Ilustrado (31 page)

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.”

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-wildlife-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.”

Laser sounds, station identification, then a booming voice. A different commentator from the one earlier says: “You are listening to a replay of the September 12, 2001, telephone interview of chess legend Bobby Fischer, recorded live in Baguio following the World Trade Center attacks. We bring you this replay, compatriots, preceding a new live interview after some words from these sponsors . . .”

I’d heard the rumors. Fischer on the run: long wanted by the U.S. government for breaking an embargo and playing a match in Yugoslavia, enraging American authorities by standing in front of international media and spitting on the U.S. order forbidding him to play. Fischer being found: someone had recognized him, despite his shaggy hair and beard, spotted playing chess with the old lolos in Burnham Park in Baguio City, beating them with superhuman ease. Fischer living in exile: staying with the Filipino grandmaster Eugene Torre, who’d introduced him to Justine Ong, a twenty-two-year-old who later gave birth to Fischer’s daughter, Jinky.

I walk down the street, his rantings drowned out by the grunts and whistles and yells of street life.

What would Crispin say? He had frothed at the mouth after Susan Sontag was publicly crucified for her reaction to the September 11 attacks. That wasn’t a cowardly act, she’d said. Wrong, but not cowardly. Crispin had gotten on his computer to send her an e-mail pledging his agreement and support. When he told me about that incident, I was worried to discover I also agreed. And I grew afraid. What scared me most was the thought of our age’s skewed conception of courage and cowardice and the slippery slope in between. I was frightened that my handy idea of heroism was invalid.

The street vendor squatting by her cart is looking at me. She keeps smiling. She has only three teeth—two on top, one below. I look behind me. Nothing strange. The woman smiles wider now. She struggles up to approach me.

The bus arrives, slows. I sprint to catch it.

*

While Salvador’s relationship with Oscurio deepened over the following years, his intermittent affair with Mitterand would persist with just enough frequency to ensure he refrained from pursuing other romantic liaisons. According to Salvador’s memoir, over his four years in Europe he met with Mitterand whenever she visited Barcelona (which proved often), twice when Salvador overlapped with her in Paris, and on twenty-three different occasions dedicated specifically to their illicit trysts: a rendezvous at the Simplon Pass, skiing on the Matterhorn in Zermatt, summer in Liguria, two “unforgettable trips to London to attend forgettable” plays, a month in the Corsican countryside near Ajaccio, an extended wine tour in the Haute-Loire, a food fest in Essen (ending in a Killepitsch-fueled public spat in Düsseldorf), and other encounters made possible by Gigi’s concert tours and her partnership in Raoul’s purveyorship of delicacies for such shops as Fortnum & Mason, El Corte Inglés, and Fauchon.