Ilustrado (34 page)

“You will?”

“I believe in you. She lives near the Lingayen Gulf. On one of the Hundred Islands. One of the most beautiful places. Have you ever been?”

“I don’t remember it. My grandparents brought me when I was in high school. That’s where my parents died and there’s a memorial. A big steel sculpture in the forest. An angel with broken wings.”

“All the more reason to go.”

“Thank you.” I realize I’m almost crying.

Miss Florentina nods and smiles. “There is a figure in the
Spoliarium
that I think you should see. A woman in the background, just standing there. Wearing a red cloak half wrapped around her face. The way she looks, it’s as if Juan Luna knew Dulcinea when he painted her.”

“Thank you.”

Miss Florentina digs through the junk around her and produces a little pad.

“Now where are my pencils?” she says.

“I have a pen.” I pass it to her.

“I remember this,” she says, looking at the Parker. She writes on the pad, like a doctor making a prescription. “Now I have a question for you, Miguel,” she says. “Why do you think Crispin didn’t seek out his child?”

“He was afraid.”

“I think it was more than that. Forgive this analogy, but I’m an old shutterbug. Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realize that all you needed was to change perspective. That was it. Crispy mistook moving away for moving forward. He lived abroad, thinking it would let him write more honestly. He told me once that he wanted to make himself the best man he could be so that Dulcinea would want to find him. Look what happened.”

“What about the mother?”

“What matters is the child. She has her whole life ahead of her.” Miss Florentina stares at me purposefully.

“What do you know about
The Bridges Ablaze
?”

“Forget that. Go find your Dulcinea.” From her pad, she rips out a page, folds it, and hands it over.

“What about the book?”

“You said it had nothing to do with this.” She looks displeased.

“I’m sorry. I just don’t know who else to see. I’m supposed to see the critic Avellaneda. But I’m sure that will all be . . . you know. You’re the last person who can—”

“Crispin, stop it, child. You never change. Forget our lunch. Just go.”

“Just one more question . . .”

“God so commanded and left that command sole daughter of his voice . . .” She turns to me, her back straight, her face challenging. Her smile very self-satisfied. “Your turn.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Hello? Crispinito?
Paradise Lost
?”

“Yes, but—”

“John Milton. Oh, child, you’re inutile. What is it? ‘Sole daughter of his voice; the rest, we live law to ourselves; our reason is our law.’”

*

“If you believe it, then it can happen,” Kap said, his face shrouded in the smoke from his cigar. Dulcé breathed deeply the scent of cloves and lemons. She swung her legs and tried not to look down from the branch. But she couldn’t help being scared. From that height, the ground seemed miles away. “Just believe,” Kap said, “not that you’ll fly, but that you’re lighter than air. You may not get it right the first time, or even the second time. But I promise I will catch you.” Kap looked at her earnestly.

Dulcé studied him skeptically. Kap wasn’t joking.

Kap certainly was impressive enough to inspire confidence, with his huge, muscular black body and his eyes that glowed like magic rubies. And Dulcé had always admired his facility with the branches. In fact, she’d only seen Kap walk on the ground once, because kapres don’t leave their trees. Ever. That one time Kap saved her from the neighbor’s Rottweiler, Miriam, had been the single exception. And boy, did Kap look awkward, even frightened, even if it was just a sidewalk. It was a deed so uncharacteristic of the kapre race that after Kap swept Dulcé off the ground with a single hand and placed her on the highest branch, after Kap growled at Miriam and sent the dog squealing, after all that, Kap climbed up bashfully and begged Dulcé not to tell anyone. Ever. Kap told Dulcé that he’d know if she betrayed him, because he’d feel it ripple through the airwaves. He’d explained that things like betrayals, lies, even unkind thoughts, send off a shock wave that only those with very sensitive ears and attuned hearts can hear, though every being on earth can feel it, somewhere inside them, even if they don’t know it.

So Dulcé trusted him. Kap was her friend and wouldn’t let her down. Dulcé took a deep breath and did as she was told. She jumped off the branch. She willed herself to stop falling. It didn’t work. The ground closed in. She
willed herself harder. The earth was fast approaching. She willed herself hardest. Dulcé felt Kap’s huge hand around her waist, pulling her slowly and ever so gently so that the tips of her feet touched the ground as easily as if she had just stepped out of bed.

“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 privileged 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.