Ilustrado (5 page)

—from
Manila Noir
(page 53), by Crispin Salvador

*

E-mail from me to Crispin: Gee whiz, Mr. Wilson! I can’t help but think Madison could’ve paid me half what she paid her therapists to diagnose her borderline personality disorder. It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness. My lolo was recently diagnosed with Freudian narcissism. He then had his secretary do research on the Net. Instead of finding all the bad in it, of course he saw only the good. “All great leaders are narcissists,” he exclaimed to my grandmother. So rather than buy all the books about how the disorder can be overcome, and how they hurt the people around them, he bought
The Victorious Narcissist
—a book about the triumphant qualities of Nero, Napoleon, Hitler, Saddam, etc. Hell, Grapes even bought a copy to give to President Estregan as a Christmas gift. LOL! Wonder how he’ll take it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not angry with my grandfather. To be angry implies you care. I just feel sorry for him. Anyway, I’ll be late for our bacon-cheeseburger date. You’ll have to tell me the gory details of your trip home and that speech at the CCP. I’m dying of curiosity.

*

“Fittingly, my father’s name was Narciso,” Salvador wrote in
Autoplagiarist
. “At one time, somewhere in the lineage before him, the name possessed the tragedy of the myth and the irony that such a name could be possessed by such a man so distinctly unnarcissistic. Upon my father, however, all such nuance had been lost: it was as if to him the name was bespoke, and the very act of christening him ‘Narciso’ authored a parody of a sacred sacrament, wherein one is named for his essence, for that worst characteristic by which he would be forever remembered. In fact, he is belittled further as ‘Junior,’
in that unabashed, and strangely Filipino, habit of giving ignominious nicknames. A self-fulfilling prophecy: try as he did, he was damned forever to be the tiny narcissus.”

—from the biography in progress,
Crispin Salvador:
Eight Lives Lived
, by Miguel Syjuco

*

“You’re the most handsome of all my grandchildren,” Grapes would often tell me. I never knew how to reply, so I smiled the smile of a shy child basking in attention. I of course didn’t believe him. I was afraid to.

“You are the most handsome because you’re the one who looks most like me,” he’d say. Then: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“The sergeant of the army.”

Grapes laughed, amused to no end. “Not the president of the Philippines?”

“Whichever is higher.”

“I’ll be president,” he’d say, “and you can be the sergeant of the army.”

He would pick me up with an exaggerated grunt and carry me to my own bed. He smelled of Old Spice and pipe tobacco, which, I realize now, are more of those comforting clichés. But that’s really what he smelled like.

“All right, Sarge,” he would say, tucking me in. It became his pet name for me. We all had them, his private names that made us each his unique grandchild. Jesu was “Groovy.” Claire was “Reina.” Mario was “Smiley.” Charlotte was “Princessa.” Jerald was “The Plum.” I was Sarge. Maybe it’s not “was” but “is.” I don’t know.

A lifetime later, Madison would call me “Beauty.” She’d look at me in bed, touch my face with her fingertips, as if afraid of breaking it, and she’d tell me: “You are a beautiful man.” I of course believed her. I was afraid not to.

Every night, under the covers, her foot would be pressed against mine. We always wanted to spoon but, because of my troublesome cervical curve and my orthopedic pillow, I had to lie on my back if I didn’t want neck pain the next day. We touched feet through the
night, a gesture of reassurance that we’d stand together through the darkest.

“I love you,” I’d say.

“I love you, too.”

“Do you love me more than I love you?”

“Yeah.”

“Good,” I’d say, sliding into the edge of sleep. “See you in a minute.”

“G’night,” she’d say. “In our dreams then.”

I never told her that I don’t have dreams or can’t remember whether I do.

*

From Marcel Avellaneda’s blog, “The Burley Raconteur,” February 14, 2002:

Happy Valentine’s all! But let’s get to the point: The nerve of that Salvador, no?! The biggest sin a Pinoy can commit is arrogance. Yes, dear readers, you may have already heard the latest literary scuttlebutt about our former comrade and compatriot Crispin’s most recent visit to our shores. Last Friday’s awards ceremony at the Cultural Center of the Philippines was marred when his acceptance speech turned into a tirade against our literature and a threat to publish something that would “lop your heads off.” How we’d hoped he’d mellowed. How I’d hoped my old friend would return humbled by failures. Autoplagiarist? (He should have ripped off from someone else.) There is a time and place for everything, my dear old Crisp. Haven’t you learned that by now
?
For those interested, literary blogger Plaridel3000 has posted a clip of Salvador’s speech on his weblog
here
.

Some posts from the message boards below:

—Wat a twatface that Salvador is! Lets c wat his so-called
The Bridges Ablaze
has 2 say. I herd it hits at the Lupases, Changcos, Arroyos, Syjucos, Estregans, among others. ([email protected])

—It’s sooo sad a man like Salvador has lost himself to hubris. Shouldn’t literature do more than just criticize? Goes to show he doesn’t have the answers. ([email protected])

—LOL! More power to you, Marcel! Lop the head off that commie. IMHO, he’s in with the Muslims for sure. ([email protected])

—Hey, kts@ateneo, I think you are correct. But in fairness, do any of us have answers? ([email protected])

—Love dat clip of his speech. Hilarious. Check out the yellow armpit stains in his barong! ([email protected])

—How do you get rid of pit stains like that anyway? My bf has stains like that. ([email protected])

—Dilute a T-spoon vinegar in cup of water, den apply carefuly w/ basting brush. Should work gr8. Ur wlcm! ([email protected])

—Halabira, I hab d answr to r cuntry’s probs: just kill d rich & reboot d systm. ([email protected])

—Gundamlover, that’s been tried before. See:
en.wikipedia.org/Khmer_Rouge
. ([email protected])

*

Out of the corner of my eye, I look at my seatmate again. His head is nodding, slumping away from me. My little bottle of alcogel peeks from his breast pocket. My hand hovers to fish it out. I decide against it. Instead, I try to sleep. I try not to think of Madison.

In the month before Crispin died, it got to a point that being with Madison was like walking naked around a cactus with your eyes closed. She even began questioning my long hours spent at Crispin’s apartment. She liked to alternate her homoerotic suspicions with accusations of literary mercenariness. “Why don’t you like hanging out with people your age, Miguel?” she asked, in the implying, opinionated manner of beautiful women not blessed with big breasts. When I recounted to her my interest in his work, and, later, after he died, my eventual dream of writing his biography, she accused me of sounding like a young naive version of Bellow’s Charlie Citrine. That was one of the lovers’ things Madison and I did, our own affectation of Atlantic academia: we referenced fictional characters as if they were people to learn from. As if real-life people were too nebulous, too private and unreal for us to understand. We liked to believe there is an alternate world, a better world, populated entirely by characters created by the yearnings of humanity—governing and inspiring themselves with all the lucidity with which we rendered them. We posited such a world to be an afterlife for the monumentally great and flawed men and women of history, because Julius Caesar is as real to us as Holden Caulfield, Pol Pot is as alive
as Judas Iscariot. Madison had just finished
Humboldt’s Gift.
Like Citrine, Madison said, I ceaselessly rationalized my relationship with my dead writer friend, before finally admitting that “the dead owe us a living.” I don’t remember what happened in Bellow’s book, but in Crispin’s case I believe it is the living who owe the dead. The debt inside ourselves, as we Filipinos say. My biography of Crispin will be an indictment of my country, of time, of our forgetful, self-centered humanity. I can hear Madison now: “Oh, how wonderfully romantic of you. Romantics are really only in love with themselves.”

*

Christened Crispin, after the patron saint of cobblers, the eight-pound two-ounce baby was brought from the hospital three days later to the family estate at Swanee, to much fanfare. Hand-painted canvas banners had been strung up at the gate. Dozens of farmworkers lined the gravel drive, straw hats pressed solemnly against their chests as they craned their necks to glimpse the child through the windows of the silver Packard. Some of them had undone their neckerchiefs and waved them like makeshift flags. As the vehicle passed, a whistle blew and on cue the workers tossed up cheers and hats that flew in the family’s wake. The car pulled up to the two-story manor, and the household staff in their cream uniforms, lined up in order of importance from the mayordoma down to the stable boy, erupted in applause. Leonora stepped out from the car, reached in to take Salvador from Ursie, and proudly showed him off. Pink cheeks were touched, the bridge of his nose pinched again and again, and his already thick head of fine blond hair caressed admiringly. They marveled at his hazel eyes. Until he reached the age of four, two years after his hair darkened to brown and into the first months of the war, Salvador’s nickname among the staff would still be “Golden.” When those who’d called him that had fled to their own families or had became casualties of the fighting, the name was forgotten and Salvador himself would not know of it until he was finally an adult.

—from the biography in progress,
Crispin Salvador:
Eight Lives Lived
, by Miguel Syjuco

*

Here’s a memento I took, out of the only frame on Crispin’s desk. An old four-by-five in sepia: in front of the Salvador ancestral home outside Bacolod. From left to right (all squinting in the sun): Ursie, short and stout; reedlike Lena in her school uniform; tousled Narcisito holding his toy glider; Crispin, almost too big for his perambulator; the punctiliously attired Mortimer J. Gladstone, their Bostonian tutor; in the background, walking beside the rosebushes, his face hidden in the shade of his straw hat, Yataro, the Japanese gardener.

*

“You sure you’ll remember everything we’ve said? Cristobal, are you listening?”

He doesn’t reply. He picks up his watch from the desk and looks at it. “The train to Barcelona leaves in three-quarters of an hour,” he says. He winds his watch until it can’t wind anymore. He tries to attach the chain but has a hard time. After a few moments he gets it right and slips the watch into the pocket of his waistcoat.

Yciar gets up from the bed. She picks up the silk robe off the floor and pulls it around her. Cristo watches her silhouetted against the thin, bright lines of sunlight coming through the shutters. They look like gashes on her, on everything.

She walks barefoot across the room and stands on his feet. She holds him around his waist. They waltz a few steps.

“I’m sure,” he says.

“Think of me when you’re on the boat.”

“I’ll have my letters sent here when we berth at Port Said. Then when I transfer at Hong Kong. And of course the minute I land at Manila.”

“You belong here. Not there.”

“I know,” he says.

She studies his face and seems guilty. She looks down. When she looks up again she is smiling. She straightens his cravat. “No. I know. You must rush home, to that hospital to care for your mother and sister. It’s your duty now.” She stretches up to kiss the bottom of his chin. “You’ll arrive in time to usher in 1895. Promise not to forget me. Being remembered is all anyone can ask from a lost love. I’ll remember you,
Don
Cristobal Narciso Patricio Salvador.” She laughs at the length of his name. “Cristo,” she says. “You look nothing like a patriarch.” She pinches his nose. “Even a new one.”

“I’ll come back,” he says.

“Before you go,” she says, reaching up on tiptoes to whisper in his ear. Her voice is so gentle he can barely hear her. “Before you go, I have to tell you a secret.”

—from
The Enlightened
(page 52), by Crispin Salvador

*

My seatmate finally asks to borrow my copy of
The Philippine Gazette.
He’d been eyeing it for hours. I take it from the seat pocket in front of me. He opens it and begins to leaf. Tsk-tsk, he says, shaking his head. He nudges my elbow off the armrest and points at a particular article. Two more suicide bombings, just this morning. This time down south, in Mindanao. Six dead, twelve injured by the first blast, at a Lotto outlet in front of the city hall in General Santos City. Most were municipal employees wagering just-cashed salaries. The second blast was at a children’s birthday party in a McDonald’s in the Lupas Landcorp’s Cotabato Plaza Mall, leaving nine primary-school students dead, six others wounded. No one has asserted responsibility. The Estregan administration suspects various groups: the Abu Sayyaf of Mindanao, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the Indonesia-based Jemma Islamiah, the Middle East’s Al Qaeda. The bombings are assumed to be retaliation for the coalition-led invasion of Afghanistan, of which President Fernando Valdez Estregan has made us a part. I look at my seatmate and shake my head at the article. Then I pretend to go to sleep.

A minute later, I hear him chuckling. I peek with one eye. He’s reading the article about the “trial of the century.” I recall seeing that case online. Even I was shocked by the not-guilty verdict received by the Filipino-Chinese couple, who killed their maid by forcing her to drink Clorox Spring Flowers bleach. The maid was minding their son when he drowned in the bathtub. She had been busy text-messaging. It wasn’t the sensationalism of the trial that got my attention. I hate lowbrow tabloid junk. I only clicked on the link that once, because the family involved was named Changco. I thought they might have been related to Dingdong Changco, Jr., who was supposed to figure prominently in
TBA
. It turned out the family in the trial was of no relation. If they had been, they wouldn’t be in this mess.