Ilustrado (7 page)

I can picture his family at Arrivals, a bright stain of joy on a tapestry of disorder. The Ninoy Aquino International Airport is your apt introduction to my country. You’ll be struck by the ubiquity of armed guards, enticed by the glossy luxury shops selling duty-free liquor, cigarettes, last-minute presents; you’ll tumble out into a warlike fug—an overcrowded arrival area with desiccated, air-conditioned air, worn linoleum, and creaking baggage carousels; a quintet of blind musicians greets travelers with faves like “La Cucaracha” and “Let It Be”; a larger-than-life, smirking President Fernando V. Estregan welcomes you from a poster taking up the entire wall; a sign declares, “Welcome to the Philippines, the most Christian country in Asia”; beneath it, another, “Beware of pickpockets.” Grasping your possessions tightly, you pass through the gauntlet of taciturn but thorough customs officials before an exit orphans you to the insidious ninety-five-degree heat and humidity and the swarming masses of other people’s family members, all of them periscoping necks to stare collectively at you. Your armpits drip sweat like a
tap, though the sky is almost always white, the sun almost always hidden. On the street, taxis done up like carnivals will honk straight at you, their drivers accosting your bags as if intending to hold them ransom for a twenty-cent tip. In their cabs—perfumed with three different fruit-scented air fresheners, pork cracklings, and spicy vinegar—they hospitably turn the air-con to arctic freezing and crank up the volume on their stereo just for you, so that the Bee Gees fly high-pitched and crystalline from the speakers by your ears. Soot-caked cops do their best to direct the beast that is our traffic, their ineffectual whistles exacerbating the chaos that is our order. It takes you two hours to get anywhere; and when you arrive, it’s almost time to go. Let me welcome you to my first country, my Third World.

*

The country has changed so much, my childhood years before the war seem improbable. I’m not sure if I remember the events as actual or if they were stories later told to me, Salvador folklore in which I reportedly took part. Most wonderful in my mind are the caged animals on Tito Odyseo’s farm. At dusk, when no other humans were afoot, Lena, Narcisito, and I would creep slowly between the cages. There was the jaguar, with his immense paws. The pair of aardvarks, named for Saints Peter and Paul. The Palawan bearcat. The ring-tailed lemurs. The buff-faced gibbons. The Philippine monkey-eating eagle named Bonifacio. And the baby giraffe, who died before he grew to his full height. I’d run with my brother and sister, around the slow-footed cassowaries that were permitted to roam freely. On those Sundays when his family would host all the others (or at least those in good grace), Tito Odyseo would sometimes release the gazelles, a fleet trio that ran without knowing the estate was a larger, inescapable cage, or ran because a dozen children gave chase, or ran for the opportunity and sheer love of running. I remember how we took after them, for those very same reasons. If only someone had taken a picture of that last picnic, with the animals in the background and the family all present. That was the last time we were together, the last time our ancestral land was still ours, the last time the spirits were still present there in the shadows beneath the trees.

When the war came, the animals were quickly stolen, one by one, by hungry farmworkers. Tito Odyseo was severely beaten one night when he fell asleep guarding the cages.

—from
Autoplagiarist
(page 188), by Crispin Salvador

*

From the window he can see Manila. Rain streaks sideways across the glass. Suddenly the plane dips again, and his thoughts take on the tinge of desolation, as they do in such moments. He closes his eyes and tries not to pray.

*

The airplane comes down low. From above, the city is still beautiful. We pass over brown water off the coast, fish pens laid out in geometrical patterns, like a Mondrian viewed by someone color-blind. Over the bay, the sunset is starting, the famous sunset, like none anywhere else. Skeptics attribute its colors to pollution. Over there’s the land, the great gray sprawl of eleven million people living on top of each other on barely more than 240 square miles—fourteen cities and three municipalities, skyscrapers and shanties, tumbling beyond Kilometer Zero and the heart of every Filipino, the city that gave the metro its name: Manila.

The megalopolis’s components, when named, sound like mountain music, all drums and cymbals and gongs: Parañaque, Mandaluyong, Makati, Pasay, Navotas, San Juan, Cubao, Quezon City, Caloocan, Taguig, Malabon, Pasig, Las Piñas, Marikina, Muntinlupa. Connecting them, the grid and the superavenues—Edsa, Roxas, Aurora, Taft—countless overpasses built like Band-Aids, innumerable billboards, restaurants for every nationality and budget, huge shopping malls with Bulgari, Shoe Mart, Starbucks, Nike, you name it. You want it, you can get it in Manila, in shops and tabloids, alleyways and boardrooms. There, by the shadow of our airplane, near Rizal Park, where the statue of our hero stands as centennial testament to a stolen revolution, we’re now flying low enough to see tangled lines of jeepneys and buses bringing people home from work; that crowd there, with the banners, is a small part of a million worshippers en route to the weekly, desperate, El Ohim prayer rally, where Christ is the answer to unanswerable Boolean questions. If you look closely, there’s Reverend Martin onstage, in his metallic double-breasted suit and happy-colored tie: a man of God and man of the people whose faith earned him financial security and a mansion in a gated subdivision.

Modern Manila. She who once was the Pearl of the Orient is
now a worn dowager, complete with the hump, the bunions, the memories of the Charleston stepped to the imported and flawlessly imitated melodies of King Oliver, the caked-on makeup and the lipstick smeared in thick stripes beyond the thin, pursed lips. She, the trusting daughter of East and West, lay down and was de stroyed, her beauty carpet-bombed by her liberators, cautious of their own casualties, her ravishment making her kindred to Hiroshima, Stalingrad, Warsaw. And yet, from the air you think her peaceful and unflustered. On the ground is a place tangled with good intentions and a tyrannical will to live. Life works with the Lord’s benevolence and a generous application of duct tape and Filipino ingenuity. Five hundred years ago Spanish conquistadors sailed their wooden ships into the world’s most perfect harbor to begin their mission of, as historians say, God, gold, and guns; their walled fortress is still there, as is their religion and blood, but the gold they, and others, took with them, or apportioned among their few native deputies. Manila has changed much since. It’s changed so little. If you know where to look, this is the most exciting city in the world.

The airplane’s wheels touch down. The passengers clap.

*

The spectators watch the action eagerly. At the intersection, stranded cars block Antonio’s way. Our hero slows. Eagle-eyes search for Dominador. There he is! He’s abandoned his Jet Ski and is running up the stairs of the pedestrian overpass. “Santa Banana,” Antonio mutters. “If he gets through, he’ll make it into the shopping arcade, and I’ll never find him in that crowd.” Antonio revs his Jet Ski ferociously. It speeds across the water, between buses, between taxis, their occupants blinking at what they’re witnessing. Antonio builds velocity, his black leather jacket flapping like a cape. He jerks his vehicle to the right, heading straight for a half-submerged car. The Jet Ski slides over its hood, up its windshield, and flies through the air, Antonio hunched over the handlebars. Man and machine arc higher and higher, the engine screaming like a banshee in heat. He lands on the pedestrian overpass, the Jet Ski’s underside trailing sparks as it slides over the cement. The fleeing Dominador looks behind him, wide-eyed and stupid-looking. The Jet Ski closes in. Antonio leaps over his handlebars, like a gazelle through the air, and tackles Dominador. They tumble
together. Antonio whispers in his ear, “If you don’t mind, I really prefer being on top.”

—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.

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.