Ilustrado (35 page)

—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.

No, Mario, I can’t, as you say, “fix things for the sake of peace.” I don’t want to be a hypocrite. (Though, of course, there’s our guilt that his failure stems from all those years exiled abroad as he raised us.) I have sympathy, and therefore I have sadness. But what will happen to him when all this PhilFirstCorp business blows up? Probably not a thing. The thing is,
we’ll
know about the stands he didn’t take.

I’m sorry for this rant. But you guys asked how things are going.

—e-mail from me to my siblings, December 7, 2002

*

The balimbing, known in Spanish as the
carambola
and in English as the star fruit, is a grass green to straw yellow fruit with almost luminescent, rubbery flesh. Growing to about four inches long, it has five longitudinal angular lobes and, when sliced, its pieces form perfect star shapes. The fruit tastes tart and clean and contains iron, vitamins B and C, oxalate, and potassium. A poultice of its leaves is often used to treat ringworm, while a tea of its seeds is a tonic for asthma and intestinal gas. Due to the fruit’s many sides, or faces, the term “balimbing” is often used disparagingly to refer to politicians and traitors, though in my mind it can also refer to the versatile, Janus-like character of the Filipino. While our national fruit is officially the mango, arbitrarily mandated by the Americans during their occupation, it is not a long bow to draw to propose the balimbing as the country’s unofficial fruit, due to its metaphoric significance.

—from
My Philippine Islands
(with 80 color plates)
, by Crispin Salvador

*

INTERVIEWER:

You’ve written about regret. It seems to be a touchstone for you. What is your biggest regret?

CS:

What a question! The deepest regrets are the most personal. If I haven’t sufficiently shared it via my writing, then maybe it should remain unspoken.

INTERVIEWER:

There must be something you wish you could have done better.

CS:

Fine. Perhaps speaking of it here will help absolve me. My father had an opponent—a nemesis—Respeto Reyes. A good man, it turns out. Very influential, except his uncompromising morals made his political career difficult. If he had not been such a good man he would have become president. Such is our country. But when I started my career as a journalist—this was shortly after I left my parents’ home, 1964 I think—part of me wanted to please my father still. You see, it had always been Junior Salvador versus Respeto Reyes, an ongoing Thrilla in Manila. And don’t we spend our
lives trying to please our parents, even when we’re trying to stick it to them? My father raised me to hate his enemies. My first writing job was helping my father with his speeches. We used all sorts of dirty tricks. Insinuated Reyes’s homosexuality, which was something completely unfounded. Purported that since Reyes had never been linked to any shadiness or wrong-doing, then he must be particularly vile, better at hiding his own dirt than anyone else. You see the skewed logic, no? Even after I left home, I
still
wrote articles against Reyes. For example, when he was imprisoned and tortured by Marcos in the seventies, I wrote that sometimes even a bad dictator has a good day. I just couldn’t understand. Couldn’t see, for decades, what a statesman Reyes was proving to be. I tell you, even when you hate your parents, you still end up defending them to the end. It’s a hopeful act more than it is dutiful or conciliatory. The truth is that the disappointment you feel toward your parents testifies to the excess of faith you always had in them.

Alas, I’ve never been able to rectify my actions against Reyes. That is the one and only thing I’ve ever truly regretted in my life.

—from a 1988 interview in
The Paris Review

*

My final meeting is in fifteen minutes. Then all that’s left is to seek out Dulcinea.

This interview with Marcel Avellaneda may be a scoop. Nobody’s ever said what sparked his animosity toward Crispin. They feuded as only former best friends can.

I took the wrong jeepney to the theater and had to walk. After wandering the labyrinthine streets, my feet really starting to kill me, I found the theater. First I saw its spires and pinnacles, and then its facade, pink and white like a seashell amid the gray flotsam of buildings. I couldn’t get in, its birds-of-paradise grillwork was shut tight. Finally, I found a gate with a rusted lock that opened.

I turn on my cell phone to use as a flashlight.

Inside the lobby, it is like stepping into sepia, with sunlight filtering through stained-glass windows and lingering on the soaring ceiling and Art Deco embellishments. But exposed wiring hangs where fixtures should be, and debris is piled high enough to block entrances to rooms that may well never be visited again. A strange place for a meeting. Thick dust has gathered like snow on the black
skin of a reclining statue. I hear something beyond some double doors. An old man’s voice.