; from there Crispin lingered on Australian Aboriginals and their dot paintings as “the last frontier of modern art,” before growing flushed over the geologic wonders extant from prehistoric terra australis incognita; he proceeded to their echidnas, platypuses, and other zoological oddities, then the creative urges of the larger animal world, epitomized by the phenomenon of cats and elephants painting; then he riffed on the pinnacle of sensuality in the softness of Bernini’s Baroque marbles, the impression of the rapist Pluto’s fingers on Persephone’s supple thighs, Daphne’s gradual then startling transformation into a laurel tree as you circle her fleeing Apollo; finally, Crispin grew agitated over José Honorato Lozano’s Letras y Figuras paintings, which, he said, ingeniously combined landscape, still life, typography, and thematic tableaux into an artistic concession to the vanities of nineteenth-century Manila socialites. All this over chipotle nachos before our cheese-burgers arrived.

  Crispin’s monologues attained velocity in that way. His Comp Lit lectures, with students spilling out the doorway, were legendary for their gee-whiz fervor, violent digressions, miraculous convergences. Yet he struck me as possessing the self-centeredness of the calcified lonesome. During our first casual conversations, he chose his words with caution. Only after a few meetings did his focus shift away from discussing himself. That’s not to say it moved to me. No. It bounded past, to another realm he found more familiar, the wondrous specifics of the great cosmologies. More than twice he jumped up to shift piles of books around, sending the topmost tumbling down, just to leaf to a spicy passage which he’d recite from memory anyway, with closed-eyed gusto. I had to strain to hear the incantations from Cid Hamete Benengeli, Julián Carax, John Shade, Randolph Henry Ash. Then he would sit in silence, soaking it up. Never did he ask how my weekend went. Rarely did he solicit my opinion, except perhaps to pass judgment on me.

  When Crispin went on and on, I would sometimes tune out, watching his hands gesticulate. Each was scarred bizarrely. The tissue, the size of a dime, was raised and silky, right in the center on the front and back of each hand. Like stigmata. Such personal mysteries intrigued me.

  When the conversation would inevitably lapse, we’d sit and stare at the large poster over his desk, Juan Luna’s masterpiece, the Spoliarium— its dead Roman gladiators being dragged across the floor of a coliseum’s subchamber, the faces of onlookers filled with grief, shock, disinterest, gothic fascination. At such times, I studied Crispin out of the corner of my eye, hunched, tired, in his squeaking chair in a tiny office that smelled like a goat wearing expensive aftershave, and I wondered about the road that had taken him to this point.

  *

  That evening, Erning Isip, the student from AMA Computer College, is still hanging out with his friends from Ateneo and La Salle. They drink and watch the Purefoods vs. Shell game in a beer garden near Padre Burgos, Makati’s red-light district. The student from Ateneo regales them with his dream of being a Supreme Court judge. The student from La Salle intimates that he’d like one day to run a shipping empire. Erning Isip tells them about how he’s behind in tuition payments. A particularly skanky girl passes, wearing a micro-mini denim skirt, a halter that reveals her muffin-top belly, long straight hair to the small of her back, and those precarious Plexiglas stilettos popular with dancers of the exotic discipline.

  The Atenenista says: “My God! A veritable Whore of Babylon!”

  The Lasallista says: �
��Nyeh! What a puta!”

  Erning Isip stares at the woman for some time. Then he exclaims: “Uy! My classmate from Intro to HTML!”

  *

  “It’s been nearly a year,” Granma said. “Isn’t it time you made peace?”

  “It’s only been eight months,” I said.

  “Why don’t you come home and spend Christmas with us?”

  “How’s Granddud?” The line was bad and there was a lag in our sentences.

  “He’s still your grandfather,” Granma said. I heard the honking of a horn, the clicking of a turn signal. “Not here,” she said to the driver. “Enter at the Tamarind Street gate.”

  “New York is beautiful, Granma. Fifth Avenue is all lit up for Christmas and it’s not even December yet. I wish you were here. How’s life as governor?”

  “Hello, can you hear me? The line’s cutting out.”

  “Granma? Hello? I said, how’s the governorship?”

  “Great, actually. You would have enjoyed it. It would have made your grandfather so happy.”

  “Granma . . .”

  “And your father would have looked down from heaven and been so proud. Because you’d be a statesman, just like he was.”

  “Granma, please, don’t—”

  “It’s very fulfilling, you know. It keeps me awfully busy. Which is good. Especially in this season, when everyone wants something from you.”

  “I heard about the president’s latest scandal.”

  “Which one?”

  “The links to the bombings.”

  “Oh. That will pass.”

  “There are others?”

  “Each one is the same. They’re always trying to impeach him. Always suspecting him of being on the verge of declaring martial law. But their parliament of the streets is just mob rule.”

  “So the scandals aren’t true?”

  “What’s true?”

  “That he’s on the verge of declaring—?”

  “I meant, what’s true?”

  “Aw, Granma, can’t you do anything? Aren’t there people in government who . . . I don’t know. People like you.”

  “Oh, sweetheart. What can anyone do? That’s just the way things are. You really think you can change the world?”

  “I can be part of the change.”

  “What would you change?”

  “Everything.”

  “What would be different?”

  “I don’t know. It would just be better.”

  “I don’t think we can really change anything. It’s too difficult.”

  “Granma, please don’t say that.”

  “Anyway, I’m home already. Your grandfather’s home. I have to go before he sees me on the phone.”

  “You don’t have to tell him it was me.”

  “I better go. What time is it there in New York? You better get to bed.”

  “Bye, Granma.”

  “I love you, Miguelito.”

  “Love you, too.”

  *

  But Dominador is like a bull. He pushes Antonio off with his powerful arms. With a press of the button, the villain unsheathes his switchblade. “I’m going to stick this in your gut,” he growls, “and turn you on like a tap.” Our hero reaches to draw his trusty pistol, but doesn’t. It wouldn’t be fair. Dominador sneers. “Where’s your big gun?” he says. Antonio smiles. “Here in my pants,” he replies. “But I don’t take it out for ugly pigs like you.” He assumes a kung fu stance and motions Dominador closer. His opponent closes in, slicing the air between them.

  —from Manila Noir (page 57), by Crispin Salvador

  *

  I pass the night at a cheap pension near the Manila airport. My flight to Bacolod leaves early tomorrow.

  The traffic was too heavy to venture farther. I sat in the back of a taxi as it inched along a cordon of traffic cones, across the broad highway from a wall of fire swallowing blocks of shanties. Black shades of men and their hulking machines moved and shimmered against the backdrop of wrestling yellows and reds and oranges. In places, spires of brilliant blue leaped and twirled and fell and shifted colors. The taxi driver and I sat transfixed, our faces pressed to the warm windows. “Two more blasts,” said the Bombo Radyo announcer, in his rapid-fire Tagalog, “at the duty-free store outside Ninoy Aquino International Airport have resulted in fires spreading to nearby residences. Let us hope, my friends, and let us pray, that the rains will aid the brave firefighters in their heroic task.”

  A couple of times when Crispin went on about his exile being heroic, I began to wonder. What was it really that kept him from returning to Manila? I even asked him once, and he said living abroad was harder. That it took more guts to be an international writer. But there was always a lack of conviction in his voice. A defensiveness. Could it be that he had just grown too soft for a city such as this, a place possessed by a very different balance? Here, need blurs the line between good and bad, and a constant promise of random violence sticks like humidity down your back. Wholly different from the zeitgeist lining the Western world, with its own chaos given order by multitudes of films and television shows, explained into our communal understanding by op-ed pieces and panel discussions and the neatness of stories linked infinitely to each other online. Had Crispin grown to love the mythology too much, the way Emma Bovary loved romances? Like a hermit with a credit card and a telephone, Crispin sat back and dismissed what was happening outside his door. “The beggars have changed, but the lash goes on,” he said, “and armchair guerrillas have taken to the jungles of cyberspace. Everything’s now so Hollywood, the world is lopsided. No wonder it revolves.”

  I disagreed. Maybe because I was younger and post-postcolonial, I knew that even if it rotated askew, it was still one world. When a butterfly flapped its wings in Chile, a child soldier killed for the first time in Chad, a sale was made on Amazon.com, and a book arrived in two days to divulge the urgencies outside our lives. Sure, having moved from Manila to New York, I saw that the global village had made it, ironically, easier for me and my friends to continue with our lives unhindered: tuning out on iPods made in China; heeding the urgings to revitalize the economy by shopping; attending rallies only if we didn’t miss too many classes, because a competitive job market or student loans stood like chaperones beside our consciences. But we also took fervid stances on issues burning up the blogs, even if engaged from the safety of our homes, our windows wrapped in plastic and duct tape. My friends and those like us monitored Fox News constantly, trying to understand the hypocrisy of the enemy, relishing our feelings of superiority before changing the channel to search for whatever subjectivity we found most satiating. Sure, we abandoned the Philippines, inhabited Manhattan, and claimed the deserted nighttime streets, always in an incredulous state of self-congratulation for what we would one day do. Sure, we went out constantly, driven by our fear of either missing out or dying lonely or simply growing old. Sure, we sat in Alphabet City bars, amid juke box music and cigarette smoke, sucking down PBRs and arm-wrestling each other in debates on homeland security and human rights in a country that still wouldn’t give us green cards. Sure, each night we staggered home, unfired, unglazed, already broken without knowing it. But at least we were trying.

  Around that time the Philippines was listed by Western governments as a terrorist hot spot, though many Filipinos scoffed. Asphyxiating a poor country’s vital tourist industry because a handful of Muslim rebels are playing hide-and-seek in the southern jungles of Jolo is like warning tourists not to visit Disneyland because of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama. Crispin not only ridiculed the warning, dismissing it with the air of having seen it all before, but he also shrugged off the ubiquitous stories of quashed coups and extralegal killings that we in the know recognize as the more pressing, if less sensational, concerns.

  And I forgave him that. Even if I thought he was running away from something by living abroad. Maybe I excused him because he was a man who’d already made many a stand, perhaps one too many, and it was now the er
a for people like me to step up. Or maybe I admired him because he had graduated into a different role. When Crispin spoke about his writing, he wielded adroitly a life sharpened by learning, defending a ferocious belief that merely being in touch with today is limited, even juvenile—in the way that this morning’s newspaper is revealed as tonight’s fish-and-chips wrapping when works like One Hundred Years of Solitude or, indeed, Autoplagiarist are picked off the shelf. A man with battered hands is shown to be a craftsman only when he puts them to work.

  Yes, I gave him that. Because TBA was supposed to reach for more than a thousand young Turks like me ever could. But when the bombings reached the cities, when our relatives at home were afraid to go to the malls, then Crispin’s indifference really disappointed. We the young are necessarily impatient with our elders’ patience. How are they so serene when they have so much less time than we do? I hoped Crispin would have looked in the mirror one morning and said: You obsolete old bastard. And that would have spurred him to a final assault. But that time I questioned him about the toothlessness of exile, he paused, then replied: What can one do?

  The scent of fire is pleasant. It wafts into my room at the pension, through the vent of the gargling air-conditioner unit. Despite myself, I enjoy it. The odor of burned homes, chilled by Freon, is wintry, like Vancouver memories of s’mores and campfire stories. I still can’t sleep. Two cockroaches climb the far wall, their antennae waving at each other. A drunk unheroic tenor belts Vita Nova love songs from the karaoke bar downstairs. I sit in bed, read my notes, and prepare tomorrow’s questions for Crispin’s sister, Lena. Later, the silence after closing time uncovers the cries of sirens still blazing in the distance. Thunder sunders all. Wind pelts rain on the jalousie windows with such force it sounds like a riot.