Cesar Ruiz Aquino

CÉSAR RUIZ AQUÌNO

CÉSAR RUÌZ AQUINO|2


ABOUT CÉSAR RUIZ AQUÌNO [PLEASE EDIT AND/OR ADD. THIS IS HORRIBLY WRITTEN]


César Ruiz Aquino , Sawi, “Sar” (short for Cesar, subliminally, Tsar), by friends. He was born on December 14, 1910 in Zambuanga City Phiippines. He loves to play with words. Ma’am Myrna Peña-Reyes a couple of years ago commented, “He is a wordsmith.” He also loves to play chess and as like in playing with words he is a master. He usually calls Dumaguete “Dumas Goethe” a place that exists mostly in the poetry. According to Dr. Evasco “The [poet] stereophonically [sees] one thing and all things, [refuses] to fix things into dead forms, and always [plays] with risible and sensible, sentient language.” In Zambuanga he became DJ in a radio station in the evening. “Naturally I am extremely good-looking on the radio, not to mention tall and dark.” He admitted himself. And because of this girls flipped to his reverberating voice. Early Life César Aquino is fondly called Sawi by his friends and contemporaries.He said: “My father is the one who gives me the name “Sawi” and no one seems to remember anyone explaining whence the name . The priest would not consent t insisting that I be given another, Christian, name: Cesar, which is originally pagan— in fact, emperor of pagans.. Nonetheless ‘Sawi’ is what I am called at home. I hear my Auntie Guiling explain that sawi in Ilocano is a bird that swoops down and snatches the eggs from frantic and helpless mother hens. As a crawler, her explanation goes, I am seen crawling and plucking objects deftly from the floor— which is what makes my father name me after the bird. For years even as a grown man I more or less give this account credence, until I find out later that there is no such bird in Ilocano. One day I believe the real explanation reveals itself to me. My father is fascinated by the Tagalog song Ibong Sawi (“hapless bird”) which tells of a bird that has been hurt and can no longer fly. Auntie Guiling gets it garbled to exactly the opposite! But only because magical unconscious on her part prompts her to reverse the dark implication of the name, paving the way for me to later on invent the pen name ‘Sawing Ibon’—accent on the first syllable.’“ He has no wife but he has an adopted daughter named Michele. He is an award winning Filipino poet, fictionist, teacher and a regular panellist of the Dumaguete National Writers workshop. He was born and raised and got his basic education in Zamboanga City, Philippines. Aquino started his literary venture when he was in high school in Zamboanga, winning the campus poetry prizes and eventually breaking, as a college sophomore, into national print in 1961 when Vicente Rivera Jr. of Graphic magazine published his story, ‘Noon and Summer.’ . This story became his ticket to the Philippine literary world.. At age 19, he received a writing fellowship to attend the 1st Silliman University National Writers Workshop with Wilfredo Pascua Sanchez, Wilfrido Nolledo and Jose Lansang Jr who seemed to steal the show from the fellows because they were writing passable, publishable promising, really hooray stuff with Edilberto& Edith Tiempo, Franz Arcellana and Nick Joaquin as the panelists in 1962. From there, he studied at Silliman, at the Ateneo de Manila (on Padre Faura) , and the U.P. Diliman in the sixties .He then taught at the Ateneo de Zamboanga, the U.P. Baguio, Maryknoll College, Lyceum of the Philippines and Silliman.He obtained his doctoral degree. He studied creative writing under Edilberto Tiempo, Edith Tiempo, Francisco Arcellana and Nick Joaquin. Ruiz Aquino has mentored many students, teachers, artists and writers at Ateneo de Zamboanga, the University of the Philippines in Baguio City, Maryknoll College, Lyceum of the Philippines University, Foundation University and Silliman University. He earned his Ph.D. at Silliman University in Dumaguete City, where he has been teaching creative writing and literature since 1981. He is also a regular lecturer-


panel member at the Annual Silliman University National Writers Workshop. Writer Anthony Tan once dubbed Aquino “the Peter Pan of Philippine literature,” as the poet is largely known for his frisky, unfettered experimentation of the literary art. Like the cosmic wonder child, fearless in the art of flying and settling into new experimental grounds. LIGWURGOWYGOIWYGOIWGPIYGYQYOEYGYQE


CHRONOLOGY OF THE LIFE OF CÉSAR RUIZ AQUÌNO [TRANSFORM THE INFORMATION BELOW INTO A LIFE CHRONOLOGY] 19__

Born in Zamboanga City.

1988

Published Chronicles of Suspicion, a collection of short stories.

The following are Aquino’s published books:  Word Without End (poems, Anvil Publishing,1993)  Checkmeta: The Cesar Ruiz Aquino Reader (poems and stories, Midtown Printing Company, 2004).  Like a Shadow that Only Fits a Figure of Which it is Not the Shadow(2015)  Recently, on February 21, 2015 ,he launched his latest book “Like a Shadow That Only Fits a Figure of Which It is Not a Shadow”, that consists 151 poems . The awards and prizes he has received include:  Writing Fellow, 1st Silliman University National Writers Workshop (1961)  GawadPambansangAlagadniBalagtas for Lifetime Achievement from the UnyonngmgaManunulatngPilipinas (Writers’ Union of the Philippines or UMPIL) in 1997  Palanca Award in both poetry and fiction: poetry in 1978 and 1987; and fiction in 1979 and 1989.  National Fellow for Poetry by the U.P. Institute of Creative Writing (2004)  National Book Award for personal anthology from the group that is composed of literary writers and professors, and whose members include Alfred Yuson of Ateneo de Manila University and the Philippine Star; JuaniyoArcellana, Philippine Star; Cirilo Bautista, Isagani Cruz, De La Salle University; Ofelia Dimalanta, University of Santo Tomas, and national artist VirgilioAlmario, a press release said.  He has won the Free Press poetry prize and the Graphic short story prize  Southeast Asia Write Award he went to Bangkok in October 2004 to receive his award from King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit of Thailand.  Dumaguete-based poet and fictionist Dr. Cesar Ruiz Aquino won First Prize for Poetry for “Jerahmeel,”  In 2014, he was named Poet of the Year by the Philippines Graphic Magazine during the 2014 Nick Joaquin Literary Awards.  “The legendary word-and-chess assassin of the South” wrote Alfred Yuson in The Philippine Star  “The most difficult to write and the most ambitious in this collection is Cesar Aquino’s “Stories”, a Palanca award winner. “ Said Mr. Edilberto Tiempo  By turns rueful lover, gentle cynic, overgrown and sorrowful Werther, and fatalist, Aquino is no trailing string from the Romantic school but very much a poet of our time.” Philippine Free Press


 “Inimitable lyricism...pioneering adventurism in the crafting of modernist short fiction in English provocative” UMPIL  “In a veritable horror of dwelling in the obvious, his comments discover how the poems do display the constituents elements of the of the magical, of wonderment, of amazement or startlement in the face of the paradoxical and mysterious inexplicable of the awesome meeting which events and manifestation that are occult and even bizarre in nature” Edith Lopez Tiempo National Artist of Literature  “Superfluous it will be to use hyperbole in describing Sawi.” Wrote Bron Joseph Teves “He is himself the hyperbole, the suspension of disbelief in real life. Not because he is not realistic, and fails to dwell in the human condition, but because to the unfamiliar, he seems to be too good to be true -—an exaggeration, until one gets to know him up close.”  He was not only and effective writer of poetry and prose but he also know how to produce and direct not just an ordinary play but a one of a kind Greek play and it was entitled Medea. He used the residence Albert Faurot . He used every part of Mr. Faurot’s house as a his stage. and three others: ‘Waiting for Godot’ in Zamboanga at Fort Pilar; ‘Sepang Loka’ in UP Baguio; and ‘Kwerdas’ at Woodward Little Theater in Silliman.


AN APPRAISAL [PLEASE EDIT AND/OR ADD. THIS IS HORRIBLY WRITTEN] Most people would describe Mr. Aquino as a hyperbole himself, a walking figurative language, his mind filled with wonders that leaves people to ponder on something that shape-shifts, his imagination. People who are first-timers to read his writings would probably say that everything is so random. It jumps from one idea to another. But that is part of the beauty of Mr. Aquino’s works. Not because he is unrealistic and cannot cope with the settings of human conditions but because in a sense, he is an exaggeration that seems too good to be true. He can apply magic to ordinary situations and turn them into unique, unusual ones. While we read, he brings us to the world he is describing and opens our eyes to the impossibilities that could be made possible. Upon knowing him, one could really say “Don’t judge a book by its cover”. Honestly, the first time we met Mr. Aquino, we concluded that he was a man of few words, strict and never really socialized. But beneath that look lies a thousand mysterious and unusual ideas that he can always put into writing. As what Mr. Anthony Tan said about him, being the “Peter Pan of Philippine Literature”, he brings his audience to Neverland where anything can happen. He flies, he glides while we become awed by the grace he bears. Then, suddenly we become inspired and start to follow his lead as we struggle to squeeze out random ideas from our own imaginative minds. As a human, he is not perfect too but he writes through his feelings and writes for himself, to express the things which can only be concrete through his writings, not for fame nor for money. Leave the people who criticize his just writes whenever he can. It is a part of Mr. Aquino’s essence in writing in which he is not Cesar Ruiz Aquino if his works does not have the beauty of being queer and unusual. In Philippine Literature, each writer has their own style and identity. Mr. Aquino surely did his part on shaping his own identity in the world of literature. What’s also nice about him is that he keeps his feet on the ground because even with his fame and everything, it does not bloat his ego. He says “You don’t write for money or to win literary contests. You only write to worship the Muse.” His mind is also considered as a quicksilver. The word comes from the sense of quick that means alive. One with this kind of character is totally unpredictable because one could be cool and wilful at one moment and then utterly fragile the next. He is widely known for his frolicsome, unrestrained experimentations in literature. Others might say that he has forgotten the essence of practicality but it must be in his experimental works where he finds great joy. Remarkably, we can easily distinguish Mr. Aquino’s main themes in his works. In his poems, it is usually romantic and bizarre while his short stories are mainly autobiographical. These themes can be found in poems like “Samarkand”. In his poem, “Samarkand”, a heavy feeling of love can be felt. It might just be part of his imagination and all but the way he expressed it felt so real. The memories and the way he depicted the place “Samarkand” was so concrete that you cannot help but wonder if how was he able to let those out from his mind. In “Memories”, one could feel the strong emotions he felt and it was even more intensified because the language he was using was Cebuano. English cannot cope with the deep words and feelings only the native language can properly express. One poem that is considered to be difficult to decipher is “Word Without End”. If you would see the


poem on the outside, you would say that it’s all based on wordplay and figurative language, a mixture of ideas without any internal logic or defined structure. WORD WITHOUT END East, the horizons and all the learning Lost. Sick for Siquijor or Avalon O I could for the sheer sight of her throw Verses away! Let the Virgins carry Virgule widdershins upon the fairy Earth, the same that on the world’s first morning Left her traces, her face an eidolon Of whiteness for the chilled blood to know Or for one word and one word only go Void as days all misspent for the starry Echo of a night come without warning Like a thousand thieves stealing on and on Love, tongue-tied, is my Tetragrammaton Opening no door, giving leave to no Vendaval that, priceless, she might tarry Even as the sands and there’s no turning

But delving deeper into it, taking a much closer look and deeper reading of the texts, there is a hidden storyline underneath all those metaphors and wordplays. In one of his short stories entitled “Stories”, which we have learned in class, was most likely an account of a part of his life. It was unusual for a normal story because it contained three stories of different settings and characters but is somehow connected with each other with a certain metaphysical force. The connection of the three stories is metaphorical. It contains three stories about confronting evil. It definitely plays with your mind, especially when you are trying to find the logic behind the connection of three diverse stories. “Kalisud A La Dante Varona” was also an autobiographical story. It was about his escapade to Leyte for the first time because he was a mentor of chess to a student who was going to have a contest in the said place. It was mostly a recount of his experience there. We once conversed with Mr. Aquino in Facebook and we were amazed by his remarkable personality. We did not even expect that he would reply to our message and the first message he gave to us was an inspiring quote for poets by Petronius which goes: ‘If greatness, poet is your goal,/ the craft begins with self-control./ For poems are of the poet part,/ and what he is decides his art./ With character true poems begin./ Poet, learn your discipline.’ -Petronius


He was a funny and open-minded person. We even exchanged Cebuano songs to listen to through the night because according to him, it was to ease the lonely night. He even gave his regards and good luck for this reader. We asked him five questions and these were his replies: 1. What or who is your inspiration when you write? 2. How do you feel when someone disagrees with the point of views that you have written? 3. What is the reason why you are here in Dumaguete when in fact, you are from Zamboanga? 4. What is the biggest thing that people think they know about your subject or genre, that isn’t so? 5. What is the most important thing that people think they know about your subject or genre, which they need to know? #1 The Muse. Even at my age I still see her now & then. #2 I say to myself it’s better if my knowledge of this character self-destructs into oblivion. But if it’s someone I admire, respect—OK lang I can more than live with it (his disagreement). #3 I discovered, in 1972, that my mother’s father was from Negros & had some property here. My grandmother and he separated when their daughter, my mother, was a child. #4 The process of poetic creation. The majority of literary people tend to believe that the writing of a poem is wholly a matter of technique, method, skills. #5 The role of inspiration in poetic creation. What is absent is a serious reading or re-reading of (put in ‘meditation on’) Plato’s theory. We may not recognize the Dumaguete that Mr. Aquino shows in his writings, even if we are Dumaguetenos ourselves. There are, of course, the landmarks and no doubt, they definitely add to our sense of place. But these places do not mean much if there were not these unusual encounters that institutionalized in the city itself. Having been part of the SUNWW, a panelist to be exact, one can see that this place is also a part of a common thread that runs through most of his stories. His writings are filled with strange watery light of lustrous imagination. At the same time, vague and it makes us wonder more as we flip through the pages. His works are more of a thing of feeling than of physical specifications. In this case, Dumaguete is transformed into the inner terrain of memory.



THE LITERARY WORKS OF CÉSAR RUIZ AQUÌNO From the Sillimanian Magazine 1967 “To a Girl Remembered,” poem [MISSING] 1968 “Figure of Orange,” poem [MISSING] “Panic,” poem “The Loneliness of a Frustrated Chessplayer,” essay [MISSING] 1988 “Botticelli Blues,” poem [MISSING] 1990 “For Alexandra,” poem [MISSING] “Kalisud a la Dante Varona,” short story [MISSING] 1993 “Ars Poetica,” poem [MISSING] “The Poem as a Flower, The Flower as a Poem,” poem [MISSING] Sands and Corals 1963. Edited by Rhoda J.B. Galima. Dumaguete City: Silliman University, 1963. “The Everyday of a Lark,” poem Sands and Corals 1968. Edited by Elsa Victoria Martinez and Eliseo P. Bañas. Dumaguete City: Silliman University, 1968. “Point of View,” poem “Dancers,” poem Sands and Corals 1969. Edited by Merlie Alunan. Dumaguete City: Silliman University, 1969. “Song,” poem [MISSING]


Sands and Corals 1973. Edited by Jaime An Lim. Dumaguete City: Silliman University, 1973. “Provisional Revision of Panic,” poem [MISSING] “Poem,” poem [MISSING] Sands and Corals 1974. Edited by Ma. Paloma Alburo. Dumaguete City: Silliman University, 1974. “Clear Water,” short story [CHECK TYPOS] “Ultimately She Couples With the Sun,” poem [MISSING] Sands and Corals 1976—Silliman University Diamond Jubilee Issue. Edited by Leoncio P. Deriada. Dumaguete City: Silliman University, 1976. “Song,” poem “All in All,” poem “Notes for a Poem in April,” poem “Point of View,” poem [MISSING] “Poem Written at Twenty and Never Going Beyond the First Two Lines Until Four Years Later,” poem [MISSING] Sands and Corals 1981-1982. Edited by Marjorie Evasco. Dumaguete City: Silliman University, 1982. “Image of Flesh,” poem [CHECK TYPOS] Sands and Corals 1989. Edited by Antonino Salvador Soria de Veyra. Dumaguete City: Silliman University, 1989. “Panic,” poem Chronicles of Suspicion. Manila: Kalikasan Press, 1990. “Proheme,” short story “In the Smithy of My Soul,” short story “And Sunday Morning,” short story “Two,” short story “Jerahmeel,” short story “Proheme to Zamboanga,” short story “Crazy in Ermita,” short story “Assault in Dumaguete,” short story “Anak Bulan,” short story “Dog Bite,” short story “Sublunary Advertising,” short story


“The Great Filipina Navel,” short story “Touch Move,” short story [MISSING PASSAGES] “The Reader,” short story [MISSING PASSAGES, BAD ITALICIZATION] “The Fourteenth Fool,” short story “A Tale of Two Diaries,” short story [MISSING] “The Browser,” short story “Lapuz Lazuli,” short story “A Fine Madness Named Pepito Bosch,” short story “Bisayan Binignit,” short story [MISSING PASSAGES] “Alihs in Wonderland,” short story “Last Exit from Malatapay,” short story “Chronicles of Suspicion,” short story “Stories,” short story “The Bulbiferous Blurbs,” short story “Proheme to the Blue God,” short story “On the Beach,” short story “Deep Purple,” short story “Kalisud a la Dante Varona,” short story “Fischer, the World Chess Champion Who Never Was,” short story [MISSING PASSAGES] Kabilin: Legacies of 100 Years of Negros Oriental. Edited by Merlie Alunan and Bobby Flores-Villasis. Dumaguete City: Negros Oriental Centennial Commission, 1993. “Here’s Writing About You, Dumaguete,” essay [MISSING]

Word Without End. Pasig City: Anvil Publishing Inc., 1993. [ALL POEMS MISSING / PLEASE FIND THE BOOK, LIST THE POEMS HERE, AND ENCODE THEM]

Sands and Corals 1995. Edited by Noel C. Villalba. Dumaguete City: Silliman University, 1995. “Sun,” poem [MISSING] Sands and Corals 1996. Edited by Dinah Rose M. Baseleres. Dumaguete City: Silliman University, 1996. “Postscript,” poem “The Seventh Floor,” short story [MISSING] “’Stories’ Revisited: Reply to a Critic,” literary criticism


Sands and Corals 1997. Edited by Sheilfa B. Alojamiento. Dumaguete City: Silliman University, 1997. “Flaming Sword Poem,” poem “Once Upon a Time in Dumaguete,” essay [MISSING] Sands and Corals 1997—Writers in Their Environment: Voices in the Wilderness Special Issue. Edited by Douglas C. Crispino, Dennis S. Cruz, Nino Soria de Veyra, Jean Claire A. Dy, Victor John L. Padilla, and Ellen May T. Sojor. Dumaguete City: Silliman University, 1997. “She,” poem “Once Upon a Time in Dumaguete,” essay [MISSING] Sands and Corals 2001—Silliman University Centennial Issue. Edited by Douglas C. Crispino, Jean Claire A. Dy, and Ellen May T. Sojor. Dumaguete City: Silliman University, 2001. “Summer of 1962, et al.,” essay “Green Poem,” poem Tribute: An Anthology of Contemporary Philippine Fiction. Co-editor with Timothy R. Montes. Pasig: Anvil Publishing Inc., 2001. “Stories,”short story Philippine Star, 11 April 2004. “The Son According to Gibson,” essay Checkmeta: The Cesar Ruiz Aquino Reader. Davao City: Midtown Publishing, 2004. “The Reader,”short story “A Tale of Two Diaries,”short story “Dog Bite,”short story “Writers,”short story “Checkmeta,” short story “Stories,”short story “Sailing to Byzantium,”short story “A Fine Madness Named Pepito Bosch,”short story “Kalisud a la Dante Varona,”short story [MISSING] “X Sight,”poem “Sun,”poem “Baguio Blues,”poem “Panic,”poem


“Song,”poem “Point of View,”poem “Verb Lovely Flesh,”poem [MISSING] “Poem,”poem “Poem Begun at Twenty,”poem “Indeed All Things Go,”poem “Memory,”poem “Regrets,”poem “Going Japanese (For Kauro),”poem “Flesh of Image, Image of Flesh,”poem “Caroline in Cubao,”poem “She,”poem “Ars Poetica,”poem “Kalisud a la Rizal,”poem “Advice to a Young Poet,”poem “Notes Towards a Poem in April,”poem “Sketch Towards a Portrait,”poem “Lines Towards the Bigger Bang,”poem “Name,”poem “She Was Trance Itself,”poem “Green Poem,”poem “Lunar Petition,”poem “Senior Blues,”poem “Cellphone Poem,”poem “Romantic Manifesto,”poem “Eyoter,”poem “from Dreaming the Real,” literary criticism [MISSING] “10 Single Poetic Theme Readings,” literary criticism [MISSING] “Mr. Mxyzptlk Pops Into the Room,” novel excerpt [MISSING] In Samarkand: Poems & Verseliterations. Manila: University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2008. “X Sight,”poem [MISSING] “Set-up,”poem [MISSING] “Like the Moon,”poem [MISSING] “Samarkand,”poem [MISSING] “Leonardo to ML,”poem [MISSING] “Tendril,”poem [MISSING] “The Line,”poem [MISSING] “She Comes with Horns and Tails,”poem [MISSING] “Sensor,”poem [MISSING] “Sight,”poem [MISSING] “Huntsman,”poem [MISSING] “Genesis,”poem [MISSING] “Gold,”poem [MISSING] “Miguelitito,”poem [MISSING] “Lady Luck Doctor to Absurd Patient,”poem “Tarot,”poem


“Signs of the Times,”poem “Going Japanese,”poem “The Raider Raids,”poem “Laugh/Tear,”poem “Memories,”poem “Translating Phiux Kabahar,”poem “Eyoter,”poem “Agon,”poem “Mr. Two Minds,”poem “Shall I Compare Us,”poem “Kalisud a la Dante Varona,”poem “P. & G. Revisited,”poem “She,”poem “Manifesto,”poem “Man of Letters,”poem “Workshop Algebra,”poem “Shock of Recognition,”poem “Safe Conduct,”poem “Lucida Console,”poem “Apologia,”poem “The Ballad of the Ampersand,”poem “Riddles Inc.,”poem “The Wind,”poem “Retro,”poem “On a Sonnet by Rimbaud,”poem “World,”poem “In the Sign,”poem “For JL,”poem “For NJ,”poem “Philippine History,”poem “Kalisud a la Auden,”poem “Riding the Cycle,”poem “Continuum,”poem “Green Poem,”poem “Sun,”poem “Anak Bulan,”poem “The Camelephant,”poem “Kalisud a la Superman,”poem “Midpoem,”poem “Jerahmeel,”poem NOTE: In Samarkand introduces the next section with the following: Two mid-twentieth-century Philippine poets, Jose Garcia Villa, and Jose Lansang, Jr., started the practice to the best of my knowledge. I have the dimmest memory of one example by Villa that I read, only that it taught me a bit in my understanding of poetry. The aim is to transform a prose passage into verse, “free” or otherwise. (Lansang never believed in “free verse.” It seems to me that “verseliteration,” my own coined word for it, is proof that indeed there is no such things as “free verse.”) This is done by collage. The way I do it, I cut it up the prose and paste the resultant line onto the white page—meaning, I write the poem with those lines. Extreme care is taken never to add or change a word, nor even to rearrange the sequence. The original punctuation marks


too must retained whenever possible. The verseliterator may drop phrases and clauses though (he has hardly a choice). Also, he may re-sequence when the lines involved are far-flung from each other. Since he cuts out plenty in the original, he gets ample opportunity to re-sequence or re-assemble. He will be able to rhyme and to work out a rhythm, even a tone (and therefore a meaning) not in the original. The bottom line is to have, when the work is done, a poem on the page, not a prose passage. I was the happiest when working with an original that was not particularly “ppoetic” or lyrical. Thus I avoided the great passages of the prose wizards like Joyce, Durell, and Nabokov. At the same time, I could not resist “verseliterating” from the prose of the poets Holderlin, Yeats, Stevens, Merwin, Hughes, and Snyder.

“Origin of the Gazelles,”poem “Words,”poem “Continuum of Three,”poem [MISSING PASSAGES] “Still Life,”poem “Landscape w/ Figures,”poem “A Portrait of Picasso,”poem “Revealing the Secret,”poem [MISSING INFO] “The Unprintable Word,”poem “The Tree Where Man Was Born,”poem “Execution Site,”poem “The Restoration,”poem “Toad,”poem “Glacial,”poem “The Hunt for Plums,”poem “Continuum of Two,”poem “Alone,”poem “Sirius,”poem “The Morning After,”poem “Dream,”poem “The Birds,”poem “Marvel,”poem “Poet and Girl,”poem “War,”poem “The Sight,”poem “Pascoli’s Odysseus,”poem “The College Sits Down,”poem “Because The Woman Was Too Beautiful,”poem [MISSING] “Parable,”poem “Dedication,”poem [MISSING] NOTE: In Samarkand, the next section is labelled “Old Poems”:

“Word Without End,”poem “She Was Trance,”poem “Botticellli Blues,”poem “A Portrait of the Artist as a Mangyan,”poem “Kalisud a la Rizal,”poem “Lost,”poem [MISSING] “Araby Revisited,”poem “W.,”poem “Memory,”poem


“Caroline in Cubao,”poem “Fragment,”poem “Haiku Luck,”poem “Solitaire,”poem “Idea,”poem “Plain Blues,”poem “Regrets,”poem “Stronger than Love,”poem “Text Muse,”poem “Name,”poem “Poem in April,”poem “Point of View,”poem [CHECK TYPOS] “Riddle,”poem “Panic,”poem “Poem,”poem “Patty Poem,”poem “Poem at Twenty,”poem “Verb Lovely Flesh,”poem “Poem at Fourteen,”poem “Dactyls at Twelve,”poem [MISSING] “Song,”poem “X Sight,”poem

Dark Blue Southern Seas 2009. Edited by F. Jordan Carnice. Dumaguete City: Silliman University, 2009. “Miguelito,”poem “She Comes With Horns and Tail,”poem

The Dumaguete We Know. Edited by Merlie Alunan. Mandaluyong City: Anvil Publishing, 2012. “Dumaguete, Summer of ‘62,” essay [MISSING]

Silliman Journal 54(2)—Special Issue Dedicated to Edilberto K. Tiempo. Edited by Anthony Tan, Marjorie Evasco, and Grace Monte de Ramos, July-December 2013. “Amorous Support,” poem “Getting Willie’s Rizal, Getting Rizal’s Willie,” essay “Kibitzer Kings,” poem “Memo,” poem “Personal Spell,” poem “Shout and Whisper,” poem “Two By Two,” poem


Caesuras: 155 New Poems. Manila: University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013. [ALL POEMS MISSING / PLEASE FIND THE BOOK, LIST THE POEMS HERE, AND ENCODE THEM]

Sands and Corals 2011-2013—Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop. Edited by Ian Rosales Casocot. Dumaguete City: Silliman University, 2013. “The Pink Monk Writes,”poem “Serpentine,”poem “Near & How,”poem “Girl on a Sandbar,”poem “Much Ado About Ness,”poem “Go Flying,”poem Like a Shadow That Only Fits a Figure of Which It is Not the Shadow. Manila: University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2015. [ALL POEMS MISSING / PLEASE FIND THE BOOK, LIST THE POEMS HERE, AND ENCODE THEM]


THE LITERARY TEXTS

NOTE: César Ruìz Aquino is fond of revising his works many times over, so no two or three published versions of the same poem, short story, or essay are ever the same. In the interest of following the stages of development of these pieces, we have endeavored to encode their various published forms. All pieces have been arranged in alphabetical order for easy reference.


THE ESSAYS AND LITERARY CRITICISM 10 Single Poetic Theme Readings [From Checkmeta, 2004] [MISSING]


From Dreaming the Real [From Checkmeta, 2004] [MISSING]


Dumaguete, Summer of ‘62 [From The Dumaguete We Know, 2012] [MISSING]


Getting Willie’s Rizal, Getting Rizal's Willie [From Silliman Journal 54(2), July-December 2013] LOVE IN TALISAY By Wilfredo Pascua Sanchez That’s how I came to love you, you are mine though I pity the man that cannot know his blindness from his love. May you not blame me, sweet Josephine, for putting you in this terrible mess. You call me Joe, and I for joy tremble at your innocence and what of it is left? You and I, perhaps in abundance of knowing, and also in revenge God teased when our backs were turned, in an absolute way in your body I knew the guidings of my dream. Towards night, we would walk streets away into the woods for you are all my virtuous sisters seeking me in vain. I’m lost time and again in illuminated roads. The world owes you a hearing, but my pen is late. Josephine, we shall write no words, but only walk in rain so I may feel your breasts, and kiss your feet and in a blaze of madness wake the buried spring. When did Rizal say this? And I mean really Rizal, the self-same Rizal of history who, as it were, had written a memoir—this. (Just another way of saying the “I” in the poem is not necessarily fiction.) If so, how is it the hero had written the text—a highly, or deeply, expressive one—in English not Spanish?


Well, since he is addressing a girl with an Irish mother and British father and American stepfather—he talks to her naturellement in English. Since I heard your lilting laughter, it’s your Irish heart I’m after, if you ever heard Mitch Miller. Besides, admit it, like the girl we don’t know Spanish; so it’s our fault not his—or if you do, the fault is not his or yours all right but neither is it mine. Es la culpa de nuestra historia. Makes good historical sense to suspect polyglot Rizal had learned all those languages with an eye on Miss Universe, eh? More serious, how is it possible that Rizal, over a hundred years ago, had left a text the author of which is Wilfredo Pascua Sanchez, Filipino poet in Chicago? The black magic of poets obviously. I suspect the poem to be autobiographical; Sanchez had transmuted his own story into the seamless one of the hero such as we have it—in exactly the same manner that John Keats, in La Belle Dame Sans Merci, had drawn a story from antique tradition and disappeared, as it were, in the persona of the knight. The personal is transformed into archetype or myth is another way of putting it, the process rightly compared to the Great Work of alchemy. As Fanny Brawne, in John Keats’ life, was the belle; the belle in John Keats’ poem is Fanny Brawne. But Keats had to work it, and when he succeeded there was no need for the reader to know of Fanny Brawne’s existence, as well as of John Keats’. I took this as the power of myth to validate a personal experience until the expatriate poet, in our correspondence, called my attention to the correct order. Didn’t I rather think, he asked, it is personal experience that validates myth? Overlooked that! Indeed Sanchez made it jell with a vengeance. Not only has the author’s story been made invincibly invisible/ invisibly invincible in the poem’s story; but the episode in the life of Rizal which is the poem’s story is turned into myth, in fact the monomyth. And in double fact creative lightning struck twice, the miracle is twofold. First, Rizal’s life validated or authenticated or gave life to or became the monomyth; then Willie’s personal occultation gives the one story and one story only a new translucence. Jose Rizal was born in the summer solstice, when the sun is at its brightest, and died in the winter solstice, when the sun is its own ghost, as Thomas Mann in one of his stories describes it. Moreover he died in pure droumenon, executed facing the guns, though they wouldn’t let him, in full view of his people and stirring the mythopoeic sense forever, especially as his death sparked the revolution. So here’s to oblige our own rhetoric. When did Rizal put those words together? A good while after he and Josephine Bracken had become lovers. That’s how I came to love you, You are mine Note the retrospective, post-coincidence, even post-honeymoon, mood of the poem—if the word may be forgiven; that is, as if the love affair of Josephine Bracken and Jose Rizal were not in fact a star-crossed one. Moreover honeymoon is no match for the intoxication alone of days when, strangers to each other, Joe and Jo (coincidence or synchronicity? I prefer coincidence) exchanged glances in the perfect if dangerous night of Taufer’s blindness. (The variations both positional and


combinative of the situation, as you can see, are well-nigh infinite and all lead to mate. But of that, later.) But the mood is not post-crisis either; not at all. If the surgeon general were to take his pulse at this point in his story I would put all of Luneta on the line if it were mine dear Joe would be advised to take a sedative. Although the two have learned to live with it (“this terrible mess”), it continues to be a thorn on their bedside. One of them takes to bed, yes, and though it’s Josephine who does, the ailment that interests us in the poem is not hers, since her character is subsidiary, but Rizal’s. However, at this point that is again to digress. Sweet Josephine, shifted to Spanish, is Dulce Josefina—which could be what Rizal called Josephine Bracken, not just “Josefina,” long before he came to write the Mi Ultimo Adios. Either that or it is a beautiful invention of Sanchez’s to intimate that Rizal already had an intimation or premonition of the phrase, the most beautiful in his legendary poem of farewell, not to say death: dulce estranjera, sweet stranger. In any event it is improbable that Sanchez hadn’t heard Sweet Caroline a pop song that was a hit around the time he wrote the poem—1969 to be exact. If I’m right about it, the song played into his hands, insofar as the poem, I believe, makes allusion to it. To demonstrate this, I will cite parts of the song, along with those from film-writer and poet Pete Lacaba’s clear, unencumbered rendition of Rizal’s exile (a dominant aspect of it). From Lacaba’s synopsis of the screenplay Rizal sa Dapitan: It is 1892. The sun has not yet set on the Spanish empire, and the Philippines is its prized colony in the Far East, the last outpost of the Spanish Inquisition. On a rainy day in July, Dr. Jose Rizal arrives in Dapitan, a backwater town in the province of Zamboanga, on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao. He is an internal exile, deported there to isolate him from the revolutionary ferment in Manila —a ferment stirred up in large part by his anticolonial writings. Though Dapitan is a paradise of bucolic charm, it is still a prison paradise. Into this Eden of profound loneliness now comes his Eve, in the form of an 18-year-old Eurasian orphan named Josephine Bracken. Her blind stepfather, George Taufer, has heard of Rizal’s fame as an opthalmologist in Hongkong and seeks treatment. The 34-year-old Rizal is smitten by her beauty. From the essay When Joe Met Miss J. by the same author: When Rizal met Josephine Bracken during his exile in Dapitan, he was 34 and she wasn’t quite 18. From Neil Diamond’s song Sweet Caroline: Where it began I can’t begin to knowin’ I only know it’s growin’ strong T’was in the spring And spring became the summer


Who’d have believed you’d come along Note how the two parallel continuums coincide. Lacaba, the same sources: Josephine suffered a miscarriage while she was living in with Rizal. The child was premature and did not survive. In an unfortunate confrontation, Josephine suffers a miscarriage, and a grieving Rizal buries his stillborn son. The song: And when I hurt Hurtin’ runs off my shoulder How can I hurt when holdin’ you The match or correspondence is still exact. Lacaba once more: Nevertheless, the nearly two years spent with Josephine are largely happy times. The song: And now I look at the night And it don’t seem too lonely We filled it up with only two Oh yes that’s him, mutant king (after Alexander, Jesus,Von Kleist, Van Gogh, Kant, James Dean, Bobby Fischer et al) after Josephine’s miscarriage. Looking at the night is the lingering last thing I see Willie’s Rizal doing, in deep thought. Here is the son we sent to study in Europe, our one and only Renaissance man, Filipino heir to Goethe and Da Vinci, to all intents and purposes a scion of the civilization of the west—at the premature twilight of his life, repudiating that civilization somewhat when he confesses: I’m lost time and again in illuminated roads. The lamps in Dapitan he himself has installed in the goodness of his European engineer’s heart; but on a deeper level a metaphorical reference to the civilization and culture of Europe that he ultimately finds inadequate, unavailing. The shadow of modernism is upon him. The 1890s are only just discovering the unconscious, although the acknowledged discoverer of the concept, Sigmund Freud, acknowledges the poets to have known it long before he came. And perhaps it’s really Henry James’ big brother William who had come right before. En español, el cerebro de un centenar de años antes de Robert Ornstein, if we may profit from online translation. Meantime JR’s faith in reason, which may be what drove him away from the church


into the lure of secret knowledge of the mysterious Freemasons, has come to nothing. This is what ails Rizal. But “ailing” may be too strong a word. Even “out of sorts” would exceed. Listless is a little more like it. What vice or, graver, what inner weakness could he possibly have felt himself sunk in, that his nine sisters, nine-fold virtue itself, were all of them alien to his innermost core, as the Irish lass was, virtue being, in the latter’s case, vestigial innocence that could yet stir and arouse and make a man to tremble, for all that her lavisher, the unfortunate Taufer, had lavished on her stepdaughter by way of not so much upkeep as education, i.e. savvy in the ways of the world? The world turns and because it does we have light and darkness and their eternal alternation; knowledge and ignorance, wisdom and innocence, being and nothingness—their alternation and their variance—a variance so irresoluble ancient Persia invented the end of the world by fire, the Big Bang except they were looking in the opposite direction. But where in the poem is this coming from? You and I, perhaps in abundance of knowing, and also in revenge God teased when our backs were turned, in an absolute way My italics. Our ambidextrous universe, at least the human or anthropocentric one. is also unfortunately one-faced; i.e. we can only see what’s in front of us, the other— the one behind—is the realm of the unseen and unknown, the dark, a condition the ancient Greeks, fools for light forever, apparently found so unacceptable they could not be content with spin or twist or turn and they invented Janus. The idea (of two faces looking in opposite directions and therefore covering both) sounds like overreach, overkill, overdose. In other words, fucking fantastic and futile. It’s in the nature of everything that we cannot see it. On the opposite side, there is not a moment when God does not see everything that we do. Therefore, enabled by love to become children again, Joe and Jo avenge themselves, teasing hapless sightless Taufer whose back is always turned as it were. Literally the English “act of darkness.” But the syntax of the poem twists or spins when, instead of the normal and expected “You and I teased God” the clause is “You and I God teased.” That we cannot see God is God teasing us absolutely. Our backs, as it were, are always turned and thus we know nothing in an absolute way. Vengeance is mine, said the Lord. Every man is Taufer. Happily, in Rizal’s case, in Josephine he discovers the primacy—which had been in truth lifelong—of intuition. In your body I knew the guidings Of my dream


At the final split moment Rizal makes a heroic effort to twist, spin, turn around and see the sun, the firing squad, the guns, maybe even the bullets coming, the lone shooter whose gun had no bullet, the moth, you and me, the child grown instantly into a handsome son of a bitch, everything. However, brilliant and sublime our intelligence may be, it is scarcely more than a small spark which shines and in an instant is extinguished, and it alone can give us no idea of that blaze, that conflagration, that ocean of light. (Rizal in a letter to Father Pastells.) And in a blaze of madness wake


Here’s Writing About You, Dumaguete [From Kabilin, 1993] [MISSING]


The Loneliness of a Frustrated Chessplayer [From the Sillimanian Magazine, 1968] [MISSING]


Once Upon a Time in Dumaguete [From Sands & Coral—Writers in Their Environment, 1997] [MISSING]


The Son According to Gibson [From Philippine Star, 2004] The story of Christ’s Passion as told by the Gospels is powerful, fascinating material for the creative filmmaker. It took one to really see and show us just how. Mel Gibson does a “cameo”—or more correctly, makes a statement—in the movie: his hands are shown nailing Christ’s hand to the cross. The statement: The Passion of the Christ is a work of creative passion as well as Christian piety. The statement is justified. You can’t help feeling he has felt his material with some depth. But thorny seems almost every aspect of Jesus Christ—not just his crowning. And the thorns may be insurmountable for the novelist or the filmmaker, who must ask himself—is his intention to give us history or His Story? If it’s the former, people are bound to howl impious! If the latter, anti-Semitic! Theology students put it this way: the former would give us the Jesus of history; the latter, the Christ of faith. The twain does not meet. Or does it? Never mind when exactly but somehow a monstrous question stirred in the Christian consciousness in modern times and it was no longer Was Jesus really God? but Was there really a Jesus? Off-hand one can say it was rationalism muttering hmm hmm. After all His Story contains one wondrous thing too many, not the least of which is that Jesus raised the dead—and not only raised the dead but himself rose from the dead, and not only rose from the dead but ascended to Heaven, and not only ascended to Heaven but sat at the right hand of God! Did all this really happen or is it all only a story? Historical investigation of the life of Jesus began in the 18th-century with a German scholar named H. Reimarus and ended in 1902 with Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus. At the outset, the questing scholar is up against a horrendous problem: the New Testament was not written as history. It’s on a par with stories like how Zoroaster of the Persians was born laughing and how Buddha turned the arrows flying towards him into flowers. But it’s not that simple, much of it is history. Can one be certain of this? Yes. Two historians from antiquity, the Roman Tacitus and the Jewish Josephus, mention a Messiah Jesus, who was crucified in the reign of Augustus Caesar. But very briefly. Yet, this precious little is the rock of historical certainty that the quester can cling to. Armed with this certainty he can then go to his prime source, the New Testament, and here he can sift history from metahistory. For the New Testament was not written by a Tacitus or a Josephus. At times Paul sounds like a poet—Jesus, all the time. The Jesus of history was a healer, miracle-worker, holy man, prophet, and claimant to being the long awaited, prophesied Messiah or King but who suffered crucifixion by the Romans. The Christ of Faith is that self-same man but thereafter more than Messiah even—he was deified. Soon the faithful prayed to him, beginning with the Jesus Prayer of the Eastern Orthodox, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me, a sinner.” In that great transit Jesus the man disappeared. At the Resurrection, Jesus became the Lord whom one may no longer touch. He became the Christ of Faith.


But the Church, as if itself reacting to this, felt the need for another council. After the Council of Nicea that declared Jesus to be divine, the Church had to declare that Jesus was a man! Truly man and truly God, said the Councils. Yet buttressing the fact of Christ’s humanity by making it dogma may not have been just a reaction to whatever heresy was going on at the time. The truth is, since Jesus is divine, believers cannot picture him doing certain human things. In the 1960s there came out a poster of him laughing heartily. The picture shocked. He looked devilish. Lately there’s a Jesus film packaged for TV during the Holy Week showing him dancing in the street. This makes historical sense since he may have been a Hasid but is not likely to be taken well by the pious. Then there was Martin Scorcese’s movie that deeply offended Christian sensibility because, even if it was only a scene from a dream, it showed Jesus making love to Mary of Bethany. The dogma that Christ was a man can therefore be perceived as a safeguard against a natural tendency of the believer to think that He was not. Two thousand years later it is a testimony that Jesus really existed. But who was the man? Was it possible to see him not through the prism of the believing community? As he was before he became deified? This was the quest and it was a Protestant undertaking—that ended, to repeat, in 1902 with Schweitzer. It ended because Schweitzer’s epochal work shattered the expectations of the rational pious. That book concluded that Jesus was a failed Messiah and that’s the farthest we can see into history. Beyond that it becomes a matter of faith, not historical knowledge. Jesus—according to Schweitzer—accepted that he was the Messiah who will bring in the long awaited reign of God (Thy Kingdom come). At a later stage, he came to the conviction that he would have to suffer greatly before the present age would violently end. In more concrete terms, this means God would step in and wipe the Roman Empire out. But nothing of the sort happened (My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?) and Jesus expired on the cross. The Christ of Faith rose out of this defeat—first as the scattered circle of disciples that had re-grouped and soon prevailed against great temporal odds. This was the circle that waited for Jesus to return while, as he promised, some of them would still be around. When that too didn’t take place, the circle became the Primitive Church, sustained by the spiritual power, namely the belief that Jesus rose from the dead, that would continue—and will continue—to sustain it across the centuries (I shall be with you always). But is it possible to ever recover the Jesus of those who lived in his own lifetime? Schweitzer said no. Amen, said the Spanish existentialist Miguel de Unamuno, a Catholic. The quest was a lost cause. “For there is no recovering the Galilean,” Unamuno wrote in Paradoxes and Perplexities, like an imprimatur to Schweitzer’s conclusion. For the Catholics had not joined in the quest. While Protestants regard the Bible as sole authority, Catholics hold Tradition as the necessary guide to reading it. In the Catholic view the New Testament is a fruit of or complement to Tradition and a meditative aid—which must be why he is not too fond of reading it! As for the problem of Christ’s historicity there’s always Tacitus and Josephus—and the Church. There’s always the dogma established by the Church at the Council of Chalcedon—


to wit, that Christ was truly man, meaning of course that there really was a man named Jesus. Where did the 5th-century Council get this? From Tradition dating back to people who personally knew Jesus. For the Catholic the problem of Christ’s historicity is not a problem. It’s either you believe it or not. What do you believe? The Creed. In the Creed the historical Jesus is almost nowhere to be found. But he’s there, all right: suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried. The man just won’t go down. The autumn of the twentieth-century saw the returning spring of the quest. In 1994 a contemporary theologian, the late G.B. Caird of Oxford, could say “those who accept the humanity of Jesus as a dogma...do not grasp it as a historical fact.” The quest continues and it is not modern hunger for facts but rather timeless hunger for the fascinating. For the fact is the story of Jesus is a fascinating one. And indeed the quest has the habit of coming up with the darndest ideas! Jesus Christ was a magician. No, he was a Tibetan Buddhist. No, he was a hukbalahap—or maybe just a Liberation Theologian? No, he was a mushroom! The crucifixion was a hoax. He was married and had children and his descendants are very much around. No, he was not a Jew but an Egyptian—a la Moses according to Freud! But much more shockingly so than even the pan-sexualist father of depth psychology could ever have imagined—for Jesus was not married to Mary Bethany or Mary Magdalene in the way we know married. He was her consort in the fertility cultus of Egypt! In other words, he practiced Tantric sex! Even a comparatively more disciplined “biography” as I. A. Wilson’s Jesus can play with an intriguing idea: Paul may have met Jesus. Not only that, the servant of the high priests, Malchus whose ear was cut by Peter’s sword, may have been Paul! Says Wilson: “If I had the chance to return in time and meet Paul, I should take a close look at his ears.” It’s almost as if the historical searchers were competing with the novelists and saying to the them, “Look, the historical truth about Jesus is stranger than fiction!” For just as bizarre are some of the things we read in the novels. If the Jesus quester can relax, there are the works of the novelists, the latest of whom, Norman Mailer, is so improbable one review bore the title He Is Finished. In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor, Christ has returned. Immediately the Grand Inquisitor arrests him. His crime? Rejecting the Three Temptations and now interfering with the work of the Church! In Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ, Paul not only meets Jesus, they collide in the novel’s great penultimate scene. Paul is telling an incognito Jesus about the good news of Christ’s resurrection. Jesus naturally cries “Liar! I was never crucified!” Paul replies in panic, “Shut your mouth!” When finally Jesus identifies himself, the apostle flees shouting, “Who cares what really happened? The world needs visions not facts!” And Jesus weeps, saying he could not bear the knowledge that the only way to save the world is through Paul’s lie. In Jose Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Jesus looks down from the Cross and pleads, “Men, forgive Him for He knows not what He has done.” In Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Jesus appears to be some kind of idiot-savant. In Robert Graves’ King Jesus, Jesus is the sole legitimate claimant to the Davidic kingship by reason of his being the secret son of Herod Antipater! He is


doomed, however, by his understanding of the meaning of the kingdom. Seeing the sheer impossibility of overcoming Rome by force, he came to the conclusion that only if one of his disciples will slay him with the sword, to fulfill Zechariah’s prophecy, will the Kingdom of God be realized. He did not convey this to his disciples directly, veiling his message as usual like a riddle. They did not catch on, except one—Judas. Graves’ book bristles with insights. One particularly brilliant instance is his version of the famous “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.” Graves proposes that the original is “Do not pay God what is Caesar’s, nor Caesar what is God’s.” The current rage is a concert of scholars called the Jesus Seminar; its most impressive scholar, John Dominic Crossan. The Seminar’s avowed aim is to collect all the acts and words ascribed to Jesus and to determine which are authentic. Their most solid work appears to be The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus. Five, not four? Yes, the fifth is the Gospel of Thomas. The Jesus Seminar has kissed the idea of canonicity goodbye. It will give everyone a chance to be heard, including the mortal enemy of the Orthodox in the first centuries—the Gnostics. Crossan is an Irish Catholic like James Joyce, a priest until he left the order. His “most controversial” work is Who Killed Jesus? the most shocking idea of which is that we cannot have certainty that Jesus’ body was not in fact eaten by carrion birds and dogs. Crossan is not playing the iconoclast—he calls this possibility a “terror” in which the present-day believer must live. But the real import of his book is the answer he gives to the question. Crossan says it was the Romans, not the Jews. The thesis is not new though Crossan may have brought it up to date. In fact, it has been fairly intellectual mainstream for quite some time. Ben-Zion Bokser, a rabbi, presented the case with exceptional clarity and plenitude in his 70s or was it 80s book Judaism and the Christian Predicament. Why did the writers of the four gospels distort history? The reasons advanced are two. One, Christians were writing the gospels while still under the Romans. It was impossible to write to the latter’s faces that they, the Romans, did it. Two, the Christians who wrote the gospels were projecting the deadly antagonism between Jews and Christians in their time to their recollection of something that had happened half a century or so before. Thus the Jews shouting “His blood be upon us and our children!” But even a casual glance at the political picture in Judea at the time makes one uncomfortable with this long-held traditional view. There was poverty all over the country and while the people groaned under Roman taxation as well as additional Temple dues, the Sadducees were wealthy and Herod Antipas positively decadent. Caesar was Rameses and Nebuchadnezzar all over again. In the late 1940s the filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer of The Passion of Joan of Arc fame wrote a script for a movie which was to have been his masterwork. He died before he could film it. But the script was published in 1971 under the title Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Jesus. In the book, Dreyer relates how he could relate to the story of Jesus because Israel under the Romans was exactly like his homeland Denmark under the Nazis. Dreyer might be said to have a “first-hand” knowledge of how the Jews hated the Romans. The Jewish populace hated not the occupying Romans alone but the Jewish collaborators, specifically Herod Antipas of Galilee and the high priests or temple


officials in Jerusalem—the Sadducees. Inversely they took favorably to the prophet, the one who keeps alive the flame of God’s ethos as well as pathos for the trampled and the dispossessed. Such a one was John the Baptist and after him Jesus. And all awaited the Messiah which meant, if you push the word to the limit, the legitimate blood heir to the vanished kingship of David. Israel was waiting for the return of the king. Jesus fitted the bill. Robert Graves suggests that Pilate instructed his soldiers to place the inscription King of the Jews above the head of the crucified one because he knew Jesus was the legitimate claimant to the Davidic throne. He was truly mocking. His job was to wipe out any semblance of a threat to Rome’s presence in Israel. When Jesus did not deny that he was the Messiah, his fate was sealed. The dolorous Christian belief is that indeed Jesus knew he was the One—but no longer in ordinary terms—not even in those of Robert Graves’. Historically considered therefore it doesn’t add up to say the Jews crucified Jesus. Of the mob that shouted for his blood, both the scholar and the novelist have a ready explanation. Bokser says minions of the High Priests were planted in the crowd—hakot! Scholem Asch says it was “remainders” of the bands of Bar Abba. Whatever. The point is that neither the mob nor the ruling hierarchy was Israel. Therefore—who crucified Jesus? The Roman occupants of Israel and their Jewish collaborators. But Dreyer, taking the liberated view that Jesus was crucified by the Romans for political offense, totally exculpates the Jews! The scene where the Jewish mob shouts for Jesus’ blood and forces a reluctant Pilate to pronounce the death sentence is missing. As for the high priests, we see them saddened by Jesus’ decision to answer in the affirmative when asked the necessary question Are you the Messiah? That politically correct film would not have been as powerful as Gibson’s. Gibson decided to tell His Story, not history. With imaginative touches of his own, true. In one swoop the camera takes us to two gardens—the Garden of Olives and the other, where it all began. Talk about in media res! The face of the Apostle John as he takes it all in, the shot and the angle of the shot telling us what the Church means by the word “Tradition.” The flashbacks that really flash. The cuts that really cut—and make whole. But in the quarrel between the historian and the faithful or the pious, he took the latter’s side. The Son according to Gibson is the Son according to the New Testament, according to the Creed, according to the Councils, according to the Church that’s more Roman Catholic than Eastern Orthodox or Protestant—the Protestant Son being the preacher and healer and friend, the Eastern Orthodox Son being the Risen Lord, and the Catholic Son being the man of sorrows. Perhaps because he is a believer, Mr. Gibson put stock in the violent visions of the German mystic Catherine Anne Emmerich. But it is safe to say it is because he is a visual artist that he took to these—and took these—with, I can see it, flaring eyes. This Son is not only physical—He is luridly physical. True man, says Chalcedon. Crucified says Tacitus, says Josephus, says the Creed. Shown shaking in agony and terror on the movie screen, He rivets the viewers. The paradox is that, though Gibson chose Sacred History over history, it is the crucifixion that, according to the scholars, is “the one undoubted fact in the history of Jesus.”


A little more history wouldn’t have hurt (though of course it would the conservative believers). A pity Gibson couldn’t take his cue from the Creed: suffered under Pontius Pilate. The Creed mentions neither Annas nor Caiaphas. As a consequence, the historians are howling anti-Semitic! Fortunately Gibson’s cinematic rendition of the idea that no one felt and no one can ever feel the pain of seeing a crucified Jesus as much as his own mother is a wonderful argument that the movie is not as the sticklers for political correctness say it is. “Flesh of my flesh, heart of my heart. Let me die with you!” cries Mother Israel at the foot of the crucified Jew. The movie’s arguable sin, which may not be original as I have not read St. Catherine Anne’s work, is not one of omission. The high priest takes a dig at Pilate and the crowd laughs. This touch conveys an image of a Sadducee so sure of his standing as a reliable collaborator. But a Pilate so genteel he can be trifled with may be a bit too much and the gibe could be on Gibson. One could wonder a bit— just a teeny weeny little cynical and uncharitable and fantastic bit—if this treatment of the Roman isn’t in fact a subliminal whitewash of a latter-day imperialism. Or maybe it is an unconscious remembrance of an earlier-day Hollywood centurion? That centurion drawled: “Truly this was the Son of God!” Well, the Aramaic and the Latin are certainly a hell—I mean heaven—of an improvement.


Summer of ’62, et al [From Sands & Coral—Centennial Issue, 2001] Because the Writers Workshop began in 1962 we somehow thought, wrongly, that the world of writers came to Silliman also at that time. I was in the workshop, a callow youth from the Zamboanga who had come to Dumaguete for the first time, unaware that his grandfather, whom he never saw, was Negrense. Well, in the time we learned that Dumaguete had been some sort of Southern writer’s Shambala forever, Ricaredo Demetilllo was here in the ‘50s. He’s the poet who gave Sands and Coral its name. Like the Tiemposs and Franz Arcellana, a graduate of the Iowa workshop. The book that we knew him for at that time was The Authentic Voice of Poetry, the first book-length attempt in the country at formal literary criticism of the Filipino poets then on the scene, pre-eminently Villa, Joaquin, and Lansang. Others wh had been on the campus Aida Rivera-Ford, Dolores Feria who was later to become my teacher in European Novel at U.P. Dilliman, and Antonio Gabila. In fact Gabila was very much on the campus when we came, only people were not so aware of him because he had stopped writing. In June after the workshop I returned to Silliman to enrol as a college sophomore. I only stayed for a semester and I’m afraid I don’t have enough literary memories to regale the interested reader with. Edith Tiempo was my teacher in Creative writing.Not one of my classmates in the class turned out a writer, though Ephraim Bejar became a theatre director and, in a notso defined, rather general fashion, some kind of awareness. I lived at woodward Dormitory and for a week or in imitation of the prose style and manner of Ernest Hemingway. He had a real writing talent but he stopped writing when he left Silliman. I was not to see him again until 16 years later in Manila when he had become a man of piety, having had a fundamentalist American pastor for a foster father whose boat, which I never had the good fortne to ride or even just see, he inherited. Marquez kept company with Eph Bejar and a certain Bert Ferrer, campus editor both, who held the Tiempos in respect and affection, these being their literary mentors and of national fame. I remember Bejar walking into our Woodward Room carrying a paperback by Henry Miller―A Devil in Paradise. That was the first Henry Miller book I ever saw and, I think, browsed, Ferrer always wore dark glasses and when I saw his eyes for the first time I remember that tey looked as disarming as his voice. He was an Ilonggo. There was alsoMyrna Peña-Reyes whowrote exceedingly clipped, terse, imagist poems a la Emily Dickinson but, in person, was unliterary and so unarty (though I think it was an effort) taht I do not wonder why we never became friends. In Myrna’s choice of a model poet and Willamor’s of a model writer we seeof course the influence of the Tiempos. But how account for Bejar’s reading of Henry Miller? And Ferrer’s dark glasses? Not to mention Marquez’s somewhat droll habit of going to and coming from the Woodard bathrooms in the nude? Surely these were not the New Criticism. In the very early ‘60s the new thing in literature, the phenomenon, were the beatniks of America and the Angry Young Men of England. Actually they came in the ‘50s but the cultural time lag delayed their shock wave here and, anyway , I don’t think we really got to read them in depth. It seems the virus was transmitted to us through the movies in, or by, Marlon Brando and James Dean. Two new names in


Philippine letters represented this trend or quality. These were the gifted young poet praised by Demetillo in his book, Jose Lansang,Jr., who lived on the U.P. Diliman campus and who had been to Greenwich in New York―and Wilfrido D. Nolledo who was writing very conspicuously, very self-consciously eccentric short stories taht amounted to a revolution in Philippine letters. Really the quality of Nolledo’s prose was so excitingly new, that the others who were writing at the time generally paled into immediate pedestrianism. NOlledo and Lansang both came to the Silliman writers workshop as writing fellows, The other fellows included Greg Brillantes and Gilda Cordero-Fernando (the two great noshows0, Petronilo Daroy, Virgilio Samonte and Socorro shows), Petronilo Daroy, Virgilio Samonte, and Socorro Federis-Tate. All the fellows had published short storiesin the national magazines. Moreover, Daroy had published a book of criticism, The politics of the Imagination. Looking back on the names now, one cannot help seeing that the Tiempos hat sat down carefully chosen the definitive list of the top young writers of the time. Too bad, Brillantes and Fernando were unable to come. They would have enforced the judgement that this workshop, the first ever, was also the best ever in the country. In the panel were Ed and Edith Tiempo, Nick Joaquin and Franz Arcelana. The Jun Lansang then wasthe Jun Lansang who wrote 55 Poems , to thisday still the book of lyric poems in this country. The Brillantes who faled to show up wasthe Brillantes who wrote The Distance to Andromeda, Still one of the authentic Philippine short story master pieces, written when the author was in his early or middle twenties, and adjudged first-prize winner in the Free Press.The Nolledo who came and stayed for the entire three weeks was the Nolledo who wrote “Rice Wine”, “Of Things Guadalupe,” and “Kayumanggi Mon Amor,” stories that influenced , quickened, and sent a generationof future Filipino novelists crashing into the sky. Repeat, the fellows in 1962 were not as workshop fellows go these days, campus writers. They were published writers and national prizewinners. By today’s standards, the fellows then should have been panellists―or at least the best of them. And sure enough, there were not the Silliman English teahers who all attendded―but the handful of youngsters whose stories and poems were actually taken up and two of whom enjoyed, since they were not from Dumaguete, free lodging at the Alumni Hall where the fellows stayed. These youngsters were Williamor Marquez, David Martinez, Wilfredo Pascua Sanchez and myself. Marquez was Silliman’s bet, Martinez was from St. Paul’s College Dumaguete, Sanchez was from U.P. Diliman and I was from Zamboanga City. WE were all four of us teenagers and it seemed we stole the show from the fellows beacuase we were writing passable, publishable (all four of us in fact contributed stories tha Joaquin, thn also the literary editor of the Free press, published), promising, really hooray stuff. I remember Marquez voicing his objection to Nolledo’s experimental writing after the panellist had discussed a Nolledo story in a uniformly appreciative note. Nolledo was then thirty. It was as the ‘50s waned that he started publishing those strange, or strangely written, stories of his and zoomed to local stardom shoulder-to-shoulder with his contemporary Greg Brillantes, Nick Joaquin and Virgie Moreno and FranzArcellana took turns saying how good and baroque and brilliant the young man was. Nolledo seemed to embody the new things then like the Sputnik, the first rocket successfully launched into space. Joaquin was saying something of the sort. How the young writers like Lansang and Nolledo were a different, new breed writing with the Bomb in their subconscious and you could feel


it in their rhythym and in fact the Bomb, Joaquin said, was not only a subliminal fear and anxiety but had actually exploded in Lansang’s mind. Nolledo subsequently, in the late ‘60s, went to Paul Engle’s Iowa workshop andstayed there for about ten years. He became a friend of the Chilean novelist Jose Donoso whose The Obscene Bird of the Night ranks with Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (Columia) and Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers (Cuba) as the three great novels from latin America in this century. But recently Nolledo’s novel, But for the Lovers, produced during his stay in Iowa, was published anew in an edition that bears a word of introduction from Robert Coover(or Robert Stone I can’t remember). The intro says that Nolledo’s novel is a neglected masterpiece. It also says that Nolledo was writing magic realism a good decade ahead of the Latin Americans. In conversations at the 1962 workshop, Nolledo told Sanchez he liked Dylan Thomas. Indeed Dylan Thomas seems the literary artist likely to have influenced him. The title of his novel is quote from a Dylan Thomas poem. I suspect that Nolledo’s heightened language, his extravagant prose, was done under the intoxicating influence of Dylan Thomas and Nick Joaquin, particularly the Nick Joaquin who wrote the prose of “May Day Eve and “The Summer Solstice.” After the workshop, Dr. Edilberto K. Tiempo wrote a paper which had occasion to read at some literary gathering in Manila later of that year. Taht paper dealt with what was done in the workshop by three young writers. These were Nolledo, Sanchez and myself. The late old man (not really that old, he was younger then than I am today) perfunctorily saying a good word or two for the new direction these young writer were taking, proceeded to build a critical stand against it. He particularly took to task Sanchez’s “Moon Under My Feet.” I still think that story, the work of a sixteen-year-old, an amazing masterpiece. And that Dr. Tiempo may have been right in his critique of “The Summer Solstice” but was wrong in his opinion of the “Moon Under My Feet.” I’ve read the story through four decades and my admiration for it has grown with each reading. How swiftly Sanchez came upon the heels of his namesake, the erstwhile daring young man of the Philippine literary trapeze, Nolledo. After Sanchez, the literary scene was never the same again. Amd not only because he revealed himself, at the 1962 Silliman Summer Writers Workshop, as the new sensation in the Philippine writing, taking the new fiction farther , much farther than Nolledo who now appeared to be merely a precursor, but because along with Sanchez came a whole new bright bunch of literary youngsters, Erwin Castillo and Ninotchka Rosca and Alfred Yuson foremost. At the UP campus, Sanchez was idolized by an inner circle of coevals who were themselves gifted albeit more shyly so. Rosca was writing opaque (a description popularized by Teddy Locsin, editor of the Free Press when he applied it to Willy Sanchez), rather murky precious prose in imitation of the Sanchez which she later consciously discarded in her activist, political years. Before this change from Frenchy bohemianism to the literature of commitment (you can say from Genet to Malraux) she had written a story called “Diabolus of Sphere” which won her a prestigious Free Press first prize. The story’s title could have come straight from Sanchez . Like Nolledo, she subsequently migrated to the US. In 1976, I saw heragain at some party in Diliman where she noticed the book I was carrying under my arm. Count Julian by Juan Goytisolo, Spain’s celebrated expatriate writer, and sort of chided me for it, saying it was the same stuff we used to indulge in back in the ‘60s at the U.P.


By the ‘90s, Ninotchka published three novels in the US> The first of these appears to be the best―State of war, wildly praised by our women writers and at least two men, Edgar Maranan―who confessed his admiration for Ninotchka as a writer from his formative years the early ‘70s― and Juaniyo Arcellana who is a practitioner of what might be called magic criticism. Nick Joaquin gave State of war a sober review in his Column, the gist of which seems to be that Ninotchka succeeds not a novelist of our history (she commits a historical howler or two, Joaquin showed) but as a playful writer, imaginative fictionist, or poet. Now why do I write at some length about Ninotchka who was from U.P.Diliman? Well, first―as I said―she was one of those who belonged to a movement that Nolledo initiated. Second, she came to the 1964 Silliman summer writers workshop. Third, not many people know it but she had been briefly ward of the Tiempos. And really it may be false to draw a dividing line between North and South even in a literary reminiscence that is more or less private. I think that’s one of the effect of the Silliman Summer Writer’s Workshop―obliteration of such boundary. His holds true, too, in the case of Willy Sanchez. Sure, Willy was the literary wunderkind of Manila in the ‘60s and the ‘70s―but in Dumaguete? In Dumaguete, yes―it was in Dumaguete that he met Jun Lansang,Ding Nolledo, Nick Joaquin, Franz Arcellana, Pete Daroy and of course the Tiempos of Silliman. It was in Dumaguete that his story. “Moon Under My Feet” was first read. And yes, by the way, he had a sisterat Silliman who eventually married her boyfriend, a nephew of the Garcias of Amigo Subdivision. Ther’s also the fact that he attended the Silliman workshop three times―in 1962, in 1964 and 1970. The “blinding thing,” as Erwin Castillo put in our mature, revieweing years, Willy Sanchez too left for the US in the golden (if false gold) years of the Marcos regime and there incredibly stopped writing altogether. Today, more than twenty years after, one still asks, is this really true? Is Willy Sanchez really not going to write again, ever? I think he will just surprise us one of these days. And I wouldn’t be too surprised. After all Ninotchka came out with her novel well into the ‘90s. Before that they were all saying she was a ‘60s thing, to talk about whom was to mumble in the time-warp, wake up man. Well who woke up? Anyway it was Erwin Castillo who won the race in the ‘60s , at least in the considered opinion of the Free Press literary editor. While Willy wrote stories that grew more and more opaque and impenetrable, Erwin offered an alternative metafiction rendered less inaccessible by a neo-primitive, Hemingway quality. And how many times was Erwin Castillo in the Silliman workshop?He Successively attended in 1063 and 1964. Then returned as a grizzled veteran in 1972. I was not in any of these workshops. But i was in closecontact, even actially worked in the same advertising office, with him in the ater ‘70s when―like the rest of his generation, the generation most injured by the dictatorship, Sanchez, Rosca, Mojares, Madrid, Lacaba―he drifted into Silence, into Remontadoism. He came again successively in 1992 and 1993 and I could’nt believe the telegram that came taht May of the presidential election. He came because he wanted to finish a novel he was writing at Dostoevskyan speed: The Firewalkers. He needed, one surmises, a breath of the workshop atmosphere of the old to keep going. Even if that workshop atmosphere of old to keep going. Even if that workshop atmosphere consisted solely of a drinking buddy’s company. But he did attend the sessions for a week―interacted with the fellows. The novel was serialized in the Graphic that


same year. In the book form, it had a blurb each frm National Artists Nick Joaquin andFranz Arcellana. There were other bright young writers in the ‘60s. Not all were of the styleor temper or manner set by Nolledo’s coeval who preceded him by a year or two, Gregoriio Brillantes, was writing from an opposite pole. It can be said that to be a young writer then was to choose between two poles or two paths―two write like Nolledo or to write like Brillantes. Brillantes was winning the top prizes earlier than Nolledo. His writing tended towards sure, solid, balanced craft. What we cann conventional or traditional as opposed to experimental or new wave or futurist. Edith Tiempo favors the art of Greg Brillantes over that of Nolledo. It is the style of Timothy Montes and Charlson Ong and Susan Lara. Carlos Cortes and Juaniyo Arcellana and Bimboy Peñaranda on the other hand are children of Nolledo. In the ‘60s the young writers who were in the Brillantes mold were Resil Mojares and Renato Madrid, both based in Cebu, who were giving the Manila young writers decent competition. Unforgettable were the 1966 Free Press awards in which Castillo won first, Madrid second, and Mojares third. It was the coming age of a generation. While the Free Press helped to foster a forum or even scene for the writing then being done in the country, Silliamn maintained a proudly independent enclave of sorts. The Tiempos conducted, besides the Summer Writers Workshop, semestral classes in literary criticism and creative writing. Silliman naturally suffered from sheer numerical limitation, but there were very good times. I remember a 1967 class under Dr. Ed Tiempo wheremy classmates were Kerima Polotan, Antonio Enriquez, Darnay Demetillo , Voltaire de leon, and myself. I remember a Georgia Jones from New York who introduced Exupery’s The Little Prince to me. There was Dale Law also taking up his MA, looking at the Zorba the Greek that I carried and telling me P.A. Bien, one of Kazantzakis’ translators, was his teacher. There were the British boys, Terrence Ward of London and Roger Wade of the Isle of Man, like Law nonwritters but serving to enhance the English Department’s reputation though the British noys did not even belong to it. The English majors then also had the advantage of being in the neghborhood of the Speech and Theater department that had Amiel Leonardia and put on plays like All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, Sleep of Prisoners, Six Characters in Search if an Author, Rashamon, Waiting for Godor, Romeo and Juliet, and Zoo story. I remember first meeting the theatre people at the 1967 Summer Writers Workshoppoetry reading at Faurot’s studio (as it was called then, not yet the “Endhouse” of a later day). The 1967 Writers Workshop was my second workshop andI attended as a fellow. Again the Tiempos hosted and from Manila the guest panellist wer Kerima Polotan and N.V.M. Gonzales. The Participants came from various places in the Philippines. Bobby Villasis of St. Paul’s Colllege and Elsie Martinez of Silliman were the hometown fellows. There were Jun Cañizares, Ric Patalinghug, Eddie Yap, and Nelson Romy Virtusio―and two guys from Zamboanga, Tony Enrquez and myself. Twonuns―Sister Delia and Sister Imelda, the latter of a beauty that I fear far exceeded that of the works submitted to the workshop. A girl from Manila, Joy Dayrit. An observer who later became a poet herself and coordinator of the Silliman workshop: Merlie Alunan. Lately I came across an article by Merlie in which she writes that she was in the 1963 workshop where Bert Florentino, Andy Afable, Raymond Llorca, Rojer Sicat and Erwin Castillo attended. This puzzles me, unless it’s alapse in memory on Merlie’s part or else she is experimenting with history as


fiction―or is it fiction as history. There was also Edgar Libre-Griño, Sands & Coral Editor and cousin to two other girls from Manila, the Osario sisters. Elsie Martinez outshone her elder brother Danny who appeared to have stopped writing after 1967, though he has recently made a comeback by winning top Palanca prizes in both the short story and poetry categories. Elsie wrote poetry in the ‘60s and one short story that won her the Palanca first Prize ―”All About Me.” She was a dear friend of Bobby Villasis and both turned playwrights in tha ‘80s. This seems to some a desertion, the literature of thheater being somewhat remote and inaccessible in our country. No matter that the greatest Philippine literary work in English so far is a play―A Portarait of the Artist as Filipino. I think myself that the Filipino writer must always write with his fellow Filipino writer in mind. If I am correct in this then the Filipino writer must sooner or later face the challenge of the novel. Rosca of my generation has made three bids. Krip Yuson has two. Resil has hinted he will write an alternative Leon Kilat novel. Erwin has published one, withheld another, and will soon blow our minds with Cape Engaño, his third, which I have read in parts and found better than many of these touted magic realists of Latin America. As for Willy―it’s as his name indicates, WILL HE? Will he write again? Postscript : To say, as I did early in this essay, that the literary current in the air then (early ‘60s or even late ‘50s) werethe beatniks and the angry young men may be misleading. The actual stuff that were being raed were not Osborne or Sillitoe or Wilson or Ginsberg or Kerouac. At Silliman it was Hemingway, Faulker, Yeats, Housman, Frost, Eliot, Joyce, Conrad, Thomas, Crane, James, among other names in the modernists tradition and noticeably Ango-Sazon. At the U.P. the names to read and to drop were predominantly European: Federico Garcia Lorca, Rilke, Kafka, Mann, Proust, Camus, Sartre, etc. It was in the ‘60s of course that Barth and Pynchon and Barthelme and other postmoderns emerged in the USA but we did not get to read them until the ‘70s. The “avantgarde” authors there were Jean Genet, Henry Miller, and Samual Beckett, figures who came at the tail-end of modernism. The list can include Lawrence Durrell and Vladimir Nabokov, to whose dazzling prose it was so natural to take if you were already addicted to Nolledo.


‘Stories’ Revisited: Reply to a Critic [From Sands & Coral, 1996] “Stories,” the title of my short story which was fortunate enough to get published abroad in 1990 and receive a nice word of praise from American novelist Kelly Cherrry, got a bad critical beating recently from―of all people―Dr. Edilberto K. Tiempo, my own mentor in English through all the lean, romping undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate years at Silliman. Dr. Tiempo’s commentary, reprinted in last year’s Sands & Coral, was part of a larger article which served as the introduction to Mindanao Harvest, a fiction anthology compiled and edited by Sillimanians now teaching in Iligan. Dr.Edilberto K. Tiempo belongs to, in my opinion, the most achieved generation of Filipino writers in English, a group that would include Villa, Joaquin, Arguilla, Arcellana, Santos, Gonzalez, Alfon, Polotan, Angeles-the group that was fat her and mother to my own war babies generation. Tiempo is one of our classics in the short story and the novel. But what most people don’t know is that he is one of our very few competent practitioners in that rather neglected, in the Philippine setting, field: literary criticism. What serious Filipino students of literary writing can forget his fifties criticism of Nick Joaquin’s shorts story “The Summer Solstice”? I read his “review” of my story with mixed, but rather mild, feelings. Here goes my reply—or is it replies—together with texts from Dr. Ed’s criticism. The most difficult to wrte and the most ambitious in this collection is Cesar Aquino’s “Stories,” a Palanca award winner. Ahem. Thank you. He begins with a wrong premise: What I am about to set down consists of three stories which I had originally wanted to write separately. Actually there are four stories, not three: [1] that of the mad woman whose baby was eaten by a dog; [2] the boy-husband Kip whose girl-wife disappears for a couple ofdays while he is hospitalized for a disease the author has withheld from the reader; [3] William, an ex soldier and a CAFCU, who speaks Chavacano...who comes from Zamboanga; a few days later William is murderd; [4] a mad woman...from La Carlota looking for Marj. Why he mentions, initially, only three stories when there are really four, is one thing that invalidates his story-telling. First: the author, who is neither omniscient nor completely the I-persona or speaker n the story, did not withhold Kip’s disease from the reader. He did not know it himself, being only the recipient of one of the stories-that of Rimando. Second: if the I-persona, who is not necessarily perfect duplicate of the author, has got faulty arithmetic and thinks there are three, not four, stories-that is a legitimate character in the story. If come fictional, and resemblance to anyone is purely coincidental. But the truth is, even granted that, the I-persona’s arithmetic is not faulty, He expressly says there are three stories because he treas the William story and the Esther Lim story as one, the two incidents being linked together tenuously by his, the I-persona’s, jacket. In the last paragraph the author says William the CAFGU might have sired the mad woman’s baby devoured by the dog. the narrator’s black jacket which he had gallantly put around the shoulders of the other mad woman Ester Lopez because


she felt cold is now bullet-ridden on William’s body. How did this happen? Had Ester Lopez given it to William, or had she asked him to return the jacket to Aquino? We don’t know. Kip, the boy-husband, and his girl-wife—where and how do they come into the jigsaw puzzle? In this last paragraph Kip is described as “hapless”; there is no indication about this “haplessness” when we see him in the hospital; in fact the college girls who came to visit find him fascinating. And then from nowhere comes Emy (“It served you”—the narrator refers to the narrator—”well when Emy could not have loved you.”) Who is Emy? The first and only mention of her was when the narrator said she was the only one who correctly answered that a baby’s gurgling laughter was the best sound in the world. All the characters appear, as in reprise, in this last-paragraph soliloquy that is really a maundering sentimental drivel and that sounds ultimately meaningless because of the coercive manipulation that found the material too divers to coerce. This is the mixture of keen detection and surprisingly careless reading on the critic’s part. William’s siring of the mad woman’s baby is a playful, figurative play with ideas, and is not meant to be literal by the author/narrator. The black jacket could not have been bullet-riddled. William was not shot, he was stabbed. After being stabbed several times, he managed to pull his gun out and fire a few shots. After Kip’s short-lived happiness with his visitors (nursing students, not ‘college girls’ which would have been less specific), he lives through a bad time— two or three days—when his girl-wife disappears, clearly pained with jealousy, and leaves Kip by himself in the hospital. He weeps when she finally returns. The narrator adds that he never knew what happened afterwards to Kip, whether Kip went home cured or not. Who is Emy? She is the girl in the narrator’s part whom he once loved and obviously remembers with regret, and whom he obviously regrets not having won and married, now that he is middle-aged and is spending his ripe years with a pair of very old, decrepit parents. I felt, not think unreasonably, that I did not have to bring in too many details about Emy. Minimal, given the sort of experimental story I was writing, being optimal. (And Emy is mentioned three times, not twice as the critic emphatically claims.) The narrator was not referring to the narrator! It is William, the ghost of William, talking to him. Inaccuracies like this, which rather abound, as I have shown, in his critical piece, convince me that Dr. Tiempo was off form when he wrote his piece. Nevertheless he catches me momentarily pale with the sharp observation that the story fails to account for the jacket being worn by William when William is killed! I did fail to depict the narrator’s retrieval of the jacket which he has momentarily lent to Esther Lim. A close re-reading would reveal, however, that there was no way the jacket could have found its way back to the narrator’s hands unless it was returned to him the same night. My ex-mentor’s real, really serious, missile is the perception that the author may have coercively manipulated his material: By coercing some metaphysical linkage he thought he could make four absolutely disparate situations cohere... Indeed the last paragraph is a mumbojumbo attempt at meaning definition by coercively melding four extremely disparate situations... The angry old man of Philippie letters may be right! But I am hopeful it is an open question. The saving point for the story may be that the author-narrator has


himself become a character in the story so that he can be allowed to maunder, wax and wane sentimental, perhaps drivel, even somewhat—yeah—coerce. If this is so, then the story is all of a piece. Experimentation within the story form (such as was find in “Stories”) is always a formidable preposition and is therefore to be applauded.


THE SHORT STORIES Alihs In Wonderland [From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] As to the Zaratan, I never met anyone who actually saw it with his own eyes. ~ JORGE LUIS BORGES Tuesday lunchtime at Silliman University cafeteria. I see Alex, a news correspondent, fall in line with his tray. I approach and tell him: “Rizal Alih is alive!” Two girls from the registrar’s office laugh behind him. “He’s going to hold an international press conference in Cairo this Friday. With Nur Misuari.” The girls are laughing hysterically. “We’ll buy our plane tickets right away!” one of them says. From the café to the DYSR newsroom, just a slingshot away. The news transcriber, Jimmy, looks up from his typewriter. “You want a scoop? Rizal Alih is in Cairo. He’s with the MNLF and they will have a press conference on the 27 th, Friday. Androgynous Jimmy props his chin on a languid hand and asks. “What is your source?” “I dream it.” “Dreams,” Jimmy pronounces, “are a bad source of news.” On the Creative Writing Center. The writers’ group, made up of seven, is huddled and not a member is speaking. “Rizal Alih is alive and well in Cairo. He and Misuari are giving a press conference on Friday.” Jojo de Veyra, “Cairo? Cairo is pro-US… When I first heard this commotion about Alih I rushed to the sports page . . .” I didn’t dream it. I got it from a friend in Zamboanga whom I had just called by long distance. Whether it was rumor or fact I had no way of knowing. The following, however, is true. When the Philippine Armed Forces started to bomb the building where Rizal Alih was trapped, the renegade policeman’s Faculty X rose to a perfect pitch. He had leaped from room to room like a monkey and the bullets, coming from all directions, couldn’t hit him. When they did, they couldn’t seem to affect him much. Absurd black indentions on his belly were all there were, and Rizal looked fit to dance. True, he gasped and grimaced, but it seemed more from a maniacal determination to survive, than from pain or anguish. Now he heard a voice inside his head saying, “When the bombs start falling, everyone’s tendency is to fall on the ground for safety. It’s when you make a dash for it.” Rizal suppressed a shout of ecstasy. He recognized the voice, it was that of his dead brother whom he loved more than anyone and anything yeah, even more than his guns and his four wives. He braced himself, clenched his teeth, and— what’s this—kisses what appears to be a bronze figurine…


I never knew the Bengali kids. I took my virtual last exit from the city in 1972 to find my fortune or misfortune as a poet in Dumaguete, in Baguio, in Manila, and—of late —in witch-haunted Siquijor. When martial law was declared later that year, Zamboanga became no longer a memory lane but a labyrinth of death and violence. Don’t you go back to far Zamboanga! In 1980 I was a confirmed loser. I floated in Manila like a bedlamite. Somehow drifted into the UP Film Center where I acquired the habit of concocting fantasy film scripts which I never cared to write down. It was around this time that I heard of a killer cop in my hometown who was becoming a legend. I went home to Zamboanga for the first time in December. The killer cop, described as a strikingly handsome Bengali mestizo from Jolo, had only passingly caught my interest and I’d forgotten about him. But back among Zamboanguenos I noticed that his name was ubiquitous. One bright morning for perhaps it was a sunless afternoon. I happened to drop by the city police station and someone nudged me: That’s him, that’s Alih.” I saw a man in plain clothes standing in the yard and then sauntering with a curiously lulling slowness. And—how about that—returning my steady gaze. He had a way of tilting back his head when he looked at you and it gave the effect that he was looking back at someone taller, though he was in fact six feet. Perhaps that was how he looked at strangers, senses alerted, scanning the air for a sniffable hint of a shoot-out. Perhaps it quite simply came from his physical structure—torso, arms, neck, chin, nose, deep-set eyes, etcetera. Perhaps it was an acquired dandy habit which means he had something of the actor or film star in him. Perhaps, closely related, he was conscious of his of his reputation and knew, read what was on my writer’s mind and was kind of posing for the camera. Choose your Wild West. I have my own—crazy but viable enough for experimental romances: I think he must have felt that of all eyes he had looked into, mine were the queerest. A queer fantasy was to haunt me quite persistently after that. Back in Manila, when I was at the Film Center, when in the company of Krip Yuson or Jose Nadal Carreon, when I ran by race chance into Peque Gallaga or Butch Perez, when I’d occasionally hear people talk of Kidlat Tahimik (the international film prize winner Eric de Guia) it would play secretly in my mind. I dreamed of making a film (never mind how) of my luckless, loveless, aimless life in Manila. All seven years of utter smallness and ordinariness. But there’s a girl. Perhaps at the Film Center. Perhaps at the sari-sari store where I buy cigarettes. Perhaps a landlady’s niece. Perhaps a staffer of a magazine where I publish a poem. Perhaps a friend’s wife’s kid sister. Perhaps one of my students in the teaching years. Perhaps she’s all of them. Of course she’s all of them. Of course beautiful and, always, mere wink in time’s stream. The movie ends this way. I am able to borrow (never mind how) Erwin’s 45 caliber and pack it with me to Zamboanga. The final scene is at Fort Pilar, in front of the shrine. Across from me is the killer cop—Alih, him with the eyes of Death at their steeliest. The witches help me but I haven’t held a gun before in my whole life! The place is deserted, there’s only the two of us—and her. She’s there too of course. And they say, ever since I can remember it as a kid, that as long as she’s there, Zamboanga will never fall. Camera shifts and closes up reverently on her image. The question is: which one of us stood for Zamboanga?


I know as I write this, that he did. I know that romance and faith and wonder bloomed in this city on account of the way he expressed his madness, not the way I did mine. Indignant Reader: “But it’s a movie. They make ‘em taller in the movies.” Amused Reader: “It’s not Rizal Alih. It’s the other—Abdurasal.” Right. In the seventies and the early eighties in Zamboanga when you said Alih you meant Abdurasal, Rizal’s elder brother. If you meant Rizal Alih, you said Rizal Alih, full name. rizal was devoted kid brother who stood in his famous, or infamous, big brother’s shadow. Only after the recent incident with the general did he step out of that shadow—and out of the shadows. Into the consciousness not only of Zamboanga but of the whole country. Eat your heart out, Abdurasal. But for that, Abdurasal is easily the prospective filmmaker’s dreamboat. The usual problem of the actor being too good-looking for the real-life character he is playing turns curiously around if that movie were to be made. The problem would be that there may be no local actor whose looks could do justice to Abdurasal. Handsome, no matter how handsome, is not enough. He possessed a charisma that sent shivers down the lovely Zamboanguena’s spine, as well as that of the little kid next door and even that of the grown man who harbors a dormant killer’s instinct. But even as sheer physical type, his dark gypsy good looks make him hard to recreate. The 18-year-old Ronnie Poe who was introduced in “Anak ni Palaris” would be the nearest, though still too far to speak of resemblance. The young Jolico Cuadra of Philippine letters is a step or two closer but he’s not as tall and, being too cerebral, doesn’t have the right gliding id quality. In my fantasy film I had no casting problem. I intended to play myself and persuade Abdurasal to play himself. When I think soberly of this now, I know that at the sight of him across from me, even if his gun were loaded with blanks, even if all the real shooting there would be is the film shooting—my knees would turn to water. The Zamboanga of my youth was peaceful and as idyllic as its bougainvilleas. All we knew were strees rambles, and at dances. Teenage Zamboanguenos pummeling each other with fists. Sometimes with bottles, clubs, chains. Shouting courses like Mexicans when they fight. Full of, as they call it, anino. Once in a while, we had a glimpse of the real, unbreakable thing in pictures of hacking victims in the remote barrios on display at the photo studios. And we shuddered in speechless horror. The teenage toughies got bawled out or belted afterward by their omnipotent fathers or stemly disciplined by their school principals. Perhaps a rare one would eventually graduate into the status of having knifed a man to death. But even such a one feared the mayor whenever he was around. I remember my only two encounter with the man. I was 16 when I saw this man sitting in his parked jeep. Our eyes met and I didn’t recognized him but since I didn’t take off my gaze I found myself locking eyes with a pugnacious-looking man. I hastily look away, recognizing who he was and realizing that I had been disrespectful. The second time, many years later, was on the phone. “Hello.” “Hello, may I speak to Desy Climaco, sir?” “Speaking!” “… It’s Delora I want to speak with, sir” “Ah, hold on.” The gruff pugnacious father’s voice told me it was him.


I guess when the man was killed, the old Zamboanga too finally. You can’t ever go home again now. Except in fantasies. “What do you think killed the old Zamboanga? How did it all start?” I asked a Zamboangueno publisher-editor who was visiting Negros, as chance would have it, right after the Rizal Alih incident. “The barter trade. It all started from there.” He couldn’t tell me much about the Rizal Alih incident. Nor about Abdurasal. However he told me if I wanted to know more about the latter I should read a bibliographical book about him: The Hitman, written by Bar Jubaira. “Baryamin Jubaira!” I exclaimed. A former classmate. The son of the writer Ibrahim Jubaira. The population explosion came like an incurable, fatal disease. Boom city, the hapless Zamboanguenos soon found out, meant literally boom! Population explosion meant literally guns, grenades, bombs exploding. Still, some could see the bright side of boom. Wrote one: “At the barter trade center, you can buy all the goods you want to your heart’s content—goods coming from the ports of neighboring countries like Malaysia, Sandakan, Jesselton and others. All these… the people of Zamboanga are enjoying thanks to the wisdom of our good President, Ferdinand E. Marcos.” Marcos, yeah, of course he’s the one who killed the old Zamboanga. The Mindanao war, an outcome of Martial Law when the Muslims refused to surrender their firearms, made Zamboanga the “Rest and Recreation Area” for the military forces in Southcom. Soldiers coming from Luzon and the Visayas who are assigned in this area take their holiday spell,a relief of seven days, in a city famous for its seafood and pretty girls. An ex-Military Police officer tells me this is what makes Zamboanga the gunhappy place that it is. “Not to mention the militiamen, the underworld, the Muslims and the loose firearms, you have all these people—the PC, the Army, the Navy— living it up in disco pubs and more especially, in minus-one beer gardens. They love to sing and out-sing each other. We in the MP were always tense about this, the minus-one singing competitiveness among them. They sang very well too. Big, strong voices that could rise very high. Caruso could shatter glasses with his voice. They couldn’t but even a sergeant with laryngitis could shatter the whole place if he wanted. Next to rivalry over a fancied girl, that’s the chief cause of trouble. The minus-one singing competition, this thing of who could sing higher notes.” Well, fancy that. He tells me of two fine Military Police moments. One was stopping a collision on the streets between the Army and the PC, complete with tanks and grenades and machineguns. Another time was negotiating the surrender of an Army sergeant of the 1st Tabak Divisiion, a Muslim, who after he was beaten up by a Navy group retaliated by ventilating a Navy boat in Recodo with a caliber 50 machinegun. When I visited the city in 1981, after a seven-year absence, I couldn’t think of walking any of its streets. When I finally did, to visit old friends at the Ateneo, walking from Pilar Street to La Purisima was a veritable adventure, though entirely in my feverish mind. But after a while I was back to my old night-outing with friends. Willie Arsena, the sculptor-painter, seeing me somewhat nervous, reassured me by asking: “Can you name anyone you know who got killed? Sure, the killings are rampant but name one, just one.” That was before the newspaperman Porfirio Doctor was shot dead in board daylight. And before Climaco’s. In a 1985 letter, my friend was singing a different tune:


“Last night a grenade was thrown in front of the La Merced Funeral Parlor. A militiaman’s head was blown off. Eyes, ears, nose, mouth, teeth, and brains cannot be found. Two weeks ago a lady doctor seven months pregnant was brutally butchered in her own house in Tetuan. Her grade school children coming home from school found her lifeless body decapitated. And the perpetrators were two students (high school) 13 years old of the AE College. What a trauma! And these insanities are committed daily. A rotten corpse was found in the Cawa-Cawa, a doctor was found dead with stab wounds at the back of the State University, a student was stabbed dead on Guardia Nacional. While another shot in Guiwan. Two dead bodies shot in the head were found on Veteran’s Avenue. While three were found in Luyahon. Apoliceman was ambushed in Governor Lim while five military personnel were sprayed with bullets on Magno Street. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc.” (sic) The ambushed policeman in Willie’s letter was Lt. Abdurasal Alih. For all the glamorous legend that he was, his death was just another item in a long catalogue. Here’s Abdurasal from the point of view of a man I couldn’t have dreamed of interviewing but did. My dad, a man now nearing 70, was a decorated veteran of World War II. Like most fathers of my generation, he was uncommunicative to his children. Naturally, we never knew his experiences in the war. But sometimes we’d pick up stray bits from listening to him talking with the other olds. I, for instance, overheard him say how, during the war, they would execute captured enemies with knives to save their bullets. I picked up another (presuming it was true) from the security guard of DXJW where I worked as a newscaster back in the late sixties. They were executing Japanese prisoners but the man ordered to do the task couldn’t pull the trigger. My old man grabbed the gun from him and, as if demonstrating how it was done, shot the Japs down. I supposed there were other incidents. I understand, however, that violence almost exactly like love is private. After the war, he joined the Zamboanga police force. And retired from service in 1982. Yeah, he knew the Alihs, particularly Abdurasal who was under his supervision. The guns of Lt. Abdurasal Alih were an Armalite rifle and a caliber 45. He was a social charmer—a man’s man as well as ladies’ man. The kids saw him as some kind of real life hero, a movie fantasy come true. If grownups spoke to him with owe, there’s no reason they could celebrate him in their little tales of magic and power. A Tausug boy told me they call him “Dirty Harry”, and one of his henchmen (all relatives) “First Blood”, which must have been Rizal. Abdurasal went after his victims like a one-cop crusader, with zeal, perhaps with fanaticism. It was calculated to give him the necessary killer’s image he needed to rise to the top of the protection game. He killed and killed and killed. Two PC sergeants. An alleged Ilaga. A suspect that he had arrested and brought back from Cebu. A department store thief as he was running off with his loot. A convict in a city jail riot. This last deserves more details. My old man rushed to the city jail with Abdurasal, another policemen, and about five members of Alih’s group. One of the prison cells was broken when they arrived and a hundred convicts, armed with knives, had gone out of control. Two of them fell, one fatally, from Alih’s bullets.


Though Alih’s mode of operation did resemble Dirty Harry’s, he was no lone wolf. The blood relatives, armed with their gold teeth, trailed and lurked in the shadows behind him when he took off for a kill. The case with the Tausug security guard seems to be the one that best reveals his reptile coldness. The Tausug entered the police premises and, combine aimed and ready, dared Alih to fight back. Abdurasal had arrested another security guard, also a Tausug, who was a friend of this one now raging with the famous Moro ferocity that, it is said, prompted the Americans to invent the calibre 45 pistol. Alih was, apart from his eyelashes, unable to move. So were the other policemen who were around. “If anyone had moved”, said my old man, “Alih was dead.” It was not to be. His passion somewhat spent, the Tausug went back to his post at the Shoporama six or seven blocks away. Abdurasal picked up his Armalite and followed. Minutes later, my eight-year-old nephew John-John ran to the police station and told his grandfather that Alih’s “contrallo” was dead. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges might have included him in his beautiful book. A Universal History if Infamy, “brief tales in which human villainy becomes a victim of fate, enchantment or its own perversity.” There was plenty of that in the life and death of this Samal-Bengali from Siasi, Sulu. The Tans of Silliman who hail from the same place. Anthony who teaches literature and Armando who teaches philosophy, told me that when Alih’s exploits as the dread killer cop made him famous, the people in their hometown could not believe it. They have known him to be pleasant and peacable young man. He may even have been myedutin (fainthearted), to use a word from the city to which they has migrated. If so, he had metamorphosed. Not so the kid brother who lived in the eldest child’s shadow. According to Armando, who is Rizal’s coeval, the teenage Rizal Alih once tossed dynamite into the Siasi municipal building to give vent to his anger at the authorities. When Abdurasal was moved down one night on his way home from the casino, an Alih sister supposedly said: “They killed the wrong Alih, Rizal is the braver one.” This has been the perception of those who are in the know, staggeringly borne out by the sensational drama with the general. The older Abdurasal was flawed by the stuff of fantasy, flashiness, illusion; where Rizal is genuine, if brute, grit. Nevertheless it is the former who haunts the imagination. The appeal of illusion is in its diabolic quality, its power to make us play with the substance of things. Alih is well, I am the guard. Dumaguete, 1989


Anak Bulan [From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] [NOTE: Dr. Aquino has a similarly titled poem.] I first meet Ernie Yniguez in 1967 in a beer garden on the ground-floor of the Manuel Wee Sit Building in Zamboanga. Before this, I know him as the small-town journalist who is so prolific and so cadgy in his articles, that I somehow think he should—if he doesn’t—write short—stories, But as I am to find out when I get to know him, he does not have any literary bent, which seems a pity because even in conversation he is a natural story-teller. I find it inexplicable that his favorite write is Anton Chekhov. When I learn further that Chekhov is in fact the only writer he reads, I know he is something of a lunatic. He can’t possibly be just modest and secretive about it—modesty is not fact one of his qualities. He writes for the local papers and the radio stations and has never seemed to think of writing for the national magazines. He doesn’t have a regular job. He is in his thirties and lives with his parents who are well-to-do. The eldest, he is the only one who has not married. Sometimes I see him walking down Guardia Nacional at night, together with some friends, drunk and laughing raucously. He is rather short, always sleekly dressed, down to the gloss of his shoes. Faint traces of the Spanish in his looks, prominent stomach, eyeglasses, a slight waggle when he walks. He appears to be the sort who finds the insulation in a town like Zamboanga so comfortable and so perfect it never occurs to him that Zamboanga is a small, parochial town. In this respect, he is a typical Zamboangueno. 1966 is my last full year in Zamboanga—that is, if I equate Zamboanga with my adolescence, which will not be arbitrary. Of my adolescent years, only two are spent outside of Zamboanga. I study in Silliman for one semester in 1962. The next semester I quit school and go to Manila for the first time to attend a writers seminar under Leonard Casper at the Ateneo on Padre faura. When the next school year opens I am back in Zamboanga. I finish my A.B at the AE College. I g to the U.P. at Dilliman for graduate work. I am twenty-one and very adolescent. I see James Dean for the first time at the Lyric Theater in Escolta. The movie is East of Eden and when the movie is over I want to bawl like a child inside the comfort room. I go home during the semestral break and beg to be allowed to quit school for a while and stay home. My mother will hear nothing of it. I do not have the courage to tell her I am a delinquent in school and I know the second semester will go absolutely the same way. I leave the university after a year with no units earned except in one subject under Mrs. Feria. Now nothing can make me go back to school. My mother yields helplessly, as though I am ill or have had an accident. I am in fact completely dazed. But I am back to my old habits in the twinkling of an eye. I visit the public library in the mornings. From our house on Pilar Street, it is one short perpendicular street away. At the end of the street—you cross Marahui pass through the skating rink, enter a small building from the American period which has survived the war and the year with patches. After lunch I roam the streets. I browse in book stores. I run into old friends. I beer it up with Willie Arsena. This goes on for about a month. In July, I join a radio station as casuall announcer. I disc-jockey in the evenings. I use a pseudo name. The pseudo name


becomes popular. People wonder who the young man behind it is. At parties, they are surprised to meet me. Naturally I am extremely good looking on the radio. I become at once shyer and shyer and more and more conceited inside. They can’t make anything out of me in person. I am the ultimate in uncommunicativeness. But quite swaggering on the radio, and on the phone when the girl s call up. They all flip over the voice. One can’t wait to meet me and comes to the station. When she enters the booth I put on a long-playing record and start kissing her outside the booth. Mortified, she stops calling me up. In March of the following year, I transfer to another station. In December, I get fired, I kick a chair in the office and let go a right sealing my adolescence with a black-eye. Zamboanga wears it for a week. I keep saying to myself it is an exorcism. I’m through with the town. I buy a typewriter. I have all the while kept my real self alive by retaining my melancholy habits and corresponding with Willy Sanchez in Manila. Writing has been torture. My vain opinion of myself contributes to my block, poisons whatever real ability I may have. But really I don’t know. Maybe I just can’t write. I only vaguely feel that it is conceit that leads me astray and makes me shirk the actual job of sitting down to work. I dissipate myself on delusions. I don’t even really read. I buy or borrow a book and keep it in my room like a miser, reading it a little here and there, but never get to read through. I’m hungry for life, but life as it is in books. I don’t want to just read it. I want to live it. But Zamboanga will never read like a book. I’ll have to be a magician. Thus, neurasthenia or else plain, unmitigated sloth. Thus it is 1967 and Manila is luring me again. It is back of my mind all the time—the book of my life which I dream of living. Willie Arsena says we shall die talking in Chinese. I decided to leave for Manila. Look for a job—begin. Begin, I plummet and sink. I somersault on a cloud. I meet Ernie Yniquez. Protocol Montercarlo is a local publisher and editor of a Mindanao monthly. I loiter frequently at his office on the second floor of the Manuel Wee Sit Building. He has, like Ernie Yniguez. some literary inclination. I am told that he keeps receiving rejection slips from literary editors of national magazines. He once shows me the first twenty pages of a novel. But also unlike Ernie Yniguez, he obviously doesn’t have it—his grammar and syntax need a great deal of mending, and nothing breaks through it. When he isn’t busy—he treats me to beer or coffee downstairs, and his enthusiasm for Philippine literature in English spills and scatters all over the place like halitosis. - Who? - Ernie Yniguez - He’s a friend of yours? - Yes. - Yes—I suppose so, I’d like to meet him sometimes. What’s he like? - He drinks like a horse. He drops by often. We talked about you once. One Sunday at lunch-time I get a phone call. It is Ernie Yniguez. He is drinking beer at the beer garden on the ground floor of the Manuel Wee Sit Building and he wants to meet me. I come an hour late. He has two companions. The empty beer bottles are piled neatly to one corner of the table. There are four unopened bottles in front of the vacant chair. My “fine”, he tells me as I sit down. I have a hard time catching up. By three o’clock we are drunk and I am still one bottle behind.


Ernie Yniguez tells me he has a fellowship to a journalism workshop in Silliman the coming summer but he doesn’t feel like going to Dumaguete without a friend along and he is chucking it. Anyway, he knows I studied at Silliman and asks me what Dumaguete is like. At night, the sea in Dumaguete is more sinuous and misted than in Zamboanga. Perhaps because of the absence of the Badjaos, it also gives the Zamboangueno the odd impression of being less salty, as if diluted a little with fresh water, or with coconut water. The coconut trees, too, look somehow different here. They blend with the rest of the town in an essential, ubiquitous way. Of course, one may find himself in a section where there are no coconut trees to be seen—but even in such a section, the sensation of coconut trees is there. It seems so long ago, so far back. I tell Ernie Yniguez he should go, then add that we can go together. I tell him of the Silliman summer writers workshop which, coming to think of it now, I may like to attend. I ask for a few days in which to make up my mind. But already we talk as if there is no doubt we are going to Dumaguete together. We split before six o’clock. We have become friends, though I walk home still rather irritated by the “fine” of four beer bottles and his constant hurrying that I catch up. I tell my mother about it. She gladly gives her consent. I do not tell her my plan to proceed to Manila. I visit Ernie Yniguez at his house in the evening four days later. I meet his mother. She is pleased to meet me and is as excited about the trip as were are. Two weeks later, we take the boat. It is the middle of April. Ernie Yniguez sees to it that we have a supply of beer bottles for the trip. We buy a case and deposit it under the cots. We arrive in Dumaguete at eight in the evening. We take a room in Miramar which is on the boulevard a little past Silliman. We settle ourselves for beer in the small dining hall which is empty. Ernie Yniquez phones the director of their workshop. He returns to the table telling me he has made arrangements for us to take our quarters in one of the dormitories in the morning. I call up Doctor Tiempo. I hang the phone up and bound between the tables. I tell Yniguez I just been granted a fellowship to writers workshop. At past ten we decide to do something else. We take a pedicab and tell the driver what we want. He tells us there’s a place at the airport. The cab shoots along the highway We meet another cab at Daro. The two cabs stop. We u-turn. The drivers talk. There are two girls in the cab. Ernie Yniguez trades places with one of the girls. We head back to town. From our cab, I see Ernie Yniguez turn around to look at us laughing. For the first time I notice that his eyes often glitter mischievously when he laughs. The eyeglasses intensify the mischievous quality disarmingly. As I catch it, I almost forget that the drivers are racing dangerously. There is only one room vacant in the lodging house where the pedicab driver have taken us. It doesn’t stop us.


And then the light from the hall outside comes in through the opening above the walls. We asked the attending boy if they can turn it off. The boy says they can’t. It doesn’t stop us either. I can’t help taking a look at Ernie Yniguez and companion. I suppress a laugh. Like a horse is straight. Beneath the potbelly and the slight waggle, he is a horse. He comes. They lie still. I keep coming back as if trying to even things off a bit. I fall asleep with a joke: I’ve outrun a horse, three Sundays to one. In my sleep I dream I am riding a horse in my grandfather’s land in the mountains and the horse is flying. The flight is slow. After a while, the horse is a giant butterfly. It becomes harder and harder to fly. We draw nearer and nearer to the ground. When we land, there is a small nipa hut on the spot. A woman is giving birth inside. From the foot of the stairs, I see the midwife come out of the room and talk to my mother. She is one of our tenants. I go up and tell her my butterfly has sprained its wing, can she heal it. The journalism workshop is over in a week. I invite Ernie Yniguez to sit at ours which still ahs two weeks to finish. He stays and transfers to our dormitory. He makes fast friends with the writers. His boyish and boisterous self further enlivens our meals at the cafeteria and the evening of getting together. During the workshop sessions, he listens quietly, his face looking intent and absorbed. After sessions, the waggishness comes back instantly and the mischievous glitter in his eyes is clearly directed at everyone in the workshop. He lampoon Dr. Tiempo’s accent and everybody else’s jargon and idiosyncracies, fellows and panelists alike. He takes to the habit of saying like the moon. She walks like the moon. His anger is like the moon. He eats like the moon. She laughs like the moon. He snores like the moon. She spreads her legs like the moon. But everyone likes him. Three days before the end of the workshop, a story with the title Fire and Lung Sports is taken up. At breakfast, I take a look at the story, completely unaware of who the author is. The title is seductive. But after three of four paragraphs, I find the pose pedestrian. I blitz through the rest of the pages looking for purple patches. A stickler for skill in language, I drop a story if I don’t spot it anywhere. I drop the story. During the session, however, I become interested as the discussion progresses. Mrs. Tiempo seems excited over the story. Soon everyone is discussing the story hotly. While it is going on, I read the story through silently. The dull prose is still there, but the writer has obvious narrative skill. Moreover, the prose does not seem so bad now. After a few paragraphss, I turn around all of a sudden to look at Ernie Yniguez. Our eyes meet. He looks flustered, but I can see faintly the waggish glitter of the eyes beneath the blenching face, ready to come forth anytime. I smile at him instinctively. The story is set in Zamboanga during the liberation. It tells of a family, halfSpanish, known for its wealth and the good looks of a children. The focal character is the eldest son, a very emotionally repressed, tubercular man of forty, who is tormented by the sight of American soldiers wooing the local girls. He watches his youngest sister, a girl of sixteen, being courted, and his jealousy, unequivocally


incestuous, turns to madness when he discovers that she is pregnant. He rapes the girl, vomits blood, and kills himself. Dr. Tiempo qualifies his admiration for the story by pointing out the rather sensational material and the author’s apparent tendency to indulge in it. He then thanks the fellows if they think the story is not merely lurid. He calls me. Some of the fellows know who the author of the story is. When I say with a poker face that the man in the story is deranged like the moon, they burst into laughter. This puzzles the panelists somewhat. I go on to say that the man is not merely mad but tragic, giving allowance to the possible imperfection in the writer’s execution. I point out that the characters’ act of madness is a heroic quality. These remarks have the effect of making Mrs. Tiempo smile which, in turn, makes me feel very good. Ernie Yniguez’ eyes are glittering now but he still looks a little rattled. By the time the name of the author is announced, everybody knows it is Ernie Yniguez. Ernie Yniguez says only three things: it’s his first attempt to write a shortstory, he’d like to write some more, he does not understand the critical comments, for instance, the remark that the phthisis is symbolic. When the workshop comes to a close, however, he is one of those who are offered a graduate assistantship in the English department by the Tiempos. I get the offer too. Manila bursts like a bubble. The confessional writer is hopeless as a social being. The best of what he does is inescapably obscene. Things, whether fragrant or feculent, when they get printed, imply a violation the degree of which varies accordingly. If this bothers him, he will flounder at the simplest fact, affect a pseudo delirium and an inconsequential cubism. I wish I could write like Ernie Yniguez, whose first story, so disturbing, us a relative triumph of pure invention. He was a natural feel for the craft. Whereas I, counting in grace alone, go down trying to invent him, invent the moon, invent Dumaguete. After Dumaguete I am never quite the same boy again. I metamorphose, bit by imperfect bit, from adolescent to adult. Ernie Yniguez and I share a cottage inside the campus for one semester. It does not take long for us to see that our personal differences rule out a really close companionship. I even begin to dislike him a little. His beery air arouses my distaste. His supposedly primitive qualities strike me as actually so much crudeness. Above all, I notice that he is recalcitrant to my dreamy moods, does not seem to have any romantic interest in women. Unable to hold myself, I tell him he cant possibly go on doing the way he does forever—a man ought to have a wife. I don’t know if this hurts him. He is not exactly the sort who gets wounded visibly. He never ever mopes. But something between us is soured. We drift apart. He finds other friends. I do too. Even here, we are irreconcilable. We don’t take to the same people. Then fate plays a little joke. Ernie Yniguez gets married. At the start of the semester we get to know a group of girls who live together in a neighboring cottage. Ernie Yniguez meets a girl named Dolores. The first time he visits the cottage alone, he comes home near midnight. He comes in quietly and briskly, all potbelly as he take his shirt off. Before he can sit down, I ask him how the visit was, framing the question very ribaldly. The eyes glitter, but to my slight surprise, he says he can’t answer my question, the girl might become his wife.


A week later, he comes home one night with her framed picture. I look at him in disbelief. Aware of my gaze, he does not meet my eyes first. Then the mischievous smile comes on his face and we burst into laughter together. And so our paths diverge and the years come and burst like bubbles—whose balloons of memory that do not include Ernie Yniguez. Dumaguete swallows and digests us separately. He becomes just one of the faces that I see often on the campus from time to time. Dolores bears a child. A boy whom the father names Dmitri. Space wheels, time drops like a crescent moon. All of a sudden I run into Ernie Yniguez one Sunday evening. The night is young. It is October in 1972 and there are no memories. We are both teaching in Silliman. Dolores and Dmitri are in Spain. She is taking further studies and will be away for a year. Ernie Yniguez is on his way to Looc, near the wharf area. He asks me if I want to come along. The place is quiet when we arrive. It’s a small place with painted walls. The light is dim because of the colored bulbs. There are three girls I ever kissed. If I live to a ripe old age, I would wish for no other benefit than that the scene would persist in my memory. Perhaps then I would not be so senile and withered. If Zamboanga, as I’ve said, is the world of my life, perhaps Rima is the rhythm of my personal immortality. The girl who serves us beer drops a few coins into the jukebox and after pressing her selections sits with us and talks to Ernie Yniguez. Ernie Yniguez introduces us to each other and tells the girl to sit beside me. After a while, she asks me if I care to dance. I shake my head and offer her a beer instead. She gets up for it and when she comes back I rest my hand lightly on her lap. She keeps pushing my hand gently off her lap. There’s a cluster of empty beer bottles on the table when the girl we are waiting for shows up. She’s fairskinned and hefty. She stands beside Ernie Yniguez and slings her forearm on his shioulder, their hands meeting in a clasp. He tells her to get some more beer but she answers that she wants to get home. Ernie Yniguez introduces me to her. She smiles at me. I reach out for a handshake and Ernie Yniguez’ eyes glitter when I kiss her hand. The four of us leave the place and walk through an unlighted neighborhood. The home is not far. It has two storeys. The girl with me occupies the downstairs portion. She tends to the kitchen straightway while the two sit down on a single upholstered seat, their hands still locked. I’m sitting on the bench at the table wondering what the time is. She takes out some eggs and a can of corned beef. We buy some more beer after dinner. After a while, I ask what the time is. No one has a watch. She says it must be very near twelve. I’m sure it’s only around ten-thirty. I drink my beer quietly, still trying to decide whether to go home or not. I can feel my body aching to get some sleep. Ernie Yniguez and friend slip out to go upstairs.


When they are gone, she tidies the bed up. There’s a smaller bed in the kitchen, folded up against that wall to which it is attached. I sit in the bed, take my shoes off. She comes out of the kitchen with a blanket and makes for the door. I ask her where she is going. She says she will sleep upstairs. I get up, overtake her and close the door. Smiling, I tell her I’m dead tired and I won’t disturb her. I add that if sleeps upstairs it will look like I’m driving her out of her own place and I won’t feel very nice about it. She yields. When the light is out, I lie trying not to moan. The nights of staying up very late are telling on my body. I bury my face in the pillow as if my whole head is a wound and the pillow is the balm. An hour passes. Another. All at once I know I will pass the whole night sleepless if I don’t get up and go to her. In the dark, I make her form out. She is lying on her side, facing the wall. I shake her gently. She pushes me away abruptly. I tell her I want to know where the water is, I need a drink. She mumbles where it is. I grope for a glass and the water container. I pour the water into the glass soundlessly. I go back to her bed, sit on the edge for a little while. I watch her, relishing the sight of them breathing deeply, tense with waiting. The bed is too small and it squeaks. She asks to transfer to my bed. We get up. She turns the light on. I feel funny standing, waiting for her to get onto the bed. She strips the gown off. In the light, I discover that she is pregnant. Afterwards, I stroke the slightly swollen belly gently. My touch is hesitant at first, as if her belly is a strange animal that might bite. I ask her if she knows who the father is. She says she isn’t what I think she is. There’s a little girl washing clothes in the kitchen when, I wake up. The little girl looks up at me quickly and shyly. I ask her who the little girl is. She says the girl is from the neighborhood who comes every morning to her place to wash. She tells me Ernie Yniguez left early in the morning. I ask her what the time is. She says its past ten. Is ask her in a whisper if the girl stays in the place all morning. She says the girl will be off in a little while. I make some coffee and smoke. We sit at the table saying nothing. The little girl leaves, saying nothing and glancing at me again. I get up and lock the door. I pulled her to bed. Afterwards, I stroke the womb again. I have an urge to squeeze and hurt the rest of her body. My hand stops and rests on her womb. I tell her to name the child Rima, if it’s a girl. She is silent. If it’s a boy, I continue, Andre is a good name. She laughs at the name, saying it like is a word she does not understand, but adds that she doesn’t like Andres. I tell her it’s Andre, not Andres, and that it’s French and it sounds better. I begin to be aware that I’m playacting to make her feel good but actually I loathe the place and have no intention of coming back. I suddenly regret that I have no money I can spare. I think of the food last night. I leave the place feeling sorry that I won’t be coming back to spare her some money.


Week pass before I get to see Ernie Yniguez again. When I see him, he tells me the girl keeps asking about me. I say nothing and merely laugh with him. Whenever we chance to sit at coffee together, the girl crops up in pour talk. It becomes a sort of habit. After a while we get over it. I see him more and more rarely. A year after I see the girl again. I am strolling on the boulevard with Butch Macasantos. Butch Macasantos is twittering, firing away at the readings he has been doing lately. Someone pokes me from behind. She gets past up in a half-run and not turning to look at me. I recognize her. I stand motionless for a moment, then run after her. I ask her where she’s going. She says she’s going home. I ask her if I can come home with her to her place. She says an uncle is at her place. She is walking fats, as if the night is propelling her feet. I ask her about the child. She says she had it aborted. I walk back to Butch Macasantos. He asks me who the girl is. I begin telling him the story. - Who? - Ernie Yniguez. - He’s a friend of yours? Butch Macasantos is at Silliman for graduate work. He is a young man of twenty-two. He comes from Zamboanga. His poems and critical insights have impressed me. Sometimes we visit the Tiempos in the evening to show Mrs. Tiempo his latest efforts. They get into a very involved discussion in which I feel a little left out, a little inferior to Butch Macasantos. Yes. I’d like to meet him sometime. What’s he like? Manila, 1976


And Sunday Morning [From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] It is better to act than to think. ~ KLEIST From Camino Real, main street of the town, the police station was four more blocks away. I stood at the crossroads, lingering a while before crossing. It must have been two in the morning; I had no way of knowing exactly. I had forgotten my watch when I left the house in the afternoon, rather yesterday afternoon, a Saturday afternoon in March. It was Sunday already and the loudness of my football, in the full moon, told me I should have called it a day with Noel hours ago. No other soul in sight any more. Lat one was the driver of a solitary horsecab homeward bound some eight minutes back. Noel who lived in the outskirts had called it a day at around eleven. He had boarded a taxi and was well on his way when I thought of how we had really grown old, how we had n fact become used to our having grown old. He was twenty-three; I was older by a year. Somehow we were not quite the same boys that we were six years ago, and each time we went out for a drink, we were both aware, each to himself, how it was becoming less and less the innocent, wild and carefree whack it used to be. Something was amiss. Youth—the adventure of youth—was not quite there anymore. I had known Noel since I was eighteen. We both painted. Then we wrote poems a little and dabbled in ideas. But painting was the main stuff and we were, to all practical purposes, absolute lunatics. We both felt we did not belong in our town —our small town—and thought of going away, of self-exile somewhere where art perhaps could thrive. Thus Europe and America lay vaguely ahead. Even Manila would do at the moment. The year after I got to know Noel his father died and then he had a job with Blocks and did not care whether he would be able to resume college which he had to quit. I had just about as much passion for school as he had, but I was going through the undergraduate program anyhow. And then, although I never had a clear picture of how my life would be in the years ahead, I later proceeded to Manila for graduate work in history. Painting somehow had to take the backseat. To start with I was not exactly driven by a demon as far as dedication to art went. So Manila was not the Manila of my bohemian dreams. I was at it for two years and when I came home I still had my thesis to do. I found Noel still tied up in his job. He had a bigger pay and never got around to enrolling in night school as he had said he might. Much water had, so to speak passed under the bridge. We could not of course sense at once anything in the nature of a transformation in each other. It was a slow unfolding. And then it was perfectly clear that our close friendship was a thing of the past. Something in him smacked of retraction—a retraction from our wild early ideas. For my part I seemed to have become a trifle too quiet and secretive, it was quite possible there was something else in my manner that my friend saw and disliked. Anyhow, as I was saying, I was less capable of disowning the romantic and fatuous dreamings of my youth than he was.


At any rate we still drank together, mostly on Saturdays, on him, say a couple of times in a month, and I w2ould think how it had always been on him that we drank since the start. But I had always been the jobless one. It was now five months since I came home. Sometimes I felt like going back to Manila and going through the thesis bit and then finding a job. It seemed a handy course to take eventually. But I stayed on obscurely for the time being. And so yesterday it was Saturday and Noel called up towards five in the afternoon. I was finishing a letter for a girl friend in Manila and realizing it was Saturday afternoon and the post office was already closed. I decided to finish it Monday. We started to drink between six and seven, making rounds of the town bars, and broke it up near midnight. After Noel left me on the walk I went on roaming, drinking alone. I had thought of going out that night even before he called. Turning left from Mabini, I finally reached the place. I found myself pausing at the door, a great wooden structure of Spanish times which had survived several renovations through the years. It was a thing of beauty, looking forlorn and forgotten. Every time I had chanced, in the past, to pass the place the door seldom failed to catch my attention, though I never felt any curiosity about the interior of the house. I could not in fact remember the impulse of entering the place ever occurring to me. One half of the great door yielded noiselessly and I ascended a flight of stairs, went through a short and narrow corridor again and paused—at the entrance to a large room. From where I stood I had a glimpse of the chess pieces and the chessboard beyond one of the players. Two men in plain clothes were profoundly absorbed in a game of chess. I must have walked in very carefully indeed, for they did not heed me straightaway. The one half-facing towards where I stood, who should glance up any moment and see me, was a very old man. Over eighty, I thought. But no, I must have been mistaken, he must be younger or he would be out of service by this time. A pure fancy flew through my mind like a star—what if I had been absurd enough to bring, presuming it was manageable, the dead man’s body, carrying it in my arms as I stood here? The old officer, who would see me first, would be obliged to jump up from his chair a little, notwithstanding his old age and office. “God!” he would cry amid a jumble of words which, although directed at this devil of an apparition, might well be an absentminded remark on the chess game going on. I made haste. I approached and saw the old officer look up and regard me fleetingly. Obviously they were used to it. People coming in at any hour, even this late. He quickly resumed what must have been a protracted appraisal of the position, clearing his throat a little. The other officer was much younger. He turned around, suddenly aware of an intruder, and looked at me a bit more keenly but otherwise much in the same manner as the old officer did. They went on, no doubt expecting me to kibitz, or perhaps loiter about, scrutinize the place out of idle curiosity. They had no clock. Once more I grew conscious of my bare left wrist. It was uncomfortable. It happened sometimes—even if I was not in any haste. The four walls, painted a light green, which looked quite old, were bare, except the one behind the old officer, which displayed a small reproduction of Luna’s Spoliarium. An orange bulb illuminated the room from over their heads. Air came in from the lone window to the left, which revealed sky and a section of the town. “Excuse me,” I said aloud, “I—there’s a man—”


He was a large old man who squinted, his totally white hair cropped severely: Both of them faced me now as I went on as though I had upturned the chessboard and disrupted the game. I spilled it out as briefly as I could. The young police officer rose from his chair and told me to sit down. He hurried to an adjoining room close to the window. The old officer was apparently waiting for him to come back at once, as he did not budge, merely looking at me, and was in fact still, for the larger part, studying the chess position. He was in need of glasses from the way he squinted, but did not seem to possess any. At length he got up and peered at me again in the way that made me think yes, appearances can indeed be deceiving sometimes and he had an excellent eyesight after all. He lumbered forward with some strain to the other room and spoke to the young officer without getting in that door. “Call up the doctor again,” he said. “I am calling him up!” the young officer yelled back inside. The old man panted somewhat as he sat down once more. Something about his great hands, when they moved in the air with a heavy numbness, drew a soft stir in my heart. I thought of how I was capable of feeling tender with some old people. I suppressed smile as I recalled how, in my thoughts a moment back, he had leaped up and assumed the look of an idiot. I thought it myself how, for the rest of my life, there would always be old men like this one to whom I felt a reverent sort of kindness, and there would always be this naturally—preternaturally very childish streak in my psychology. It appeared I had to wait a while. “I was about to move my King away from the attacking Knight when you came,” the old officer said. “As you can see, my position, in spite of the check and its ominous suggestions to the amateur player, is hardly in any danger. Nevertheless I would say the balance is tilted a bit in his favor, from the psychological viewpoint. You see, I fear, very irrationally, the enemy Knights. The piece has a certain mystique of dread and terror for me. And yet I do not have the slightest flair for my own Knights. I prefer the Bishops.” He drew a compartment open before him and took out some sheets of paper. I had meantime taken a close look at their game and saw that he was losing. He was playing white and the castled white King was under steady pressure in a closed middle game; a state of affairs that was incompatible with the way he so articulately analyzed his game. But maybe he was merely indulging in it and was in fact taking himself offhand. I refrained from making a comment and merely listened to him attentively. “You’ll have to fill this up,” he said as he handed me the papers. He drew his pen and gave it to me. The sheets were blank; there were no forms to be filled out—I was to write a tentative confession obviously. The young officer had come out of the other room smoking a cigarette. He stood beside the old man. He exuded the detachment of a tough, hard-working expert at his routines. He was not more than thirty-five, I thought, as tall as the old officer but not as thick-set. He held his pack of cigarettes across the desk to me. I politely took one and stood up reach for a light. The young officer said that I could, if I wished, tell them the rest of it later, after a good sleep. He said I looked very tired, especially my eyes, and I might prefer to rest first. I could go home and come back when I was ready, probably in the morning before noon. I answered, returning to my seat, that there was nothing much to remember really, and that I did not quite agree with him. Outside of feeling a little cold, I was okay. Alright, he said, but he added in a warning sort of way that


my story might have to be retold all over or elucidated here and there, at their pleasure, until they had a clear picture. I was told that at the moment it was in fact rather hard for them to take me seriously, although certainly it would be inconceivable for them not to investigate the matter. I had described the dead man correctly, all right, and the man was killed at about eleven in the evening last Thursday, just as I said. All nice going, but all that didn’t mean much. Those things had probably leaked out. Besides, the doctor still said it was suicide. He paused, rather abruptly, after this, his eyes shifting somewhat, and I quickly caught his sudden hesitation. Since when had it become the doctor’s job, in a case like this, to tell whether or not there was foul play? But before I could as much as voice my objection the young officer had resumed. What he meant was that upon some prompting the doctor had expressed his agreement with the police over the case when the police thought it looked like suicide. The fact remained that there were no fingerprints on the gun but those of the victim, and there was nothing in the autopsy to lead them anywhere else. There were some things that were funny about this case at any rate, he admitted as he dropped his cigarette carefully to the floor and stubbed it out underfoot, giving me a look. Until now they could not find out who the dead man was. The landlady did not know, and there I was not knowing anything in this regard either. No one knew who the dead man was and, as he was obviously a stranger in the town, where he came from. Only a couple of months—the landlady said—was out most of the time. So how come no one, but no one, seemed to have known the fellow existed, outside of her and me. People were behaving very strangely, he said. Whoever had heard of a landlady who admitted boarders without bothering to find out who o earth they were? He then went on to observe. Smiling, that ours nevertheless was not a town of mystery, even if that was the impression sometimes of convent girls who read the dailies with a gasp. At this remark I was prompted to smile back, acknowledging the rhetorical turn. “Quite so,” I said. “Very well, start writing,” the old officer said. He had been rummaging through the drawer and rearranging some things. I was curious to see any trace of his reaction to the young officer’s earlier suggestion. But he said nothing more and seemed in perfect accord with his companion, looking at me with a peculiar expression—one I couldn’t quite place—rather senile and rather intense and inscrutable with that squint. I bent over the sheets and concentrated on the task before me. I was not enjoying my smoke. Not that it did not happen to be my brand and I did not like it. It had a fine taste and it was even likely that I would be patronizing it in the future. But I was in some difficulty. I got up to throw my cigarette out of the window. I thought of noel. In the cool night air I thought again of how for years now I had been avoiding something the a craven fashion, and how I would always seem to be doing this in essence no matter what I did. But I loathed him too, not so much for the way he went about his own dissipation. Something else galled me. I could never give up my illusions, if indeed they were so. I was bound to some invincible faithfulness, as it were, and I was holding my ground. I was sticking to the agony in the simplest for one could, with an awareness that perhaps what I was doing tock a courage of some sort too. It was Sunday morning in March, and here I was in a proceeding fairly out of hands as far as my competence went. To be sure I had never been much of a hand in anything in life. But then there was more to that, it was more than that. It could not be my own doing entirely. A large share of the crime, of the sin, must ultimately belong to someone else, belong to him as much as his own


skin and the weight of his own stupid skull. So my life was a joke. So here I was. I was doing something with great lucidity and there was no taking things back. Where did one go from there? I looked at the sleeping, quaint houses outside—the trees and the black posts and electric wires that seemed to float with the moon when one walked quietly alone in the streets and dreamed and himself floated, floated in the sky with the moon. The moon was there still, and Sunday morning, the month of March and April as well, soon to come, to follow, delicious to shoot one like that, to drag the carcass in by the collar—to see the smile still there even when the bullet had broken the skull, still intact and sweet and full of filth—to shoot away at all the smiles in the world, at all the filth in the world. I started to walk back in the desk without looking at the old man who must have been watching me with great interest. The young officer had gone to the other room again. I looked at the sheets of paper and the chessman that were still in their place. They had not tucked it away and probably had in mind resuming the game later. The outcome of the game, however, seemed quite clear enough. The position was lost for the old man. But I did not feel like saying anything as he quite probably knew it himself. And whether they would resume the game or play another one instead did not mean anything to me. Dumaguete, 1968


Assault on Dumaguete [From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] How many times have I called you up? At most five times. It’s possible you suspect I’ve seen you. I haven’t. though it wouldn’t be entirely untrue to say I have indeed seen you know what you are, who you are. You are Cyclops’, adopted daughter and I’m Ulysses. I phoned you because my boredom with both life and death had become a matter of life and death. Now the thought of you stirs me to write a pronovel. I bet I love you, Josie. You are my seventh solitude and my Latin Quarter. ~ JULIUS THE FOURTH We shall seek to safeguard our impartiality against the invasion of history by desire. ~ BURCKHARDT A concatenation of pseudo fantasies. I am compelled to make it out in—yes sir no sir —fictional terms. No act of striptease, this. Self-out-pouring is water of facts seeking poetic level. Done out of love for the living day, none other. Really some days are made for coupling. One hears it almost in the blue sky. But things are caught in some evil inertia. Of course, the motels are never empty. But that doesn’t mean anything. Fags not infrequently sire children. Weeks back, I met a catamite. Some artists are right—one has to be undemocratic to stay healthy. One’s hand is neither earth nor the eyes sun. makes me long for the age of kings. It’s an old story. Still, who knows? Perhaps our mistake is that we did not cook the French Revolution—thus the universal diarrhea. Money is like God’s infinity. It frames our mortal limits and thereby becomes the eleventh commandment. I’m a Catholic at heart—I don’t believe in a classless society. Here I am incomparably loyal to the Philippine poor folk—whence, as far as I can empirically tell—I spring. I grin like an idiot when told that for centuries my people have been duped and exploited. Nay, we owe the Spanish friars our deathless gratitude, in a word, decency. Poverty is God-given. And it would take a bat not to see hierarchy as an organic condition of the world. Although it’s true that the Spanish friars went too far. We have the hopping qualities of frogs. To ensure the success of the operation (I don’t mean literary success), I shall devise a sort of split-person point of view. The name of the character is Julius the Fourth whom we have just quoted. Julius is necessarily the author—me!—but much of him insists on being fictitious. This I hope is not too much of an addition to the world’s desperate confusion. We shall have renditions of Julius 1—Julius himself speaking, writing. This opening portion is in fact already Julius speaking. Julius is fond of quoting himself? Yes. Let it be said at once that he is superb craftsman in the art of flattering oneself. After obtaining a master’s degree from Silliman in 1971, Julius taught another year at the Ateneo de Zamboanga. In 1972, restless as a periwinkle, he went back to


Silliman to teach. On the second week of classes he was admitted to the hospital on Silliman Avenue obscurely ill. He had all the signs of a nervous collapse. Insisting that he had ulcers, he went through a complete check-up and was astonished to find out that his stomach was as sound as a rose in bloom. Once, made to strip, he had an illusion that the attendant smiled sidelong, as though the rose was in bloom, in more language—as though the organ was in a state of perceptible tumescence—but since it wasn’t the smile could have been only on account of the mole. She was slightly cross-eyed, wore colored glasses. Anyway the mole, which was indisputably there, was, to coin a word, a mismole. For it must be said that Julius’ lovelife went against the grin of the popular superstition about moles. If the attendant thought he was a devil with women, then she was crosseyed indeed. At twenty-nine, Julius had a knowledge of women that was not even rudimentary. His naïve understanding of the ways of women was positively freakish. Needless to say, Julius had never been in love, not even in his fantasies which were so proliferous as to be almost apocalyptic. For he had, not surprisingly, a gluttonous interest in the aesthetics of sexual passion. And he couldn’t look at a prepossessing woman without ravishing her in his mind. He read the psychologists, and insights into the psychology of loving was one of the yardsticks with which he approached novelists. His brain thus teemed with imaginative insights, all derived from literature, which never saw the light of his own conviction. In courtship or seduction, Julius was, as a matter of fact, a mongoloid. He knew it too. But this did not deter him from the habit of improvising lectures on love to his students—an expedient he had frequent recourse to whenever the torpor of his students became total. Sure enough, the eyes of the girls would turn lucent, something which, for Julius, redeemed the wretchedness of being a Filipino English teacher, of being, in a phrase, buried alive. Julius on love had a classroom eloquence born of coital malnutrition. But in Silliman, the girls yawned. Julius noted it with an alarm he barely managed to conceal. Oh well, he reasoned, after all it was the seventies—fetuses were sprouting on every campus. At Oriental Hall, dormitory for girls, the gossip was there were twelve pregnancies in one semester. The boys from Manila were making like buccaneers. Julius, a chess tactician of auriferous potential, switched to being unspeakably horny. To no vail. He had become soporific. The girls simply knew better than he did on his favorite topic. For the first time in his life, Julius had something of an original insight into love: only pristine women, particularly old maids, like listening to discussions on the subject—once carnally initiated they fall into a sort of bigoted omniscience. This put an end to a facet in his classroom career. He seldom took up the topic of love again, and when he did, it was always by way of accentuating his weariness with the world. Not that he felt he had finally come of age as far as women was concerned. On the contrary, he knew how to receive the illuminations of modesty. There was one girl whose interest in him was sufficiently apparent for one to say she was begging for it. In a summer misadventure, Julius met her by chance at a Dance to where he had somehow strayed. You know how people dance these days —they don’t dance, they entwine. A way of dancing that would have apoplexed Fray Salvi. Julius, who had not had dance I n twelve years, gave himself up to the pleasure of fondling his former student’s waist all evening, then, throwing all caution to the wind, inhaled her cheek with a kleptomaniacal kiss. In the dark, Julius perceived her blush.


When he saw her at the cafeteria a few days later, she was aloof all of a sudden, her face darkening as though Julius were a passing cloud. It was the summer of 1974, she wore the memory of Julius’ boldness like a silent anger. Julius, had he not spent all his time playing chess, would have racked his brain for a complex psychological explanation. But, being as we have said preternaturally stupid in such affairs, the chances that he would see the girl’s feeling as possibly a delicious concrescence—just one more spontaneity away from, say, removing her sandals to walk barefoot in the park—were nil. Faye visited him on his first morning in the hospital. She came with Rose and Adelita, her constant companions. The three girls were high school seniors in Silliman. Faye was Bing-Bing’s kid sister. One day he saw her frolicking at the beach in Silliman. That was in 1969, when Julius was given to venting the impotence of his life on the sea. She was thirteen then, and ion the pale of gold afternoon her skin, darker gold, made Julius nostomanic. He got up from the sand and went to where she was playing nimble footsy with the water. “Watch this,” he said, and as she turned to him he slid down to one knee at her feet, closed his eyes, and held his mouth open to the sky as if to catch a drop of rain. But it was the rainbow he swallowed and the young girl gasped, too astounded to laugh at one. When Julius opened his eyes, a cascade of nervous laughter sprayed his face and she saw how she was taking to him, like a squirrel. From there on Julius watched the girl blossom and knew she basked in the gentleness of his inward eye. The girls shrieked with laughter when they saw his age on the bedtag. Rose called him grandpa, which stuck—thenceforth that’s what she called him, though Adelita and Faye didn’t follow suit, except during the visit. He noticed that after a while the two girls had drifted to a distance while he was talking with Faye, as if Faye and Grandpa were sweethearts. The girl never ran out of things to say, though she wasn’t the talkative sort. She had a manner of looking at something else when talking to him—a magazine, a picture on the wall, a box. She seldom looked at him in the eyes—more often caught her glancing in silence at him. When particularly animated, there was something split about the way she carried the conversation: one half of her was talking to him; the other was talking about him—to her companions, as though it was one of the sessions in which she talked to them about her sister’s strange friend. She buoyed him up. The next day, Father O’Brien came. He visited the hospital to talk to the patients once every three days. There were two other patients in the room—a nondescript college student and a little boy who didn’t look sick, completely obvious to people, sitting up in bed and looking out of the window into Hibbard Avenue, waiting for his mother to come. When she came, he ate the things that she brought with a mute joy. Julius never heard him talk. When the boy left the hospital, Julius had fallen in love with the child, haunted by the boy’s solipsistic silence. A youngish man, slightly younger than Julius, took the child’s place. For some reason, Julius did not notice this one, even when the college student had also left and there were only the two of them sharing the room. As his bed was nearest the door—the door opened to it—Father O’Brien went to him first. For a mad instant, Julius was under the hallucinations that the priest had come to the hospital just to see him. He was quickly disabused, but not after he had absurdly sat up and uncoiled his heart somewhat.


Five years back, Julius had ceased to be an agnostic. He frequented the Divinity Library, gripped by the theological writers. His favorites were the Protestant theologians Bultmann and Tillich, and three Jewish authors—Buber, Baeck, and Heschel. An idea caught his fancy—we can’t tell exactly when. He wanted to have, like James Agee, a priest for a close friend, who would also be his confessor. He contemplated this with a choosiness verging on idealism. It’s easy to guess what sort of priest he wanted—one with an intellectual bent combined with depth of character, and yet youthful, youthful and sensitive enough to take a keen interest in the wayward aesthete infidel such as he was. For five years Julius was eluded by his phantom. At the Ateneo de Zamboanga, where he taught for two years and where he had some experience with the priests, would-be priests and ex-seminarians, both the stony conservative and the radical jelly repelled him—some of them were midget Raputins, too feeble, too patently furtive for their not too secret inclination. It was even more difficult than finding an ideal girl. At Silliman he found the pastors more congenial. Dr. Pierre Jordan, though their age gap precluded the friendship he wanted, was a little chapter in his life. And Harry Lee, the Korean was perhaps just a shade too wholesome, too spiritually antiseptic. And so his wish slumbered beneath the surface of his anarchy. When Father O’Brien entered the hospital room and came to him, Julius’ dream woke. I told him I wasn’t so sure any more—whether or not I was still a Catholic. “I’ve read some Jewish philosophers and some of the things they say disturb me,” I said. Whenever I am confined in a hospital I become really romantic. I float upon the orbiting stillness of things. The sun is clouded. The day is veiled as though by a woman’s eyelashes in a love-sated dream and my soul like a fish knifes the sleeping water. The boy was a pearl of an incident, a deep-sea dive, a ripple of reflection. And now Father O’Brien, a momentary delirium. Even as I spoke, I had a blotting sense of the inconsequence, the queer abruptness of what I was saying, which came like a wave that had forced itself to swell and blunder upon the wrong bather. Already I knew I was blundering. My imagination had gotten the better of me, talking as though I was reading a book in the course of a particularly intense passage the author had materialized—or, more accurately, as though I had entered into the book’s world and the author’s cogitation could accommodate my responses. Father O’Brien had rotund knitness that made him look short. He looked an energetic fifty, the sort of eternally bust man of whom a business executive, even more a college dean, would say “I have confidence in his judgment.” To rescue him from the usual dullness of these two, I hasten to observe further that he gave the air of having little time, his manner I his shoulders suggesting something heavy, like the impediment of armors—every moment a meeting point of physics and knighterrantry. He struck me as one who se daily moral exertions were so rigorous as to enable him, at the end of the day, to sleep at will, and to sleep a sleep so controlled that he also could wake up at will. Sitting upon in that hospital bed, febrile and worn-down, long-haired, unkempt, slightly rat-eyed—I too was all of a piece. Gradually I felt more and more that something repelled him, perhaps a mounting gibberish. When he spoke it was like he had cleared his throat (he didn’t). he said each man had to decide for himself. That there’s no forcing of the religion I was born into


on anyone. In a moment, he had gotten up and it was only the one I saw that he was making his routine rounds of the patients in the hospital. The first thing I felt upon his counter abruptness, coated with ample civility and gentleness, was one of disappointment. Years later, it would occur to me that Father O’Brien answer amounted to a snap ex communication. Vaguely, I looked forward to his next visit. Bing-Bing had dropped out of school. She was a willowy girl of twenty, with long hair reaching down to where she was all fish. She sang folksongs and visited the barrios to talk to the peasants. Sometimes Julius would tell her he loved and they would both laugh because they both knew it was not true. That was how it was too whenever Julius, dizzy with feeling, would attempt to kiss her. If Julius ever kissed her, that too would have been not quite true, at most a half-truth, even if the kiss were, let’s say, a study in exploration. And perhaps they would have laughed too afterwards, though Bing-Bing’s eyes were the shining of truth itself and Julius was crazed with feeling. Once Julius felt lonesome. Night had fallen, the sky swore an untainted loyalty. All time and space lay like an empty memo made flesh. Julius phoned BingBing, bought a bottle of gin, and waited for her at the amphitheater, among the row of green-painted seats facing the Silliman church. Bing-Bing came with Faye and Butch Macasantos and Franz, Julius’ younger brother. She had her guitar. Franz asked for his favorite. She sang it, her voice named angel of the morning. Franz sang along, as flat as mineral, then gave up, chased a passing dog. Butch showed me his latest poem, then seeing I read it carelessly read the passage he liked most and explained what he meant then seeing I was still listening half-heartedly pocketed the poem and fished out his harmonica and accompanied angel of the morning. When he played his loneliness was like Charlie Chaplain when I drank I said to myself I was drinking the gin to him not to Bing-Bing nor Faye nor my brother Franz nor the passing dog. Bing-Bing stopped singing and laid the guitar on the grass. Franz took the bottle from me and talked to Faye. Butch abandoned Charlie Chaplain and joined the bottle. I asked Bing-Bing where were her poems. She said how many times did she have to tell me she’d never show her poems because she felt bashful about it, just as she felt bashful about singing in front of Darnay Demetillo. I said well then I’d take a look at her paintings. She said she’d not show me her paintings either. I persisted. Her eyes rolled up to the sky and its loyalty, fed up with mine. Her gesture suffused the gin with dangerous feeling. Give me one picture I promise I won’t look at it. What would I do with it. I’d keep it in my room inverted on a wall for three weeks. Julius you’re crazy. And during the allotted period I’d write a story. “And when the story is written I’d turn the painting around and look at it.” “I thought you said you won’t.” “Not until the story is written, in three weeks.” “Then I won’t give you my painting.” “Okay, I won’t look at the painting. Just let me keep it for three weeks.” “No.” “Not even if I won’t look at it?” “Yes.”


“Yes?” “NO!” “Come on, Bing.” “No.” “Come on.” “You’re not going to look at it anyway.” “Oh, you want me to look at it.” “No.” “Then I won’t. It will hang on the wall with its back to me. It will help me write a story.” “Crazy.” “It will neutralize the effect of the star that’s crossing my life pinioning the open that otherwise would proliferate with putative pain.” “Where’s my hat?” “It either eloped with a wind having a velocity of from 32 to 63 miles an hour, a gale, or it fell and went back to the void trying to salute me because you wouldn’t.” “Good grief.” “The story begins at the point when you painting. That ought to be quite a scene. Then on—what happens in three weeks. In a way, the story will write itself. A mirror. I look into myself hard. Two mirrors admiring each other—Julius and his story. Things are happening. People come and go. You. butch. Others. Everybody. Then I look at your painting inverted on the wall.” “Thank you.” “-How I’ll never see it. The day comes. I give it back to you. I kept my promise, and the story fades out slowly, lingering to a few more days, the few days after. I’m alone on the beach in the afternoon. I’m thinking of your painting that I never saw.” “Supposing you got tempted and looked at the painting?” “I might see an empty canvas, see that you knew I wasn’t going to keep my word and you decided to make a little joke. I look at the empty canvas. Long. Thinking. Looking back on those three weeks and comparing memory with fiction, loneliness with words.” “‘That’s exactly what I thought I might do, give you an empty canvas!” “I don’t know—I guess it would be a better story if you really gave me a painted picture. But I’m not going to look at it anyway—I think I’d keep my word— how then would I know it’s not an empty canvas? I’m not going to use the omniscient point of view. It will kill the story after one sentence. Well—when you give me the painting I’m going to make you give me your word it’s not an empty canvas.” “You’ll take my word?” “Yes,” “Really, you will?” “Yes—and the painting. I’ll take it tomorrow.” “No.” “When?” “I’m not giving you any ever.”


Julius caught again, like a dart and like a ribbon, Faye’s glance. He touched her face, as if to touch her glance, a ribbon. It lay under her eyelashes as she looked at the grass. He glanced at Bing-Bing and saw her looking as if suspended by a slight surprise, but looking as if early that morning she had given Faye a ribbon to wear. Now in the hospital, alone, Julius remembered this ribbon that was never there, and the painting. He wondered if Bing-Bing would have taken his word when he returned the picture and said he kept his word—he hadn’t looked at the picture. But before her answer could crystallize in the room filled with absences, Faye came again with Rose and Adelita and the visit was very much like the first, except that after a while he saw her looking at something on the floor and he remembered the night her eyes were veiled with her eyelashes completely at the amphitheater and the ribbon again and now, propped on a pillow, he touched he r hair and at that exact moment Father O’Brien came in and Julius saw the priest’s eyes turn away from what he saw and he went towards the other patient. Julius blushed like a fish and Faye saw it and blushed too and the two other girls and it seemed everyone was embarrassed and Julius had a vision of his hand torn to ribbons, then to fish flinging about flinging for life inside a church and of a crucifix that fell into the sea and bobbed back and floated the crucified manform turned into a skeleton and Jesus walked upon the water. The only time you ever shocked me was when you said you couldn’t believe Jesus did not masturbate. I didn’t looked shocked at all then, did I? I’m fairly good at dissimulating, especially when caught off-guard. My face I imagine, becomes as it were cryptic, like a shell locking up a pearl. At chess, it’s when my opponent makes a superb move, when I feel I’m about to be beautifully outplayed, that I become very composed, so in control of myself it’s like I could will my heart not to beat. Had it been anyone else who said it, I don’t think I would have been shocked. Nine out of ten I would have said to myself, “This town hasn’t changed a bit, it still hasn’t gone beyond the jukebox.” I don’t mean Dumaguete. Or any other town. I’m not thinking of any town. I’m merely trying to suggest how I feel whenever “liberated” people rattle their handcuffs. How sure your touch was. It was as if, in your best form, you had done an exquisite watercolor of Jesus, the details of which we shall consign to the reader’s imagination. Of course, my golden one, you don’t paint. Or do you now? If you do, pray paint a portrait of your Hamlet your Heathcliff and your Rip van Winkle, and paint him as the Tarot fool balancing on the seawave on one hand, with only his left eye intimating ever so slightly of love and squalor. Lately I’ve really become serious about writing a novel—or, if that sounds too emboldened, perhaps a novelette. I’ll call the central character Cesar Ruiz Aquino. Does the name sound verisimilar enough? It occurred to me, complete and spontaneously, as though somewhere there’s actually a man with that name. Of course it partly spring from my name. I’ve always felt like changing my name from Julius to Cesar. My name gives me a way too much—I mean my natural disposition which makes me walk in the street like, always, it were the Fourth of July. I haven’t ceased to regret it’s been changed to June 12. It still makes me feel like pinning history like a girl and kissing her against her will. Speaking of kisses, let me tell you in advance that the character in my novel has always wanted to kiss you—rather autobiographical on my part, as you can see. But I guess that is one of the few moments in the novel which I am particularly faithful to history and, consequently, perfidious Aristotle and your parents. I’ve often confided in you concerning those dreams I dreamt circa


1973. Dreams wherein we kissed. My two favorites are the one in which we were swimming in the sea at the wharf, it was World War II, everyone was restless about the Japanese in town. I kissed you a lot then and we were literally floating, until William Butler Yeats came and saw us. In my dream he was a little boy. Did it mean it would take a world war for me to do it? Did it mean I ought to have done it as early as 1962? But you were then only eleven and I saw you only once, at your place—I was correcting papers for your mother who was my teacher in English 51. You came to the table and asked me what would an emperor be doing with testpapers. I saw at once that you were gifted and precocious, you struck me like some fabulous young creature caged in a world that was all of your own, a world I had accidentally entered, I who walked in Silliman like a youth walking in a magic forest. Time has done tricky things to that first impression, modified now for instance by the secret halfswoon I feel whenever, sitting next to you, I catch a whiff of the incense that is your body. Dreams take their troll. The other dream was more naturalistic, to use the language of literary criticism. There was another of those parties at your house. I kissed you gently among the windfall and the lotuses and you laughed and said “Why not?’ Why not indeed? Well, the truth is even in the realm of phenomena we were always kissing—our times together had been nothing but kisses. But that this is all figurative makes me feel like a tadpole; on the other hand you yourself told me I read poems aloud like a Welshman. You once baptized me Hamlet—though I insisted I was Heathcliff—for weeks I wondered why, thinking in the end that it must have been because you had perhaps found out I was writing Marilyn impossible love letters and I was cracking up here and there. Whenever I made a joke you always found it funny—sometimes it astonished me—you reassured me like a constant moon. Remember the time we were waiting for the bell to ring, looking at the milling youngsters and I casually said that I was feeling Rip van Winkle? Your laughter made me feel like I had brought Hibbard Hall down. It got to a point where I wanted to be always clever when you were around—and when you were not and you crossed my mind I kept investing jokes with which I could waylay and ensnare you. But ever now I’m still sluggish. I cherish the day when even my sorrow would be a trick with which to make people laugh. But that would be a miracle. I would have to be a prophet. You don’t really believe in miracles, do you? Literally? You can’t even believe Jesus was chaste to the end. I do. Let’s not wrangle over the word chaste. I mean it in St. Paul’s sense. Here, perhaps, we part ways forever. In other respect, Silliman seems so far away to me now. I can’t blame your old man—generosity to renegades has its own limits. Or was it my eternal ma’am, she who conceived you twice, who, in my delirium, was a sort of intellectual Hindley to my Heathcliff and your Catherine? God, how can I swim in my own gibberish—I’m still there Weng, plucking my brain like a guitar without strings, though lately I seem to have grown so ancient and decrepit-looking I’m embarrassed when I cough and I’m inventing a girl named Josie, gold and large eyes of my sorrow, threshold of Tangier. If I’m lucky I might pull it yet. There’s one danger: my silences are so ripe I might turn out lacking in originality. Still that should be the day. If I manage it, I shall be a footnote to the words stealth and tenderness. So far it’s all tentative exorcisms, tentative spalling. Think of a sick man who goes to a doctor and gets himself completely cured first before committing suicide. My ailment is called memory. These are big words, particularly for a grown man who squeals when going through a blood test. Manila, 1976



Bisayan Binignit [From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] It was called Isla del Fuego by the Spaniards because, according to the popular explanation, the island was once covered with molave harboring swarms and swarms of the brightest fireflies. To this day, natives refer to it as “Isla”. How it came to be called Siquijor, variously spelled in the archives as Siquijor, Siquihor, Seguiyod and Seguiyod, is not known. The poet JolicoCuadra went on a punning spree when he visited the island in 1973. Siquijor, he said, was “sexy whore” and Lazi, one of the bigger towns, “lascivious.” He would have made another one had he known the original name if the town of Maria: Cangmeniac. Outrageous puns, but on the right track. “The sexual force is the nearest thing to magic—to the supernatural—that human beings ever experience,” wrote the Englishman, Colin Wilson. “ Sex is the greatest magical force in nature,” wrote the Italian, Julius Evola. Siquijor has a twin island: Camiguin. Look at the map. About the same size and shape, these two tiny islands seem headed for the ravages of tourism. They would be a blink away from each other by jetplane. (But why oh why do we choose to blink away distances when little journey could mean the story—or at least a chapter—of our lives?) the twins sort of flit over Mindanao like a pair of gems on an invisible crown. If you turn the map upside down (a good thing to do—my advice to anyone bored with the Philippines of for that matter with the whole world), they are like eyes. Mindanao forms the hair, Bohol the nose, Cebu and Leyte the beard. The Philippines looks at you with eyes of fire! Islas del Fuego! The eyes of witchcraft! Eliphas Eushenko, a Boston balikbayan, visited it in June of 1988. Steeped in the lore of the Lamas and the Sufis and the Perdurabo faction of the Golden Dawn, he found the opportunity of raiding the island, a mere hour and a half away from Dumaguete by motorboat, too much even for his powers of resistance which are legend to his Igorot friends. I went along as guide, having gone to the island twice. The first time was in the summer of 1973, in the company of the same JolicoCuadra and yet another poet, Felix Fojas whose name alone, rhyming perfectly with the arcane word ojas, meaning “ spiritual energy”, perhaps entitles him to be the Merlin, or at least he David Copperfield, of Cavite. The second was it the realm if fiction: A Tale of Two Diaries, written in 1986, EDSA—provoked but Siquijor-inspired. In the ensuing search for comparisons I was at a loss as to which of us was Zorba and which was Nikos, which was the Knight of the Woeful Countenance and which was Sancho, which one was the raw, young anthropologist and which the Yaqui man of knowledge. Which was witch! Let’s just say the God Director behind our trip had an insoluble casting problem. I was set on assuming an identity of zero, since Eliphas was the one who had the power; but quite often my friend insisted on the being the fool—as when he hired the Silliman University pumpboat for 800 pesos to take us to the island. Which could mean the magical law—the fool shall have power—can apply in reverse: the powerful shall be foolish. So it seemed. Everything boded well otherwise on the morning of June 26, a Sunday. Siquijor was clear blue in the distance and the sea was like the smile of a


woman profoundly sated. Moses Sycip and wife Joni, the Boston magus’ physician inDumaguete, took us to the Silliman beach where the pilot and his assistant, a boy, were waiting. The lady doctor saw to it that the boat was laden with foodstuff enough to last us in case, she joked, our boat conked out and drifted to Borneo, somewhat clairvoyant as it turned out, though not quite. One of the problem Siquijor visitors face is the transportation. Here’s how it is straight from the seahorse’s mouth: “We can no longer bear the shock and revulsion that will come if another maritime tragedy will occur because of the inadequacy of vessels plying the CebuDumaguete-Siquijor-Mindanao routes.” Siquijor Governor Ben Aquino was alluding to the sinking of M/V Christopher in 1987, one of the three ships then serving Siquojorians. The two ships left, like the illfated one, are” of World War II vintage, frequently repaired even while on voyage.” M/V Christopher sank because (1) it was not seaworthy, (2) it was overloaded, and (3) there was a storm. “Because the passengers cannot be accommodated by the present schedules, there is always the tendency to overload to almost twice the allowed number of passengers. Overload boats are allowed to leave after a closed-door negotiation with authorities in charge of issuing departure clearance.” Governor Ben was crusading for improvement of the situation. His statements came out in the papers early in 1988. The subject was topical, for Dona Paz, a much bigger ship, had just sunk. “There are other shipping companies applying for new shipping routes to Siquijor, but it seems that the Marina (Maritime Industry Authority) gives more importance to the profitability if shipping companies presently enjoying a franchise rather than to the convenience of the public.” By the middle of 1988 a cute luxury vessel, M/V Princess Joan, was launched. Cheerful news to Siquijor visitors. But much transporting is still done by the pumpboats. In this cowboy manner, too, did Cuadra and Fojas make their way to the island in 1973, guided by Odelon Ontal whom Rowena Tiempo called the Rimbaud of Dumaguete and Siquijor street fighting. (A friend of writers, this native of Lazi does reciprocal justice to the description of Siquijor and its people by a seventeenth-century European traveler:” Tho’ small, ‘tis inhabited by people of valour, and dreaded by those of Mindanao and Jolo.”) I tell Eliphias of Jolico Cuadra’s pun on Siquijor. He comes up with his own: Seek a whore! I return, the fireball: Suck a whore! And into the literature of exhaustion Psyche whore! Psycho war! Seel a war! Psyche ore! Sexy war Seeker! Sicker!


Sucker! Succor! Sugar! Shaker! Score! Scar! Scare! Square! Sick whore! Seek cure! Sick cure! Secure! Sick war! Sick gore! Seek gore! Suck gore! Sexy gore! Sexy core! Sexy hour! See queer! Sea queer! Sea cure! Sexier! Sexy ear! Sexy here! Sexy her! Sexy year! Six a year! Seek yore! Sexy hair! Seek one! Seek her! Suck her! Seek ye ore! Seek ye her! Seek ye her island! Seek ye your island! Seek ye here! Suck ye her! Suck ye here! Seek your island! Seek her island! Suck ye her island! Seek cure island! Suck her island! Scare island! Secure island! See queer island! Succor island!


I can think of only one in Spanish: Si! Que horror! And two in Cebuano: Sakiyodi! Sige yud! both faithful to what’s probably the original spelling and pronunciation of the island’s name, and vindicating Jolico’s pun. As if licensed by this torrent of horrible puns, rain turns up from the island’s southern tip, rising (it doesn’t really fall until you’re in it) from the sea like some gigantic sea-creature dispatched to teach us a lesson in reverence. Eliphas, used to snowy American cities and airconditioned Manila, beams like a frustrated flying fish. After a week in Dumaguete, I saw that he was ready to be bored. Siquijor seemed to promise resurrection itself. But I warned him that the night-life of Siquijor was going to be worse. If Dumaguete was a sleepy town, I said, Siquijor was in a state of suspended animation. The pilot ask me in a low voice if Eliphas is a Japanese. People mistake him for one everywhere he goes, even in Japan. It’s not just his skin and his looks—it’s his way of gradually growing stock still in front of you, eyes narrowing into Zen slits, as though the while world had, for no particular reason, turned into a temple. I tell the pilot bits of my catch as catch can weather and climate lore. This is the vendeval, the wind that at this time of the year, blows implacably from Jolo, Sulu, northbound as my heart at Sandy’s voice. The man welcomes the topic with Elan. He knows the winds and currents and seasons of the islands like the fingers on his hands, perhaps even better. I try to top the things he tells me with a chunk of esoterica, without the slightness scruple that I’m stealing. The vendaval in history was the death wind of our race, for not only did it bring destruction to our crops and habitation but on it rode swiftly the virgin-eating Moros of Mindanao with hands like talons and blades shaped like lightning! I rattle on, not caring whether I am wide of the mark with regards to important details and even essentials. In December, during the other half of the year, the wind blows from China and it brought cheer to the hearts of our ancestors, for it made delirious caravels of the harvest songs upon our fields, but half a year later this wind returned, this time as the fearful vendeval with its raiding Moros, from the south back to the north, full circle, or rather full figure eight, a la Yin Yang, the cipher if infinity. And so we Filipinos know the cylclic nature of this universe with authority. It’s in our geography. In our elements. (see erwin Catillo. He knows more about it than I will be able to in five reincarnations.) Either for sudden shyness or because it couldn’t countenance my my—I was too absorbed in my plagiarism to notice. Lesson: never talk loosely about anithing while it’s happening, be it the rain, some music playing, or love. “Never seek to tell thy love! Love that nevertold can be,” as the poet William Blake puts it. I make the pilot talk about M/V Christopher. I am hoping he will tell me something he’s a let—down from the papers and the radio. But haven’t known. The only thing new is his sounding as if he had been there. A big wave splits the boat in two. A screaming comes across the sea. Two American women, Peace Corps volunteers, swim to the island pulling along a little girl plucked in the dark at random, the wind taking them to the part if the island near Cebu. Some survivors are carried all the way to Bohol! A ten-month-old baby girl floats easily in the snarling water, clutched by her mother who swears not to let her go even if the sea swallowed the whole world itself and morning never came. (The mother’s name couldn’t have been more appropriate: Mercy. The father was an Austrilian.(The baby from down under refused to go under.) M/V Christopher was three kilometers from the island when it sank. On July 11,1987. Yeah, the vendaval did it. It is invitable at a certain point that I ask,” About this far—here—I guess?” and just as automatic is the courteous “ about here—this


far—yes! “ About this time of the year and about this far. A second or two of silence, someone perhaps straining in vain for an instantaneous feel, if not some mental image, of the dreadful scene. Or perhaps, in my case, waiting non sequitur—non Siquijor! (stream or sea of pun and consciousness, you know) for a whale or a submarine to suddenly surface, either of which I sometimes do when far out to sea, ever since my painter friend Darnay Demetillo told me they saw a whale once on a trip to microscopic Apo island between Siquijor and Negros, and ever since a fisherman relative of mine slighted a submarine off Pagadian in the early seventies. I do nothing of the sort. What occurs to me is that we should land on the town of Siquijor instead of San Juan as originally planned. The reason we planned it so was because we wanted to spend the morning on paliton beach before deciding where to base ourselves. But the town of Siquijor is nearer. I then tell the pilot to head for it, a change of mind that proves lucky for us. Some green-winged insect alighted on Eliphas’ hand. The island’s oneman,or oneinsect, welcoming party he said,amused. He took out his wallet and was counting the money when the engine conked out. Nothing alarming, I thought—the pilot could fix it in no time. But could he, really? After a good while it turned out he was helpless. The engine—or genie(almost an anagram there)—refused to work. Now had we proceeded to San Juan as planned, we wouldn’t be as close as we were to the island. Moreover, the sea wouldn’t be as still, a current would be pulling us. Since the town of Siquijor occupies a portion of the island directly on the opposite side facing Mindanao, we were harbored and the sea was as calm as a dead prophet. But for this, Joni Sycip’s joke about drifting to Borneo wouldn’t have been too far from being fact,for that’s where the current, at this time if the year, heads— southwest. Barring chance of help from another boat, we would have been in a real fight. Eliphas said something about pulling out the money bills too soon as though the trip was over and done. We were a kilometer away from shore, in the heart of an incredible stillness of water as it were. Perhaps it was nature’s intention to show us how still she can get at times. But we were about to see something else. I asked the pilot if we had paddles (bugsay in Bisayan). We had two. We took turns paddling. Eager to show off, I took the rear and boasted to Eliphas that I grew up near a fishing village in Pagadian, and though I was remote from the village boys, I did pick up a native skill or two, like paddling. “ Paddling to Siquijor” said the embattled Magister Arcanorum. He was alluding aloud for my benefit, since one of our reasons for taking the trip to Siquijor was because I wanted to write about the island. The allusion was to Spalding Gray’s book Swimming to Cambodia, though you couldn’t help thinking of William butler Yeats line, slouching towards Bethlehem. After a while the sea turned green and we could see the bottom. It wasn’t that shallow but the water was unbelievably clear. Then we saw the strfishes— starfishes of all sizes and colors, strewn on the seafloor as infinitely as the pores on your skin. No alliteration meant but the sight was enabled you to behold the unconsciousness and it wa saying yeah, as above so below. I told Eliphas thios was why our boat conked out—so we would be forced to paddle and not miss them. They wabted to be seen. Months later he would write to me from Manila and tell me how


a friend of his who was knowledgeable on marine life was astonished to hear of this, of the starfishes, I presume, not of what I said. Perhaps one could make a wish on a starfish? The nineteenth-century French historian of magic has this to say of the star or pentagram:” the star which conducted the pilgrims is the same Burning Star which is met with in all initiations. For alchemists it is the Great Arcanum, for Kabalists the sacred pentagram… the study of this pentagram did itself lead the Magi to a knowledge of the New Name which was to be exalted above all names and to bend the knees of all beings who were capable of adoration.” Thus wrote my friends namestake, Eliphas Levi. But what magical,adorable child waited for us on this island? Think of the island as a mandala and a ziggurat. The six towns are on the rim of the base which you can round on tricycle within an hour’s time. If you circle so and it’s a clear day, you can see Mindanao from San Juan and Lazi, Bohol from Maria, Cebu from Enrique Villanueva ana Larena, and Negros from Siquijor and San Juan. The Philippines dances around you, as it were. The “ray” roads lead you into the heart of the mandals and the top of the zigurrat. We took a tricycle from siquijor to Larena—northward and clockwise—hired it for fifteen pesos. We were to learn afterwars the face is only two pesos per passenger for this route. Since a tricylcle would normally carry five people, ten would have been most we had to pay. Well, we made the first human being we met on the island happy. We decided to make Larena our base, since it’s the only poblacion with an inn —the government-owned Tourist House. Cottages are available on some of the beaches but I felt them gloomily withdrawn and isolated. After brunch, we tricycled back to siquijor and hit Dumanjog beach. Here Eliphas swarn without end, capering like a Japanese swordsman. Or to keep the imagery simple, maybe I should say like a swordfish. Drinks were costly at the beach disco-house. Eliphas drank like a Japanese swordfish ana I ate like an African one-man piranha. From the bar’s transistorized radio came the sound of a Cebu Station. The Cebuano version of a Beatles song. May Pamatay (Don’t Let Me Down), had Eliphias laughing literally in stitches (he can show you the scar). The beach wa not consistently sand, but you could tell the clear sand areas by the green color of the wateerl.except for a group of children spearfishing [MISSING PASSAGES]

apprehensive over how we would make her look if we printed her photograph in the papers. It seemed that a newspaper had juxtaposed her picture with that of a human skull or some other weird-looking voodoo paraphernalia and the sinister effect horrified her. I couldn’t talk to her and ask questions to my heart’s content because of the presence of the others. With us were the driver and two other men from the Capitol.


According to Bosya, Imelda’s legs developed what looked like fish scales. Her diagnosis sounded more like poetry than medicine. Bosya said that San Juanico bridge in Leyte, during its construction, had hurt a merman or manfish (okay in Cebuano) with a falling object. Since the bridge was her brainchild, Imelda was responsiblefor the merman’s injury. Thus the strange fishscales. Bosya exorcised the evil and in a few days the fishscales dissappeared. I asked her when and how she acquired her occult abilities. She said the was a midwife in her forties when she had a dream of the Virgin. From that time on she fount out she coud heal. But healing is not Bosya’s only activity. People in Negros say she is an adept in the black art of barang (kulam in tagalog), the sorcerer’s deadly ability to inflict fatal and hirrivle injury on a person miles away with the help of crawling creatures, e.g. centipedes, crabs, spiders—that are able inexplicably to travel halfway across the world if need be and lodge themselves inside the victim’s body. I find this hard to think of the goodnotured,wraith-like wisp of an old woman who leaned on me when we got up for picture-taking outside her hut. Not even the black map and the large bruise on her perpetually startled fave made her look like the Death mother. She seemed to be the incarnation of all the grandmothers I’ve clung to in the childrens park of my mind, as krip Yuson might say. “She’s genuine,” said Eliphas afterwards. He pointed out Bosya’s self possession and gracious sense of humor when facing people.” That can only mean she’s confident, sure of her powers. A fake would not be able to act that way.” On to the island’s highest peak—Mt. Bandilaan! From where in good weather you can see Mindanao, Negros, Cebu and Bohol. Unfortunately for us the island was wrapped in mist. I wanted to shout love from the very top. But not only was there nothing to see, there was also no one to think of. And even the cool mountain air could not evoke a single sudden memory of Baguio. I was magicless at the peak of a magic island. From Bandilaan to San Juan. A great rain loomed, but somehow we were able to elude it. On the way we picked up an American hitchhiker. I was amazed at how well he had picked up the Bisayan accent when he [MISSING PAGES] of Divine Providence Church and look at the image of the Virgin. Perhaps it was her comb I carried? I promised myself I’d spend more time in Maria next time I visited the island. It seemed the quietest and most unassuming of the six towns. Salagdoon beach had a certain physiognomy that appealed to me most. Eliphas and I were comparing and rating the beaches and the towns. I told him Maria was the one after my own heart. “Paradise if you can bear it,” as Gertrude Stein described Majorca to the young Robert Graves. A good description, come to think of it, if transposed to women—i.e., a woman is paradise if you can bear her. As we passed Enrique Villanueva, pressed by time and weather and unable to come down and sight-see, we began to worry about our scheduled departure the next day. The sea was like one of those Son of Satan or Damien movies. We ate and beered at the Larena wharf that evening with Governor Ben and the other guys, in the eatery which is his hang-out and whose owner, Mr. Douglas Ybañez, is leaseholder of the land on which the Swiss-owned building at Paliton will


perch. I can’t remember how and why now but I had the impression Mrs. Ybañez had the impression Eliphas was a Japanese tourist interested in investing in the island. Eliphas made it clear that he was a cosmic citizen who could express himself only in Tagalog and English, and that he could express himself rather well—except in love. Drunk with the island’s charm, particularly with the wind that whistled and hissed among the trees, he raised his glass to the night and the witches and cheerfully said he was going to marry on the island. When talk drifted to the subject of witchcraft, I could sense a trace of embarrassed qualm, though finely concealed. Happy Eliphas explained that the word witch was originally not disgraceful, its true meaning being a person who possesses ancient knowledge or science. That it was the Church in the Middle Ages that persecuted such persons and called them agents of the Devil but the truth was they simply happened to perpetuate the old religion. That witches therefore were the dispossessed old priests and priestesses, the antique dispensers of the grace, as well as the wrath, of the power. Or powers. Which meant wise. “True,” said the Mormon beside him. “This is true.” Since Siquijor has always been well-known for the malign practice of barang, or paktol (a variant), people from Siquijor naturally feel it as a stigma. And feel defensive, Governor Ben, in a feature article that came out in one paper, typically adopts the enlightened, modern stance, saying this is old-fashioned and outmoded superstition, but—also typically—tends to be a proud believer when it comes to white or benign or right hand or healing witchcraft: “Although the governor dismissed the practice (barang) as a false belief, he expressed wonder that while some cases were declared by medical practitioners as ‘hopeless’, the same cases of illness are cured by witch doctors.” He then points out, in this press article, that Siquijor has the least health problems in Region 7. I thought of the eighty-year-olds and ninety-year-olds I’d seen on the island’s hilly streets, without walking stick or youngsters on whom to lean. There are many stories about Siquijor sorcery just waiting to be collected or compiled. Of two or three years vintage is the story that tells of how an old man came from Siquijor to Dumaguete to vend his lato (an edible seaweed, formed like graped but green and tiny a droplets) on the shore near the boulevard. He had the ill luck of running into a group of drunks who first tried to extort money from him, then—realizing he had not a single centavo—asked if they could have his lato which was good for pulotan and chaser at the same time. The old man begged to refuse, saying his lato was his only means of staying alive in Dumaguete. The drunks then offered to buy it, but at a price much cheaper than the old man wanted. The old man had to yield, but reading his disgruntlement, one of the drunks beat him up. Days later, the drunk fell ill. His stomach would distend, fill out like a balloon with no one could tell what, very painfully. The hospital he went to didn’t know what to make of it. But, back home, someone noticed that the way in which his belly swelled and subsided and swelled and subsided so many times in a single day corresponded with the rising and ebbing of the sea. The old man and the seaweeds! The drunk was dead in a week. Because of the expected inclement weather, Governor Ben suggested that we postpone our departure to Wednesday and attend a dance at Enrique Villanueva, his hometown, on the night of Tuesday. Eliphas’ chance to meet some of the girls and perhaps find the right one if he was serious about what he said. Ninja in the witches’ island said he was but he wanted to marry five.


Five? Why, of course—the pentagram! A girl’s body is a pentagram, more so than a man’s which is more complicated. Or maybe he meant Limasawa. That’s it, Limasawa. Is it coincidence that the Samaritan woman whom Christ spoke to on the way to Galilee had also five husbands? Graves says Jesus was speaking in parables and what he meant was she was enslaved by the five material senses and therefore was not worshipping the true God who was Spirit. Well, you can say that Eliphas! And you can say that of the Filipinos before Magellan came. In fact, you can say that of Filipinos to this day—worshippers of the five senses, Limasawas all of us! Erwin, Recah, Jolico, Nick, Fernando Modesto, Johnny Altomonte, Danny Dalena, Fernando Poe, Bencab, Krip Kilat (aqui sila tumba!), Pepito Bosch, Butch Perez, Pecque Gallaga, Joecarr, Butch Bandillo, Bimboy Peñaranda, George Estregan, Romeo Vasquez, Dolphy, Arsenio Lacson, Ferdinand Edralin Marcos, Manuel Luis Quezon, Wilfredo Pascua Sanchez, Jun Lansang, Franklin Osorio, Romy Diaz, Amado Cortes, Charlie Cortes, Eddie Garcia, E.K. Tiempo, Franz Arcellana, Armando Malay, Leopoldo Salcedo… M /V

Catherine leaves Siquijor for Dumaguete at seven in the morning. We were up at

six. A light rain was falling. Half-way to Siquijor town, we easily caught sight of n enormous rainbow ahead (Larena is more elevated than Siquijor). It was the hugest I ever saw in my life, linking Negros and Siquijor. I felt reassured at the sight of it, interpreting it as a good omen, a charm against evil, though afterwards I was to learn that rainbows presage storms. It was my first time to see two islands, miles apart, connected by a rainbow—and the very islands we were travelling to and fro! What else could it mean but that we were welcome and bon voyage and take your pick of the carpet’s color next time! That this island had something I didn’t know what for me, more than Darley’s island promontory had something for Darley in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. Durrel could spin words that glitter like the planet’s rarest stones but I did not have to spin a single imaginary detail in our three-day stay in Siquijor—not the lazy galaxy of starfishes under its pellucid seawater, not the little girl’s white comb spewed by a stormed-horned sea, not the lovely apparition that made Limasawa Eliphas forget the nymphets of Borobudur, not the old woman at whose secret rite merman and crab and seaweed advanced or retreated, not the obscene madman that reposed like a bat at the church door in Lazi, and certainly not this rainbow that seemed larger and brighter than both life and scripture. We were settled on the boat when we learned that it couldn’t leave due to the hoisted storm signal. And indeed the disappointed passengers were excitedly pointing to a titanic black net of a raincloud advancing from Mindanao. We got off the boat and ha breakfast at one of the stillhouses in the wharf. We watched the storm pass between Negros and Siquijor. The sea vanished and the part that remained visible frothed, but in my lyrical frame of mind I thought I saw sampaguita and white orchids. As a matter of fact, I saw Bosya dressing the hair of a radiant child, though her comb was in my pocket. We went back to the Capitol trying to take stock of our situation. The storm had passed but the boat trip was cancelled just the same. One of the guys told us we could take a smaller launch, actually a motorized banca, that was leaving at one in the afternoon. We decided to take it. We killed time by visiting the dormant airstrip in Cang-alwang, narrower that the one in Dumaguete but longer. Then, on


the hope of confirming Eliphas’ epiphany, we went back to Larena and visited the Larena Vocational College. An amazing small campus. There are classrooms perched on sea-cliffs just like those castles in Europe, from where you can see Negros. No trace of the girl. I looked at stockstill Eiphas and wondered, for the first time, if the girl was a koan. Everytime a wave struck us I thought we were done for. The faces and demeanor of the women looked like omen itself. I sensed that they were frightened and sick and probably praying since their heads were bowed though their lips were not moving. Times have changed. In the old days, they would go into their litanies and orisons loud and clear, surer of their roles as mediators between heaven and earth. Now, not even a wild kittenish susmaryosep! The lady, in front of me, however, told me that it would be smoother once we were past the midpoint between Siquijor and Negros. Another passenger, a man, unperturbed as an unopened newspaper, said the waves were nothing. Nothing compared, I took it, to the storm in which the boat got caught that morning as it came from Dumaguete. As I set foot on the ground, I looked back at Siquijor. I wanted to find out if it would look—if it would feel—the same as the one that, for over ten years now since 1962 when I first came to Negros, among other strollers and promenaders on the boulevard in Dumaguete, I would gaze at, especially with the white afternoon moon full as unmelting ice cream over it. But a fog thick as proto history obscured the view and there was no Siquijor. The island is within you, the mist must have been saying. Or, somewhere you have never travelled. There was something else. Back on the boat I was not exactly up to my neck in morbid thoughts. Out of nowhere had come a feeling that some déjà vu detail in our Siquijor adventure had completely escaped me. And now, though I couldn’t put my finger on it, it was, so to speak, at the tip of memory’s tongue. As we hailed a tricycle, I knew what it was. It was with us all the time, or rather we were on it. The Ford feral I could have been mistaken but I had a gut feeling it was the very same Ford fiery that was featured in an advertising copy I wrote for J. Walter Thompson back in 1979. So then, did it mean that the story I was going to write about the island (this!) would be some kind of ad? Heaven forbid! But on second thought, yeah, why not? Anything to give Erwin a gallop for his beer. SOMEWHERE YOU HAVE NEVER TRAVELLED. Or, THE ISLAND IS WITHIN YOU. Dumaguete, 1988


The Browser [From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] I’m thirty-five and, alone in life, my own biggest disappointment. Very early in youth, I’d wanted to be a writer—a gift, a hunger, found early. A few stories which got published in the national weekly magazines when I was in my early twenties justified my ambition. I was a young writer of promise. In the seventies, when “young writer” was a description no longer quite applicable, my writing became even more infrequent. There was the martial law eclipse of writers general, but I cannot be sure if it was the political situation responsible for my own inability to fulfill myself. I think the truth is I had given up at some point in my wanderings. One day, I don’t know when exactly, I just thought it was foolishness to go on. I concluded that even the most mediocre American author of pulp had to his credit an honest craft that enabled him to produce a novel in a matter of months; whereas I was hobbling through decades still in search of the bright word, the indelible phrase, the perfect paragraph. Of course it was not easy to say good-bye. I never really got to. I went on playing, if not the would-be writer, at least the man with a literary mind. I moved in literary circles. I continued reading, both the dear classics and the current sensations (which is more than I can say of my contemporaries who, in their youth, similarly blazed like the morning star and then blinked, conked out when they got married). These were not pretensions. I entered and browsed in bookstores as the pious enter and worship in their churches and temples. I loved to touch, to run my fingers over a paperback’s flaxen cover as if the blurbs which I adoringly read were rosary beads. I loved the sheer eyeful of letters so finely arrayed and woven on the page—their fixed life and dance on the page as it were—at times feeling that to be more wonderful than even the order of the stars. I loved the smell of a paperback’s newness. I loved the lightness, the feel of its thickness in my palms and just before returning it to its shelf, I would clasp the volume tightly shut, and then bring it to my lips! All this sprang from a sense of tremendous secret force that could hold life’s multitudinousness within so delicate, so ethereal a frame. I coveted that magic power and incomprehensibly shared it whenever I held in my hands the work of a particularly gifted author, e.g., Peter Suskind, Thomas Pynchon, John Cowper Powys, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Malcolm Lowry, Stanislas Lem, Giuseppe di Lampedusa, G. Cabrera Infante, Robert Graves, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, J.G. Ballard. . . Dumaguete, 1989


The Bulbiferous Blurbs [From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] Jorge Arago: “Recollocating!” Perfecto Tera, Jr.: “A perfectionist” Juaniyo Arcellana: “Anak ni diablo! Ti magus!” Alfred A. Yuson: “Aqui sila tumba!” Vicente River, Jr.: “But next time send me a real story with character and incident!” Rowena T. Torrevillas: “Why not?” Victor Jose Penaranda: “Yo otro!” Pepito Bosch: “Thing!” Virgie Moreno: “Itim aso!” Jose Nadal Carreon: “Murmuring marmosets!” Fernando Afable: “Ineffabie!” Jolico Cuadra: “Him dogstar till the phoenix hour!” Jose Lansang, Jr.: “As winds ravage leaves of trees Who’d only muzzle in her hair!” Wilfredo Paschua Sanchez: “Hindot ni Mallarmel!” Edilberto K. Tiempo:


“My goodness! Cirilo Bautista: “Pajama alas Siete!” Wilfredo B. Noledo: “Kayumnggi, mon amour!” Erwin E. Castillio: “Iba ang may pinagsamahan!” Ninotchka Rosca: “The book of gook!” Greg Brilliantes: “Quid pro qoul” Nick Joaquin: “!!” Jose Garcia Villa: “,” Dumaguete, 1989


Checkmeta [From Checkmeta, 2004] It was close to midnight and the loudness of my footsteps on the centered sidewalk told me I should have called it a day with my friend Larry hours ago. No other soul in sight anymore. Last one was the driver of a horsecab on his way home. Larry, who lived in Sta. Maria, had taken a taxi. “See you later,” my friend for some ten years now said as he sat in the front beside the driver and grinned, five rounds of beer and pulotan and the magic of art and literature shinning in his face, through the cab window. I said something hilarious and Zamboanga lay in sleep under our triumphant laughter, two young men each one fatally betrayed, even when he had begun to suspect it, by the illusion that one was going to be young and promising forever. Turning left, I reached the place. I found myself pausing before the door, a great wooden structure from Spanish times which had survived renovations through the years. Everytime I passed it, the place never failed to hold my attention, though I never felt any curiosity about its interior. Now I was about to enter and see it. One half of the great door yielded noiselessly and I ascended a flight of stairs, went through a short and narrow corridor and again paused at the entrance to a large room. The door was open. From where I stood I saw two officers in plain clothes sitting unnaturally immobile across from each other. Then I saw the chessboard and the pieces. For a spilt-second I thought I was hallucinating and was about to enter aches club. But I saw that there were no other tables. It was a lone chessboard and there were no other people in the place except the two. I must have climbed up and walked very carefully indeed, for they sat there for a long while before noticing me. The one half-facing towards where I was, who should glance up any moment and see me, was considerably old, but seventy. An involuntary thought crossed my mind—what if I had brought the dead man’s body, carried it absurdly in my arms as I stood here? I could see the old officer, the first one to see me, jumping up from his chair despite his advanced age. “Holy God!” he’d cry profanely amid some other unfinished words directed not at this devil of an apparition but at the chess game they were playing. Nothing of the sort happened. I approached and saw the older officer look up and regard me fleetingly. They were used to it. People coming in at any hour, even this late. The other officer was much younger. He turned around, suddenly aware of an intruder, a looked at me a bit more keenly but otherwise much in the same matter-of-fact fashion as the old officer did. They went on playing, no doubt expecting me to kibitz, or perhaps loiter about, scrutinize the place out of curiosity. But there were virtually nothing for one to gawk at idly. Except for the clock and reproduction of Luna’s Spoliarium, the walls were bare. “Excuse me,” I said. “There’s a man…” I spilled it out as best as I could. The younger officer rose from his chair and told me to sit down. He hurried into an adjoining room close to the window. The older officer was apparently waiting for him to come back at once, as he did not budge, merely looking at me, and was in fact still, for the large part, studying the chess position. He was in need of glasses


from the way he squinted, but did not seem to posses any. At length he got up and peered at me again in a way that made me think yes, appearances can be something deceiving indeed and he had an excellent eyesight after all. He lumbered forward with some strain to the other room and spoke to the young officer without getting in at the door. “Call up the hospital again,” he said. “I am!” the young officer yelled inside. The old man panted somewhat as he sat down once more. something about the way he wore his age, accentuated by the nature of his job, inevitably drew a soft stir in my heart—which made me wonder, given therefore the natural softness people have for the old, at how, a moment back, it was hard not to laugh at the image of him jumping up and looking like an idiot, even when it was purely imaginary. It appeared I had to wait for a while. “I was about to move my King away from the attacking Knight when you came in,” he said. The old man had correctly judged—I think from the way I looked lingeringly at the pieces on the chessboard—that I played chess. I even felt that somehow he knew that I played it so well. Was he perhaps aware that I was the best in the city when I stopped playing at eighteen—that in the truth nobody could have stood up to me in a match three years before when I was fifteen and had just learned the game? Could he have any inkling of what I was and what I could do and not just in chess either? That the year I stated playing chess I was reading, all on my own, sonnets by Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats? That at twelve I had seen the devil? Because honestly I didn’t and still badly needed, even now, guidance and direction—in fact deliverance from a bad situation. “As you can see, my King’s position, in spite of the check and its ominous suggestion to have the amateur player, is hardly in any real danger. Nevertheless I’ll give it to mu opponent—the balance is tilted a bit in his favor, from the psychological viewpoint. You see, I rather irrationally fear the Knight: Which is funny because I do not have any special flair for my own Knights. I prefer the Bishops.” I had taken a quick look at their game and saw that the position was incompatible with the way he so articulately analyzed his game. He was one of those! But maybe he was just talking and actually knew. I refrained from making a comment and merely continued to look at the board. From the configuration of both the white and the black pawns I could see that the players were not illiterate. The young officer had come out of the other room smoking a cigarette he was not more than thirty-five, not as tall as the old officer and not as thick-set. He had the air of a tough, hard-working cop who looked busy, perpetually at his job, even when he was just playing a game of chess or smoking cigarette. He said if I wished I could go home and come back in the morning to tell them all about it later, after a good sleep. He said I looked very tired, especially my eyes, and I might prefer to rest first. I answered that there was nothing much to remember really and that I did not quite agree with him. Outside of feeling a little cold, I was OK. Alright, he said, but he added in a elucidated here and there at their pleasure, until they had a clear, complete picture. Then I was told that at the moment it was in fact rather heard for them to take me seriously! Certainly, he went on, it would be inconceivable for them not to investigate my story. I had described the dead man correctly, all right, and the man died at about ten in the evening last Friday, just as I said. All nice going, but that didn’t mean much. Those things had probably leaked out. Besides, the doctor, who was on the phone a while back, still strongly insisted it was suicide. He paused, rather


abruptly, after this, his eyes shifting somewhat, and I quickly caught his sudden hesitation. Since when had it become the doctor’s job, in case like this, to decide whether or not there was a foul play? But before I could as much as voice my objection the younger officer had resumed. What he meant was that the doctor had expressed his agreement with the police over the case when the police, not without his, the doctor’s, encouragement, thought it looked like suicide. The fact remained that there were no fingerprints on the gun but those of the victim, and there was nothing in the autopsy to lead them anywhere else. There were some things that were funny about this case at any rate, he admitted as he stubbed his cigarette out on the ashtray and gave me a look. Until now they could not establish the dead man’s identity. The landlady did not know and there I was not knowing anything in this regard either. No one knew who the dead man was—though he had been a lodger in the room for almost a year. So how come no one, but no one, seemed to have known the fellow existed, outside of her and me? People were behaving strangely, he said. Whoever heard of the landlady who admitted boarders without bothering to find out who on earth they were? And there I was claiming… he didn’t finish, shaking his head and smiling. His face radically altered—became oddly disarming—when he smiled. Ours was not a town of mystery, said—even if this was the impression of the convent girls who read the dailies with gasp. I could not disagree more and I guess in away the old man was on my side. Just their game I was on his. The check on his King was part of a winning attack but of a winning defense— true, his King was not in any danger, but his game was doomed. The old man, playing the white pieces, was conducting an elegant attack or the black King in a semi-open position—had sacrificed pawns and a piece to get a position in which a white was poised for a brilliant Queen sacrifice to overlooked an interpolatory move by Black—the Knight check—which whether white captures it or not, would then allow the saving move. White will never be able to carry out the Queen sacrifice, much less checkmate the Black King, and so—hopelessly down in material and its attack repulsed, white was headed for defeat. In such a game as this, the creative chessplayer cannot sympathize with the loser. It is a case where heroic human efforts gets upset by an unforeseen event, a purely contingent flaw that ruins the otherwise inspired vision. It is blind matter tripping up the spirit which, in this case, had evidently been al over the place, i.e. all over the chessboard, for all the fact that the old man was seventy. I wanted to let the old man know this. Perhaps, when the nightmare of an impossible, tragically flawed story had passed and we had become friends, I would. Maybe we could even play some chess. And, if I found out that hi literacy extended beyond the chessboard, that he read poems and stories, I could explain to him what this was all about.


Chronicles of Suspicion

[From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] You have accused me of stealing from one of your less known chronicles: “Helen”, published anonymously in the defunct Manila magazine, Ermita (August 1976 issue, page 49). What hurts irreparably, you say, is that I have made some changes and alterations and now you are tormented by the suspicion that I may have rendered the thing better. Let me recall your chronicle briefly. The first time you saw her freckled face was under a tree in Ermita where her mother had grown up, as well as his grandmother. The first and the only time. She had shown up for the interview you need to write your piece, after which you never saw her again. Her name was Elena Maria, sixteen and, in the words of a song from a region where her mother was born: pagkatam-is unta nga handumun. You wrote that Mariel would have been an arcane anagram of a nickname. (Ma-ri. “the fruitful mother”; el, “good.) But it was Helen and the name provoked you to quoted from famous poets—words you, the internal quota, would have quoted in her presence if you could. (You couldn’t but nonetheless she was going to read your piece when it came out.) You quoted: 1. “Sweet Helen make me immortal with a kiss.” From The Tragical History of Doctor Fautus by Cristopher Marlowe. 2. “Helen was not a mortal woman; she was Helle, or Persephone, a Goddess of Death and Resurrection.” From the white Goddess, Robert Graves. 3. “Heaven is in this lips…” Marlowe’s Faustus once more, before Helen. 4. “Stay, thou art so fair,” Faust Goethe. This was not said by Faust to Helen, who does not exist in Goethe play. It was what he wished he could say to each fleeting moment in our lovely but ephemeral lives. But it therefore struck you as apropos since she, your Helen of Ermita, was bent on going back to US for her studies. She said she wrote poems herself—as a hobby. Which meant not the way in a bygone area Jesus Balmori had done it who was known to his race as Batikoling and who was her great, great grandfather. Nor—you felt with understandable certainty—the way she danced. She had danced the Binaylan, the Muslim ‘Dance of Viels” ……last year in Wisconsin.. at church service… Here I come to my own defense. I have heard the last in ghostly ellipses and haunting italics not only in order to evoke her voice out but because that piece of information mysteriously led you to foretell with head long whimsicality, unmindful that someone could be fool enough to take you seriously: “Someday perhaps, when you find the street, you’ll see to it that all time and space will hear of that, and of how a secret, vertical river wakes and rushes with her smile when she says Wisconsin, neither Zamboanga nor Negros nor Ermita was beautiful.” Though you didn’t know me at the time, I am certain that you were addressing me. For no one has cared to remember those words, not even you, but I whom perhaps a more complete and less deserved oblivion awaits. I,


anyway, have found the street. I have slipped under the same waterfall that you have elusively described and which I found envelops her like a transparent veil (not content to wait and watch till she steps out in a lightning of freckles). Madder than you, I have whispered words of fire in her ear, all of my own coinage, but some of which may soon pretend to have written, like a death wish, as now, under my name. *O for the memories of what might have been. (My rendition. You had not bothered to translate if for non-Cebuano readers.) Dumaguete, 1898


Clear Water [From Sands & Coral, 1974] I recognized two women across from us when were seated. They smiled when my eyes met theirs and I thought of their smile, that it was good despite their calling and the jeepney was warm with the fullness and the driver’s joke and the rain and the gin I had drank. It had rained very suddenly and very hard and the wind was just as hard as all the people who had come to the places on the boulevard to spend the evening had gone except us and when the jeepney came it seemed to have come out of nowhere and it had been a while getting wet under a spare roof and thinking the rain would stop anyway despite the sky. In the rain her eyes were deep green. Now we were inside a still open space not far from the hotel where she was staying with her father. There was a group of young men who spoke Tagalog very fluently, Manila youngsters studying in Zamboanga. I had my back to the group and knew one or two were staring at her, from the way her eyes moved. They were the only people inside the place and they talked very loudly and I felt uneasy. But after a while they were gone. And the rain and the wind too were gone and now it was almost midnight and we were on the way to the hotel and on the street, bluish and hushed after the rain, I kept kissing her again and I had the odd sensation of a thief to flee with his loot but held back by an urge to improve on a detail of the house he has broken into. She must have sensed it for she laughed vaguely. A small laugh, smaller than her small voice, that had a shyness in it that surprised me. He would, as we say, pass the time on the boulevard. From there the restlessness of Friday afternoons lingered into Saturday mornings. He would feel sick from all the cigarets he smoked and he would lie, lying as if the nicotine were a bullet in his gut. But he would rise and fill the pails because there would be no water when he woke up. And the bullet would turn into a longing. He longed for the metaphors that did not tumble out of his longings. The sea spewed a white swirl of orchids. If one had come like that, it ended lying half-abandoned in a corner of his mind, contextless, melancholy as a pared fingernail, though always a possible title for a story. And the Dark Sea Spewed a White Swirl of Orchids. He had, as a matter of fact, a flirtation with whole sentences for titles. Of Love, a Thief, and the Beautiful Country of Summer. Because There is No Word Beautiful Enough to Be Your Nickname. Like the Rest, My Love, Your Name is Written, But in Italics. When Silence is Not Golden Nor the Word Silver. Eddie Sevilla, born in the forties, drank to the dregs what it was to be thirtyish in his case. At twenty-seven, he subsisted still, economically, on the tight means of his parents and, spiritually, on the loose ends of a dubious talent. He was a man trying to wake from a bad dream, trying to move his toes that he might come to. He


thought continually of loving and perishing—paired, as Nietzche said, from all eternities. Less often, and as fruitlessly, he thought of life and chaos. Life he thought as something hardwon, effort, lucidity. And chaos, the deferment of effort, the opposite of lucidity. Eddie Sevilla, the central character in a story he still had to write—though, if he were the one to say it, he would say ‘a story he thought of writing’, was alive, an old young man, a survivor of youth, and prevailed like ash at the core of an apple. For always there were more cigarets to buy than time to write, and the butt-ends of his conscience stared at him like little monk men that lay about lifeless from some disease. The long of days and nights, he spat, was meant for coupling, though this coupling, like his story, was elusive, was the scent and skin of the apple without the apple, and perishing took a lopsidedly greater puff of his life and all the butt-ends were after all the proof, unmistakable as scars, of a warped brand of fidelity. What seemed the flaw in Eddie Sevilla’s character was that, suffering sufficiently for writing as he was, he wouldn’t suffer sitting down to write all day and erasing the outside world from his thoughts. The mere thought of it was quite unendurable. So that in the evenings, after the boulevard and the supper downtown, he would find nothing to do and his legs took him, as we say, back to the apartment. He lived in an apartment which, because the other three were vacant, looked more like an abandoned house that made one see there were no ghosts unless one lived alone. Then he would be the ghost. The place had been rented by a ghost of a friend who had gone home and left the question of settling the bills of five months to no one. But his friend had given him the key and told him he could live there if he wanted, and wait if he could because it was possible he might come back at once. About nine every morning, Eddie Sevilla woke up to the gentle rocking sea of possibilities. He swam at the beach in the morning, drank in the afternoon, read in the evening, and when the night had deepened he was not too tired to see how thumbnail his life was, how impossible, and he, as we say, dragged himself and filled the pails because the faucets were like his life in the morning. He was contained in some Chinese box. The first thing he saw when he woke up were the posters all over the place, and he thought of the prohibition in Islam against reproducing the human figure in art. This association roused him somewhat. He looked a long time at the beautiful faces that stared without end at every detail of his privacy, looking at him in the eyes. Summer. He had finished the thesis: Cubism In Poetry. The impulse to wire that he was coming home winked from a corner. A thought of staying peeped from another. When he saw her at the beach in Silliman for the first time, he went up to her and then he felt sure something was going for him. That was last year. Last summer. At Insular, he saw her one more time and then he was back in Zamboanga and he thought it had slipped by. When incredibly she turned up, on a trip to the towns farther south of the country she was born in, it was almost as if she were still an uninhibited mental act—he had fantasied a few times—utter was the ease in which in the three days she stayed, their bodies slid into each other’s license. He was startled by the thought that they were essentially strangers. An impregnable essence. Going to bed only refined it.


She would always be the American girl he saw on the beach who was at once easy and hard to talk to and whose long black hair and smallness fairly stunned him. She had green eyes, but some things about her, he thought, were not American. Her first name, her slow movements, the long black hair, the smallness. When two strangers go to bed before a firm acquaintance, the status quo, being strangers, is sealed, so to speak, with semen. One could gloat over the impurity that as thus been made more impure—made, that is, a purer impurity. They would always be strangers to each other, not so much because she was American and he was close to thirty and she was seventeen as because in the town where he had grown into the loneliest boy in the world, she went, on the day she came, past Israel, as he did, and had come as he had on the day she left, if the hyperbole and the pun and the metaphor and the syntax could be forgiven, from Africa. Unpinning myself from the womb I haven’t quite kicked myself out, hankering for a dead present, one in which there would be no way back, I sometimes catch a glimpse of the lost townstreets of Nick Joaquin. At night, past the waking hours, men piss out of their windows into the streets, and the act, far from being an insult to the magical tone in which Joaquin’s stories are woven, is a radical enhancement of the town’s nineteenth-century beauty. I am drifting, taking stock of myself, watching the sky reflected on certain mornings. In the afternoon, the yellow dust of horse-shit. I think gazing at the dunes and the dark sea at the beach, of Erwin Castillo’s Ireland —the sheer inspiredness of its writing. Modifying the view of Franz Arcellana: Castillo does something with language that makes Mojares more obviously the poet and Villanueva more obviously the matter. My dear country, my adolescence is finished. Better so godawfully late than never. I regret that in my dream of exile I thought of you in London beneath the sea, together with your literature in English. But thus can the very sky plummet to rid the planet, not of our rhymes, but ourselves, smelling too much of beauty soap.” And when it seemed that May too was going, the grass its eyes languidly like some sensous green animal. One never saw the neighbors descended from the Spaniards who came to the island to become rich long, long ago. That is something about the big old houses they live in—you never see them at their windows. It rained when the sky was not blue but that was rare. Then the sky was lavender. In February, when the typhoons came one after another, the town hardly noticed. It did not show, except a little in the streets when it rained and where, just before the rain fell, the winds howled like a dark angel. One knew of the typhoons from the radio and the papers and the way the beaches were. And only the habitués of the beaches minded because the water was rough and cluttered and killed all zest for swimming. But even then, there were days when, out of the grey, the sea lay tightly like a beautiful woman asleep——a bather splashed as heartily as one would release an arc of pellucid urine. The soft, sun-strewn haze of a foggy morning! The water so lovely it was as though one floated in color. Color—that is what the world is. The secret that men have quested for in their heroic lunacies. And what indeed is the color of color? A girl’s otherness. A plume of silence. It seemed a strand of her hair had caught in his face as flotsam in the sea, and he saw once more the green of her eyes, the ripple of her name, tasted the


seawater of their kisses, felt her nipples in the sand with his fingertips, the spray of her fingertips. I like men, she said, her small voice and her sweet young face unbelievably sweeter and younger than what she said. She was leaning over me, as if asking me to sign a contract. It was a schoolgirl saying she was not a schoolgirl. But maybe I didn’t know, wouldn’t know. The thing was she could have been from another planet, or from another species, if that were not too gruesome. He, in any case, was ready for it again.” I thought of life and chaos. Of my father who was recovering from the pus the doctors bled out of his liver. I thought of my mother who was awkward that afternoon hen Tita Plohner appeared at the door. As awkward as I was. As awkward as Tita Plohner was. Out of the blue sky of her promiscuity, real or imagined, she asked if he loved her and fell into a piece of plagiarism, became herself a sort of plagiarism. I said it didn’t mean anything to say I loved her. I had misplagiarized. In Camus’s L’Entranger, Meursault is asked that question qice by Marie Cordona: Then she asked me again if I loved her. I replied, much as before, that her question meant nothing or next to nothing—but I supposed I didn’t. I phoned on the morning of their plane. “Yes,” the voice, neutral, came. Her airport voice. “Good luck,” I said. “Thank you.” At twenty-six, I had ‘a feeling of having been routed in life’. I had a part-time teaching job at Ateneo, teaching for the first time. Silliman at Dumaguete was a loose end, a thesis I meant to do the next semester. Tita Plohner, who grew up in the Philippines, was on her way back to Manila. From there she would proceed to America. I said I loved her and then she thanked me again and her voice thanking me had an effect I couldn’t make out. She had a very small voice on the phone that always struck me. It was Sunday. In the afternoon, I felt depressed, and the feeling grew and it was hard to believe. Towrards lunch-time one morning I came home from a swim and vaguely noticed as I began to peel my shirt off that some clothes hung on the wall were missing. Then. I had turned around absently, with the queer faint apprehension that some thief had broken into the place and made off with some things. He stood, cornered, where the mirror had been. His right arm held the clothes, and his left hand held the oval mirror uncertainly—he had, it appeared, just disengaged it from the wall. Then with a greater shock, I saw that the shirt which fitted him was mine. It would be best to say that, a thief, he looked like a thief. And to add that it was though he were beholding something that had sprang alive from the mirror if


the mirror were not in fact in his hand—or from an evil-looking poster he had not noticed in the past. The man’s lower lip fell slightly, and he perceived him biting something tiny, as if grasping with his teeth the fact of his having been caught. Something faintly obscene assailed him from their facing each other thus, both wishing they had never seen each other—the thief in sorrow for having been broken into the place, and he for having caught him without meaning to. It could not be said of course that the thief’s sorrow was his, and his the thief’s—a thief is a thief only when caught in the act—only then would he feel that ‘sorrow’—he would see himself, a thief, in the one who catches him, see that he is a thief. Curiously enough, the shirt that the thief wore was his, and he had been in the act of taking off his shirt as if it were not his. But it was sickness he felt at seeing the thief that was a queer counterpart of what froze and impaled the thief to where he was: the thief’s fear of what he, the owner, would do—which was the fear over what he had done. He was, to the thief, what the thief had done; the thief was, to him, what he could not do. A shape of anticipation trembled in his mind like a monad: he would let the thief go and even allow him to have the shirt he was wearing.” I had often wondered what it would be like. There had been times in the past when I tried to do it, swimming far out—into the deep—into a fear of the deep that lurked deep—only turn back each time, overcome by the fear. Now here I was—or here it was. The water had turned dark, thick, and, opaque, smooth, seemed something alive, capable of moving on its own volition. I tried to slow down, to make my strokes deliberate; but I kept arrowing with an almost painful excitement, like one in the middle of coitus, and it was fear—the same fear that had made me to turn back in the past now driving me on wildly, unmanning me, draining me of principle until I stopped and, I didn’t know how it was, I turned on my back and floated and did the unreal thing of looking into the sky and I saw the white, thin slice of fingernail that was the moon. Then I closed my eyes and the crescent had looked like a clasp that held the dark side like a precious stone when it seemed as though the sea moved beneath me and the crescent fluttered like a wild white afternoon insect of the mind in the sky and it was my heart become pure impulse and I had opened my eyes and turned and couldn’t be still in the water and it was the nether moon until my eye caught with a dreadful clarity the enormous stretch of water that had caught me, a dark circle turning like the enormous silent roar of the world suddenly audible and all about me and the enormity of what I had done was as stark as the enormity of what I could do and I dove under on a sudden uncanny whim to look at the bottom but instantly recoiled from the dark gasping. There seemed absolutely no reason to die, and the coldness of the water made me feel like crying. I looked landwards and saw in a rush of joy that the land was not too far away, watching me like the faithful sentinel of some secret it knew was in no danger of daring to discover. At eighteen, a friend had asked him, also eighteen: What is the color of color? The question, steeped in the bittersweet of lost youth before they had lost youth, was in due time thrown away like an old coin. Or like a pretty stone from the sea that one had picked up and kept until it had become what it was. An ordinary stone. Life passes without unity, and life is very rich; we, very poor. Once the same friend told him of a dream; the two of them stood before a transparency. It seemed as if his friend was telling him about it again, still astonished by his dream of clear water.


When DXJW, the first radio station in Zamboanga, went on air in 1958, it gave Zamboanga the epithet city of flowers. This epithet was used every station break, being part of the station break: This is DXJW broadcasting from Zamboanga, the city of flowers. Sta. Maria and Tetuan are the two barrios that are presumably the Zamboanga of this epithet, abounding as they are in flowers. A more accurate epithet would have been city of fishes. The sea in Zamboanga abounds in more kinds of fish than can be found else in the world. But in radio accuracy counted less than euphony. In any case, in Sta. Maria where he was born and raised, Willy once dreamed he sat on the stairs and a monkey declared to him with a stupefying breadth of gesture: ‘Don’t you remember we’ve across all that?’ He kept having dreams of the same ineffable absurdity, but they were never quite like the time we rambled about the seawalls of Fort Pilar, eighteen and taller than DXJW could ever reach. Each stroke a cheer for life. In our lost youth in Zamboanga, Willy Arsena, imperishable friend of my youth, asked what the color of color was, and the words slid away from all of youth’s planetary yearnings.


Crazy in Ermita [From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] Sartre once observed in Exupery that he, Exupery, made of the airplane a medium of perception—an organ of perception, to be exact. The airman as a stage in evolution, Earlier, the Futurists saw in the automobile—presumably more so in the airplane—a symbol for their aesthetics that called for lightning associations, thunderbolt syntax, forms blurred by motion, the abandoning of the ordinary modes of logic—their own unmystical counterpart to the Surrealist’s “psychic automatism” and, in the nineteenth century, Rimbaud’s “systematic derangement of the senses.” In the sixties space travel, moon travel. The exquisite experience of being able to behold our planet as in a mirror. Then the late sixties and the early seventies. An ancient thing becomes in the west a voyage, more or less perilous, to inner space. You don’t have to ride a rocket, you simply swallow or smoke or inhale. Aldous Huxley espoused it in his essay, The Doors of Perception, putting the mescaline eater in the same genus as the Hindu mystic—an argument that Martin Buber, of Hasidism and therefore himself no mean tripper, couldn’t swallow. At any rate the weed seems older, anthropologically, than either the cross or the Star of David. And what about that which seems as old as man’s navel—the boat? There’s Rimbaud’s Le Bateau lyre. The poem seems to me the definitive contemplation of the boat. But strike the literatures of the world at almost any random point—you’ll find the boat. It’s as pervasive and as old as the moon in the sky. I suspect myself I had seen a boat before I ever set my eye on a fish. Maybe I can even write a story in the current trend about a submarine taking a nap in Egypt, inside an air-conditioned pyramid. Either taking a nap or contemplating, in lieau of a navel, its periscope. Putting aside the movies, there are really only two kinds of boats: the boats you have visualized in literature—e.g., The Odyssey, The Ancient Mariner, Moby Dick, Lord Jim—and the boats of your life, like for instance the last boat you took from Davao to Manila. If you take the plane it’s like you will miss a part of the trip; it’s like you won’t be taking a trip to Puerto Princesa completely. A boat you never took is like a woman you never had the good fortune to love, by whom you are properly torn to pieces. It’s more simple if you’re a woman—it’s like a man who never. . . People are either boat lovers or not. Nick Joaquin finds boat trips unbearable. To him, journeying by boat is an ordeal, even if the conveniences were perfect. It’s a pity because I imagine that if Joaquin ever writes a poem about boats, he will more than hold his own with Eugenio Montale. But perhaps Joaquin is as incapable of evoking boats on the Marne as Montale is of evoking horsecabs on cobbled streets. And the truth is our inter-island boats, particularly the ones whose food is almost a sin against the Holy Ghost, rank with the bangungot as a national expression, a veritable Philippine artifact on the dark side of the pan de sal. If I had, among other things, Joaquin’s cogency, I might attempt to illuminate Philippine culture by writing a thesis on our inter-island vessels. That’s what all those Free Press articles of Nick Joaquin were—theses. People mistook them for journalistic pieces. For one thing Quijano de Manila, to use Nietzche’s phrase, made each thesis absurdly exciting, writing it like a Parisian novelist.


In mid-December of 1974, Darnay Demetillo asked me if I was interested in teaching at the UP College in Baguio. He was himself following up the prospect of a teaching job there after finishing his Fine Arts at Dilliman in March. I was jobless at the time, desperately so—I’d pounce on anything. Baguio seemed a beguiling prospect, a way out of a sort of impasse. For a year in Manila I was making like a driftwood, except for a five-week job as a reporter for the NMPC during the 1974 Miss Universe Contest and another editing a Karpov book for the Chessplayer lasting two months. Once idle I could do nothing but lie back, cut my toe-nails in the current. I lived in a motel-tormented street in Malate. I had come to Manila in June, leaving behind a teaching job in Silliman that lasted two years. I left it because I wanted more time for chess. I wanted to pursue the Greta Filipino Chess Game—to checkmate love between the eyes and cage it like a meteor. There were days I was certain if I played against Morphy, Alekhine and Fischer in consultation I’d cream them and wipe them put until Morphy becomes insane, Alekhine wets his pants and Fischer goes into absolute seclusion. But I was reduced to writing poems. The Queen, which obliterates in straight lines, curves. . . Needless to say I went to Baguio, went back to teaching. People were losing their faith in me in Dumaguete. I had told everyone I’d settle down in Dumaguete. Commitment. Authenticity. But my own reflection in the mirror did not believe what I spoke from my heart. In the same breath, I had written to Krip that I’d never find myself in teaching, never be able to fulfill myself in the provinces. Where is your heart? The mirror asked. Willy Sanchez was practicing witchcraft in New York, tweaking Genet’s nose, Erwin was born in Bethlehem, the handsomest son-of-abitch whoever wrote prose in the Philippines. I keep leaving my own faces behind. And I keep ending in Pagadian, though I have not seen it in ten years. Now I was leaving behind not only houses but boats. It was terrible. It was like turning my back on my front. When the bus turned on Kennon and I beheld Baguio for the first time, looking like a fabulous misted game of solitaire, where your life promised to be one of the hidden cards, soon to be turned up—the Queen of Hearts or the King of Diamonds or the Ace of Clubs perhaps—a tear of joy sprang to my eyelashes. A reflex of consummate hypocrisy—mist veiling mist veiling mist. I knew even then I could never burn my boats behind. I could never be an orangutan. It’s hard for me to breath even a foot above sea level. The most natural thing to do then was to turn some of that mountain into seawater. Not just a gift from the sea but the gift of sea. I gave Baguio a sea. An event more or less unprecedented in the city’s history. And so for a year I chased my life in crazy circles, with the rainbow of my sails. No one seemed to know what I was doing. They all though I was merely jaunty, perhaps besotted with love for my student Terry. Maybe I should have consented to paraphrase myself. Maybe I should have lowered my metaphors a little and said that there were times when the mists gave the mountains the semblance of islands. Or that the smoke from my chain-going cigarettes was making a similar effect. Or that you couldn’t do anything against nature. I mean the depth and nature of young women. In Baguio where they were intoxicatingly rosy-cheeked, the girls could not help being mermaids still. “all fish below the thighs.” We lived in a beautiful basement in Ferguson that was, alas, windowless. For two long months Darnay and I were payless and there was a continual cloudburst and the hole in my boot made me miserable. Otherwise I had never felt better in my life. Every time I woke up it seemed I was making up from Adam’s sleep, disregarding the stuffy air in my room. In September we moved to Hillside, waged


and thus less and stridden about money, but also divested of magic of first days. It was in Ferguson on our second week, that I wrote my story Jehrameel. On the third week I attacked the white paper of my would-be first novel—The Cigaret With Nine Lives And Other Stories. It proved abortive. I fizzled out in a matter of days. My scheme was to make every chapter of the novel a complete legitimate short-story in its own Wright while still an integral part of a whole jetplane of a novel. I must confess too that my real motive—a big part of my motive anyway—was to cure myself of cigarets. But I never got anywhere except for a new patches in one of which the central cigaret gets arrested for burning inside a public vehicle. One day, at noontime, the cigaret dreams it is a man, Sinbad the Cigaret thirty-plus, ex-agnostic, admirer of Klaus Junge and Leo Baeck, seaswim lover, dream and word jeweler, coral and pearl-doomed fish and lotus mimer, expired wizard. When the cigarette awakes, its fire, at once keen eye, sensous mouth and sexy navel, is still a chihuahua’s life-span away from the aquamarine filter, as though the world had not moved since the cigaret was by a thundercloud benighted. All alone. By its constitutive entirety, its effective power, its pretense that it is not what at bottom it is—a virgin. In its dream it consummated a girl named Sorbonne, a girl named book review, a girl named vitamin c, a girl named the rise and fall of brilliant chess combinations, a girl named love me not in the hereafter. Only one girl. And a hundred other girls. And a certain quantity and quality of older women. Oceans, mountain-peaks, lost cities, lotuses, oyster shells, blue-breasted pigeons, spiderwebs, luna moths and axolotls. That was when I was happy, when it was not hard to side-step the conscience which spelled out with precision bombing the ephemeral nature of my stay in the city. The trick, effortless with me, was to lose myself completely in the moment. U.P. at Baguio was a most efficient Calypso—a nymphet Calypso. No matter if at sleeptime the conscience nuzzled in my face like a beetle. The mountains did not oppress me at first. At first the faucets in Ferguson were dry and we stored rainwater in a tank and the tank was always full and it brimmed with the moss and the raindrops even when it did not rain. For drinking water we had to go up behind a cloud and bought it for thirty centavos and it would last for five days. “Let’s do something exciting.”Darnay would snap out of his gin-bottle. Then I’d know that, though he never ran out of gin, we were running out of water and another five days had gone. And up we would trudge into the cloud. “You know I only have to think of the future and then I’d feel better,” I once said, which must have mystified Darnay, for as much as he could tell—though he and looked at me and studied me and drank his gin till he was dead—I never gave the future a serious thought. But I explained that what I meant was that I could feel my body decaying, as a snake could feel the grass wither. I knew the simple fact that I was not getting any younger. But hence, I was always better than I would be the next day, the next year, the next ten years. All I had to do was think how much older I would be in ten years and there was I—ten years younger. In this way each present instant becomes youth regained. I had discovered the art and secret of juvenescence, one might say. One did it neither by living forward nor backwards but sort of both at once, sort of spinwise and hopwise, a procedure which in me had become breath and wizardry. In Baguio, there were times I felt I was young forever, there were times I felt I couldn’t die. I looked at the drunks in the streets and I was filled with a kind of insight: the drunks didn’t die, they just lay on their back in the streets, as happy as the day they were circumcised.


But the mountains knew something. Quiet at day, at night in my sleep their cliffs resounded. When I went to Baguio I had made a crazed leap for life in this country only to find myself, as it were, marooned, face to face with my life as I had lived it so far and as I was still living it. And I looked away, caught on the peak of my own deluding. Once, in a higher English class, I told the students that I often felt like in Baguio I could jump off from the planet. I had a curious dream then, a dream I always forgot upon waking up. The dream pursued my sleep, kept coming back. I kept dreaming it, as if the dream wanted me to see that it was not a dream at all but the most literal thing in creation. The dream must have recurred throughout the year, and yet it was not until I had left Baguio, last June, that I have been able to remember it. I dreamed I was on a mountain. It was all mountain, pure mountain—there was no north, south, east, or west. The sheer sense of it was vertigo. The sensation of slipping any moment, rolling down, falling. I had a thin sense that UP was nearby, somewhere, though I couldn’t see it. If I ventured a few steps and took the least turn I would lose my way completely. But I did and I was instantly lost, UP was lost. I felt weak. I held on to earth. I couldn’t move much. In that flesh of vastness, that void of space, there was room only for holding my breath and breaking into a sweat. I say that the dream was recurrent, but outside of a sharp intuition that it was —that I dreamed it several times, I really can’t tell. It’s hard, inasmuch as I was unable to recall it on waking up. It’s possible I dreamt it only once. Or if I did dream it several times, each recurrence must have been merely a remembrance—in sleep, in another dream—of the dream, so that each recurrence was exact to the last detail. This last alternative is the most tenable for now I can speak of the last time I dreamt it. The last time I dreamt it, it was altogether a different dream, a new dream. It was no longer just a recurrence. It was more like a variation of the same dream. But then again it couldn’t have been just a variation either. It was more like a resolution —a resolution of the dream in the new dream after which the old dream, together with the new dream, could see the light of the day. After that, I didn’t dream of it again—and I was soon able to recall it awake, though, needless to say, involuntary. I was there again. But I was walking in ease, as carefree as a brook’s gurgling. I had no feeling of being lost. The place was the same—the same unknown mountain, but the dim knowledge that it was the self-same, unknown mountain now constituted a familiarity, a knowledge. I wandered on and on, wandering, as it were, purely. The only false impression I am giving here is that I was walking a lot. I wasn’t. Rather I paused a lot. Now a step or two, then I’d pause. Now I’d walk a bit longer, and pause again, then walk on, now longer than the last, now even less, turning here and there from time to time. But even this falls short. I wasn’t going through that much. I wasn’t moving that much, and yet, even if I was still on the same spot, the view changed. That again is false. The truth was I came to a point in my walking when, first, Italy—I remember that well, first it was Italy—came into view across from the mountain peak where I stood. I walked on and one by one saw the others. Thus I was able to see the countries and the cities, their wonderful and far, far away geographies. Saw them not with the excitement but with a serenity that as nothing more than a counterpoint to the sadness of what, awake, I know: that I may never see them. (P.S. of course I saw them. I am tempted to say with my great name sake that I came, I saw, I conquered. But I prefer what Soren Kierkegaard said of his Regina: I came, I saw, she conquered.)


In high school I was a difficult mixture of the introvert and the exhibitionist. That difficulty eventually turned out well for me, though it took a protracted—well-nigh eternal-adolescence. Even from the beginning I contrived to veil chronic fits embarrassment with clowning. My blushes made visible the truth, obvious to some of my teachers, that I was struggling inwardly with pathological shyness. But it worked. I did not cease to be afraid of people, but clowning gave me a glimmering of my identity. My clowning consisted chiefly of combining, during recitation, my answers with poetical quotations and, as far as a fourteen-year-old was capable, on-the-spot wordplay. At twelve I had done instinctive Dada. Called on to answer a difficult question, I leaped from my seat, tossed the correct answer like a gypsy’s hat, and executed a double clockwise rotation, to the delight of my classmates and the goodnatured forbearance of our English teacher, Mrs. Tumulak, who threatened just the same to spin me like a top. This was in Pagadian, my first year in high school. On the second semester of my second year I again transferred to Zamboanga where I had spent a year in grade six. In Zamboanga my shyness became pronounced, owing much to my Cebuano inability to pronounce Chabacano and English words. But not for long. Soon my clowning assumed a new shade, gained, as we say, in dimension. My classmates would roar, my teachers smile, and the English poets, whom I was starting to read, give me a standing ovation. Only my teacher in stenography shook his head and indicated what he thought of y mental condition by pointing to his head with his forefinger and describing a nasty circle—one might say, the shorthand for the word poet. For what I was doing then if not evincing a nascent flair for divine lunacy. I was at this time reading a book, World Writers. A tome. My investiture, somewhat precocious, to the melancholy of literature. Quite a bit of an impetus. I read it with unflagging ambition. I too would be a writer. I was not only reading the book, I was living in it. Eating and sleeping and moving my bowels with it. Even away from it, people sensed that I was still inside its pages, from the very way I breathed. It was at once my theatre and my cocoon. Were I to see the book again this very minute, I have not the slightest doubt in the world that I would shower upon it, if not tears, abandoned kisses. There was something elderly about that book, something parently, quite apart from the fact that it was handed to me by my mother, a little after I won second prize in a high school poetry-writing contest. At the end of the same schoolyear, she handed me another book. Hudson’s Green Mansions, in its intensest moments, was my sexual initiation, redolent of a young girl’s sweetest sweetnesses. How well I remember the spells the book wrought on me. The names. Orinoco. Riolama. Hata. How well I remember the scene where Abel kisses Rima for the first time, asleep in his arms and, without his knowing it, waking to his kisses, kisses that were at first tasted lightly, almost gingerly, fearful for being stolen and she might wake, the, as he becomes aware that she was aware, growing sweetly, tremulously deep and yet, though deep as oblivion, still subtle as the quintessence of jasmines. Quintessence of first kisses, of a boy’s sweetest, innocentest, purest erection. Rima was the first girl I ever kissed. Perhaps Rima was the only girl I ever really kissed. If I live to a ripe old age, I would wish for no other memory. If Zamboanga, as I’ve said, is the word of my life, perhaps Rima is the rhyme of my personal immortality.


No matter how I look at it, erotic love seems to me life’s wildest gift. It’s the most elusive. It’s all the gold we’ve ever wanted. For Abel it turned to ashes and he spent the rest of his life watering it with a nameless grief. After he massacred whole villages in a blind rage. I too have, ever since, massacred places and people with words and dreams. I never got to write my report. My teacher passed me on trust, that I had read the book. In the late sixties she perished with her husband and all their children in a plane crash. Only a ghost of a chance that she’ll read this, fifteen years later. Willie Arsena and I gave Zamboanga its first bohemia, though you can’t strictly call a pair of adolescents, very callow and much attached to conventional families, bohemians. But we were having our first taste of the bohemian spirit, if only in a sort of nocturnal, clandestine make believe. To all intents and purposes, our friendship was an idiosyncracy, lasting well through the sixties. To this day I have no inkling of what the people in our town though of us. Perhaps they have no inkling to this day, of what we thought of them. But for each other, neither of us would have been possible in Zamboanga. That might be the gist of our friendship—we mirrored each other’s impossibility. Thus was Willie the one imperishable friend of my youth in Zamboanga. He had dropped out of school when I met him in 1960. His father had just died and he was the supporter of the family—his mother, a brother and a sister. He was aspiring to be an artist and, in a vague way, to be some kind of sage, some kind of philosopher alderman. Of course he would sooner void his bowels on Guardia Nacional Street than be a city councilor. Maybe Willie just did not have it in painting or sculpture. He never learned. Whatever raw talent he might have had found expression only in monomania. He was obsessed with an intuition of his own creative talent. It goes without saying that the proper obsession should have been to prove that talent. The word was the god of our idolatry. But he seemed to lie back on his phantom ambition and because he never really worked at it, the ambition, mere ambition, threatened to become, horribly, a delusion. There were no art books nor real painters in Zamboanga, to compound it. His exposure was nothing more than occasional glimpses in the magazines. Then again, he was never really a book freak. A real reader of books grows on his verbal proficiency as he goes on. Willie could never turn a phrase. If he was stunted in art, in philosophy he was a miscarriage. In fairness to Willie, I must round up my appraisal of him by saying that it is impossible to doubt the artistic nature of his temperament. His very life—the intensity and basic madness of it was something else. His boyhood and early adolescence, of written, would read like a crack of thunder. Had he turned out to be a writer, he would have turned out superior to Egmidio Enriquez. Egmidio Enriquez wanted to be a bit of a Lawrence, always strewing flowers in his prose. Willie would strew the streets of Zamboanga with coffins, an image I’m adopting from one of his dreams. Before I introduced him to Kafka (The Metamorphosis and Other Stories), Willie had amassed a pile of crayon drawings—only one basic figure: insect-like human forms, or more exact perhaps, human-like insect forms. And his wood figures —thinly disguised penises, all of them. He gave me one figure—an elongated man full of holes. It naturally also looked like a penis. If it was a self-portrait, which I think it was, though perhaps done unconsciously, then it was Willie Arsena, man and


penis, riddled with bullets. Granting that these early attempts, to the trained eye, did not even have an edge of promise in them, that he had gone abstract or expressionist woefully too soon—I’m sure nonetheless, ignoramus as I am in the fine arts, that they were dream-stirred, that they were the dreams, however imperfectly executed, of a disturbed but gifted young man. As for his actual dreams, it’s extravagant to say they were nightmares, but they were nightmares, chronic, evil as syphilis. Willie breathed nightmares. He had a sensibility so twisted it was refined—or so fine it was twisted. He refused to come with me to pay respects to a friend who had died—to attend the vigil a second time—on the ground that a typical vigil is an exercise in cretinism, particularly on the part of the bereaved. That was one time I really detested him. I was not myself exactly a boy scout either. If he could enter a drugstore like a malign entity, tantalizing the fag who owned it with lewd suggestions, I could unleash satirical dung on people, buried the entire town under it in fact. His edge came from being a member of a teenage gang before we met, in the late fifties, the era of Marlon Brando, James Dean and Elvis Presley. I owned mine to a familiarity with the angry young men of Britain and the beatnik of America, culminating in my discovery of Henry Miller and my friendship with Willy Sanchez and Erwin Castillo in the middle sixties. Soon he too was reading Henry Miller. And we began imitating Tropic of Cancer in Zamboanga, especially at night. But we never got to screw a whore in the Miller manner. As a matter of fact, we never went around screwing whores. Much of our adventures was talk, if not, making the bar , rounds at night and making boyish, hopelessly innocent thrusts at hostesses. I should nonetheless speak for myself. For my purposes, it is sufficient to say that we always, in this regard, ended in blind alleys. Fortunately, there was always the alternative of emulating, thanks to his salary, Miller’s attitude to food. But the best part of it was our ability to see a little of the neurotics in Tropic of Cancer in our friends who had some artistic inclination, who were the oddballs in Zamboanga. There was boy Fernando, whom the town could never quite make out whether or not he was a lunatic. Once he shaved his eyebrows, just so, he said, he could shed the veil of familiarity between him and the world. Once, on a visit to our house for the first time, where he met some people for the first time, he felt a bit left out in the conversation. He slipped away a few feet, went two or three steps up the stairs and sang a Mario Lanza in a fine falsetto. There was Felix Seno, a pianist, whose studio was a hang-out for the group on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Seno and Leleng Apostol formed a song-writing team, the latter providing the lyrics. They hoped to market their productions in Hollywood, have them sung by Tony Bennet or Frank Sinatra or Sammy Davis, Jr. There was one I liked, which I always requested them to sing—There’s a Rainbow In Your Eyes. It went—“There’s a rainbow ion your eyes, that is why you live in dreams.” But it was always a question of finances, and their dream of Hollywood ended in candle-lit, though there were no candles except the figurative one signifying the death of their dream, mornings of singing their hearts out to each other, their eyes shining with tears, and rainbows. That was in1960, and that was where and how I met Willie. Leleng had brought me to the studio. We were studying in the school, the Zamboanga AE College, and we had become friends trough reading each other’s verses in the campus paper. He was in his thirties, surviving a wife who had died a few weeks after the birth of their child, about a year after they got carried. He never tired of feeling sorry for himself, and we never tired of his sentimentality. He always made me think of a movie, Words


and Music, particularly the scene where Mickey Rooney soaks himself in the rain and dies of a broken heart, less of pneumonia. Leleng was, anyway, taller than Mickey Rooney and he had a heart keen enough for chicken barbecue and beer on CawaCawa Boulevard on star-fired evenings for him to every fancy soaking himself in a fatal rain. He was quite a bit of an oddball too. He flirted with yoga for a while, then with the Rosicrucian. Then with levitation and making himself, at will, invisible. The last time I saw him he was reading the New Testament avidly and was utterly convinced of the imminent, in two or three years, end of the world. I was then on vacation from Silliman and, as we parted, he asked for my address. He wanted to send me escabeche from time to time. He had re-married and it seemed his wife cooked it well. Leleng Apostol was the closest to us in this bunch. Seno was next. In 1965 he turned radio announcer. His English was so atrocious it was it was delightful to a Nazi. Seno was a clown, in the unflattering sense of the word. The sort who made you sorry you could laugh. I’m tempted to make up a fictitious detail about him—that one day he surprised his wife by buying a big, expensive dictionary—how he began to devote more and more of his free time to it, almost to the total exclusion of his piano and his wife, and how it didn’t do his English in any good, making it in fact more ludicrous, bombarding it with all sorts of improbable “vocabulary.” The piece of slander is not too wild. One day he actually did something somewhat better. He named his first child Webster. And, because I missed to ask him whence the name, I can’t think of any explanation other than the one implied by my fiction. There was Mr. Villa, the old man, a painter of sorts. His paintings, Willie said, were as mutain as the painter who painted them. Mutain means always having muta, and muta means the dirt you may have in your eyes when you wake up. He was so financially straightened he could never buy a cherished dream. He wanted to buy a tape recorder so he could tape record himself all day long and preserve his ideas. He pronounced it “edyas.” Sometimes that’s what we called him, Edyas. He ended up painting coffins for funerarias. There was Echavez, who was outright insane, whose dark glasses had become part of his physiognomy—as impregnable as his pomade and white sidewalls. He claimed that the song-writers in America had plagiarized his compositions, e.g., Greenfields, From the Candy Store on the corner to the Chapel on the Hill, Put Your Head on my Shoulder. He once gave me a typescript of a patriotic song which he wrote to supplant the Philippine National Anthem. Echavez had written poems in his college days and was a bright student. Towards the end of 1966 he proclaimed that ten thousand periscopes were observing Zambaonga, minutes after he had hacked his father. Upon which in the night Willie betakes himself in a dim corner to his demon carnal. Underyoungman when the fool moon is among the horses and the houses. Reviling the waitresses for lack of bohement feeling and revealing. The girl is better whose message is the meridian. Whose hidden self, her indivisible nipple, plays hide and suck at one revolution and a rotation per peanut. An ogre, darkening alone, looks on amoebable. Tacitus agreement that woman is the Boeing that larveth herself with insectious passion, then breaks into a black dragonfly! To be suffered and caught (1) by the tail (2) from behind (3) when she’s not looking. And God created woman of


home and woman of the beauty parlor. All fireworks and no foreplay makes Frigida a doll wife. Thus spake Willitrustee. A portrait of the artist of a young bullfrog. A vacuum of circumstances. Nevertheless a van golliwog. With an ear for surgery and an eye for Heracles coitus. A condom for horse! A gunshot is hard. No one falls and the Fall is on. And the hard. And john summons and summers elke. I get up to take a look, then a leak, then perceive to buy cigarets outside. In the street on the night under the compelling stars. Pardon my hardon. Boyhoodlooming, eyeing no one in part collar through the haze and daze and craze and maze of words made flash. The maked beast with tomed nails and shy lashes upon witch in the night Willie betokens himself to a droppel carnal. The condom of heaven is within you! Imperishable friend of lifetime, he tells you ten years later that the girl is now a whore, touched in the head, whom they call Masarap. No one seems to know what her real name was. Men can lay her for a coke—for a chewing gum. He tells you this in a peal of laughter, and your memory of her flirts like a far-away lightning among the ruins of his resemblance to David Hemmings in Blow-up. Lighting the cigarette away from the cigarette vendor, he accosted her. You discerned that she was not more than fifteen and, instantly, that she was feebleminded. Her clothes were coarse and dirty. Her skin was coarse and dirty. But she was pretty, and when you caught the cheap perfume you caught her fifteen years with something like quelled sob. You thought of a cheap, dirty restaurant that served good clean food. Where one perceives a hint of the sacred in the way food was prepared, the way it was arrayed in the counter, the way it was laid, steaming, on the table. And a hint that this inner refinement had nonetheless acquiesced to the principle that hunger, at some point, was all. And so, upon the threshold of whoredom both, on a sultry night in the Sunken Garden in Zamboanga where, in the early sixties, the lights and the grass and the leaves were neglected, they rolled and wrestled beneath a bush, awkward and fumbling and yet, somehow, unerring. They kept talking throughout, thrashing like fish throughout, and their flurry of words and emotions were as flies lost to the word upon a nucleus of garbage—or else, and you prefer this, bees drunk in their own honey. And it fouled, it stung, it kindled, it nourished—hive alive of winged envoys and harbingers to your youth of what sex was, what as woman was. What did it matter—what does it matter that she was crazy? Your remembrance of her flies in sparks and when it is over, when you have said the last word—offals in Ermita. There are fireflies in the morning, stars twinkle in the sky. Manila, 1976


Deep Purple [From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] I recognized two women across from us when we were seated. They smiled when my eyes met theirs and I thought of their smile, that it was good despite their calling and the jeepney was warm with the fullness and the driver’s joke and the rain and the gin I had drunk. It had rained very suddenly and very hard and the wind was just as hard all the people who had come to the boulevard to spend the evening had gone except us and when the jeepney came it seemed to have come out of nowhere and it had been a while getting wet under a spare roof and thinking the rain would stop anyway despite the sky. In the rain her eyes were deep purple. Now we were inside a still open place not far from the hotel where she was staying with her father. There was a group of young men who spoke Tagalog very fluently, Manila youngsters studying in the town. I had my back to the group and knew one or two were staring at her, from the way her eyes moved. They were the only other people inside the place and they talked very loudly and I felt uneasy. But after a while they were gone. And the rain and the wind too were gone and now it was almost midnight and we were inside a still open place not far from the hotel and on the street, bluish and hushed after the rain, I kept kissing her again and I had the odd sensation of a thief about to flee with his loot but held back by an urge to look at himself in the mirror. She must have sensed it for she laughed vaguely. A small laugh, smaller than her small voice, that had a shyness in it that surprised me. It seemed a strand of her hair had caught in his face as flotsam in the sea, and he saw once more the deep purple of her eyes, the ripple of her name, tasted the seawater of their kisses, felt her nipples in the sand with his fingertips, the spray of her fingertips. Once, towards lunchtime one morning, I came home from a swim and vaguely noticed as I began to peel my shirt off that some clothes hung on the wall were missing. Then. I had turned absently, with the queer faint apprehension that some thief had broken into the place and made off with some things. He stood, cornered, where the mirror had been. His right arm held the clothes, and his left hand held the oval mirror uncertainly -—he had, it appeared, just disengaged it from the wall. Then with a greater shock, I saw that the shirt which fitted him was mine. It was as though he were beholding something that had sprung alive from the mirror if the mirror were not in fact in his hand -—or from the books dishevelled all over


the place. The man’s lower lip fell slightly, and he perceived him biting something tiny, as if grasping with his teeth the fact of his having been caught. I phoned on the morning of their plane. “Yes,” the voice, neutral, came. Her airport voice. “Good luck,” I said. “Thank you.” I said I loved her and then she thanked me again and her voice thanking me had an effect I couldn’t make out. She had a very small voice on the phone that always struck me. I thought of life and chaos. Of my father who was recovering from the pus the doctors had bled out of his liver. I thought of my mother who was awkward that afternoon when Deep Purple appeared at the door. As awkward as I was. As awkward as Deep Purple was. It was Sunday. In the afternoon, I felt depressed, and the feeling grew and it was hard to believe. She stiffened and caught his hand when he tried to take the garment off. “I can’t.” He’d been making love to her very slowly, gently. Taking thoughtful sips, not guzzling. Journeying for the journey. Remembering what a friend once told him. Experiencing the blast, as it were, in slow motion. Stopping when you had to stop, as now. “I’ll take it off when I come,” he whispered. “Can you do it?” “Trust me.” They began then. He entered her abruptly and stayed inside her for a dizzying while, taking her hand and guiding it to where her fingers could feel the roots of his embedment. She was twisted so that their faces met but he was fucking her from behind, her leg coiled around his body. He was moving minimally, lying on his side, the weight of his body distributed evenly and his left arm working as rudder whilst his right hand was free to wander. It was a position he had never before assumed and which came to him just them, in a flash, as if from inspiration. It was the best, effortless, like fucking through the perfect medium, in which one lolled, idled, forgot, the fuck of pastel, of water color, butterflies, parachutes across the summer sky. Time bloomed. Went by, Echoed. Or stopped. Pulled a chair and sat, looked on. A voyeur. Or they were Time -—their bodies were the clock’s hands telling, for once, the true time, the true hour, pilgrims borne on a deep sea current that flowed on and on in a motion so uniform they could have been sleeping, god and goddess dreaming they were mans dreaming they were insects on the primal job, until the sea shook and he sort of keeled, wrenching away from her as he went off, she hugging him tightly to her body as if to soften the violence of his denial, to break the fall he had to take. But he was back almost at once, fumbling in the dark to penetrate her anew. The idea both astonished and made him gloat over the audacity, the boastfulness of it Again something that came to him like an improvisation. For a while he wondered if it was true, then saw how his strength had not diminished a bit. He was going as strong as ever. He could have laughed. It was a little like cheating Death. He was even more keenly conscious of his power now and it fairly disoriented him, fucking her now with frank greed, with a sort of


reckless dissonance, varying himself indiscriminately as it suited his fancy, then, as if to test himself to the limit … It was the mountains. He is a mountain giant, made of rock and mineral and wild earth, and he is stronger than this sea of night under which the town lies submerged in perfect sleep, a sea so immense in its stillness at times his own consciousness seems, as he waits, lying superbly motionless and wide awake, something wafted to his ears from very far away. I had often wondered what it would be like. There had been times in the past when I tried to do it, swimming far out -—into the deep -—into a fear of the deep that lurked deep -—only to turn back each time, overcome by the fear. Now here I was —or here it was. The water had turned dark, thick, and, opaque, smooth, seemed something alive, capable of moving of its own volition. I tried to slow down, to make my strokes deliberate; but I kept arrowing with an almost painful excitement, like one in the middle of coitus, and it was fear -—the same fear that had made me turn back in the past now driving me on wildly, unmanning me, draining me of principle until stopped and, I didn’t know how it was, I turned on my back and floated and did the unreal thing of looking deep into the sky and I saw the white, thin slice of fingernail that was the moon. Then I closed my eyes and the crescent had looked like a clasp that held the dark side like a precious stone when it seemed as though the sea moved beneath me and the crescent fluttered like a wild white afternoon insect of the mind in the sky and it was my heart become pure impulse and I had opened my eyes and turned and couldn’t be still in the water and it was the nether of the moon until my eye caught with a dreadful clarity the enormous stretch of water that had caught me, a dark circle turning like the enormous silent roar of the world suddenly audible and all about me and the enormity of what I had done was a stark as the enormity of what I could do and I dove under on a sudden uncanny whim to look at the bottom but instantly recoiled from the dark gasping. There seemed absolutely no reason to die, and the coldness of this water made me feel like crying. I looked landwards and saw in a rush of joy that the land was not too far away, watching me like the faithful sentinel of some secret it knew I deserved, though not just yet, to discover. Dumaguete, 1973/Manila 1979


Dog Bite

[Version 1. From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] I once lived in boardinghouse owned by a Chinese with a Filipina wife in a quiet back alley in Quiapo. The place consisted of a main unit: a house in the pre-war, Spanish style, where the owner and his family lived, and an annex that housed the boarders and which had obviously been built for that purpose. Most of the more than twenty boarders were Bicolanos. There were four of us Zamboanguenos. Two Pampanguena sisters roomed in the lower storey of the main unit. Except for one medical student who was studying at UST and three engineering students at Mapua, all were either law or pre-law students at MLQU which was very near. The place was cheap and looked cheap. Its most redeeming feature was its location—it stood on a very quiet and very accessible street. It had an iron gate behind which the owner kept a dog leashed. The dog was small and thin, and very vicious. Excepting its masters, it sprang at who ever entered. When it did, it fell back hard on the pavement and struggled frightfully with the chain that held it in check. The unwary visitor who was coming to the place for the first time was in for quite a bit of a jolt, for the dog was well -concealed behind the door and missed tearing off a morsel by inches. For some unaccountable reason, the boarders did not complain about this, did not seem to notice this particularly cretinous detail in their boardinghouse existence. I secretly hated the dog, and my hate was concentrated. I thought nothing of the Chinese who was its master. I kept thinking of how to torment it. The constant nearness of the owners, however, prevented me from undertaking anything. But after a month in the place I got my chance. On the eve of the coming New Year, I noticed how it shivered from the firecrackers. I gathered all the firecracker packets I could. Towards midnight, under cover of the continuous explosions, I tossed packet after packet under its belly. It was still shivering in the morning, all shrivelled up in a corner, long after the city had quieted down. Its will seemed so completely crushed I felt the impulse to touch its face and cup its mouth in my hand and squeeze it. I was almost sure it would not do anything. The boarders who had risen early gathered near the dog, amused. Some still had a handful of firecrackers to explode and sustain in the dog’s spasms. They stopped when the Chinese owner came out bearing his anger in silence. It was the only time I ever really felt his presence in the place, although he did nothing but wear a resentful face. He was very unobtrusive by nature. The Bicolanos and the Zamboanguenos got along rather well. However, I once overheard the older Bicolano students talking among themselves and one of them was disparaging the intellect of Zamboanguenos. He said there wasn’t a single brilliant political figure from Zamboanga that one could speak of. My roommate was a Zamboangueno who was thought to be a little crazy in the boardinghouse, even by fellow Zamboangueno. At night he’d often go out for a stroll in Luneta carrying a tape recorder and camera even when he had no films.


Most of his tapes were Mario Lanza songs. He liked to sing along. Sometimes he’d record himself. When it was not Mario Lanza songs, it was passages from Mariowe’s Doctor Faustus which he recited well. He also loved to practice public speech and imitate the style of Roseller Lim, our senator. I wasn’t disturbed by his behavior except for one thing. He kept a knife under his pillow and he would now and then practice knife-throwing on the wall. Once he told me to pose because he wanted to take my picture. My eyes stared at the knife, poised for a throw in my direction. I asked him to put it down and not make a joke like that. He tucked it under his pillow but did not take his dilated eyes off me. I knew then that he was faking madness but that he was not so sane all the same. At other times he was every bit the older one. He once succeeded in inviting me to a foray on Ermita. We took the Mabini-Harrison jeepney and came down on M. H. del Pilar. My heart beat fast. I was nineteen and had never known a woman. The places were closed because it was lunchtime. After a while we came to a place. The woman who opened it laughed after he had spoken to her. She said it was tanghaling-tapat (high noon). I couldn’t hear the rest of they were saying but they seemed to reach an agreement because he beckoned to me. I approached. There were girls seated inside. All at once I didn’t want to do it. I told my room-mate I’d just wait for him. He replied that we were in it together and I should stop acting like a child. I held my ground until he got exasperated and walked out of the place without saying anything to the woman. He said I was a hell of a companion. He didn’t say a word all the way back to the boardinghouse. The medical student was the handsome one in the group. He was dark and large, with roundish eyes and a very gentle manner. One Sunday afternoon, I came out of the room to find the guys mon-keying around outside the medical student’s room, their heads jammed together as they strained to peep in through a hole. Some were standing by, waiting for their turn. I was told that Lauro, the medical student, was in bed with a girl. They said that the girl was very beautiful and fierce and she was on top of him. The older guys looked shaken. One of them, the Bicolano whom I once over head disparaging Zamboanguenos, said Lauro would be finished if the girl got pregnant, but he sounded like he was trying to console himself. Weeks later, the guys went into the same sneaky and jerky scramble outside another room. I learned that two guys were making it with two girls in one bed. This time the guys found it funny; it was like the time they laughed at the shaking dog. Lauro came to me one day. He asked if I could write a love letter for him. He somehow had found out I was a wordboy. I found myself obliging him. I asked if it was the same girl he had brought to the boarding house once. He shook his head and laughed, then gave me a picture of the situation as best as he could. After that he was always nice to me. But we didn’t become close friends. I never became anyone’s close friend in the boarding house. I was the loner in the place. And in as much as I was the only boarder who was not going to school, I was in a way even more of an oddity than he. I certainly was the most uncommunicative. He had offered to buy me cigarettes while I was writing the letter. I said I did not smoke, but thanked him anyway. He then asked to be excused, saying he wanted me to be able to concentrate.


It didn’t take long to finish the letter. It was funny how I was actually writing it with conviction. I seemed to be writing it to a girl I knew and admire, though it was some one faceless, someone I worshipped in the abstract, if such a thing were possible. But I soon found out that there indeed was a girl at the back of my mind all the time. It was the young Pampanguena He elder sister was seldom in the house. The woman was thirtyish. A man of about forty was her lover. I heard from the guys that the man was married. He would bring her home sometimes in the evenings and those were among the few times I saw her. In the mornings I didn’t see her because I was a late riser. The two sisters did not eat their meals in boardinghouse. When Marie, the younger sister, was not around, the man stayed with her in the room. Meals were served in the main unit. The boarders and the owner’s children watched television together at lunchtime and in the evenings. I usually took my seat in an inconspicuous corner from where I could stare at Marie and also observe the others as they looked at her from time to time. She was pretty. Sometimes the clothes she wore revealed surprising voluptuousness that was in contrast with her girlish smallness. She was a freshman at MLQ. Once, coming from a bath, she passed by every near where I was sitting. A drop of water fell on my arm. I did not wipe the drop of water off, letting it stay on my skin like it were something I had, unknown to her, appropriated from her body. It was as if she touched me as if I were carrying her essence. I put my tongue to it in the end but all I tasted was the sourness of my own skin. She eventually made me very miserable. For a long time I suffered because of her and she had not the slightest knowledge of it. One evening we happened to walk home together. She coming from school and our paths met on the street where our boardinghouse was. I didn’t see her at once, not until we were side by side and I couldn’t avoid her any more if I wanted. She smiled. She asked if it was true that my name was Usa, I said it was my nickname. She asked if I was a Muslim. I said I was not, told her my father was a Cebuano and my mother a Zambaonguena. My father had wanted me to be their only child and he thought up the name, which is a Cebuano word meaning “one”. The priest, however, would not consent to the name and I had to be given another, Christian, name. Nonetheless it was what I was called at home. She asked if I was, indeed, an only child. I told her my parents both perished in the war when I was a few months old and I grew up under my grandmother’s care. She said she heard it said in the boardinghouse that I was a Muslim. I told her I could speak a little Tausug inasmuch as the street where I grew up in Zamboanga was very near the Muslim district of Rio Hondo. She asked me to say something in Tausug—anything. I did. Her eyes widened a little and she was smiling again, saying the dialect looked just like my facial expression. She then asked me to translate this and that till we got to the boarding house.


I never got to be alone with her again. She stayed inside their room most of the time. When she came out, the presence of others, more voluble then, I killed any chance of us gravitating towards each other. One afternoon I took a book with me to the hall in the main unit. I was vaguely hoping to see Marie. In the afternoon the place was very quiet—most of the boarders and the owner’s children were in school. Those who were left stayed inside their rooms doing their school work or else taking a nap. The owner’s eldest child—a very fat boy of about twelve was inside watching cartoons on television. The boy and I were enemies. It amused me to watch him on the sly. He was always seated and he had a way of gorging himself that made me feel like giving him a whack. Lazy and young as he was, he had watchful eyes that reacted perpetually to people’s actions around him with an adult air. Being new in the city, it was inevitable that my ways would meet his disapproval. An actual reprimand on one occasion made me smoulder for days. When a second time came, I went white with anger and barked at him in Tausug. The fat boy shook. I never caught him looking at me again after that. The boy pretended not to notice me and to be wholly absorbed in watching the show. I sat in the hall and carried on my own pretense of reading a book, glancing at Marie’s room from time to time. The room seemed so quiet and still. After a while I grew tired of waiting for Marie to come out and decided that she was not in. I got up and went back to my room. I lay in bed and closed my eyes and briefly considered going out for walk. It was a sunless afternoon and when the weather was like that I liked to go out aimlessly to cool the streets. I woke up in the bed past five, astonished that I had fallen asleep. I went back to the hall, again with nothing on my mind but seeing Marie. I came out in time to see her sister’s lover carefully making his way out of the gate as the dog leaped at him and fell back. The owner’s son was gone. I sat in the hall and glanced at Marie’s room. Try as I might, I couldn’t visualize the face of her sister. The guys started coming in. When it grew dark, they gathered in the hall and turned the television on. I went on secretly waiting for Marie to come in till it was supper time. I had begun to forget about Marie as I followed the program when I heard her voice. I looked up and saw her talking to one of the housemaids through the halfopen door, wearing something light brown, the color almost, of her skin. The door was shut and she was gone almost at once. I felt oppressed, sure that she was not coming out of her room any more and that brief glimpse was all for the evening. But after a while I was following the show again—shots of a train hurtling interminably. Then a railway station and the train emptying of its passengers, gaudy Americans of a bygone period stepping out to flow into a crowd of people more plainly dressed. Out of nowhere I had a disturbing thought that Marie’s sister was not with her and she was alone in the room. I glanced at their room once more and I had a sudden picture of Marie together with the man all afternoon. I felt very sick all at once. I remembered how still it had seemed inside the room that afternoon as I sat in the hall. She took on a certain clarity in my eyes. Everytime I looked at her I looked at her the thought that she had been his seared me. It was as if I had myself who knew


her. I studied her slightest actions obsessively, straining to evoke the picture of her in bed with the man. It was like falling into an abyss in which I could never reach bottom. I tried to figure out her schedule in school. After a week, I was able to establish a pattern. I then tailed her in secret. I would go out of the boardinghouse minutes ahead of her and stand go on Hidalgo, far enough from the school building for her not to spot me. I hoped to see her swerve and head for the boulevard, whereupon I could really trail her. But she never did. I would go back to the boardinghouse already exacerbated, and wait until her classes were over. Then I would go back to Hidalgo, again lurk in a corner a few minutes before she came out of school. I got the same results. I persisted for weeks, though I couldn’t do it everyday. Then I gave up. As the days went by, there were moments when I doubted myself. I considered alternatives, like the man had come to visit her sister and left at once and he found she was not in. or else he was in the room that afternoon, alone, waiting for Marie’s sister and left when Marie came. But somehow these were very weak and did not make sense. Only the possibility that her sister was in the room and Marie was not alone offered to believe that it was so and a kind of numb calm would fill me. But only for a moment. In the end I knew I could settle for nothing less than actually seeing Marie and the man together in bed. The guys were peeping into Lauro’s room again. It was very late. I asked them who it was with Lauro. They said they didn’t know but showed me a girl’s undergarment. I said it was Marie’s and the guys laughed. I snatched the undergarment and ran down the stairs quietly. I intended to wipe the dog’s rabid face with it. The dog sprang to meet me and as it caught my hand and the undergarment. I felt my flesh and bone rip without pain, like the sky had ripped silently. I held on to the undergarment and grappled with the dog, working with both hands to cram it down the dog’s throat. It choked and slackened but clung to me upright like a man, its hind legs wrapped ridiculously around my leg. Then it broke free and swarmed all over me, howling as if it to vomit blood. I ran back to where guys were and everyone scampered for shelter. I grabbed the dog by its hind legs and swung it against the door of Lauro’s room. I swung it again and again until it was limp. I took my roommate’s knife and went to work on the dog’s belly. I tore the stomach, the chest, the throat. I couldn’t find the undergarment. I went to bathroom to wash. But I found out there was not a drop of blood on my body. I sought my wounds with my hands, but there weren’t any, though I ached all over. I found the bit of green soap, almost melted away. It was one of the things I came upon the first time I stealthily took the waste can that always stood outside Marie’s room in the evening. The first time the thought that its contents might be able to help me entered my head I had actually rejoiced. While I couldn’t find anything that could resolve what had eaten me, small scraps which I knew came from Marie were like soothing medical applications and I went at the game watching for the waste can every evening. It was an operation I was able to perfect. The only time I failed to retrieve anything from the waste can’s contents was when I had come late one evening and the truck that collected garbage in the area beat me to it. Even then I considered finding out where the garbage was dumped and somehow find something that could be a final illumination.


The soap smell intensified the hope and I felt a drowning sensation from the water. Manila, 1976


[Version 2. From Checkmeta, 2004] I lived in a boardinghouse owned by a Chinese with a Filipina wife in a quiet back alley in Quiapo. The place consisted of a main unit: a house that was postwar but antique-looking, where the owner and his family lived, and an annex—a link of rooms indistinguishable from each other—that housed the boarders and that had been cheaply built obviously for that purpose. Most of the more than twenty boarders were Bicolanos. There were four of us from Zamboanga. Two Kapampangan sisters roomed downstairs in the main unit. Except for one medical student who was studying at the University of Sto. Tomas and three engineering students who was studying at MIT, all were either law or prelaw students at MLQU which was very near. The placed was cheap and looked cheap. Its most redeeming feature was its location—it stood on a very quiet and very accessible street. It had an iron gate behind which the owner kept a dog lashed. The dog was small and thin and very vicious. Excepting its masters, it sprang at whoever entered. When it did, it fell back hard on the pavement and struggled frightfully with the chain that held it in check. The unwary visitor who was coming to the place for the first time was in for quite a bit of a jolt, for the dog was well-concealed behind the gate and missed tearing off a morsel by inches. For some unaccountable reason, the boarders did not complain about this, did not seem to notice this cretinous touch in their boardinghouse existence. I secretly hated the dog, and my hate was concentrated—I thought nothing of the Chinese who was its master. I kept thinking of how I may inflict suffering upon it. The constant nearness of the owners, however, prevented me from undertaking anything. But after a month in the place I got my chance. On the eve of the coming New Year, I noticed how it shivered from the firecrackers. I gathered all the firecracker packets I could. Towards midnight, under cover of the continuous explosions, I tossed packet after packet under its belly. It was still shivering in the morning, all shriveled up in a corner, long after the city had quieted down. Its will seemed so completely crushed I felt the impulse to touch its face and cup its mouth in my hand and squeeze it. I was almost sure it would not do anything. The boarders who had risen early gathered near the dog, amused. Some still had a handful of firecrackers to explode and thus sustain the dog’s spasms. They stopped when the Chinese came out bearing his anger in silence. It was the only time I ever felt his presence in the place, although he did nothing but wear a resentful face. He was very unobtrusive by nature. The Bicolanos and Zamboanguenos got along rather well. However, I once overheard the older Bicolano students talking among themselves and one of them was disparaging the intellect of my townmates. He said there wasn’t a single brilliant political figure from Zamboanga that one could speak of since time immemorial. And of course they had the outstanding constitutionalist in the country, Senator Arturo Tolentino. I shared my room with a townmate who was thought to be a little crazy in the boardinghouse—even by fellow Zamboanguenos. At night he’d often go out for a stroll in Luneta carrying a tape recorder and a camera even when he had no films. Most of his tapes were Mario Lanza songs. He liked to sing along. Sometimes he’d often record himself. When it was not Mario Lanza songs, it was Faustus’ swan


speech in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus which he delivered rather well. He also loved to practice oratory and imitate the style of Roseller Lim, our senator. I wasn’t bothered by his behavior except for one thing. He kept a hunting knife under his pillow and would now and then practice knife-throwing on the wall. Once he told me to pose because he wanted to take my picture. I did not see the camera. My eyes were staring instead at the knife, poised for a throw in my direction. Faintly, I asked him to put it down and not make a joke like that. He tucked it under his pillow but did not take his dilated eyes off me. I knew then that he was faking madness but that he was not so sane all the same. At other times he was every bit the older one. One day he succeeded in inviting me to a foray in Ermita. We took the Mabini-Harrison jeepney and came down on M. H. del Pilar. My heart beat fast. I was nineteen and had never known a woman. The places were closed because it was lunchtime. After a while we came to a place. The woman who opened it laughed after he spoke to her. She said it was high noon.2 I couldn’t hear the rest of what they were saying but they seemed to reach an agreement because he beckoned to me. I approached. There were girls seated inside. All at once I didn’t want to do it. I told my room-mate I’d just wait for him. He replied that we were in it together and I should acting like a child. I held-my ground until he got exasperated and walked out of the place without saying anything to the woman. He said I was a hell of a companion. He didn’t say a word all the way back to the boardinghouse. The medical student was the handsome one in the group. He was dark and large, with roundish eyes and a very gentle manner. One Sunday afternoon, I came out of the room to find the boys monkeying around outside the medical student’s room, their heads jammed together as they strained to peep in through a hole. Some were standing by waiting for their turn. I was told that Lauro, the medical student, was in bed with a girl. They said that the girl was very beautiful and fierce and she was on top of him. The older ones looked shaken. One of them, the Bicolano whom I once overheard disparaging Zamboanguenos, said Lauro would be finished if the girl got pregnant, but he was sounded like he was trying to console himself. Weeks later, they were at it again, going into the same sneaky but quiet scramble outside another room. I learned that two couples were doing it in the same bed. This time the guys found it funny. It was like the time they laughed at the shaking dog. Lauro came to me one day. He asked me if I could write a love letter for him. He somehow had found out I was a wordboy. I found myself obliging him. I asked if it was the same girl he had brought to the boardinghouse once. He shook his head and laughed, then gave me a picture of the situation as best as he could. After this incident he was always nice to me. But we didn’t become close friends. I never became anyone’s close friend in the boardinghouse. I was the loner in the place. Even my crazy roommate kept company with the other law students. And inasmuch as I was the only boarder who was not going to school, I was in a way even more of an oddity than he. I certainly was the most uncommunicative. 3 He had offered to buy me cigarettes while I was writing the letter. I said I did not smoke, but thanked him anyway. He then asked to be excused, saying he wanted me to be able to concentrate.


It didn’t take long to finish the letter. It was funny how I was actually writing it with conviction. I seemed to be writing it to a girl I knew and admired, though it was someone faceless, some I worshipped in the abstract, if such a thing were possible. But I soon found out that there indeed was a girl back of my mind all the time. It was the young Kapampangan girl. Her elder sister was seldom seen in the house. The woman was thirtyish. A man of about of forty was her lover. The border said that the man was married. He would bring her home sometimes in the evenings and those were among the few times I saw her. In the mornings, I did not see her because I was late riser. The two sisters did not eat their meals in the boardinghouse. When Marie, the younger sister, was not around, the man stayed with her in the room. Meals were served in the main unit. The boarders and the owner’s children watched television together at lunchtime and in the evenings. I usually took my seat behind everyone, in an inconspicuous corner where I could stare at Marie and also observe the others as they looked at her from time to time. She was pretty. Sometimes the clothes she wore raveled a surprising voluptuousness that was in contrast with her girlish smallness. She was a freshman at MLQU. Once, coming from a bath, she passed by very near where I was sitting. A drop of water fell into my arm. I did not wipe the drop of water off, letting it sat on my skin like it was something I had, unknown to her, appropriated from her body. It was as if she had touched me, as if I were carrying her essence. I put my tongue to it in the end but all I tasted was the sourness of my own skin. She eventually made me very miserable. For a long time I suffered because of her and she had not the slightest knowledge of it. One evening we happened to walk home together. She was coming from school and our paths met on the street where our boarding house was. I didn’t see her at once, not until we were side by side and I couldn’t avoid her anymore if I wanted. She smiled. She asked if it was true that my name was Sawi. I said it was my nickname. She asked if I was a Muslim. She said she heard it said in the boardinghouse that I was. I said I was not, told her that my father was Ilocano and my mother was Cebuana. My father was the one who gave me the name “Sawi” and no one seemed to know where he got it from.4 The priest, though, would not consent to the name and I had to be given another, Christian name. 5 Nonetheless it was what I was called at home. She said it was a nice name. Then she asked me if I could say something in Cebuano to her. I did. Her smile widened. She said the dialect looked just like my facial expression. She then asked me to give the Cebu\no equivalent to this word and that until we got to the boardinghouse. I never got be alone with her again after that. She stayed inside their room most of the time. When she came out, the presence of the others killed any chance of us gravitating towards each other. One afternoon I took a book with me to the hall in the main unit. I was vaguely hoping to see Marie. On afternoons the place was very quiet—most of the boarders and the owner’s children being in school. Those who were left stayed inside their rooms doing their school work or taking a nap.


The owner’s eldest child—a very fat boy of about twelve was inside watching television. The boy and I were enemies. It amused me to watch him on the sly. He was always seated and he had a way of gorging himself that made me feel like giving him a whack. Lazy and young as he was, he had watchful eyes that reacted perpetually to people’s action around him with an adult air. Being new in the big city, it was inevitable that my ways and manners would meet his disapproval. An actual reprimand on one occasion made me smoulder for days. When a second time came, I white with anger and barked at him in Cebuano. The fat boy shook. I never caught him looking at me again after that. The boy pretended not to notice and to be wholly absorbed in watching the show. I sat in the whole and carried on my own pretense of reading a book, glancing at Marie’s room from time to time. the room seemed so quiet and still. At length I grew tired of waiting for Marie to came out and decided that she was not in. I got up and went back to my room. I lay in my bed and closed my eyes and briefly considered going out for a walk. It was a sunless afternoon and when the weather was like that Manila lived up to what it was to my young man’s mind before I set foot on it: a magical place. I woke in bed past five, astonished that I had fallen as sleep. I went back to the hall, again with nothing on my mind but seeing Marie. I came out in time to see her sister’s lover carefully making his out of the gate as the dog leaped at him and fell back. The owner’s son was gone. I sat in the hall and glanced at Marie’s room. Try as I might, I couldn’t visualize the face of her sister. The guys started coming in. when it grew dark, they gathered in the hall and turned the television on. I went on secretly waiting for Marie to come in till it was supper-time. I had begun to forget about Marie as I followed the program when I heard her voice. I looked up and saw her talking to one of the housemaids through the halfopen door, wearing something light brown, the color almost of her skin. The door was shut and she was gone almost at once. I felt oppressed, sure that she was not coming out of her room any more and that brief glimpse was all for the evening. But after a while I was following the show again—shots of a train hurtling across a landscape. Then a railway station and the train emptying of its passengers, gaudy American of a bygone period stepping out to flow into a rowd of people more plainly dressed. Out of nowhere I had a disturbing thought that Marie’s sister was not with her and she was alone in the room. I glared at their room once more and I had a sudden picture of Marie together with the man all afternoon. I felt very sick at once. I remembered how still it had seemed inside the room that afternoon as I sat in the hallway. She took on a certain charity in my eyes. Everytime I looked at her the thought that she had been his seared me. It was as if I had myself been her secret lover and thus was the only one in the boardinghouse who knew her. I studied her slightest actions obsessively, straining to discern shades and nuances of meaning which I somehow hoped would evoke the picture of her in bed with the man. It was like falling into an abyss in which I could never reach the bottom. I tried to figure out her schedule in school. After a week, I was able to establish a pattern. I then tailed her in secret. I would go out in the boardinghouse minutes ahead of her and stand on Hidalgo, far enough on the school building for her not to spot me. I hoped to see her swerve and head for the boulevard,


whereupon I could really trail her. But she never did. I would go back to the boardinghouse already exacerbated, and wait until her classes were over. Then I would go back to Hidalgo, again lurk in a corner a few minutes before she came out of school. I got the same result. I persisted for weeks, though I couldn’t do it everyday. Then I gave up. As the days went by there were moments when I doubted myself. I considered alternatives, like the man had come to visit her sister and left at once when he found out that she was not in. or else he was in the room that afternoon, alone, waiting for Marie’s sister and left when Marie came in. but somehow these were very weak and did not make sense. Only the possibility that her sister was in the room and Marie was not alone offered me an escape. I clung to the hope. Sometimes I was able to force myself to believe that it was so and a kind of numb calm would fill me. But only for a moment. In the end I knew that I could settle for nothing less than actually seeing Marie and the man together in bed. The guys were peeping into Lauro’s room again. It was very late. I asked them who it was with Lauro. They said it was Marie! I replied that that couldn’t be because I just came from Quiapo church and she was there. They laughed and showed me her panties. I snatched the undergarment and ran quickly and quietly downstairs, I intended to wipe the dog’s rabid face with it. The dog sprang to meet me and as it caught my hand it seemed that there was a flash that at the same time a ringing in my head. I held on and grappled with the dog, working with both hands to cram the undergarment down its throat. It choked and slacked but clung to me upright like a man, its hind legs wrapped ridiculously around my leg. Then it broke free and swarmed all over me, growling and howling as if to vomit devils. I ran back to where the guys where and everyone scampered for shelter. I grabbed the dog by its hind legs and swung it against the door of Lauro’s room. I swung it again and again until it was limp. I took my roommates knife and went to work on the dog’s belly. I tore the stomach, the chest, the throat. I couldn’t find the undergarment. I went to the bathroom to wash. But there was not a drop of blood on my body. I sought my wounds by my hands, but there weren’t any, though I ached all over. I found a bit of green soap, almost melted away. It was one of the things I came upon the first time I stealthily took the waste basket that always stood outside Marie’s room in the evening. The first time the thought that its contents might be able to help me entered my head I had actually rejoiced. While I couldn’t find anything that could resolve what was eating me, small scarps which I knew came from Marie were like soothing medical applications and I went at the game watching for the waste basket every evening. It was an operation I was able to perfect. The only time I failed to retrieve anything from this magic waste basket was when I had come home late one evening and the truck that collected the garbage beat me to it. Even then I considered finding out where the garbage was dumped and somehow throw myself at the mountain of trash and retrieve something that could be final illumination. The soap smell intensified the hope and I felt a drowning sensation from the water. 1

MIT is Mapua Institute of Technology; MNLQU, Manuel Luis Quezon University

2“

Tanghaling-tapat!”


I am ot, and have never been, the taciturn type. In fact, there are good number o people who know that I can be voluble. But just as often I can be groping and incoherent—and even clam up on occasion. 3

I heard my Auntie Guiling explain that sawi in Ilocano was a bird that swooped down and snatched eggs from frantic and helpless mother hens. When I was still a crawler, her explanation went, I was seen crawling and plucking objects deftly from the floor—which was what made my father name me after the bird. For years even as grown man I more or less gave this account coherence, until I found out later that there is no such bird in Ilocano. One day I believed the real explanation revealeditself to me. My father must have been fascinated by the tagalong song Ibong Sawi (“hapless bird”) which tells of a bird that has been hurt and can no longer fly. Auntie guiling got it grabled to exactly the opposite. 4

5

Cesar which is originally pagan. In fact emperors of pagan.


A Fine Madness Named Pepito Bosch [Version 1. From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] “Hello.” “Hello—is this where Pepito Bosch lives?” “Yes.” “Pepito Bosch? The...er... Pepito Bosch?” “Yes, yes.” “Great. May I speak to him please?” “Who is this?” “Cesar Aquino.” “Please hold on.” “Hello.” “Hello.” “He went out.” “Is he coming home for lunch?” “He may.” “Please tell him I called and that I’ll call again. Tell him some magazine is putting him on its cover and I’m doing the write-up.” “Hello.” “Hello. May I speak to Pepito?” “He went out.” “Oh. We have an appointment at twelve. Some place in Mabini—I forget the name of the cafe. He said it’s near Hobbit.” “Is it Oar House?” “No. Not Oar House.” “Good Times?” “That’s the one. Can you tell me where that is?” “Let’s see—it’s a little before Las Palmas from Hobbit.” “Going to Luneta?” “Yes.” “Hello.” “Hello—may I speak to Pepito?” “Just a moment.” “Hello.” “Hello. Pepito?” “Cesar Ruiz.” “Here,” Mother hands me a slip of paper as I get up. She has written Las Palmas and Good Times down while listening to me talking on the telephone. “Memory plays tricks,” she says sort of pedantically, proud of her accomplishment. I put the slip of paper in my pocket almost chuckling. Now where did she get that? Did Borges’ line get so famous that it landed in some popular magazine—Women’s perhaps? Has it become a common expression? Call me, if only here, Cesar Ruiz. In 1976 the European chess grandmaster Ludek Pachman reacted with some irritation when I showed up for our interview without ballpen and paper. I couldn’t say anything, just grinned. Perhaps I should


have told him I could play blindfold chess by way of absurd reassurance. That I had a fairly retentive memory, that is. That I was not really a reporter or a journalist. That, as I like to boast, I can play chess better than any writer and write better than any chess-player. Only one another person calls me Cesar Ruiz: Erwin E. Castillo. I like it. Sounds to my ears like a very special nickname. Does something to me that I can’t define. Like a magical word or phrase that not everybody can speak. Pepito and Erwin, each in his magical way, can. Perhaps only they can. It’s like you were indeed the lightning that you have always fantasized yourself to be but that the guy who grants you this is merely slicing a piece of cheese. For you. Easy. In fact, a pleasure. A smile. You are only a name—a game of a name. Well, off I was, in the flush of rainy June to an appointment with madness in vendaval-blown Ermita. Armed with a ball-pen, two sheets of yellow pad paper, a lesson from Borges, and a strange nickname. As it turned out, I hardly wrote down anything as I talked, twice, to Pepito. The hell. Let memory play tricks. His or mine. The 1988 vendaval brings Krip Yuson’s third child, feminist furor over Erwin’s bilmoko beer commercial, the magus Eliphas from Boston, an Indian poet from Orissa, the Free Press as it used to be, and rumor of Ermita. I’m dying, Negros, dying. And vestigial Sawi, homed in from the South like the Moro vintas of old, missing, a ghost word spoken and welcomed and tossed anyway in clouds and clouds of dragon smoke. (To understand the last detail, read the novel Grendel by the late John Gardner. It’s very short and his very best—one of the best from the seventies. When I visited Erwin in his lair in Makati, reuniting over a hoard of San Miguel, I kept feeling like Grendel talking to the dragon, you see. I get some of that too sometimes when Leon Kilat, with Eliphas, with Edith Tiempo, with of course Quijano. But with Pepito Bosch, it’s not just a feeling. He is the dragon—and I don’t mean the Chinese horoscope. Here begins a physical description.) There are people you’ve only known only in pictures. Through years and years they take on, in your mind’s eye, a substantially as firm as bread and as inviolable as a chess variation you have exactly calculated although not played. Perhaps you do get to meet and see such a one in person. There are then only two possibilities. Either he looks different or he looks as he is in the pictures. Now even in the latter case there is a difference: you’re seeing him in person. Some words are like that—adjectives in particular. Gaunt was never as real to me as when I saw Pepito Bosch again after quite a few years. Seeing him again was seeing the word gaunt in person as it were. As though the word had leaped out of The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. I could have cried out: “I’ve seen gaunt but you are gaunt!” He stands six feet. Except that he doesn’t really stand. He extends, and I don’t know what the true verb for it when he rises on his feet. This piece is in large part a failed quest for some such verbs to describe his being there and being six feet tall or six feet gaunt or six feet in extent. Best perhaps, to say six feet of madness, magic, hallucination. I’m writing this now and I am swept by despair over my inability to render in words the essence of a Pepito Bosch moment. But it’s funny how in conversation he is often caught precisely in the same web—when, wideeyed, no words come to him or perhaps a thousand are rushing but he has lost his voice, his voice or his tongue, and—his eyes locked with yours—he nevertheless begins to convey a point to you and gestures with his hand slow-mo, all set to say it but not a word comes out, and the dramatic pause is all there is and yet the pause has marvelously assumed the dimension of a full statement which is travelling,


gesturing hand described if not communicated, shared. It’s the strangest sort of eloquence. And if you listen attentively, gamely, long enough you may get a feeling you are inside his belly. Balding, his long hair is vendaval-brown dragon’s hair. It’s the eyes too. They seem perpetually round, bright. When they grow soft you knew he is smiling, and the bared teeth are handsome enough to flash in the memory like a mythological creature’s fangs. I know now—he is not tall, he is long. Extends is not bad. A few inches more and he’d be serpentine—go, if he wanted, in coils. I may be exaggerating a bit but I’m sure a little child will understand what I mean. If I told a child, when Pepito happens to pass by, “Look, a dragon!” I’m sure he’ll see it. Or I’ll show him the picture of drawing of a dragon and say “Look, Pepito Bosch!” and if the child knows Pepito Bosch, he’ll see it. Dragons have to be Caucasian. With faces like arrows. Bosch is seventy-five percent Caucasian. But because when he talks he sounds as Filipino as puto bumbong you are not aware of that at all. But then again this seems to be no ordinary puto bumbong. The voice, the accent, the taste is Filipino but you feel somehow different, elsewhere, in Rio de Janeiro, in Tangier, in Vladivostok. The puto bumbong has become international and not only that, it obviously has traversed inter-galactic boundaries. Think of it. In far, far away countries beings both real and imaginary will be eating puto bumbong (dinuguan if they are not vegetarians) in all the galaxies. And the name There are Filipino names that sound very far away from being Filipino, especially the first time you hear them. Zshornack is an example. We all know how the name comes at us the first time we come across it. But Zaldy Zschornak is part of the conscience of our race. It’s as Pinoy as Berting Labra or Paquito Toledo. Same with Poe. Edgar Allan Poe is definitely an American poet, but Fernando Poe—Jr. or Sr.,—is a Filipino tradition. Same with Jaworski. Same with Bosch. Pepito’s full name is Jose Ramon Bosch y Roensch. Bosch is Catalan. The surrealist painter Hieronymus Bosch, dijo Pepito, was progenitor. Bosch does not sound Spanish because it is of Dutch origin. Since Bosch in Dutch means “jungle”, he says he would, if he ever writes or films, use Huseng Gubat as his pseudonym. Roesnch is German, Pepito is only one-fourth Filipino if we go by blood. But, as I said, there are other considerations that can compel you to think of him as more Filipino than say Doming Landicho, the Tagalog writer, or Isagani Cruz, the new critic, ever can be. Pepito Bosch is a Filipino after Nick Joaquin’s heart. And like Nick Joaquin, a Mañileno through and through—a Mañileno, we might say, to the Manille born. He was born, grew up, and will likely fade away in Pasay. Pepito de Pasay would be a good alternative to Huseng Gubat The full name smacks of that historical continuity the persistent tendency of which to be broken Nick Joaquin lyrically laments. It’s a name that has not broken with the past. A name in fact that belongs to the past. Except that Jose Ramon Bosch y Roensch or Pepito Bosch or Huseng Gubat or Pepito de Pasay was one of those gifted young men in the late fifties/early sixties describable, had the phrase been available, as the shock wave of the future. Let’s see. In 1959-1960 he went to UP to study chemistry and, having been a college editor perviously at La Salle, found himself in the poetry class of Jose Garcia Villa who had come back from exile. Villa stayed only for a year and then went back to the US. In his class were Perfecto Tera, Jr., Jorge Arago, Fernando Afable, Jimmy


Abad, Jolico Cuadra, and Pepito Bosch. “Jolico and you must have been the goodlookers in that group.” I remark. See the dragon fire soften into a human smile. I’ve not seen Pepito Bosch as a young man even in pictures. But yes he messed with theater for a while. He did heaps and heaps of restless things, as Zorba would put it. He cautions me against identifying him too exclusively with literary people. “That’s only one aspect.” He tells me that be belonged to a generation that pioneered in taking the artist or intellectual into the streets, in forming a new image—from bookworm egghead to wonder kanto boy. Learned meant not only well read but well versed in the hard, seamy, even underworld facts. This new culture was to flower more fully in Willy Sanchez, Erwin Castillo and Reach Trinidad. But guys like Jolico and him started it. In Israel he underwent training I’m guerilla warfare. “Did you see action?” I ask. “No, the farthest I got was being assigned the post of sentry one night. I’ll never forget that. The order was to shoot anyone who came and failed to say the password. I spent a terrible night of struggle with myself. I dreaded the moment when I would have to pull the trigger. Luckily for me, it never came.” “Would you have pulled the trigger?” “No. At some point I made up my mind not to shoot.” The poetry class under Villa, that briefest year in our literary chapters, surely cannot be ignored by students of the beautiful letters. It set a whole aesthetic temper on the UP campus. Something which, in my opinion, no young writer who ever went to UP in the early, and mid, sixties could escape. Pepito says he was twenty-one at that time (a problem; if the day of his birth, as he says, was November 16, 1940 the he ought to have been nineteen, not twenty-one) and he found the UP experience mind blowing. I myself went to UP in 1964-1966 and I think I know what he means, though Villa wasn’t there anymore. The UP I went to still had Tera and Arago and Afable and in addition Willy Sanchez, Erwin Castillo, Ninotchka Rosca and Jose Nadal Carreon. And, yes, Ishmael Bernal whom I remember falling, party-drunk, in giggles into a ditch at one time—and making us up in a play directed by Erwin in another. Too, there were lots of Virgie Moreno, Franz Arcellana, Ricaredo Demetillo, Petronilo Daroy, Alex Hufana, Luis Teodoro, Jose David Lapuz. And a little of Jose Ma. Sison who would invite us to read poetry at Lyceum. And plenty of Nick Joaquin to whose Free Press office at Paso Tamo (Ding Nolledo, Greg Brillantes and Jose Ayala were there) we would troop like deathless memories of love, genius, suspicion and betrayal. Procesion de los toros, then wrote the very young Erwin Castillo. “We were all fakes,” cried Frankie Osorio almost two decades later in front of Pantranco Lansang, terrifying as Dante, was there. Manalo had killed himself a little earlier. “Was Jun Lansang in that class?” “No, he was in the US that year.” It would not be like this piece if I did not ask about Jose Lansang, Jr. Pepito now tells me Ernesto Manalo was madder. “Jun was not violent, Manalo was.” And I find out why I didn’t know back in 1964-1965 because they never talked about certain things surrounding Manalo’s death. Manalo, upon the suggestion of some doctor to his relatives, was lobotomized. “Lobotomy erases certain memories.


If successful, you are supposed to come out of it purged, stripped, of whatever it is that’s ailing you emotionally and mentally.” (My mind drifts to a Christian theological ideas: that God can erase the past, obliterate things that have happened to nothingness.) “But,” Pepito continues, “that’s more hypothetical that factual because the doctors cannot perfect the surgery to precision. That’s why they’ve done away with lobotomy.” “What did it do to Manalo?” “He heroically exerted himself to remember. The memories were not completely obliterated because he was continually flooded with vague feelings, very intense, tormenting. The inability to remember must have been hell to him. In the end it got so bad and he killed himself.” Ask any sage what death shall be/ And he will say there is a soul/ That thrives on nothing foul/ Escapes the rotten body free... Manalo’s unforgettable quatrain. “Still good,” Pepito smiles. “I mean...you know.” Appraised only now, so to speak, of the real situation, I wonder a good quarter of a century after, if Jun Lansang who, in the words of Jolico, “carried his madness too far” had not been through all these shuddering years living in the shadow of a madness greater than this, with which he has desperately been in secret competition, and whose own madness was therefore propelled by a sense of inadequacy, that he could never be mad enough, or that he could never be as mad. It was not as if there had been nothing on the scene, or there was no scene, before Villa. Pepito talks about the David Cortes Medalla period and Medalla’s Le Cave d’Angelique. Set in some slum area in Ermita where Medalla read to Manila’s lovely young socialites. “Is it true Medalla was in love with Diana Jean Lopez? Some nurse back in Zamboanga told me he was.” “He was gay.” “Of course. But she was beautiful, wasn’t she?” “Beautiful.” Very few voices that I’ve heard can say “beautiful” and impart the proper reverence implied by the word. Pepito says it like you would never really know how beautiful Diana Jean Lopez was unless you saw her. Or unless you heard Pepito’s voice say she was. After the year at UP he travelled for a year in the US and in Europe. Then proceeded to further studies in chemistry in Germany, for seven years. Odette Alcantara tells me Pepito has a PhD. “Are you sure?” “I’m sure.” “Then he’s really my double.” “What? Who?” “Dr. Strange, but never mind.” He came back for a few months in 1963. This time the cafe of madness was one called Black Angel, owned and run by the young Betsy Romualdez. In 1969, he came back for good. By then, there were new names in Philippine Bohemia which was Los Indios Bravos. Alfred Yuson, Emman Lacaba. Bencab. Poets. Painters. Actors. Clumsy lovers. These were the psychedelic years, when occultism flowed side by side with political leftism, sometimes together one may imagine. When Marcos declared martial law in 1972, a whole wild magical era ended. Indios Bravos


became Hobbit, peopled by midgets. Gone forever were Grey November and Bravos and Black Angel and, yes, Cock n’ Bull where Quijano de Manila got into a ramble one night (ditto Willy Sanchez got shot in the leg at Indios). We know that Lily Amansec, who owned it, later went deep into the occult and has not been seen around or heard of since then. Did Cock n’ Bull perhaps signify calaba just as they say KBL did? I ask Pepito about the beatniks of the early fifties and the rock n’ roll of the mid. Was he influenced by the beat poets? He was. He devoured Kerouac and Ginsberg and made like a beatnik in San Francisco in 1961, in a club called The Hungry I and a bookstore called City Lights. As for rock n’ roll, he was not quite infected by it, being a devout lover of classical music. Even jazz left him indifferent. How then did Pepito come to play the Conga? “When I was a small boy my parents made a fatal mistake. They took me along on a boat tour in the South.” “Why was it a fatal mistake?” “It blew my mind. It really blew my mind. That’s how it all started.” This was in the late forties. He mentions Zamboanga in particular—the Zamboanga after the war. Suddenly I knew what he meant. For a moment an odd thought crossed my mind: Is he perhaps stealing, “plagiarizing” my experience? I’d written about it in a story of Ermita magazine. Perhaps he was doing this unconsciously? However, it seemed more likely that we shared, for a second time, a similar experience—first UP Dilliman as a young man, then this: a boat trip to Zamboanga in childhood. And he has an advantage over me—he remembers the name of the boat: Turk’s Head. I made him retell an experience he had once told me years ago. As a college kid at La Salle he was with a group that every summer, for four years, scoured the Cordillera mountains. Since this was in the mid and late fifties you can well see the Low Waist Gang in the background. It was the time of teenage gangs about whom today’s punk or new wave rock artists are so nostalgic. James Dean, Sal Mineo. But, as Pepito points out, at the time what his group was doing was incomprehensible to both parents and other kids. Going to the boondocks became fashionable only in the seventies, with people like Bimboy Peñaranda, Sylvia Mayuha, Butch Perez, Tikoy Aguiluz. Pepito’s group arrived in a village and it seemed completely deserted. The guide told them the people were probably taking a communal bath in the river. Pepito and his companions asked him to take them to the place. They were all there—the men and the women and the elders. All naked as Eden.nit was this time, he says, that he discovered how “super-civilized” the tribal Filipinos are. “They looked at us casually and, without as much as a nod, of the head, completely made us feel like visitors not intruders. But there we were, young men from Manila, from de la Salle, and how we leered at the naked bodies of the women. We could feel their embarrassment at this, at the way we stared. And suddenly it was we who were ashamed of ourselves. At least I can speak for myself. We were the savages; they were the ones who were civilized. Super! But yes the women were beautiful. Super! You know—I mean.” Was it among these mountain tribes that he picked up his interest in shamanism? No, he says, Was it from reading Elaide? Or Castañeda in the early seventies? He says he read them but had become a shaman earlier.


It had to do with his first acid trip. This was in 1967, in Germany. He was with a band of musicians and, stoned, he found himself unaccountably in front of a conga. But there he was. He beat the conga so hard and so nonstop his hands blistered. It was love at first sight blister for Pepito and the conga. Balat, he informs me, is what you call drums and when you strike them with your hands you rouse all the animals that men have hunted, slain, eaten and skinned from the beginning of time and one of them comes to life within you, shivers in your body and howls in your throat. Thus began Bosch’s balat shamanism. Is it perhaps unconscious fear of blisters that is the real reason why he plays the conga with his fingers not touching the drumhead? The sight of his playing, near paroxysmal in intensity, with eyes closed and his throat howling cats and dogs and demons, but his hands not actually touching the conga is one of the most hilarious things I’ve seen in life, in movies, on stage, or in drawing room. It’s all in his ears or in his mind of course. Maybe it’s akin to the Hindu nada, the voice of the silence that only the mystic can hear. His own explanation is less highfalutin. “It’s the limitation of the human body—its inability to execute the conception. Which is why I am now into electronic music. “Tantric sex,” I say non sequitur to probe his shaman’s experience further. “You don’t even begin to understand,” he says a la Dancing Sorcerer of Trois Freres and don Juan Matus. I wait for him to go on. “She’s suddenly there.” After a silence which seemed to say that’s that, I prod him on some more with: “What if I refuse?” “You can’t refuse. You can’t refuse. Which is why they love me. Fourteen hours. Twenty four—forty eight hours. And they surrender.”—[ ] “Is that how it went with the deaf-mute?” “No, in her case I was entirely the learner.” Kilat had tipped me on how a Luneta-mute girl had picked Pepito up once. “I did not have to do anything. She saw me and that’s it. She saw me. She knew I wanted it badly. I didn’t even know it myself. But she read me. She read my body, what it was saying. So I was sitting there and she came to me and without a word—I mean without a word in her sign language—she held me like this,” he grabs me by the arm, eyes around as Armageddon, “and took me to a motel. I did not have to do anything. And I found out she was right. I wanted and needed it badly. It was fuck at first sight.” “How was she?” “She was good, amazing. Just like the blind who develop a keen sense of touch s compensation for the loss of their eyesight. In her case, her body was very eloquent, very articulate, fluent, felicitous, poetic, lyrical. Terrific wordplay. She could pun in at least a dozen languages, including Sanskrit. And her style was varied, diverse. She was equally at home in hard-boiled prose. She was the first minimalist. I mean—you know.” He tells me of the time he accompanied Jose Garcia Villa’s reading of his poem with the conga. “Whose idea was it?” “Another poet suggested it while Villa was reading.” “Which poem? The Anchored Angel?


“No, but it was a comma poem. Every comma -” he strikes an invisible conga and motions with his head as if beckoning to me some wonderful adventure, his face lighting up with that I can only describe as a post-Fall giggle. Paradise regained. He looks mischievous and angelic at the same time, one of God’s favorite little devils playing his drum with pure joy. I think of Villa’s line: The bright, centipede, begins, his stampede... Pepito el Pasayeño. In English, Pepito the Pasayan. It sounds Cebuano. In Cebuano, pasayan means big shrimp. Enormous shrimp, bright centipede, dragon. Full-circle on a theme. “But it takes two to tantra.” I protest several minutes, perhaps a half-hour after we had left the topic. Meaning neither really surrenders. But I realize perhaps he meant “surrender” in the real English, not Filipino, sense. He rises and says “See you,” abruptly. But as we go out of the cafe he asks me to go with him. “Where?” I’m looking at the sky beyond his shoulder and now he tells me about the child prostitutes. How they get ravished first by neighbors and/or relatives. Then by the Chinese who’d pay a thousand. And finally, the tourists. He says he once wanted to make a film of this, but it broke his heart. Pepito has a daughter named Andrea by his estranged German wife who is now in Germany. Recently, he received a picture of the child on her first communion. He tells me this with a contained glow, a sober and solid happiness that makes me think of Nick Joaquin’s Manila. Philippines. Jose Rizal, Maria Clara. The Catholic past. I realize, almost like a shock that this Buddha of Pinoy Bohemians is able to stir my own Catholic depths as nothing and no one can, except an occasional girl, these days. “How good is Butch Perez?” “He’s very good. You’ll find out. In five or seven years. Or ten. He’ll blow our minds with his film.” And we are near the boulevard. And they come, tender as yesterday’s rain, wild, dark-haired and dark-nippled gypsies to this mad noble, or noble madman. But Pepito is not a madman. No madman can do this. Just as John Philip Law in Barbarella said that an “Angel does not love; an angel is love,” you cannot say that Pepito Bosch is a madman. Pepito Bosch is not mad; he is madness. “This is the other half, Cesar Ruiz,” he says as they pull him away. Manila, 1988


[Version 2. From Checkmeta, 2004] “Hello” “Hello—is this where Pepito Bosch lives?” “Yes” “Pepito Bosch? The—uh—Pepito Bosch?” “Yes, yes.” “Great. May I speak to him please?” “Who is this?” “Cesar Aquino.” “Please hold on.” “Hello” “Hello.” “He went out.” “Is he going to be home for lunch?” “Maybe.” “Please tell him a magazine is putting him on its cover and I’m doing the write-up, I’ll call again” “Hello.” “Hello. May I speak to Pepito?” “He went out.” “We have an appointment at twelve. Some place on Mabini—I forgot the name of the place. He sait it’s near Hobbit.” “Is it Oar House?” “No, not Oar House.” “Good Times?” “That’s the one. Can you tell me where that is?” “Las Palmas, Going to Luneta.” “Yes.” “Thank you.” “Here,” Mother hands me slip of paper as I get up. She has written Las Palmas and Good Times down while listening to me talk on the phone. “Memory plays tricks,” she says somewhat pedantically. I put the slip of paper in my pocket almost chuckling. Now where did she get that? Did Borge’s line get so famous that it landed in some popular magazine—Women’s perhaps? Has it become an expression? Well, off I was in the flush of rainy June to an appointment with madness in vendaval-blown Ermita. Armed with a ballpen, two sheets of yellow pad paper, a lesson from Borges. Back in 1976 the European chess grandmaster Ludek Pachman reacted with some irritation when I showed up for our interview without ballpen and paper. I couldn’t say anything, just grinned. Perhaps I should have told him that I was a chessplayer not a reporter and therefore “Mr. Pachman, surely you know blindfold


chess?” Or boasted outright, informed him that I could play chess better than any writer and write better than any chessplayer including him. As it turned out, I hardly wrote down anything when I interviewed Pepito. The hell, Mr. Pachman. Let memory play tricks, his or mine. The 1988 vendaval had brought Krip Yuson’s third child, feminist furor over Erwin Castillo’s bilmoko San Miguel beer commercial, and the size of the Free Press as it was when it exited in 1972. Read the novel Grendel by the late John Gardner. It’s very short and his very best—-one of the best from seventies. When I visited Erwin in his lair of an office in Makati, I kept feeling like Grendel talking to the dragon, you see. Only difference is the dragon sat on a pile of gold; Erwin, on a hoard of San Miguel—-and whereas the dragon would kill you if you as much touch a single item in his pile, Erwin would if you didn’t drink all. So where does Pepito come in? In the dragon’s den, naturally. Because you see if Erwin is a dragon and believe me—he is—Pepito Bosch is the dragon. There are people you’ve known only in pictures. Through years and years they take on, in your minds eye, a substaintiality as firm as bread and as inviolable as a chess variation you have exactly calculated although not played. Perhaps you do get to meet such a one in person. There are then only two possibilities. Either he looks different or he looks as just as he is in the pictures. Now even in the latter case there is a difference, you’re seeing him in person. Some words are like that—adjectives in particular. Gaunt was never as real to me as when I saw Pepito Bosch again after a quite a few years. Seeing him again was seeing the word gaunt in person as it were. As though the word had leaped out of the Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. I could have cried out, “I’ve seen gaunt but you are gaunt!” He stands six feet. Except that he don’t really stand as much as he extends and I don’t know what the true verb for it is when he rises on his feet. This place is in large part a failed quest for some such verbs to describehim being there and being six feet gaunt or six feet in extent. Best perhaps to say six feet of hallucination so hallucinated all the verbs went on leave. Im writing this now and I am swept by despair over my inability to render in words the essence of a Pepito Bosch moment. But its funny how in conversation he is often caught precisely in the same web—when, wide eyed , no words come to him or perhaps a thousand are rushing but he has lost is voice, his voice or his tongue, and—his eyes locked with yours—he nevertheless begins to convey a point to you and gestures with his hand slow-mo, all set to say it but not a word comes out, and the dramatic pause is all there is and yet the pause has marvelously assumed the dimension of a full statement which his travelling, gesture hand described if not listen attentively, gamely, long enough you may get a feeling that you are in his bells. Balding, his long hair is vendaval-blown dragon’s hair. It’s the eyes too. They seem perpetually round, bright. When they grow soft you know he is smiling, and the bared teeth are handsome enough to flash in the memory like a mythological creature’s fangs. “Cesar Ruiz,” he smiles. Erwin and Pepito, independently of each other, are the only people who occasionally call me this, which never fails to give me a pleasant, warm feeling when I hear it , as if were some kind of arcane matter to which it is the key. I know now—he is not tall, he is long. Extends is not bad. A few inches more and he’s be serpentine—go, if he wanted, in coils. I may be exaggerating a bit but I’m sure a little child will understand what I mean. If I told a child, when Pepito happens to pass by, “Look, a DRAGON!” I’M


SURE HE’LL SEE IT. Or I’ll show him the picture or drawing of a dragon and say, “Look Pepito Bosch!” and if the child knows Pepito Bosch, he’ll see him. Dragons have to be Caucasian. With the faces like arrows. Bosch is seventy five per cent Caucasian. But because when he talks he sounds like barong tagalong itself, you are not aware of it at all. But then again this seems to be no ordinary barong tagalong. The voice, the accent, the taste is Filipino but you fell somehow different, the same but different, here but elsewhere, in Manila but in Rio de Janeiro, in Tangier, in Vladivostok. The barong-tagalog has become international and not only international but inter-galactic. Think of it. Far, far away and long, long ago beings both real and imaginary once were barong tagalong. And the name. There are Filipino names that sound very far away from being Filipino the first time we hear them or see them in print. Zshornack is an example . The name just comes at us the first time we come across it. But Zchornack is part if the conscience of our race—at least for those who remember the sixties. It’s as Pinoy as Silayan or Kabahar or Coching. Same with Jaworski. Same with Bosch. Pepito’s full name is Jose Ramon Bosch y Roensch. Bosch is Catalan. The surrealist Heironymus Bosch, Pepito says, was a progenitor. “Sure?” “Sure?” “Surrealist?” “It’s genetic.” Bosch does not sound Spanish because it is of Dutch origin. Since Bosch in Dutch means jungle, he says he would, if he ever writes or films, use “Huseng Gubat” as his pseudonym. Huseng Gubat went to UP to study chemistry and, having been a college editor previously at La Salle, found himself in the poetry class of Jose Garcia Villa, the poet from New York. In Villa’s class were Perfecto Tera, Jr., Jorge ARago, Fernando Afable, Jimmy Abad, Jolico uadra, and Pepito Bosch. “Jolico and you must have been the good-lookers in that group, “I remark— see the dragonfire soften into a human smile. I’ve not seen Pepito Bosch as young man even in pictures. But yes he messed with theater for a while. He cautions me against identifying him exclusively with literary folk or looking him always in a literary context. He did heaps and heaps of things, as Zorba(oops) would put it. “That’s only one aspect,” he says. He tells me he belonged to a generation that pioneered in taking the artist or intellectual into the streets, in creating a new image—from bookworm egghead, today’s nerd, into wonder kanto boy. Learned would now mean not only well-read but also well-versed in tough guy—even gangster or underworld—facts. This culture was to flower in Willy Sanchez and Erwin Castillo but guys like Jolico and him started it, if radically. Jolico hobnobbed with both Doveglion and Nardong Putik. Pepito, for his part, underwent training in guerilla warfare in Israel. “Did you see action?” I ask. “No. The farthest I got was being assigned the post of sentry one night. I’ll never forget that. The order was to shoot anyone who came and failed to say the password. I spent a terrible night of struggle with myself. I dreaded the moment when I would have to pull the trigger. Luckily for me, it never came.” Would you have pulled the trigger?”


“No. At some point I made up my mind not to shoot.” The poetry class under Villa, that briefest season in our hell—beg your pardon, heaven—surely cannot be ignored by students f the beautiful letters. It set a whole aesthetic temper on the UP campus. Something which, I think, no young writer who went to UP in the early, and mid, sixties could conceivably escape. Pepito says he was twenty-one at that time and he found the UP experience mindblowing. I myself went to UP in 1964-1965 and I know that he means , though Villa was not there anymore. The UP I went to still had Tera and Arago and A fable and, in addition, Willy Sanchez, Erwin Castillo, Ninotchka and, Joecarr. And yes, Ishmael Bernal whom I remember falling , party drunk, in giggles into a ditch on one time—and, at another, making as up in a play directed by Erwin T.S. Eliots’s Murder in the Cathedral—on performance night at the PGH on Padre Faura. Too, there were lots of Virgie Moreno, Franz Arcellana, Ricardo Demitllo, Petronilo Daroy, Alex Hufana, Luis Teodoro, Jose David Lapuz. And a little of Jose Ma. Sison who invited us on one occasion to read poetry at lyceum. And plenty of Nick Joaquin to who’s m Free Press office at Pasong Tamo(Ding Nolledo, Greg Brillates and Jose Ayala were there) we would troop like deathless memories of love, genius, suspicion, and juvenilia. Procesion de Los Toros, then wrote the very young Erwin E. Castillo in Short-Story International. “We were all fakes,” cried Frankie Osorio in front of Pantranco two decades later. “Was Jun Lansang in that class?” “No, he was in the US that year.” It would not be like the piece if I did not ask about Jose Lansang, Jr. Pepito now tells me Ernesto Manalo was madder. “Jun was not violent; Manalo was.” And I found out what I didn’t know back in 1964-1965, when Manalo had just killed himself, because they never talked about it. All I picked up was that (from Freddie Dimaya)he fell under the category of “gentle poet,” (from Jun Tera) he was a better poet than Jun Lansang and (from Willy Sanchez) he wrote this line: Ask any sage what Death shall be And he will say that there is a soul That thrives on nothing foul Escapes the rotten body free. Manalo’s unforgotten quatrain. “Still good,” Pepito smiles. Manalo, upon the suggestion of a doctor to his relatives, was lobotomized. “Lobotomy erases certain memories. If successful, you are supposed to come out of it purged, stripped, of whatever is that ‘s ailing you emotionally or mentally. (My mind drifts to the theological idea: that God can erase the past, obliterate things that have happened to nothing—meaning they never happened.) “But,” Pepito continues, “that’s more hypothetical than factual because the doctors cannot perfect the surgery precision. That’s why they have done away worth lobotomy.” “What did it do to Manalo?” “He heroically excreted himself to remember. the memories were not completely removed because he was continually visited by feelings , very intense nut vague and shapeless and therefore tormenting. The inability to remember must have been hell to him. In the end it got so bad he killed himself.


“I am unable to say anything, made me speechless by the story as much as by the way Pepito tells t so calmly. Appraised only now so to speak, of the real picture, I wonder a good quarter of a century later, if Jun Lanasang who, in the words of Jolico, “Carries his madness too far,” had not been through all those shuddering years consciously living in the shadow of a madness more fatal than his, which he emulated if not completed with in an agony (a word whose greek root means contest) that was itself, is truth, as poetic as anything he wrote. I suddenly shange the topic. “Is it true Medalla was in love with Diana Jean Lopez? Some nurse back in Zamboanga told me he was.” I wanted him to talk of Medalla and Medall’s Le Cave d’Angelique, set in some slum are where Medalla read to Manila’s lovely young socialites. “He was gay.” “Of course. But she was beautiful, wasn’t she?” “Beautiful.” Very few voices that I’ve heard can say “beautiful” and impart the reverence implied by the word. Pepito says it like you would never really know how beautiful Diana Jean Lopez was unless you saw her. Or unless you heard Pepito’s voice she was. Yet sing now of beauty Which lasts not forever Through all metamorphoses I am terribly lonely Pepito’s smile is even wider this time. I didn’t change the topic after all. He actually laughs and replies: For that by Hera she is so beautiful Reason I’ll not betake me to satire. With that, we finally leave the poets of U.P. Diliman in the sixties. After the year at U.P. he traveled in the US and in Europe. Then proceeded to further studies in chemistry in Germany, for seven years. Odette Alcantara tells me Pepito has a PhD. (“Are you sure?”) “I’m sure.” “Doppelganger.” “What? Who?” Dr. Strange, but never mind.”) He came back for a few months in 1963. The cafe of forgetting this time was called Black Angel. In 1969 he came home for good. There were new places like Grey November and Los Indios Bravos. And new names in the higher life. Krip Yuson, Emman Lacaba, Bencab. Poets, painters, actors, clumsy lovers. These were the psychedelic years. When occultism socialized with socialism. Bohemia marched with Marxism. Or so I wordplay. When Marcos declared Martial Law in 1972, Indios Bravos become Hobbit, as if to say Rizal and company were shorter than you thought. I ask Pepito about the beatniks of the early fifties and rock ‘n’ roll of the mid. Was influence by the beat poets? He was. He devoured Kerouac and Ginsberg and


made like a dharma bum in San Francisco in 1961, in a club called The Hungry I and a bookstore called City Lights. As for rock ‘n’ roll, he was not keen on it, being a devotee of classical music. Jazz, too, left him indifferent. How did then Pepito come to play cogna? “When I was a small boy my parentsmade a fatal mistake. They took me along on aboat tour of the South.” “Why was that a fatal mistake?” “It blew my mind. It really blew my mind. That’s how it all started.” This was late forties. He mentions Zamboanga in particular—the Zamboanga rught after the war. Suddenly I know what he means. For a moment an odd thought crosses my mind. Is he perhaps stealing, “plagiarizing.” my experience? I’ve written about it in Proheme to Zamboanga, which I have no doubt he has read. However, it seems more likely that we shared the same experience—for the second time! First going as a young man to a UP Dilliman set aflame by Villa. Now this [—a boat trip to far Zamboanga set aflame by both sunrise and sunset. He says he remembers the name of their boat—Turks Head. I make him re0tell an experience he once told me about years ago. As a college kid at La Salle he belonged to a group that every summer, for four years, ranged about the Cordillera mountains—in unconscious quests, one assumes, of marvelous. The fifties was the age of the teenage gangs. Pepito points out that at the time what his gang was doing was incomprehensible to parents and gangsters alike. Going to the boondocks—i.e., Sagada—became a fashion only in the seventies. Pepito and companions arrived in the village that seemed deserted. They were told that the tribe had gone to take a bath in the river. The de LaSalle boys asked to be taken their guide. They were there—the men and the women and the elders and the children. All naked as Eden. It was then that he realized l, he says how “super-civilized” the ancient Filipino tribes in these islands before Magellan really were. Then they were perfectly relaxes , friendly and hospitable. I mean they were enjoying their communal bath, faces beaming , looking at us casually and, without as much as a nod of the head, completely made us feel like visitors not intruders. But there we were , young men from Manila, from De LaSalle, and how we leered at the naked bodies of the women. We could feel their embarrassment at this, at the way we stared. And suddenly it was we who were ashamed of ourselves. At least I can speak for myself. We were savages; they were the ones who were refined and civilized Super!” I remain quiet, at a loss for words. Pepito senses this and makes an attempt to go on though it’s clear in his tale is done. “But yes the women were beautiful. Super! You know—I mean…” Was it among the mountain tribes that he picked up his interest in shamanism? No he says. Was it from reading Eliad? Or Castenada in the seventies? He says no, he heard them but had become a shaman earlier. His first acid trip had to do with it. This was in 1967, in Germany. He was with a performing band of musicians at a club when, stoned, he found himself unaccountably in front of a vacant conga. He stared at the forlorn instrument for a moment and then he swears he just suddenly felt it was destiny. Forlorn! The very word was conga! He had never played with a band before, much less played the conga. but there he was, beating the conga so hard and so nonstop his hands blistered. Balat, he tells me, is what you call drums and when you strike them with


your hands you rouse all the animals that men have haunted, slain, eaten, skinned and prayed to from the beginning of time and one of them comes to life within you, shivers in your body and howls in your throat. Thus spoke shamanism. He tells me of the time he accompanied Jose Garcia Villa’s reading of his poem with the conga. “Whose idea was it?” “Another poet suggested it while Villa was reading.” “Which poem? The Anchord angel?” “No, but it was a comma poem. Every comma—“ he strikes an invisible conga and motions with his head as if beckoning me to some wonderful adventure, his face lighting up with what I can only describe as a post-Armageddon giggle. He looks mischievous and angelic at the same time, one of God’s favorites little devils playing his drum with pure joy. I think of Villa’s line: The, bright, centipede, begins, his, stampede I visualize Pepito stampeding on the cong, his hands getting as many blisters as the centipede has legs and Villa’s poems commas. Is it perhaps unconscious fear of blisters that is the real reason why he plays the conga with his fingers not touching the drumhead? The sight of him playing, near paroxysmal in intensity, with eyes shut and his throat howling cats dogs and demons—but his hands not actually touching the conga—is one of the most hilarious things I’ve seen in life, in movies, on stage, on television or on drawing room. It’s all in his mind’s ear—or ear’s mind—of course. Maybe it’s pretty much like how it goes with the Hindu nada, the voice of the silence that only the mystic can hear. What is the sound of two hands beating the drums without touching? His own explanation is less highfalutin and less acrobatic. “It’s the limitation of the human body—its inability to execute the conception. Which is why I’m into electronic music.” “Tantric sex.” I say non sequitur, just to probe or humor the shaman. “You don’t even begin to understand,” he syas a la Dancing Sorcerer of Trois Freres and Don Juan Matus. I wait for him to go on. “She’s suddenly there.” After a silence which seemed to say that’s that, I prod him on some more with: “What if I refuse.” “You can’t refuse. You can’t refuse. Which is why they love me. Fourteen hours. Twenty-four, forty-eight. And they surrender.” “Is that how it went with the deaf-mute?” “No, in her case I was entirely the learner.” Krip had tipped me on how a Luneta deaf-mute had picked Pepito up once. “I did not have to do anything. She saw me and that’s it. She saw me. She knew I wanted it badly. I didn’t even know it myself. But she read me. She read my body, what it was saying. This was long before all those books about body language were written. So I was sitting there and she came to me and without a word—mean without a word in her sign language—she held like this,” he grabs me by the arm, eyes round as March 16, 1521, “and took me to a motel. I did not have to do anything. And I found out that she was right. I wanted and needed it badly. It was fuck at first sight.” “How was she?” “She was good, amazing. Just like the blind who develop a keen sense of touch as compensation for the loss of their eyesight. In her case, her body was very


eloquent, very articulate, fluent, feliticitous, poetic, lyrical. Terrific wordplay. She could pun in at least a dozen languages, including Sanskrit. When she was on top, she was all etymology and I, all scholarship. But her style was varied, diverse. She was equally at home in hard-boiled prose. She was the first minimalist. She could do argot, pidgin, pig Latin—if you wanted. You know—I mean…” “It takes two to Tantra,” I say. But it’s my turn o take a disconcertingly abrupt non sequitur. He rises and says, “ See you.” Then as we go out of the café he invites me to go with him. “ Where?” “To the other half.” I’m looking at the sky beyond his shoulder and now he tells me about the child prostitutes. How they ravished first by neighbors and relatives. Then by the Chinese who’d pay a thousand. And finally the tourists. He says he once wanted to make a film of this, but it broke his heart. Pepito has daughter named Andrea by his strange German wife who is now in Germany. Recently, he received a picture of the child on her first communion. He tells me this with a contained glow, a sober and solid happiness that makes me realize I am not in Bohemia but in the country of Jose Rizal and Maria Clara. Not in the New Age but in Nick Joaquin country. Intramuros, old Manila, Philippines. “How good is Buth Perez?” “he’s very good. You’ll find out. In five or seven years. Or ten. He’ll blow our minds with his film.” And we are near the boulevard. And theys come, tender as yesterday’s rain, wild, dark-haired and dark-nippled gypsies to this mad noble man or noble madman. No mad man can do this. In the sixties science fantasy movie Barbarella John Philip Law says, “An angel does not love; an angel is love.” After that fashion Pepito Bosch is not mad; he is madness. “This is the other half, Cesar Ruiz,” he says as they pull him away.


Fischer, the World Class Chess Champion Who Never Was [From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] Keeners students of chess and its history know that a chestplayer’s passion for the game can reach heights commonly associated with artist in a grip of their genius and vocation. Steinitz, Rubestien, Alekhine—all burned consumingly for chess, or rather chess so consumed them, one is left with the sense that it was burning bush they touch and moved as they played enternally. Here is how such chess player, though not as glorious as the three described: “He passed half his life at the chessboard. He would have preferred to go on forever. He dreamed of a life in which eating and sleeping would be got through while his opponent was making his moves.” The hyperbole smacks of fiction. The somewhat omniscient intimacy that the subject is a literary creation. His name enforces this: Fischerle. Surey he is a character modelled on—or at least the author is alluding to—Bobby Fisher, history’s most monstrously passionate chess player. Indeed Fisherle is a chess player in Elias Carnett’s famous novel, Auto da Fe. The book was however published, in 1935, eight years before Bobby was born, and the English translation came out in 1946, when Bobby Fisher was three, still a couple of years or so away from the rudiments of the game. Canetti seem to have been prescient. On page 372 of the novel (Pan Books Ltd., paperback edition) we came upon a brief sentence: “ He was bound to get the noble prize.” If it was secretly alluding himself, which we think he was, Canetti had to wait for nearly half a century for the precision to be made. The noble prize for literature was awarded to him in 1981. How closely does Fishcherle, Canetti’s creation, resemble Fisher—a man we all know, given reclusiveness to be real? Fisher broke into the consciousness of the international public n the mid fifties as a twelve year old chess prodigy. He was written about as “the boy who played, ate and slept chess.” True enough no obsessions to prove oneself the best of the game—instantly game—ever rose to such a pitch as his head or had, neither before him nor after. The boy Fisher declared that he was the world’s best player, and the man gave the world a rather indigeble impression that, indeed, he is the greatest that has ever been and perhaps the greatest there will be. To believe the last, one would have to be Jew, who sees history as moving linearly toward a final point, who believes that time must have an end, a termination. But what if it this is not so? What if the world abides forever as it is? Even if time machines were invented, even if Fisher were granted a literal immortality, there would be no end to the challenges that will come to him to the future. He’ll be playing forever and question whether he is the best, even if he is, will never be settled. There is another antipodal way. What fisher wants, what his rooters want, can only be obtained in the realm of myth, of poetry, of the vertical. In that world it is impossible to play only one game and be the greatest. In that world death and finitude are accepted, are necessary, are as they cherish rudiments of an


enchanted game. We propose the idea that fisher may have, not so long ago, intuited this. Therefore it is right that he has stopped playing. And for Fisher to now suddenly emerged to the seclusion and play in a world match with Kasparov would be a reckless reentry into a vicious circle of history, of futility, even if the gamble pays off. This seems at least a coherent account of his intruding mania of seclusion. It is known that in the early eighties Norman Mailer was bent on writing a book on Fisher. Mailer was mighty equipped for the task, yet the book never materialized. We understood along a line of our hypothesis, that Fisher is vigilantly keeping safe the superlative facts of his caliber a chessplayer from the flights to fancy to expected from a literary man. But perhaps even more, that he is guarding the myth, the poetry, he secretly but inarticulately has himself against himself against a journalist , even a metajournalist, representations. Humor, he would be quick to recommend, can rescue fisher from the rigors and the more painful consequences of this passion. But even here he is actually uncompromising. More than his autism ordains that he be humorless when it comes to stature as the greatest player of all time. For Fisher has conceived that along philosophical, Platonic, Euclidean lines. His has been a quest all along for the equation that establishes his centrality as chest history as fact. If only the equation can be fund—like a hidden more or hidden combination. Thus his intransigent withdrawal to the scene , from events, from reality. In the now almost twenty years since he walked out of the chess world, we have crumbs of information on Fisher as these: Nowadays he travels all over the US and the first thing he does when he gets to a town is to visit the public library and to read whatever chess book he still has not read. Caisa , the chess muse, has not known such an enduring manomania… He is known to have engaged grandmasters in blitz chess on two occasions. On the first, we read how he polishes of his grand masters with unbelievable ease. On the second, we read that a grandmaster described his play as “rusty” …He has been jailed and arrested for vagrancy and when he identified himself as “Fisher, the chess champion of the world” , he was savaged by his jailers…. He was heard to have been in Manila, travelling ignite as usual shortly before the third and the last world match between Karpov and Kasparov and to have said that Kasparov would lose the match due to “pressure from above”… A new Fisher game appears in the chest column at last! However it turns out to be the score of a name he plays in a computer after beating which he said “that was ridiculously weak”. Except for the one about being jailed, the little items have been the effect of reassuring their fns that their inaccessible hero has not gone the sad way of Paul Murphy and Wilhelm Steinnitz before him, and more recently, the Brazilian champion Henry Mekling. For now and then he is rumored that Fisher has cracked up. E somehow not inclines to give this credence. What is frightening and seems unreal about Fisher is that he is sane. Now to Fischerle for the comparison. Fischerle stands an inch and two over six feet. We saw him when he visited Manila in 1976. He was surprisingly hefty, surprisingly had a smile capable of disarming the girls. Fischerle a dwarf and a hunchback is married to and is wholly dependent on the earning of a prostitute who receives the gentleman right after the bedroom. When she’s on the job, Fischerle hides under the bed:


“There he listened carefully to everything the man said—he didn’t care what his wife said—and soon he develop an instinct whether the man is a chess player or not. The moment he was sure of this, he crawled out as fast a he could —often hurting his jump very much—and challenge the unexpected visitor to a game of chess. Some men agreed at once, as long as the game was for money. Not one of the was puzzled by his sudden appearance. But Fischerle’s passion grew with the years. Each time it was harder for him to postpone his challenge long enough. Often he was forcibly overcome by the conviction that just above his head an international champion was lying incognito”. Fischerie, in fact, has fantasies of one day meeting and outplaying Capablanca, the world chess champion at the time book was written—and which the novel is set. Capablanca was a chess player whose invincibility on the board was legendary in his day as Fisher’s is in ours. Fischerie’s ambitious dream was the crowning perfection as, of its monstrousness. Since he is merely a character in a novel written in the thirties, this delusion draws not only an absurd encouragement but our sense of the marvelous. For the more intense his dream becomes, the more certain he is of his fulfillment—that is to say the more intense he becomes—the closer he actually edges to a stupendous reality. On page 214, he announces: “In three months I shall be the world champion gentlemen.” And the funny thing, the wonder, about it is that words ring true. A grosser instance is when he tells the press that “ As a world champion, he fell from heaven.” This is the an almost exact verbal replica of what the 1960 Latvian World Chess Champion, Miktail Tai, said of Fischer: “The greatest chess genius has fallen down to heaven.” Not of the same order, however, is part in which he vanquishes and humiliates Capablanca. For some reason the climax to his career find us disenchanted. We are reduced to knowing he is only a poor ,demented as if the encounter, loonily triumphant a it is, proves to be unworthy of homoncus and the hallucination is a hallucination, is a hallucination—if the encounter proved to be unworthy fantasies , that he bowls over us, that he is—as we now say—fantastic. On page 182 he addresses a huge crowd of “at least a thousand of reporters.” The words he announces are: “Gentlemen, I’m surprised to find myself called Fischerle everywhere. My name is Fischer, I trust you that you will have this error rectified.” Two pages later he writes down and talks for everyone to see the following sign: “Chess Champion of the world, Fischer.” [MISSING PARAGRAPH]


The Fourteenth Fool [Version 1. From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] “It is the shape of a sugar-loaf, perfectly conical.” ~ SIR JOHN BOWRING, A Visit to the Philippine Islands The Nmiaci (Mi-a-tsi), the fourteenth entry in The Book of Fools, has claims to being the most interesting, possessing a literary quality that makes it read more like composed fiction than historical fact and sets it apart from others. To some this constitutes a defect not a virtue, feeling that the imaginative ring of the story is out of place in the book, whose fascinating appeal lies almost wholly in the easy verifiability of each fool’s historical existence. The Book of Fools is a painstakingly compiled collectanea of the world’s greatest fools from the beginnings of civilization to the present, in which are blended trustworthy scholarship and the plainness of a cooking manual. The phrasing, though not overly colloquail, is uniformly artless to the point of being homely. As a result, each concrete moment of sheer foolishness shines through the book like a gem. The style, one might say, is the sap. And this is why the Nmiaci, in which one quite often runs into a coil of ornate expressions, sticks out like a sore thumb, or rather like an anomalously robust and vigorous one. Its enthusiasts on the other hand see th Nmiaci’s special treatment as the editor’s subtle means of revealing their savant stature. It amounts to a signet. Nor was this arbitrary. Even if its critics have admitted the impossibility of writing the story of the Nmiaci in the same vein as the rest. It would have had perforce to be scrapped altogether. Apparently the Nmiaci was problematic and received a greater amount of study and meditation from the editors that any other single item in the book. This view has led many to the opinion that the Nmiaci may be well in fact the arch fool, the donkey par excellence, the dimwit of dimwits. This is a terrific distinction. For the books selectiveness is itself mind-boggling——it includes only twenty one fools where even a thousand would have been an infinitesimalfraction to the total number of dolts in history. Each of these twenty-one fools is a superfool, standing out from an incalculably vast infinity of fools, whose foolishness, if we may have a little hyperbole, amounted to genius. That he should have come from the twentienth-century is understandable. Without detracting from its historical importance, we know that the century that produces Einstein was also the natural age of certifiables. That the country no his origins should have been the Philippine Islands, too, is perfectly comprehensible to anyone familiar with the history of this country, although a little after the book’s apperance it is known that some of the more advanced countries maddeningly begrudged in the Philippines this honor. But to move on. Apart from the country and the century in which he lived, we know next to nothing of the Nmiaci by way of biographical details. The life of either Jesus or Arthur by comparison is a fiesta of facts. We do not even know what his name was. What is availble, however, is adequate to put his historicity beyond doubt. It is not the skimpiness of the facts per se that cast a shadow on the subject so much as its heightening , romantic effect. As with all historical puzzles, the whole thing tends to be story rather than history.


The earliest quest for the historical Nmiaci was undertaken four or five generations after his time. A team of German scholars conducted an on-the-spot investigation in Albay, a province in Bicol region at the southern tip of Luzon, the country’s largest island. The Nmiaci was not from these parts; although the lunacies were legend, it had never been established what particular region he came from but it seems certain that he was not a Bicolano. At any rate this was where he was known to have meandered during the last days of his life—particularly the Legaspi Tabaco lowland. Now the whole of Albay is dominated by a slopes of the astonishingly shaped Mayon Volcano, the world’s most perfect cone. It did not take much intuition on the part of the Germans, at the sight of this natural marvel, to guess that the fourteenth fool had in time moved up from the lowlands to the hills and ultimately the slopes, where he disappeared forever. The researchers at once stumbled upon the most impressive thing on record about their subject. Not ne inhabitants knew what “Nmiaci” meant. And yet— regardless of sex, age, social position and mental ability—each one invariably smiled at the owrd. Asked why they did, the people could offer no explanation whatsoever. But the smile came again and again even from the ame person each time the magic word was uttered. The implication was staggering. It seemed that the Nmiaci had become, among these people, a racial memory, a nerve-end so to speak of their collective unconscious. The theory gained in strenghts as the sleuths began their ascent inot the hills. “They re-lived one of the great lessons of the Nmiaci: Foolishness inclines to heights,” to quote from the book. The smiles widened and variegated as they climbed higher and higher: now a grin, now a simper, now a beam, now a smirk, now a grimace, now a twinkie. Soon they were on the slopes and at about four-thousand feet above sea level it became a positive chuckle. They were half-way to the crater and could not make much further progress. As it too assumed variety, the laughter for some unaccoubtable reason made their hair stand—now rumbling, Now subterranean, now convulsive. They quickly made their way back to the lowlands. The record of their experience is basic reading for anyone wishing to make a study of the Nmiaci. The book continues “Although the German scholars could not gather anything from the highland folk beyond pure, inexplicable laughter they could not besaid to have come out of it empty handed. It was a resounding tribute to their wirk that even their most austere and humorless colleagues received the story of their journey with undivided cachination.” But a circle that knew had on fact eluded the historical detectives. This was the Nmiaci, an inseparable triad of ragamuffins, who derived their name and lifestyle from the fool and to perpetuate him in flesh and folly. When a triad grew too old and feeble it had to disappear and relinquish its foolishness to a new triad. Where the former disappeared into is just as difficlut to answer as where the latter sprang from. But the triad existed for over a century, roaming the area where the scholars conducted their field iunvestigation. Their paths could not have crossed— the scholars could not have interviewed them wothour noticning something: the Nmiaci on principe never smiled although they were exceedingly daffy. But even if the two parties had met, it is doubtful if the scholars cpould have eked out anything in the nature of information from them. The Nmiaci followed a vow of secrecy and chched their science and practice in all sorts of idiotic subtleties not the least maddening of which was silence combined with a serious face. In time they were able to keep their name hidden from everyone, which explains the relative failure of the quest.


The Nmiaci were in truth grandmasters of madness. It is enough to cite a single Nmiacism to illustrate this: You cannot oull the leg of a centipede. But it went that way of all esoteirc organisms. It declined until finally it collapsed and its teachings were disclosed and scattered, falling into the hands of people sufficiently unhinged to take an interest in the,. After its decline and fall the Nmiaci became fairly well-known, enjoying a certain fringe famousness. It became an underground movement, a countr culture. But, although peripheral, it lacked the vitaloity and ifre of the original fools. The Nmiacisms became dogma. To draw an image from the life of the fourteenth fool himself, they were like the cruncated reamins of the volcano that had exploded its last and turned extinct, blowing away its very cone and cone in the process. The core, precisely, was lost—the essence, the missing cone. Some of the new fools even went around in cars—and the pilgrims who went to Albay contemplated Mayon complete with Walkman, The secret remained. The most ardent dunces who swore and clowned by it were unaware that the name Nmiaci itself was a riddle. But this is to jump. In the beginning of our century and obscure writer, Rasa Equinoc, ewho had at first tried understandably to conseal his idebtity by disguising his name under some unintelligible anagram now justly forgotten, wrote and published an essay which was destined to become one of the most celebrated documents on the Nmiaci. Equinoc’s essay contained a hitherto unknown incodent in the life of the fourteenth fool upin which he based the startling conclusion that the fool died a serious man. The fool according to Equinoc was well ij his forties when he underwent a conversation. Somewhere along the course of his aimless wanderings around Mt. Mayon he suddenly became weary of making people laugh. The change of heart was triggered by an incident in either Daraga ot Tabaco. (Enrique observed: “That Daraga and Tabaco were his favorite haunts indicates that the fool was an inveterate smoker and a confirmed ogler. It also suggests the sort of eye he sometimes cast upon Mayon Volcano.:) One day he chanced to see a mooncalf being stoned by a group of children laughing and eating their ice cream. He saw and felt for the first time the pain of hi sisolation. He saw himslef: a fool sandwiched between the silent gods, by whom he was wrought, and the boisterous children,by whom he was pelted. To both the fool was delighful and their delight was the fool’s fatigue.” Equinoc says that he himself began to understand why the fool is sometimes calles a nut or a noodle. The idea that the Nmiaci died a sreious man rocked the Nmiaci establishment. Nmiaci purists resisted, it controverting the idea with another. They claimed that it was a piece of sensationalism based on a textual misconstruction. What really was meant was that the fourteenth fool died of a serious illness. But the excitement caused by the essay indicated the end of an era and the start of a new craze. Foolishness for foolishness’ sake was dead. Equinoc, however, erred in leaning too heavilyin the opposite direction. Carried by the momentum of his own eloquence, he succumbed to the temptimg but rather chaeap notion that the Nmiaci thereafter headed for the volcano’s crater. It was left to later writers to develop more fuly the implications of his pioneering work and to refute as well its grosser features for bwing the only known one in which the fool ever spoke in the famous for beng thw only known one in which the fool ever spoke in the first person: Only a volcano can kill me. And it will hava tio erupt. A forgivable boast. Theeditors rule out of the possibility that the Nmiaci perished in any of the volcano’s twentieth-century eruptions, bolstering their argument with incursions into the history of ice-cream.


The authenticity of the incident recounted in Equinoc’s work has not been disrupted. It is not apocryphal. The editors collate his account with another, a more through-going fiction, obviously. Equinoc inspired, in which we read of the Nmiaci having, that night, a dream of the idiot. In the dream Nmiaci hands him an icecream which the poor fellow proceed to eat slowly and quietly, pausing only after having consumed its contents to consider the empty cone at length, licking it once more, then turning it this way and that, till finally he outs it on top of his head with the most imbellic of smiles. You can’t wear your cone and eat too, said the Nmiaci— but he was talking in his sleep and hje woke up to his own tears. It is hard to go by facts alone in tracking the fool as he disappears into the slopes of the volcano. There are no facts. The dreams, on the other hand, can multiply. It was madness for him to gon but one concludes he did and it was just like him to do so. Rather than go for the crater, which is crazy, he opts to lose himself in quiet contemplation of the mountain, which is just as mad. For that, of course, he had to have some distance. But even in the lowlands his untracebility is absolute. There is only the volcano. And the name. The riddle of the name corresponds to the riddle of the triad who held the keys to the secret of the fool who invented his name. the number signifies triadic nature of his fooluishenss; it is true, is it good, it is beautiful. It is the shape of the volcano, a triangle, to which the fool in displain of the square aspires. It represents, wistfully, the destruction of what it celebrates: his loneliness. Nmiaci is a syncopated anagram and a perfect acronym. I am incredible. No man is a coney isanld. Dumaguete, 1966


[Version 2. Now titled: The NMIACI (The Fourteenth Fool)] The Nmiaci (pronounced Mee-a-tsee, stress on the second syllable), the fourteenth entry in The Book of Fools, has claims to being the most interesting, possessing a literary quality that makes it read more like composed fiction than historical fact and sets it apart from the rest of the book’s contents. To some this constitutes a defect, not a virtue, feeling that the imaginative ring of the story is out of place in the book, whose fascinating appeal lies almost wholly in the easy verifiability of each fool’s historical existence. The Book of Fools is a painstakingly compiled collectanea of the world’s greatest simpletons from remotest antiquity to the present, in which are blended trustworthy scholarship and the plainness of a bicycle manual. The phrasing, though not overly colloquial, is uniformly artless to the point of being homely. As a result, each concrete moment of sheer foolishness shines through the book like a gem. The style, one might say, is the sap. And this is why the Nmiaci, reading which means getting beguiled by one ornate coil of a sentence after another, sticks out like a sore thumb, or rather like an anomalously robust one. Its enthusiasts on the other hand see the Nmiaci’s special treatment as the editors’ subtle means of revealing their savant stature. It amounts to a hidden signet. Nor was this arbitrary. Even its critics have admitted the impossibility of writing the story of the Nmiaci in the same vein as the rest. It would have had perforce to be scrapped altogether. Apparently the Nmiaci was problematical and received a greater amount of study and meditation from the editors than any other single item in the book. This view had led many to the opinion that the Nmiaci may well be in fact the arch fool, the donkey par excellence, the dimwit of dimwits. This is a terrific distinction. For the book’s selectiveness is mind-boggling—it includes only twenty-eight fools where even a thousand would have been an infinitesimal fraction of the total number of dolts in history. 1 Each of these twenty-eight fools is a superfool, standing out from an incalculably vast infinity of fools, whose idiocy, if we may be allowed a little hyperbole, amounted to genius. That he should have come from the twentieth-century is understandable. Without detracting from its historical importance, we know that the century that produced Primal Scream Therapy was the breathless age of certifiables. That the country of his origins should have been the Philippines, too, is perfectly comprehensible to anyone familiar with not so much the history of that country as its gestalt, particularly during elections. Apart from the country and the century in which he lived, we know next to nothing of the Nmiaci by way of biographical details. The life of either Jesus of Nazareth or Arthur of Avalon or Buddha of Benares by comparison is a treasure trove of facts. We do not even know what his name was. What is available, however, is adequate to put his historicity beyond doubt. It is not the skimpiness of the facts per se that casts a shadow on the subject so much as its glamour, the invariable romantic effect it has on its readers. As with all historical puzzles, the thing tends to be story rather than history. The earliest quest for the historical Nmiaci was undertaken four or five generations after his time. A team of German anthropologists conducted an investigation in Albay, a province in the Bicol region at the southern tip of Luzon, the country’s largest island. The Nmiaci was not from these parts; although his lunacies were legend, it had never been established what particular region he came from but it seems certain, though known to relish popping red pepper into his


mouth during meals, that he was not a Bicolano. At any rate this was where he was known to have meandered during the last years of his life—particularly the LegaspiTabaco lowland. Now the whole of Albay is dominated by the slopes of the amazingly shaped Mayon Volcano, the world’s most perfect cone. 2 It did not take much intuition on the part of the Germans, at the sight of this natural marvel, to guess that the fourteenth fool had in time moved up from the lowlands to the hills and ultimately the slopes, where he disappeared forever. The researchers at once stumbled upon the most impressive thing on record about their subject. Not one inhabitant knew what “Nmiaci” meant—and yet, regardless of sex, age, social position, and mental ability, each one invariably smiled at the word. Asked why they did, the people could offer no explanation whatsoever. But the smile came again and again even from the same person each time the magic word was uttered. The implication was staggering. It seemed that the Nmiaci had become, among these people, a racial memory, a nerve so to speak of their collective unconscious. The theory gained in strength as the sleuths began their ascent into the hills. “They relived one of the great lessons of the Nmiaci: Aspiring to heaven is the effect of the Fall, as well as the cause.” The smiles widened and variegated as they climbed higher and higher: now a grin, now a simper, now a beam, now a smirk, now a grimace, now a twinkle. Soon they were on the slopes and at about four-thousand feet above sea level it became a positive chuckle. They were half-way to the crater and could not make further progress. As it too assumed variety, the laughter for some unaccountable reason made their hair stand—now rumbling, now subterranean, now convulsive. They quickly made their way back to the lowlands. The record of their experience is basic reading for anyone wishing to make a study of the Nmiaci. The book continues, “Although the German scholars could not gather anything from the highland folk beyond pure, inexplicable laughter, they could not be said to have come out of it empty-handed. It was a resounding tribute to their work that even their most austere and humorless colleagues received the story of their journey with undivided cachination.” But a circle that knew had in fact eluded the historical raiders. This was the Nmiaci, an inseparable triad of ragamuffins who derived their name and life-style from the fool and whose existence was then unknown. Nmiaci therefore either refers to one man—the fool—or the triad. The triad constituted a priesthood or an apostleship whose lifetime work was to preserve the memory of the fool and to perpetuate him in flesh and folly. When a triad grew too old and feeble it had to disappear, somewhat in the manner of elephants, and relinquish its foolishness to a new triad. Where the former went to is just as difficult to answer as where the latter sprang from. But the triad existed for over a century, roaming the area where the anthropologists had conducted their field investigation. Their paths could not have crossed—the sleuths could not have interviewed them without noticing something: the Nmiaci on principle never smiled although they were exceedingly daffy. But even if the two parties had met, it is doubtful if the scholars could have gained their confidence and elicited anything in the nature of information from them. The Nmiaci followed a vow of secrecy and cached their science and practice in allsorts of idiotic subtleties not the least maddening of which was silence combined with a solemn face. In time they were able to keep their name hidden from everyone, which explains the relative failure of the quest. The Nmiaci were in truth grandmasters of madness. It is enough to cite a single Nmiacism to illustrate this: You cannot pull the leg of a centipede. But it went


the way of all esoteric groups. It declined until finally it collapsed—died, so to speak, of their own secret life—some of its teachings somehow disclosed and scattered, falling into the hands of people sufficiently unhinged to take an interest in them. After its decline and fall the Nmiaci became fairly well-known, enjoying a cult following. It became an underground movement, a counter culture. But, although fanatical, it lacked the vitality and fire of the original nincompoops. The Nmiacisms became dogma, albeit also enigma. To draw an image from the life of the fourteenth fool himself, they were like the truncated remains of a volcano that had erupted its last and turned extinct. Some of the new fools even went around in cars—and the pilgrims who went to Albay contemplated Mayon complete with walkman in the 90s, then mp3 player and iPod in the following decade. The secret remained. The most ardent dunces who swore and clowned by it were unaware that the name Nmiaci itself was a riddle. But this is to jump. Sometime at the turn of the present century, a mysterious researcher who wrote under the pseudonym Z published an essay 3 which was destined to become one of the celebrated documents on the Nmiaci. Z’s essay contained a hitherto unknown incident in the life of the fourteenth fool upon which he based the startling conclusion that the fool devoted his latter years to the pursuit of sobriety, if not in fact—no matter if he didn’t know the critical term—‘high seriousness.’ The fool according to Z was well in his forties when he underwent this conversion. Sometime in the course of his aimless wanderings around Mt. Mayon he suddenly became weary of making people laugh. The change of heart was triggered by an incident in either Daraga or Tabaco. 4 One day he chanced to see a mooncalf being pelted with all sorts of cruel if harmless missiles by a group of children laughing and eating their ice-cream heartily. Z describes this incident thus: “He saw the whole of Mayon turn upside down and the earth spinning along with it and himself falling into the volcano and out of it—at once—despite being in actual fact immobile. An out-of-the-body experience since not only was he an IQ turtle, he had turned turtle inside and in that fashion had given the lie to the paradox of Zeno. What indeed could be slower than a turtle but a turtle that had turned turtle?5 This allowed Achilles, at last, to whizz by like a missile and the missile, the last and the hardest, hit the mooncalf. “It hit the Nmiaci too. “He saw, first, that the mooncalf was him—then, as if the missile struck the same son- of-lightning twice, he saw that he was the mooncalf (there is a difference there), a creature sandwiched between the silent gods, by whom he was wrought, and the boisterous children, by whom he was pelted. Obviously to both, the mooncalf was, as the poet might word it—and more aptly in this instance too—a phantom of delight. I, too, for the first time, understood why the fool is sometimes called a nut or a noodle. But for the fourteenth fool the matter went beyond the pleasure principle, beyond even the death instinct: it was an intimation of immortality.” The idea that the Nmiaci ended up a practitioner of high seriousness rocked the Nmiaci establishment. Nmiaci purists resisted it, controverting the idea with another. They claimed that it was a piece of sensationalism based on a textual misconstruction. What happened, they offered as a corrective, was that the fourteenth fool was encoding his real message behind Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase which was in truth convenient because it, seriousness, was the exact opposite of what was meant, namely the slang high. It was only irony of, one might say, the first iron. But the excitement caused by Z’s essay indicated the end of an


epoch and the start of a new craze. Foolishness for foolishness’ sake was dead. The new foolishness—namely, the foolishness of commitment—had come of age. Z, however, erred in leaning too heavily in the opposite direction. Carried by the momentum of his dialectic, he succumbed to the notion that the Nmiaci, pure as the driven snow, was in fact not a nut or a noodle but a snowflake that had found its doppelganger. Alas, committed was the Nmiaci to the snowflake principle that there can only be one! The Nmiaci according to Z headed for the volcano’s crater, to bring the idea of commitment further—in fact, to its logical conclusion, namely, commit suicide. It was left to later writers to develop more responsibly the implications of Z’s pioneering work and to refute as well his eventual grim thesis. Z, it was pointed out, seemed to have ignored a Nmiacism famous for being the only known one in which the fool ever spoke in the first person: Only a volcano can kill me. And it will have to erupt. (A forgiveable boast. The editors rule out the possibility that the Nmiaci perished in any of the volcano’s twentieth-century eruptions, bolstering their argument with irruptions into the history of ice-cream.) At all events, the authenticity of the incident recounted in Z’s work has never been disputed. It is not apocryphal. The editors collate it with another, a more thorough-going fiction, obviously Z-inspired, in which we read of the Nmiaci having, that night, a dream of the mooncalf. In his dream the Nmiaci is a child who hands the latter an ice-cream which the mooncalf proceeds to eat slowly and quietly, pausing only after having consumed its contents to consider the empty cone at length, licking it once more, then turning it this way and that, till finally he puts it on top of his head with the most imbecilic of smiles. You can’t wear your cone and eat it too, said the Nmiaci, but he was talking in his sleep and he woke up to his tears. It is hard to go by facts alone in tracking the fool as he disappears into the slopes of the volcano. There are no facts. The dreams, on the other hand, can multiply. It was madness for him to go on but one concludes he did and it was just like him to do so. Rather than go for the crater, which was crazy, he opted to lose himself in quiet contemplation of the mountain, which was just as mad, considering it was emitting smoke and, just barely perceptibly, shivering like a dinosaur. For that, of course, he had to have some distance. But even in the lowlands his untraceability is absolute. There is only the volcano. And the name. The riddle of the name corresponds to the riddle of the triad who held the keys to the secret of the fool who invented his name. The number signifies the triadic nature of his foolishness: it is true, it is good, it is beautiful. It is the shape of the volcano, a triangle, to which the fool in disdain of the square aspires. It represents, wistfully, the destruction of what it celebrates: his uniqueness and consequent loneliness. Nmiaci is a perfect acronym and a syncopated anagram.6 I am incredible. No man is a coney island. 1

Somewhat like saying a millennium is one month, and the month February (no leap year please) at that. 2 ‘It is in the shape of a sugar-loaf, perfectly conical.’ Sir John Bowring, A Visit to the Philippine Islands 3 The Volcano Is Extinct, I Am The Eruption 4 Z observed: “That Daraga and Tabaco were his favorite haunts indicates that the fool was an inveterate smoker as well as an intemperate ogler, the last clause in turn explaining the mystique he had for Mayon Volcano.”


5

Z’s essay has it that the Nmiaci described his experience in the netherworld afterwards in this manner: The universe itself had turned turtle. And it was granted to me that I would catch a glimpse of what held it up. It was turtles that had turned turtle all the way.


The Great Filipina Navel [From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] They’ve coined a term for it: ‘sexy dancing.” Generic. The meaning ranges from the “a-go-go dancer,” the ones you see in bikinis dancing to a disco tune in nightclubs to a sea of beer-sweating males . . . to our very own version of the striptease in which the girl performs a bit of gruesome circus: picking up some money bill dexterously (certainly the wrong word) with their cunt—an exhibition which semiology must decode as the most intimate gesture of fallen whoredom . . . to the sort which “sexy dancing” choreographers call “sexy dancing” proper—with “class”—of which the most familiar example is Vivian Velez’s vertiginous sequence in a commercial. The common denominator is that the female dances, partnerless, to male pleasure. Naturally (or unnaturally) we can make mention of something somewhat underground: sexy dancing where the dancer is a macho dancing to the delectation of a recent bestseller: faggots. But many things go inside a night club. In the fifties in the States there was once a club that featured a huge naked Negro poised like an art-work. Kind of sculptured dance, if you could call it that—as when you say kinetic art. The reverse. The size of it was hypnotic. It was a mighty, nightly attraction in the place. In came one evening Filipino novelist Mig Enriquez—who promptly does, lets out, his thing. Ithyphallic Negro loses job in the morning. The choreographers say it’s art. They’re right (though better off if they knew Salome). Stand to reason. Dancing is art; sexy dancing is dancing; ergo, sexy dancing is art. (And if they had a notion it is in fact the earliest art.) (But arty is dead. Ergo, sexy dancing is dead. Long live advertising.) Your name doesn’t have to be Billy Graham to realize that sexy dancing is not meant to feed your virtue (if you’re a vice president: why not Nixon?). but you do have to go beyond the libber to metaphorize thus: sexy dancing is calypso all over again turning male chauvinist pigs to good old plain and simple pigs. But wait—here comes the poet. Who has, as usual, something subversive to say. He says that any ritual that gives you a hard-on is religious. Ergo. Long live sexy dancing! This thing must have begun when matriarchy yielded to patriarchy. In countries where women are subordinate you notice how courtesanship is brought to the level of art. The geisha for instance. Or you can very safely assert that nowhere is sexy dancing sexier and dancier than in the belly dancer, Salome. The east yeah. Adroit de seigneur. I used to think that the Japanese woman must be the best woman in the world. She seems to be the incarnation of all the faunas in the saunas of your mind. Remember what Buddha said when asked by a woman in distress what were the qualities of an ideal wife. The master mentioned several. But the climactic one was: the ideal wife is her husband’s slave. I was twenty-six when I first saw that this essay describes in the middles of its first paragraph. I was with two writer-friends from my UP days: Jose Nadal Carreon and Frankie Osorio. I blushed like a flamingo. This caught the girl’s eye—and a


smile. She drew to where we were. To where I was. Mistake. It snuffed the flamingo out. But there was Frankie and Ardo. And she travelling from my embarrassment to a thousand one nights of Arab expertise. Ours is, as you know, a curious country. It’s neither here nor there because of its Spanish Catholicism, a culture famous for splitting women into whores and virgins. But it’s also a country that matriarchal and pagan at heart. More crucial, this. Because we are matriarchal at heart, sexy dancing will always be a neurosis with us. We will always when we watch and enjoy the sexy dancers be pubertous boys playing hooky, having our fill of something we cannot normally take home to discuss at dinner. Unless perhaps you eat dinner alone and enjoy talking to yourself. Unless the little woman herself runs the show—literally. Meaning that she restores “sexy dancing” to a possible original condition, i.e., as part of the social, not to say cosmic, scene. In to her words, we don’t split sexy dance from the women we hold dear. Get it? Holistic, as the campus theoreticians would say. No more schizophrenia. The sexy dancer is the who in primal times was trusted with sowing the seed, for in any other hands but hers things will not prosper. The may be wistful thinking, not sexy dancing. Except one, never the two navels shall meet. Manila, 1980


In the Smithy of My Soul [From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] One day I will die. That is the only thing I can be really positive about. As one day I was born, one day I will die; maybe so suddenly I won’t even have time to be sad and say farewell to all that matters in this world. This is the world, my one and only; the good earth—life among people brown and burning in muffled screams every day. Here where wind and sun boil the sea to gold, I earn my keep by kissing the ground that my father and mother tread. When daylight comes, I take coffee and rice so I can burn and be brown when a woman of my brown people pouts with mouth and breasts, or when a man of my brown people pierces my meat with dagger looks in the cool of street and evening. My brown people say with eyes bewitched in the sea-scented moonlight that far away, beyond even Manila, there are lands inhabited by beings so beautiful they could reach the moon and make love like gods. But these being once had a hero who crooned that blood is red anywhere. So he went to a theater to buy immortality and a bullet for his head. He died because of us; my brown people flame toothfully in the sea-scented moonlight. So that now I will not talk much with Lilian even as they say she is the most female of females hereabout. She strides with grace, natural grace, this Lilian. When she flowers into smile everybody is brown more and burns more. That is why I am very brown and burn so much because, joy of joys, I am the owner of those smiles of hers. When we talk, the whole world becomes to me just her pair of innocent eyes. That is Lilian, one of those girls who were born only to make a man feel all the world of tomorrow is but a bedroom and some soft, clean pillows and some soft, clean blankets; not so big a world, really. I talk to her ever so tenderly. I gaze at her ever so tenderly, for that is Lilian, a tenderness of something I want to own, and I feel I own. But today no more of such gazes, of such talk. No more of such tenderness. Goodbye to dreams of love. I’m sorry, Lilian. Anyway we will have such a lovely memory to cherish later. How the world can become just your pair of eyes and a tender dream to me. How innocent your voice is when you moan I’m mad, I’m mad. How I say don’t mind them, I love you. They can all die sour for all we care. I’m tired of relations; through with being afraid lest I displease somebody. I never did succeed much, anyway, in my efforts. I often turned out to be awkward, foolish. And even if I did succeed sometimes, what the hell? I don’t think they deserve it. I don’t know why I should be so thoughtful when they are not, even a bit, themselves. Let me be mad. Let me be an island that knows only defiance, without regrets whatsoever. Let your joy be my joy; your sadness, my sadness. Let your all be my all, even your books and your notes, because I do not take enough of coffee and rice that I may be strong enough to be interested and take down the professor’s dictation. Because of you, I am a dreamer, Lilian. But today, goodbye to this dreamer me that you have made. To me now, it’s but once upon a time that I used to have thoughts that almost everybody says are divine. Thoughts of the world. Divine, they say. Things divine, like a one-story mansion with wide, marble steps, and Bermuda about, a fountain


maybe, pine trees, and a red car with which I will tour the big, big world of my hometown. Lilia nays I am such a wonderful dreamer she will find life quite hard to bear without me. No more, Lilian. Now that I really have been persuaded my blood is red enough to adore, no more. No more of your angel face and moonbeams magnifique playing in your eyes. It still feels good to day-dream of riding that red car though. Telling these faces here someday how the world will have treated them. See me. I’ve got a car, and a mansion with wide, marble steps, and Bermuda about, and a fountain, and fine trees, and look who’s beside me. But I ooze of other flames. Every night in bed, when all is tired and still, my ears hum with a thousand thoughts of futile to ignore. Yeah. My blood is red. Certainly yours is a body with too much poetry to ignore. Yours is a joyful virgin of femaleness too good to lose. But ours will be a melody too brief. Later, you will wither into years and then maybe suffer a disproportionate belly like your mother’s and I will, as all lovable husbands do at such a time, go to hell with the perfumed birds of night. I have no stomach, for the aftermath of love erotic. Coffee in the morning, papers, ink, clichés, coffee again, and then one-story mansion with marble steps, rice and stew, a faded woman with an ill-fated belly, children who say daddy with sugar kisses and later grow into angry beat-generationists who make a rug of mother earth reaching for the stars. These are thing like lying in the grass beside a canal of clean water. I love to watch the daysky in the water. I become romantic and of course it is splendor here too. Only I am afraid somebody will call the police and say a drunkard is on the loose frightening tourists. That is why I do not really lie down. I just stand looking and looking at the serious and clear liquid where the sun, haunted with morning and gossamer films of cloud, is like a moon sunk in eternity. I just stand and think of myself lying on the grass and pondering lost childhood. There are things like rum. There are thing like listening to Deogracias play the piano and crying to his rhapsody when Larry is around. Sing to the whimpering keys and cry and dream and talk about how Deogracias makes love to some of his prettier students. Just wait, pardner, one of these days I will make music of my own and become a semimillionaire and go to Hong Kong and Tokyo and play Casanova with yellow Bardots when the lights are low and Sen-Sen becomes Beethoven. This must be life. This must have been the dream of the centuries twisting upon the eyes of our patriots in the moonrise of their wounds. That’s right, pardner, grins Deogracias. This is the gift, the heritage, eveningful of streetcars, brisk shadows, naughty lights, distant jukebox jazz, department stores with dreamersturned-salesgirls who are simple dreamable but who smile at us if intuition tells me them we are no wealthier then Jesse James. I don’t have a job yet, lady. But this is a free country, lady, and I have a sympathetic pal in school who can buy the whole place if you like, or buy you if you are buyable. Lady. Come on pardner, let us go to Seaside Eden and watch some of your professors lecture to the perfumed birds of night, grins Deogracias. But it’s a pity we don’t have Larry around. You know, he cries even to jazz or rock ‘n’ roll. Moreover, I think we are wealthier when he is around. Oh never mind, pardner, anyway we will just watch the perfumed birds of night. We shall keep our distance and order only liquid, grins Deogracias.


So I go home for supper and become a mute. I have been brave enough to down two glasses and I’m afraid my voice smells a little. But I do enjoy the table conversation of the others in spite of my muteness. They enliven my appetite, I am glad, I chuckle inside. They have dreams. They eat very much so they will grow tall and meaty. They study their lessons every day so that one day they may go to the land beyond Manila and have their skins bleached and their faces lifted and most probably marry people who can make love like gods eternal. Because they sense that I chuckle they talk even more agitatedly. They want, oh how they want to sneer at me, provoking me to be a mute no more and say go ahead, work hard to become gods-ever-vital because tomorrow is the time for all good, erotic gods to become senile and forgotten. So then at last they can sneer at me and say go ahead, lie on the grass and be caught by the police. Be a rat. We will meanwhile go to church regularly and pray passionately with eyes closed and kiss our rosaries so that after we are through making love like gods we will end up in paradise and ever after be happy and gay. But hold on to dear vow, to dear principle, to dear fear. Remain a mute till you have drunk water when you can open your mouth into monosyllables which somehow remark that the night is still young you want to inhale virgin air outside. Look for Larry and have a talk with him in the wind of the wharf. Larry and I talk as if we were metaphysicists. We really are, he says, because unlike Deogracias he does not dream of millions and Bardots who whimper softly when the lights are low and Sen-Sen becomes Beethoven. We really are, dear friend, because you too have conventions, Larry croons to the black, profound see, like those divine fellows we come across in golden eras of history. One of these days, dear friend, we will be like the happy fish, the happy tree, the happy bird. We will all be gold. I think you have something there Larry, but I want to be gold because others cannot. If all will be gold anyway, there is no sense struggling tooth-and-nail to become so, as we are doing. I look at Larry’s eyes and remain immobile for a while. Perhaps that way he would not have sounded rather queer?—pathetic? Then my mind looks up to freeze in the soulful air. Thinking of my own business in turn, I leap up to hum voicelessly the tune of my life. I hum to the gaping stars of night, stooping like a giant and say goodbye to Larry who, however, dim in shadow, says he will be going too, since the night too is late for him and he lives an hour of jeepney away. See you next century, Larry. There will be a dance for us students next week. A ticket costs only two pesos and for the love of my face I buy one and I am cordially invited. Come with a mask, they simper toothfully, so the affair will howl louder than the dogs. I don’t need any. I have always worn one which I don’t think I could take off. I will never, I think, because once upon a time I unbuttoned my shirt since it was warm and the girl I had a crush on said it was bad taste. O forgive me Lilian for having worn masks with you too. All the while you were with me. But I was not born yet when you said I was a wonderful dreamer. You know it can get real crazy sometimes and you have got to forgive your tongue something wet and sweet to lick, like lollipop maybe, or lips such as yours which are wetter, and sweeter, and do not get consumed. So, you see, Deogracias wants to mine his piano of about a million and then go to Hong Kong and Tokyo to make love more often and with more gusto. So you see they eat very plenty at home to grow big and tall, study hard, dreaming of going someday to the lands beyond Manila; all so they could have themselves hermoso enough to marry people who can make love like gods. So you see Larry goes in saying we are all raped and sick because we


love to clothe ourselves, and wear leather shoes, and dream of Thunderbirds; but dear friend, he croons with eyes bewitched by the moons of his exotic soul, one day we will all be gold, happy as the fish, as the tree; happy as the bird. I love them all even when I am mute and immobile. Every day I burn with them. And bleed in muffled screams. Every day they dance around me like ghoulish flames and I stare at them simpering like an idiot. I say to myself I love my brown people, here where wind and sun boil the sea to gold, where I earn my keep by kissing the ground that my father and mother tread. I love them when they grin toothfully in the salty moonlight, when they croon, even when they yell, and they sneer. Even when they look upon themselves in the mirror every morning and every time when nobody is around, laughing at the own reflection like idiots. Yet, I will be on my own. I am born individualist. Goodbye to Lilian and happiness and pride. I will find you all later after I have been able to swim in a paint and oil like a world champion. Whereupon I will be a rat no more. I will swim and swim now while I burn very brown although nobody cares to give a damn watching my blood flame because they are all busy dreaming of a nice, red car, and a mansion, and somebody who can make love like a god. Or because they are all busy driving a red car, touring the stage of the world. Or maybe because they are all sound asleep after having made love like gods. When I go to bed I do so with a conscience so clear it gives me insomnia. I love my brown people when their eyes gleam in the moonlight talking of Rizal, and the white hero who died because of us, because blood is red anywhere even in this corner of the world where the sea once tried to drown everybody. I go to sleep thinking one day I will die, possibly without seeing the dawn brighten the wounds of my poor hungry soul. But die is certain. That is the only thing I can be really positive about. And I will die fighting if there are still things to fight for. Such as lying in the grass when childhood is gone and the sun is an angry moon deep under the canal waters. Meanwhile I wrestle with my soul so I can go to sleep. Lie on my back. Lie on my right side. Lie on my left side. Lie on my front. I must sleep so I can have the strength to rise from my chair tomorrow and say I don’t know sir to the professor. And when I sleep I sink into the greenish moonscape of a dream. I dream of myself high upon a platform with brush and paint before a wall of my room which by sorcery of subconscious becomes a canvas. Upon the ground are my people gaping like eternity and terribly frozen in the moonlight. I am painting Deogracias in gold teaching a girl how to play the piano. The girl looks familiar and when I finish I realize that it is Lilian and they are not sitting beside each other. Lilian is upon his lap and, forsaking the piano, together they madden to become music themselves. Somehow I can feel that they are naked and that my dream is just being modest about it because not even dogs, much less people, like tasteless cloth. Then, as Deogracias rises to rhapsody, not upon whimpering keys but upon a whimpering woman, my brown people start to move—freeing themselves from a chain of time—to dance ghoulish flames around the stage, and while they all flame to savage ritual before and about me, I strain to shriek, perhaps blankly sensing that this is all a naughty nightmare, only to find my voice uttering a primitive and unpoetic moan. Nevertheless it was quite a try; I have desired to scream, not because it is a masterpiece that my brush sings of, not because the orgy creeps within my flesh but because my heart pains to see Lilian happy in the song of such an assault. I love Lilian, after all; yet if I admit that to her or the world, I cannot sing the song of my life, bleed to flames and stop like a giant to the stars that gape like fire-ghosts at the sea.


Zamboanga, 1962


Jerahmeel [From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] [NOTE: Dr. Aquino has a similarly titled poem.] How the world came to have an inkling of the moon’s fate was itself a bit of witchcraft. For the moon itself had shown no sign of it whatsoever. It waxed, shone full, waned, disappeared, returned as thin as it had gone, and waxed again, in the sky—coming and going in all the familiar guises with which, through the ages, it had been wont to beguile mankind. The whole lunar occurrence, if it might indeed be called such, came in two waves. First, everyone was having strange, bewitching dreams of the moon. A fisherman dreamed that all the seawater had gone to the moon and it rained fish. A gifted actress dreamed that she suckled her lover on the moon, before her biggest crowd yet. A chessplayer, biting in his sleep the dregs of a grand struggle, dreamed of a lovely half-moon, visible through the window, and two full moons, even lovelier, plying the two-colored diagonals of the chessboard and casting a stranger, greenish quality of moonlight among the chess shadows—twin moons, but, to use the jargon of the game, moons of opposite color. A doctor dreamed that the moon, completely fooling the astronomers, in fact lay at the earth’s core. Then someone else dreamed of a dawn in which it was the moon that rose breathtakingly in the east. And so on. Crescents and eclipses on a tiger instead of stripes. A boy attacking the moon with his crayons. A soldier moaning from the moon’s broken flesh. Each dream, taken in isolation, would have been an occasion for marvel and delight. But occurring as it were like an epidemic, they were unnatural. And hardly had people begun to talk uneasily about it when the thing stopped altogether. All at once no one had a single dream of the moon any more. This sudden void, evoking indefinable echoes, was the second phase and it was in fact more disquieting. It was then that people caught on to what was taking place, or rather to what was about to take place. Instantaneously—and for that reason infallibly—the world grasped the phenomenon of the moon’s loss. Earth had experienced no deeper shock. What everything else had failed to do—the unification of all humanity—the fact of losing the moon forever did utterly. It cut through all barriers, just as hitherto the beauty, the poetic power, of that splendid body had cut through all geographies. And yet no one had actually spoken of it. Lying at the threshold of utterance, the death of the moon made everyone inexplicably sad, even the truly wicked and the mentally unfit; and were they to rise again, the dead, it might be said, would no doubt have fallen in with the collective sadness. It remained to be clarified that, in a certain perspective, more or less that of science, the end of the moon did not mean the end of mankind—of life on earth, for that matter. It was the sun that sustained the world, and moonlight was. In a manner of speaking, light embezzled. Rash as it would be to say that the moon more or less was the ornament’s essence, one could point out that it had seemed so precious only on account of man’s aesthetic sensibility, or, perhaps, more significant, on account of human sentiment. There is specially one striking thing about man: the capacity to love something for no other reason than that the thing is


there, regardless of whether it is wholly undesirable or that it is, like the moon, a wonder of beauty. At all events, some future that would accept the loss of the moon matter-offactly was conceivable. This future would look back on the time of a mooned earth with at most an occasional mist of nostalgia, of wistfulness. The only thing that would be in question is whether the memory of a mooned earth—of the moon’s existence—would in time also be obliterated. Of the whole flight to the moon, Jerry could not afterwards recall a single clear detail. So unclear was the experience and so indifferent had he seemed to how it felt that the very word flight appeared to be no more than a fleeting afterthought. It was as if he had been on the moon all the while and there was no question whatsoever of a journey taken. But he did not come up—ascend to where they were, that much was certain. All the same the process was obscure. True, he was, as he made his way to the moon, conscious of being alive to a certain nascent harmony, a certain unexpressed faint leaping in his heart, but that must have been solely the innocent joy he felt at knowing that he was fated to save the moon. They had been waiting for quite a while, gathered on top of some towering rock formation—very high, but still hemmed in by the great rims, walls jutting up into a barely visible sky. All that waiting had made her, for a moment, look what she was underneath —a young girl. Even when she had fully regained her ease, Jerry thought he discerned in her a sort of pageant carriage, the sportful attitude of a pageant figure, the faintly bashful manner of a young woman at her nuptials who is in truth just one girl among but who is nevertheless a queen of the hour—of the day. But indeed she was a moon queen—the new moon queen, thought that had to wait till Jerry came. For one wild, eerie while, totally unprecedented, some things had simply not gone according to schedule and the cosmos dreamt in a split-twinkle of madness. Now that he had come at last, the moon could proceed with its single sacred ceremony: the crowning of the new moon queen when the old moon-queen dies. Thus she beheld Jerry, and before her gaze Jerry found himself decimated. He was not a man approaching his thirties-m he was a boy. A maiden as she was and gentle as her eyes, the effect of womanly poor and superiority that she gave was stark, and would have been dreadful if it were not in fact curiously pleasant. One could tell at once that the slightest expression of haughtiness was foreign to her countenance, but there was in her look becoming blend of appreciation and aloofness that fixed him as he really was: a child of the universe. On earth, perhaps only himself, he might certainly cherish the awesome identity of having been the one who saved the moon, and that he might be more like him too. But here, at the actual money, he was a boy and felt wholly like a boy, felt himself to be the diminutive ring-bearer at some wedding. Inadvertently his eyes caught a glimpse of the inconspicuous old moon-queen dying in a corner. Jerry started at the close resemblance between the two. What surprised him even more was the expression on the old moon-queen’s face. She floated in the abstraction of a bottomless joy. It did not seem possible. Then it occurred to him that he was face to face with the one difference—the only difference between earth-people and moon-people. The latter looked to death as the most wonderful event in existence. Jerry perceived that this did not indicate a radical pessimism—a moon-gnomic disenchantment with life. Far from it. In the first place, the ceremony centered on


the crowning of the new, young moon-queen, and the old, dying moon-queen’s place was rightly by the side. It was no, moreover, what one would call a reflective, philosophical joy. Such was the joy of the Greek hero, as well as that of his Indian counterpart, a joy suffused with essential suffering, albeit at once redeemed and redeeming. But the smile of the old moon-queen, borne as a ripple of prehuman wisdom, was the fresh taste of water. Moon-people died sweetly. Death to them was as honey. One could well imagine how alien to them would be the idea of approaching death with dread. Jerry thought of the one who had looked at him. She looked every bit what she was. A true goddess. A dream of creation. No one, he thought, could be that beautiful and not love life. Her very glance must, in fact, bequeath to everything its elusive justness. Even to death. Death, the deathless nightmare. Jerry saw in a flash what had eluded him. It was a mere resemblance. The old moon-queen was the new moon-queen and he, Jerry, was no ring bearer, held, as in a mirror, in the irises of the moon. He drove, light as a leaf, as a feather, and it was clear to him that he was not flying but gliding in space like a leaf, like a feather. At certain durations is descent was suspended and he was floating, floating in midspace, and fired by a terrific volition his limbs spread like petals and his body arched like an underwater acrobat’s. between earth and the stars, in the eye of the ether, he relished, lived the grace of a moonbeam, of a great showfish, or a great waterfall, and it seemed to him, as his arms made little, adoring circles towards earth, that he was executing a sidereal sequence with eternity. No one was watching him of course, except he himself—and he had a pellucid awareness of this, that he was watching himself— but down below he sensed perfectly the earth’s full rejoicing, hushed and self-secret though it was in the dream of the sleepers. For it was clear that in the night once more the flowers bloomed, the brooks gurgled, the rivers flowed, the sea broke in ripples, the leaves fell upon pavements of cities. Baguio, 1976


Kalisud a la Dante Varona [Version 1. From the Sillimanian Magazine, 1990] [NOTE: Dr. Aquino has a similarly titled poem.] [MISSING]


[Version 2. From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] [NOTE: Dr. Aquino has a similarly titled poem.] I would never have gone to Tacloban had it not been for a chessplayer named Roy Mercado of Foundation University in Dumaguete. As his coach I had to be wherever his victories took jim. My life was, so to speak, in his fingers, which were yellow with nicotine. I would never have gone had he lost to his opponent—the Kolokoy of Mirisi —in the crucial qualifying match in Tagbilaran that had my heart like a chess piece in his shaking hand. His name of course means king. Very appropriate. Foundation University Chess King, just as in my day I had been Silliman University Chess King, since after all my first name means much the same thing. We trained in Cebu for three days before proceeding to Tacloban. Our host was an initially taciturn but in the long run gracious school principal, a Mr. T.Y. Sapayan. We left Cebu in the early evening of February 24. When we got to the boat —M/V Samar Queen (cheesy name too)—there were no more cots available. Many faced the prospect of spending the whole night without sleep and without even a chair or stool to sit on. I don’t know how the others managed. I took what seemed the only thinkable course: wander about in crazy circles, zippy zig zags, tipsy tangents, preposterous perpendiculars, sexy spirals, ambiguous angles and amorous arcs—vaguely hoping that somehow a solution would soon present itself. Sure enough, I came upon the little league baseball team—tykes from Dumaguete and their two coaches—resourcefully spreading their mats on the boat’s deck. There was, crosswise, enough space above their heads. It was like sleeping among the duendes. I spent the night, before falling asleep despite the cold sea wind, listening to the little champs talk and talk. I marvelled at how they spoke my mother tongue much more felicitously than I did. I put on two jackets and wrapped myself with a blanket but it was still very cold. We slept in the wind and under a waxing moon that moved with us all the way, it seemed, to the Pacific. From time to time I would wake up -—a boy kept bumping heads with me. I saw Leyte, then, for the first time, morning of February 25, 1983, exactly as Magellan and famished crew must have seen it—all mountain and forest and sunlight and grass and trees and beaches and blue sea. You wouldn’t know Samar and Leyte are that close until you see it. On the map they look like perfectly separate islands. On the spot they are Siamese twins. A helicopter hovered in circles above us. Sea spray. Below, in the transparent water, were jellyfish of fantastic sizes. Roy Mercado is telling me of Dante Varona’s diving stunt as we cross under San Juanico Bridge. “He almost got killed but in the movie you wouldn’t know it.” He looks up at the bridge’s underbelly and grinned, scratching his thick beard. “We’ve lost the joy of looking at things in the sky, be it an airplane or a kite. Or when you’re below and, he-he, it’s a girl unaware.” The day glare in Tacloban was harsh. I was squinting all the time, wishing it would go soft just once for a while so I could enjoy a walk up and down its streets. It finally rained on Sunday, but by then it was too late. It was the day of our departure. Here, anyhow, comes Roy Mercado: “I was rambling about, trying to erase all though of the coming chess struggle, savoring the newness of the city. I saw this girl—I’m not a writer, so let me just say that she was pretty and that, a s consequence, I was lost. I wanted to come


up to her with a prepared line, Do you know E.T.? I meant to tell her, if she bit, that I was feeling all alone, millions of light-years away from Taclobo. From Taclobo to Tacloban! But I couldn’t summon enough guts. In chess as well as in love I am a disciple of Petrosian, that is, I am more of a waiting than an attacking player. I believe that defense is the best offense. I wait patiently for the opponent to make a blunder. But how could she possibly make one? I pondered this for nearly a minute, till she was gone. “Other athletes are of course more spectacular lovers. They don’t just make love—they jump, swing, dive, heave, sommersault, run, kick, jab, dribble. We chessplayers merely sit and think and blink. Women naturally prefer the former, but not all. I knew of one who constantly reassured me and cheered me on, once magically lumping together Rene Descartes and Billy Joel on the occasion of my asking her whether I stood a chance with her or not: I love you just the you think! “A Pfennig for your Weltanschauung,” I told him. It was not love and chess all the time. One absurd afternoon, it was one hundred year of reading, God forbid, Domingo de Guzman. “Domingo de Guzman unfair to Pollock!” he spat. It seems de Guzman had written (somewhere in time): “When a cigarette vendor urinates on the pavement, has thereby created a work of art equal to, and surpassing even, the painting of Pollock.” Roy Mercado, almost cross eyed with anger, replies: “I don’t know what gives de Guzman the kidney to say that since I doubt very much if he has seen Pollock’s actual canvasses. Maybe he has taken to heat what someone—I think it was Henry James—said, that to find anything interesting you just have to look at it long enough. Granted—he has looked with sustained philosophical thinking on piss. Nevertheless it is quite simply impossible to agree with him. Anyone with a minimum intelligence would see that Pollock had genius whereas the cigaret vendor only has talent.” I was often the last to go to sleep. I soon observed that many of the guys talked in their sleep. Especially after losing. Maybe it’s an outlet. Because you don’t get much of a chance to talk when you’re the loser. Roy Mercado, whose cot was next to mine, was the most talkative. One night, just in fun, I answered him. He answered back, as though glad for a conversation, in a tone startlingly awake. For a moment I thought he was. He was saying, loud and clear, “Kalisud a la Dante Varona!” Then I thought perhaps it was I who was asleep and it was all a dream. Wish I could have stayed on. But then again thank goodness I couldn’t have. I couldn’t have endured very long your sudden aloofness. When you spoke the dialect I wished you didn’t. I was sad beyond measure and it made me sadder. I guess it was knowing I’d never, for all the wildness of my life, see you again. That, and the bruise-like, pleasing perfection of your pout. Dumaguete, 1983


[Version 3. From Checkmeta, 2004] [NOTE: Dr. Aquino has a similarly titled poem.]


[MISSING]Lapuz Lazuli [From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] At the Narra men’s dormitory in the UP Dilliman of 1964 one night I stood very close to lightning. I had just bought cigarets from the store and was on my way back to my room when it struck. It struck so close clap didn’t follow false but were, was, one ear-splitting lash of glare. It was so close I smelt of it,—[ ] Under almost exactly the same circumstances I saw lightning at close range again a little over a year ago at the Anders Bonifacio College campus in Dipolog. I was on my way back to my quarters from a cigaret store when it danced just a few steps ahead across the road. It danced, say, like a girl, before the terrible crack. It was the very night of my arrival in the town and I wondered—now rather the old man who takes the least incident to be sign or cipher—whether I was being warned not to accept the job or being welcomed to a new life in a new place that promised a lot of fireworks ahead. The year I spent in Up Dilliman in 1964-1965 was perhaps the most magical in my life. That night of the near brush with lightning remains intact in memory for obvious reasons, though the details have been obliterated. The years are like lightning too. They blast what you take for real to airy nothing. But I remember another evening when a room-mate, an agriculture student who loved Camus, was telling me how good Jose David Lapuz was. Jose David Lapuz was in those days a campus star. Student admirers went around saying he was the foremost Filipino authority on Philippine-American relations. To this day I do not know whether this was mere adulation or hard fact but I understood, though I was never present in any of his lectures, that he was a dazzling public speaker. I got that impression from the way his fans, such as my room-mate, described him. They were dazzled, lit up, struck. Not quite the way lightning does at close range but let’s say, hyperbolically, thereabouts. I saw him only once myself, at the Basement, then a sort of bohemian cafe in the UP Arts and Sciences building that daily bristled with the boy geniuses of the mid-sixties: Willy Sanchez, Jorge Arago, Perfecto Tera, Jr., Erwin Castillo, et al (one of them was not a boy—Ninotchka Rosca). I sized him up as an unmistakable arch specimen of the witty, flamboyant, pallid intellectual upon whom effeminacy invests a certain glamour and authority. Like Tinio. Like Medalla. Like Villa—who’s of course the original, inspiring model. Petronilo Daroy, erstwhile literary critic and himself cut somewhat in that mold, divided the campus mandarins into two: the literary, bohemian, ivory-tower ones and the political, nationalist, ideology-oriented such as Lapuz. Towards the end of the sixties, the latter pre-empted the campus scene. Even Tera had begun to write poems no longer a la Montale but a la Mao. But the whole gifted, gilded caboodle disappeared, anyway, in 1972 when... I, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines... BOOM! martial law, and pffft! the intellectuals, like Jack Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick. The years struck. Sanchez was in Chicago. Tera in London. Rosca in Hawaii. Daroy left teaching and ran a furniture shop, then resurfaced, when the hated Marcos was gone, as newspaper columnist. All burnt, or snuffed, out in the old, now nostalgic, creative sense. As another columnist, Nick Joaquin, puts it—promise was not equal to performance. For a flickering post-EDSA moment, Sison became a “celebrity.” And Jose David Lapuz? He was seen at UST, an incomprehensible, imperturbable British something carrying an umbrella.


Lapuz was in Dumaguete for three days from February 17 to 19 on the invitation of the Silliman History-Political Science department. When I heard that he was going to speak at the Luce Auditorium, I decided to come out of my cave and take myself to what I was certain would be triple treat, namely, Jose! David! Lapuz! But for some absurd, idiosyncratic reason changed my mind and opted to forget it, forget Lapuz. He was not to be eluded, however. I caught him on TV when the local kapihan had him as guest on the issue of the US bases. And so after a quarter of a century I finally saw Lapuz in action, finally saw what it was my UP room-mate saw back in the sixties. It’s a pity that Lapuz, whether or not he has a circle of admirers at UST, is so little-known that go most people his name always evokes the name of Manglapus as a sort of orienting context. Lapuz? Oh yes, Lapuz, Manglapus. But Lapuz is hands down the more captivating speaker. He is the one who, as his name implies to Cebuanos, goes through like a spear. Nick Joaquin once said that Filipinos do not speak English as beautifully as they did Spanish. It’s those three-hundred years, Nick says, have to do with it. Well, English is almost a century old in our midst. The kids pronounce the words more correctly than their elders do thanks yo television and the betamax—but beauty in this department is not a mere matter of correctness. The Filipinos who speak English most beautifully are not Harry Gasser or Eddie Mercado or Nestor Torre or Raul Manglapus—people with an American voice or a British accent or a smooth, flawless, trained diction. English “correctly” enunciated, i.e., the way the British and the Americans or the Australians and the Canadians do, simply do not become us. Bit listen to Nick Joaquin or Edith Tiempo or Franz Arcellana or Pepito Bosch. There you have a miracle—you have alchemy, hierophany, polygamy. You hear English as if it were an ingredient of Filipino cuisine, meaning you do not only hear it but taste it, savour it, munch it, find it to be delicious, tasting of adobo and pan de sal and greem mangoes and bagoong and dinuguan and torta, it is, if you will, kamayan English or Cubao English but English you can wag your tongue and finger at foreigners, whether friend or foe, with. Even the incomparably nasty, infamous Visayan variety can be entrancing, as the example of Daroy, who may be caught pronouncing Shirley Temple “Shirley Teempol” (knowingly, with perverse relish), demonstrates. It’s what upstairs not just the tongue that accounts for it. As with Lapuz. Oh his syntax can slip for sheer extemporaneousness and his vowels are not perfect as the kids hooked on new wave would have it but he is the only one I know, apart from Joaquin, who speaks in torrents, who spouts and cascades and overflows and runneth over and at the same time stay on a high level of intelligence. The kapihan had invited vice-consul Jim Wagner of the US consulate in Cebu who was unable to make it. Lapuz argued for the removal of the bases “...en seguidal right now! (looks at wristwatch)... eleven a.m. Friday, February 19, 1981! “and was so eloquent I had no doubt what the audience and the other speakers felt at the moment, as the camera momentarily focused on their faces, was almost like being in love. It was bruited that Lapuz’s speeches were that triggered the antibases demo by militant students when US ambassador to the Philippines Nicholas Platt came to Silliman in the afternoon of February 19 (Lapuz had just, pun premeditated, left). Such feedback came like blurbs. Passionate! Brilliant! Emphatic! Sheer theater! Pro-Russian! The last could be an asinine reaction, except that he did come to the kapihan garbed somewhat like a commisar. The students chanted and chorused in the background and the way it looked on video it was as though they were chanting and chorusing for Lapuz, not the issue


per se. It occurs to one that Lapuz himself might have felt the same vibration or illusion for despite the genuine power you may sense a George Meredith, I-feelpretty something in the man. The actor, the artist, the showman. This guy does not belong to politics or ideology. He doesn’t belong to the world of Adrian Cristobal, Jose Ma. Sison, Francisco Tatad but to the world of Virgie Moreno, Jose Lansang, Jr., Pecque Gallaga, not to Real politik but to romance, the world of beautiful letters, beautiful manners, beautiful people. Lapuz belongs to a generation that was young when Peter O’Toole was young. We find ourselves compelled to dream of some happy crossbreed in the future. Not for now, alas. This seems to be no country for such men—yet. Here the realm of Villa is just not the realm of Marcos. A Malraux is inconceivable in our midst, a poet who is also a statesman, whose poetry is not compromised but on the contrary enhanced and enriched by public service or involvement in politics. But perhaps it’s too much for a third-world country to aspire to French airs. France, that’s one place in the world, we are told, where the intellectual is on equal footing and footage with the movie star. Where poet may also be diplomat. One other such chap was Jean Giraudoux whose dramatic masterpiece The Madwoman of Chaillot went on stage at the Luce early in March with a Silliman faculty and student cast. Giraudoux, for a while France’s most distinguished playwright, served in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs much of his life. He also went around Europe as penniless vagabond. One of the characters in Chaillot rhapsodizes thus: “A financer is a creative artist. Our function is to stimulate the imagination. We are poets!” That we could say this, even in farce, of our politicians and leaders—or that they would. Makes me think of what Joaquin said of Aguinaldo: at the most crucial moment in our history pur fate was in the hands of a man who was not a poet. Chaillot must be Giraudoux’s most revealing work. In it he lets the lunatics and vagabonds of Paris decide the fate of his country—or at least express, lyrically, the uncreated conscience of his race. And in Irma, the waitress, he may have immortalized one such waitress he had seen in real life, a girl with “the face and figure of an angel,” a vision of purity in an age “when the pimps have taken over.” Silliman high school lass Christine Pijuan played the part and for two nights Dumaguete was Paris. It was a Dumaguete buzzing with the rumor that a hunchback female sweepstakes vendor had sold the grand ten-million-peso winner in the February 25 draw, curiously repeating the first-prize sale here three years ago by a male hunchback vendor. The town was ablaze with magical hunchbacks, vagabonds, and lunatics! Jean Giraudoux was in Dumaguete! Niece of the dawn! Lightning at close range! dressed not like a commissar but like a ragpicker’s dream, like all the high school girls you ever chased in the bohemia, in the Paris, of your mind. Dumaguete, 1988


Last Exit From Malatapay [Version 1. From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] Friday the seventh. Krip van Winkle leaves in the morning and misses the last session which goes on till evening and which ends rather badly, particularly for Morningstar and me. We get into the feminist argument over a poem by Katzen jammer. She opens the discussion by saying she commends the poem’s condemnation of war as a patriarchal syndrome, adding that—as the poem demonstrates—the starts in the war games little boys play. I retort that war can bring out certain stupendous things in human beings, for instance courage, awe, philosophic depth, and believe it or not—ultimately love. I say that of course I too wish war could be abolished—who doesn’t?—just as we all wish we didn’t have suffering in general in this planet. I point out that Homer treated war with unflinching realism, even with lyricism, with that amounts to shamanic ecstasy. Since I have not yet read at this time T.H. White’s The Book of Merlyn, I am unable to quote or allude to the following: “War is one of the mainsprings of romance. Without war, there would be no Rolands, Maccabees, Lawrences or Hodsons of Hudson’s Horse. There would be no Victoria Crosses. It is a stimulant or so-called virtues such as courage and co-operation. In fact war has moments of glory. It should also be noted that, without war, we should lose at least one half of our literature. Shakespeare’s packed with it. (Italics mine). Finally I say that war games little boys play is play and it may be wrong to stop that. Edith (whose name ironically comes from an Old English root meaning “combat, battle, war”) sides with Morningstar. They argue that these war games involve a cultural inculcation that logically bears fruit in the murderousness of real war. I reply that play is not cultural. They chorus that it is. I say no, animals too play and animals do not have cultural (unfairly using an insight of a Dutch historian). Then they continues exchange becomes a full-fledged feminist thing when I let out the words “Mothers can grow babies, but only fathers can make men.” Morningstar pounces on this, saying it is a “sexist statement.” I hold on, sure that the anthropologist I have in fact quoted cannot be oversimplified as sexist. It is war to the bitter end. Merle Winchester stands up and sits apart on the sofa. Therefore give heed on your clever and patriotic womenfolk and remember that the Capitol of mighty Rome was once saved by the cackling of its faithful geese. (Albert, he-he, Einstein.) A little before this skirmish I sneak out with Vim and explain to him my Rosal Dormitory predicament, namely, now that Eliphas and Van Winkle are gone, how can possibly show up at their party solo flight and not look like a clown? So how would he like to play Tonto to my Lone Ranger? “Robin to your Batman!” he says with vigor and alacrity. Solved. But, he says, what about the party for the workshoppers at Eming Wee’s place? I tell him we can go to Rosal first then to Eming Wee’s, or vice-versa. Later we are able to concoct a reason why we are acting like conspirators. We tell them we are getting in touch with a Siquijor guide for our coming trip to the island.


It rains hard that night and it is difficult to execute our maneuvers. At seven we are at Rosal. Their party is scheduled at seven-thirty and so we are able to talk only with the dome manager Moon Yang. And of course Boobs to whom I deliver Eliphas’ letter. The girl feigns an absolute lack of interest in this document. So there we are: Vim and Sawi, or, literally translated, the Enervon of Misfortune. Then it is almost seven-thirty and we have to go, promising to be back at nine. Off we dart to Eming Wee’s. Eming greets us at the door announcing very loudly. “Hello there, dearie old man!” I greet back: “Chief Justice!” I am seated near Winchester and Morningstar and it is difficult to break the iceberg. I never get to. Eming Wee has them absorbed in conversation. There are four of us in a corner but it seems Eming is aiming at leaving me out. Just as well. Maybe he is smarting from that Rosante’s night when Eliphas and I conquered Mt. Talinis. The kids are grouped in a circle at the dining table. They call me twice or three times, seeing I am alone and looking one thousand lightyears away from home. But I stick to where I am because I feel joining them alienate me further from the three W’s of Eastwick. I sit in my lonely chair sadly sipping my rum-coke, brooding on the absurdity of the human condition, when a pert and youngish law student of Eming’s comes in and sits next to me. We fall into a slow and keen conversation at some point of which I distinctly catch a simultaneous and collective glance of envy in our direction from, in alphabetical order, Binah, Bonnie, Eming, Hyacinth, Morningstar, Winchester. At nine I lazily… bolt up! “Why don’t we have a poetry reading?” I say. “Yes!!” comes the hearty reply from everybody dispelling all may paranoid imaginings and delusions of grandpa. Morningstar’s eyes are aglow. “Okay,” I say. “We will be back right away, we just have to check out something.” It is easier to die for the woman that you love than to live with her. (George Lord Byron). Back to Rosal! Their costume happening is in full swing when we arrive. Boobs is dressed up like a soldier complete with a pencilled mustache and a jacket at the back of which is inscribed the name Gringa. She sits beside me and talks about Eliphas. She tells me how Eliphas tried to hold her hand, whereas her boyfriend in high school always asked for permission before doing it. She says she is sure Eliphas is merely playing with her. I am tempted to hold her hand and reassure her that Eliphas is a well-meaning if amorous young man. To my right is MoonYang who introduces Vim to the other girls. Vim’s eye picks out Fahrenheit, a chicklooking chick with a tart pretty face and lovely legs that no doubt make his temperature rise. But he holds back when he finds out from someone that the girl’s father is a soldier from Mindanao. I stand up and talk to her and signal to Vim to come over. It doesn’t work. Death is stronger than love. Vim and I and the dorm cook’s husband and the library security who’s a friend of MoonYang’s are the only males in the party. The secu is taking pictures. I ask Gringa and a doe-eyed beauty who is dressed somewhat like Wonder Woman— bare back, bare shoulders—to pose with me for a picture. The two say yes but the camera has only one shot left and it is meant for the whole group. The lights dim and a song trembles and I find myself in a clinch with Wonder Woman, my right hand tracing the seven wonders of the world on her soft, smooth, young skin. But I must be dreaming. Keep off Gringa and Wonder Woman, I tell Vim, though add that love is the strongest force in the universe and it doesn’t know friendship. Vim: “Bakit si Juanerio at si Krip?” Me: “Wisdom, Wisdom.”


When we go back to Eming Wee’s it is eleven and there is no one there, no one. The place is quite as a graveyard. I find out the next day that Binah and the others are mad at Vim because he had the key to their apartment and they had a difficult time sneaking in. Two things loveth man most: danger and sport. And therefore loveth he woman above all, woman being the most dangerous sport. (Nietzche) Saturday the eleventh. I wake up shortly before noon and after brunch head for Rosal. I’m feeling faintly depressed. In the morning I see Binah in the café alone waiting for Morningstar to come down from Alumni the Bonnie leaves then I am feeling more and more depressed. Have no time to wait for Morningstar. Leave. At past one I am at Rosal talking to MoonYang. A girl named Mahalquita asks me to help her with a reaction paper on Nick Joaquin’s A Heritage of Smallness. I promise to return the next day and help her. I go downtown still feeling depressed and head, as usual for nowhere in particular. Bump into General Douglas MacArthur’s rumored Somewhere in Time who is with a nursing graduate who looks like orgy itself but turns out to be a born-again. They take me to Sans Rival for a treat. I tell the bornagain I am manic-depressive and paranoid and I’d love to eat her. She laughs over and over sans rival, spaghetti, and coke. After a while the Kamikaze sisters come in and take another table. Kiriti and MacArthur’s ex-rumoramor agree to meet the next day at Kiriti’s place. Then come a comely Chinita type from Silliman whom I’ve fancied for a half a lunar year now or so and miracle of miracles exchanges raised eyebrows with me. Before we break up, MacArthur’s Park gets me to promise I’ll accompany her to Kiriti’s on Sunday. On my way back to the campus I run into a balik-Silliman who was gone for a semester, a bedroom-voiced, mist-lipped darky who makes me feel it’s a pity Genghis Khan’s not aroung anymore, here’s just the right answer to his withdrawal symptoms. Her name is Quintessence. “What’s that?” she asks, looking at the Tarot book in my hands. “He reads a lot of weird stuff.” Says her companion who’s also named Boobs and Gerardus’ once and future lust. I asked to read her palm and she extends it, but I suddenly realize I do not have my eyeglasses with me. I tell her I’ll just read her eyes. “You have bright eyes.” I say, “but I don’t know about your future.” I can’t love a woman unless I can convince myself, inspite of all my previous failures, that I’ll love her for the rest of my life. (Robert Graves) Six in the evening. I go to the café. See Binah, all by herself. “Katzen jammer?” I ask. She shrugs her shoulders. She is eating her supper. We talk a bit. She says it is her last night and she wants to walk around. I understand (or think I do). A moody stroll, meditative, lyrical. One last look at Dumaguete, Dumaguete. Or better yet, serene, transcendental. I OM, therefore, I am. It occurs to me very fleetingly to join her but it doesn’t feel right. She wants to be alone is my overwhelming impression. But she seems to be probing, to be asking indirectly about my once fancying Witchie. A myth, I tell her. All there was to it was my wondering if it was true she was a dyke which would be a pity because. Just because. But what Binah does not know is that someone told me Witchie moved in on her last summer and I am sure Witchie made me a conversational piece, having acutely perceived who was the


forbidden apple of my eye. Well, no use grieving over slit forbidden fruit juice. Anyway, for pure madness, I tell her of my more horrendous sexual misadventures circa 1949. Her eyes smile, mine guffaw. “Do you eat here often?” I ask. “No,” she says. “Then you never saw Anis Ambergris.” “Who’s that?” “The one before the last one.” “Who’s the last one?” But we are at the gate and she is turning left towards downtown. I am turning right towards the heart of nevermore, meaning biglang liko at some point towards Rosal. That your eyes might be shining for me when we came. (T.E. Lawrence) Sunday. I go to Rosal past one. Help the girl with her paper on Heritage of Smallness. Gringa and Wonder Woman do not come out, tired from reviewing for the exams the whole night. Moon Yang too, who wakes up when I am about to go. Mahalquita has me all to herself. A pity I forget the Pinoy green joke with the handkerchief. Could have served as a good illustration of Joaquin’s thesis. Take MacArthur’s Somewhere I Have Never Travelled to Kiriti Kamikaze’s place as promised. Hear the beachhead, the guns crack, the bombs explode, the seawater swish. The Return. And I only am escaped alone to tell thee. But I love her, and her only. Hear don Juaniyo Matus mumble wild is the wind, wild as my love for you but quoting me quoting Donald Barthelme quoting Nat King Cole re the balloon of her telephone voice, the neverland touch of her eyes, the unrequited requited, the Robertus’ sister of the mirror and the echo, the… Dumaguete, 1989


[Version 2. From Checkmeta, 2004. Now titled: Sailing to Byzantium] Whatever truths or fable you may find in a thousand books, it is all a tower of Babel unless love holds it together. ~ JOHANN WOFGANG GOETHE Friday the seventh. Krip van Winkle takes a plane back to Manila in the morning and misses the last session which goes on till evening which ends, rather badly, particularly for Morningstar and me. We got into a feminist argument over a poem by Katzenjammer. She opens the discussion by saying she commends the poem’s condemnation of war as a patriarchal syndrome, adding that—as the poem demonstrates—this starts in the war games little boy play. I retort the war can bring out certain superb and stupendous things in human beings, for instance courage, awe, philosophic depth, and believe it or not ultimately love, I say that of course I too wish war could be abolished—who doesn’t—just as we all wish we didn’t have suffering in general on this planet. I point out that Homer treated war with unflinching realism, even with lyricism, with what amounts to shamanic ecstasy. Since I have not yet read at this time T.H. white’s The Book of Merlyn, I am unable to quote or allude to the following. “War is one of the mainsprings of romance. Without war, there would be no Ronalds, Maccabees, Lawrences or Hodsons of Hudson’s House. There would be no Victoria Crosses. It is stimulant to so-called virtues such as courage and co-operation. In fact war has moments of glory. It would also be noted that, without war, we should lose at least one half of our literature. Shakespeare’s packed with it.” (Italics mine.) Finally I say that war games little boys play is play and it may be wrong to stop that. Edith (whose name ironically comes from and Old English root meaning “combat, battle, war”) side with Morningstar. They argue that these war game involve a cultural inculcation that logically bears fruit in the murderous of real war. I reply that play is not cultural. They chorus that is. I say no, animals too play and animals do not have culture (unfairly using an insight from the Dutch historian, Huizinga). Then the continues exchange becomes a full-fledged feminist thing when I let out the words “Mothers can grow babies, but only fathers can make men.” Morningstar pounces on this, saying it is a “sexist statement.” I hold on, sure that the anthropologist I have in fact quoted—Weston La Barre—cannot be oversimplified as sexist. It is war to the bitter end. Merle Winchester stands up and sits apart on the sofa. Therefore give heed to your clever and patriotic womenfolk and remember that the Capitol of mighty Rome was one saved by the cackling of its faitful geese. ~ ALBERT EINSTEIN A little before skirmish I sneak out with Vim and explain to him my Rosal Dormitory predicament, namely, now the Eliphas and Van Winkle are gone, how can I possibly show up at their party solo flight and not look like a clown? So how would he like to play Tonto to my Lone Ranger? “Kublai to your Genghis!” he says with vigor and alacrity. Solved. But, he says, what about the party for the worshoppers at Eming


Wee’s, or vice-versa. Later we are able to concoct a reason why we are acting like conspirators. We tell then we a getting in touch with a Siquijor guide for our coming trip to the island. It rains hard that night and it is difficult to execute our maneuvers. At seven we are at Rosal. Their party is scheduled at seven-thirty and so we are able to talk only with the dorm manager Moon Yang. And of course Boobs to whom I deliver Eliphas’ letter. The girl feigns an absolute lack of interest in this document. So there we are: Vim & Sawi, or, literally translated, the Enevervon of Misfortune. Then it is almost seven-thirty and we have to go, promising to be back at nine. Off we dart to Eming Wee’s. Eming Wee greets us at the door announcing very loudly, “Hello there, dirty old man!” I greet back: “Chief Justice!” I am seated near Winchester and Morningstar and it is difficult to break the iceberg. I never get to. Erming Wee has them absorbed in conversation. There are four of us in a corner but it seems Erming is aiming at leaving me out. Just as well. Maybe he is smarting from that Rosante’s night when Eliphas and I conquered Mr. Talinis. The kids are grouped in a circle at the dining table. They call me twice or three times, seeing I am alone and looking one thousand lightyears away from home, But I stick to where I am because I feel joining them will alienate me further from the three Witches of Eastwick. I sit in my lonely chair sadly sipping my rumcoke, brooding on the absurdity of the human condition, when a pert and youngish law student of Eming’s comes in and sits next to me. We fall into a slow and keen conversation at some point which I distinctly catch simultaneous and collective glance of envy in our direction from, in alphabetical order, Binah, Bonnie, Eming, Hyacinth, Morningstar, and Winchester. At nine I lazily—bolt up! “Why don’t we have a poetry reading?” I say. “Yes!” comes the hearty reply from everybody dispelling all my paranoid imaginings and delusions of grandpa. Morningstar’s eyes a glow. “Okay,” I say. “We will be back right away, we just have to check out something.” It is easier to die for the woman that you love than live with her. ~ GEORGE LORD BYRON Back to Rosal! Their costume happening is in full swing when we arrive. Boobs is dressed up like a soldier complete with penciled mustache and a jacket at the back of which is inscribed the name Gringa. She tells me how Eliphas tried to hold her hand, whereas her boyfriend in high school always asked permission before doing it. She says she is sure Eliphas is merely playing with her. I am tempted to hold her hand and reassure her that Eliphas, at thirty-something, is a well-meaning if amorous young man. To my right is Moon Yang. Who introduces Vim to the other girls. Vim’s eye picks out Hot Cake, a chic-looking chick with a tart pretty face and lovely slender legs that no doubt make his Fahrenheit rise as it certainly does my centigrade. But he holds back when he finds out from someone that the girl’s father is a soldier in Mindanao. I stand up and talk to the girl and signal Vim to come over. It doesn’t work. Death is stronger than love. Vim and I and the dorm clock’s husband and the library security who’s a friend of Moon Yang’s are the only males in the party. The secu is taking pictures. I ask Gringa and doe-eyed beauty who is dressed somewhat like Wonder Woman— bare back, bare shoulders—to pose with me for a with me for a picture. The two say yes! sweet heavens, yes! but the camera has only one shot left and it is meant for


the whole group. The light dims and a song trembles and I find myself in a clinch with Wonder Girl, my right hand tracing the seven wonders of the world on her soft, smooth, young skin. But I must be dreaming. Keep off Gringa and Wonder Girl, I tell Vim, though add that love, admittedly, is the strongest force in the universe and it doesn’t know friendship. “Second to death,” says Vim. Me: “Wisdom, wisdom.” When we get back to Eming Wee’s it is eleven and there is no one there, no one. The place is quiet as a graveyard. I find out the next day that Binah and the others are mad at Vim because he had the key to their apartment and they had a hell of a difficult time sneaking in. Two things loveth man most: danger and sport. And therefore loveth he woman above all, woman being the most dangerous sport.” ~ FRIEDRICH NIETZCHE Saturday the eight. I wake up shortly before noon and after brunch head for Rosal. I’m feeling a bit depressed. In the morning I see Binah in the café alone waiting for Morningstar to come down from Alumni Hall then Bonnie leaves then I am feeling more and more depressed. Have no time to wait for Morningstar. Leave. At past one I am at Rosal talking to Moon Yang. A girl named Mahalquita asks me to help her with reaction paper on Nick Joaquin’s A Heritage of Smallness. I promise to return the next day and help her. I go downtown still feeling depressed and head, as usual for nowhere in particular. Bump into General Douglas MacArthur’s rumored somewhere In Time who is with a nursing graduate who looks like orgy itself but who turns out to be a born-again. They take me to Sans Rival for a treat. I tell Born Again I am manic—depressive and paranoid and I’d love to eat her. She almost chokes with laughter over sans rival, spaghetti, and coke. After a while the Kamikaze sisters comes in and take another table. Kiriti and MacArthur’s ex— rumoramor agree to meet the next day at Kiriti’s place. Then comes a comely Chinita type from Silliman whom I’ve fancied for half a lunatic—I mean, lunar—year now or so and miracle of miracles exchanges raised eyebrows with me. Before we break up, MacArthur’s Parks gets me to promise I’ll accompany her to Kiriti’s on Sunday. On my way back to the campus I run into a balik—Silliman who was gone for a semester, a bedroom—voiced, mist—lipped darky who makes me feel it’s a pity limahong is not around anymore; here’s just the right answer to his withdrawal symptoms. Her name is Quintessence. “What’s That?” she ask, looking at the tarot book in my hands. “He reads a lot of weird stuff,” says her companion who’s also named Boobs and gerardus” once and future Gehenna. I ask to read her palm and she extends it. but I suddenly realize I do not have my eyeglasses with me. I tell her I’ll just read her eyes. “ Yiu have bright eyes,” I say “And,” clasoing her hand in mine once again, “ a bright future.” I can’t love a woman unless I can convince myself, in spite of all my previous failures, that I’ll be love her for the rest of my life.” ~ ROBERT GRAVES


Six in the evening, I go to the café. See Binah, all by herself “Katzenjammer?” I ask. She shrugs her shoulders. She is eating her supper. I understand (or think I do). A moody stroll, meditative, lyrical. One last look at Dumaguete, Dumaguete. Or better yet, serene, transcendental. I OM, therefore I am. It occurs to me very fleetingly to join her but it doesn’t feel right. She wants to be alone is my overwhelming impression. But she seems to be probing, to be askingdyke which would be indirectly about my once fancying witchy. A myth , I tell her. All there was to it was my wondering if it was true she was a dyke which would be a pity because. Just because. But when Binah does not know is that someone told me witchy sational piece, havin acutely perceived who was the forbidden apple of mu evil eye. Well, no use grieving over split forbidden fruit juice. Anyway for sure madzness, I tell her of my more horrendous sexual misadventures circa 1949. “How old are you really?” “Forty-three” Her eyes smile, mine guffaw. She knows I am forty-six. “Do you eat here often?” I ask. “No,” she answers. “Then you never saw is Anis Ambergis.” “Who is she?” But we are at the gate and she is turning left towards downtown. I am turning right towards the heart of nevermore, biglang liko at some point towards Rosal. That your eyes might be shining for me when we came. ~ T.E. LAWRENCE Sunday. I go to Rosal past one. Help the girl mahalquita with her paper on A Heritage of smallness. Gringa and wonder girl do not come out tired from reviewing for the exams the whole night. Moon Yang Too who wakes up when I am about to go. Mahalquita has mee all to herself. I am tempted to tell the Pinoy green joke with the handkerchief. Could have served as a good illustration of Joaquins’s Thesis. Take MacArthur’s Somewhere I have Never Travelled to Kiriti Kamikazee’s place as promised. My right hand is a snake’s head that suddenly slithers round her waist. Hear the return, the beachhead, the gunscrack, the bombs explode, the seawater swishn in leyte. But the strength of another promise, more eternal wins. I love her, and her only. Hear Don Juaniyo Matus mumble, Jun Lansang read, David Bowie sing wild is the wind, wild is my love for quoting Barthelme quoting Nat King Cole re the balloon of her telephone voice, the twinkling of an eye, the occasion of my return from the Netherlands to Never.


Mr. Mxyzptlk Pops Into the Room

[From Checkmeta, 2004]

[MISSING]


On the Beach

[From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] Though it cannot be found in the history books, Gaius Julius Caesar reached Haiti where, among the tribal magicians, he got acquainted with the occult in its lushest, most demoniacal forms. With characteristic brevity, he summed his experience up in these words: Veni, vidi, voodoo. His epileptic convulsions and trances, meantime, had begun. This he was able to conceal from people, but not for long. What he tried to keep a secret also was a growing interest in the druids, whom he regarded more highly than Rome’s own soothsayers and auspices, as well as those of Egypt. Surfeited with the intoxication of military conquests, he took an intimate stroll on the beach one evening with his friend and angel, the noble Brutus. The sky swarmed with stars one of which, somewhere in the east and the middle between the zenith and the horizon, for some unaccountable reason caught his eye. He could not believe it. The star, to which he was not paying a more than casual attention, began to move to the left just a little then halted, then moved again—sailed—in the same direction and then returned to the original spot. Surely it had been an illusion and it would now stay fixed where it was. But the star, once more, began to travel this time to the right, and then downwards closer to the horizon. “E.T., Brutus!” he cried in grave but utter amazement. Dumaguete, 1987


Proheme [From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] There’s nothing as sweet. Mita and Rey like that atop the boat of Nano the midget lying upside down under the house. And strange. His little heart swam in the strangeness. He was abashed and said to the others: - David also do it, David blinked. - Daedalus also do it. Daedalus shook his head. - Tom also do it. Tom ducked behind David. He was lost. Poor Mita. Just quiet because she’s a girl. - Is Mita afraid of Nano? - Yes. - Rey is not afraid of Nano. Is Mita afraid of Mierkoles? - Yes. Mierkoles was a strange one. He said nothing and did nothing. Just looked and smiled. Mita was afraid of his smile. He was a mooncalf. Nano was not a mooncalf. He was a midget. Got drunk and danced like a rude top. He caught an octopus. The octopus was bigger than he and their heads looked alike. It was his brother! Everybody laughed. Funny midget. Bought chocolates and lanzones for Auring the beautiful friend of Auntie Belen. Then Auntie Belen tugged her out of the room and they came out giggling. - Hoy Nano! - Hoy Nano! - Will Rey grow bigger than Nano? - Yes, beloved. - If he won’t eat plenty? - He’ll be just like Nano. - He’ll be just like Nano. - Who’s bigger, you or Nano? - Who do you think is? - You. His mother sat down and hoisted him up onto her lap. She had a gold tooth. - Are we sure of that? - Yes. - Does Rey want to grow bigger than Nano? - Yes. - And bigger than Mama? - No. - Then poor Mama will have to carry Rey always! She kissed him. He pushed her face back with his tiny hands and held it. He liked to pull her face this way and that. And touch the gold tooth.


Mierkoles was big. His hands were like feet. He was strong. He hit Inday Mameng with a firewood. Inday Mameng’s head bled. But Mierkoles ran away because Inday Mameng was very brave. That’ why he hit her with a firewood and ran away. A mooncalf! But he talked to Rey, nice like a friend. - Mama, Mierkoles wants to take me with him to the sea. Mierkoles smiled. - Can I go, Mama? - No. He looked at Mierkoles. Mierkoles smiled and waited. - Please, Mama. I want to go. - No, you can’t. She spoke without looking at him or at Mierkoles. - Why not? - Just because. She was firm and Mierkoles gave up because he went. It was a pity, such a good thing. He was beginning to like him. His mother said when Mierkoles was gone: - Ha! You trust that mooncalf to drown you! Mother of God! Mama Nena was the mother of his Mama. Mama Vicenta was the mother of Mama Nena. Mama Vicenta was tall and straight and always smoking a tobacco. She took care of Ado and Robin Hood. Her favorite was Robin Hood. - It’s the father himself who gave him that name, Mama Vicenta said. Mama Nena frowned. - The father himself gave him that name. Why, what sort of man was his father? Mama Nena was bossy with everyone except with this Mama. His Mama her daughter was beautiful and smart. Everyone was in awe of her. He was her son. Inday Mameng was the mother of Robin Hood and Ado. Their father was Vic. He was touched in the head but Rey never saw him. He left Ado and Robin Hood and their mother Inday Mameng the sister of Mama Nena. A handsome man but touched in the head. Always dressed up and his head shining with Brilliantine or Million Dollars. He won a banana-eating contest. Inday Mameng chased him with a bolo because he ate a whole bunch and swallowed even the peelings. He didn’t have to! He was touched in the head and never returned. Mama Nena was the eldest that’s why she was bossy. Inday Mameng was the youngest and the chum of his Mama. She recited his name: - Rey, hey Rey, hero, hooray! - Rey, hey Rey, hero, hooray! — Say good-bye to Mita. - Bye, Mita. - Bey, Rey. - Bye, Mita. - Bye, Rey; She was gone. Her big sister Lota took her place. When nobody was in the house except Rey one day Adolfo her boyfriend came and sat on a chair and made


her sit on his lap. And they were laughing at him and he took her breast in his mouth and they wanted him to see it. - Who made the world? - God. - Who made God? - Nobody. - But how? - He just came along. That was tough. He didn’t understand it and he grew quiet with the wonder of it. East. West. West, father. East, mother. Things connected in magic combinations in his mind though they did not make sense when he repeated them to others. It was a game played alone. Dumaguete, 1984


Proheme to the Blue God

[From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] Just before I tumble into sleep, exhausted, I would feel it—this swallowing terror— my nothingness. In the morning of course the world’s invincible beauty always falls back into place, especially at dawn, when it does so with a revenge. But how many dawns has one left? To make it worse I’m an inveterate night owl. I very seldom catch the dawn—and that’s when I have stayed up all night. Manila, 1981


Proheme to Zamboanga [From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] Zamboanga is the word of my life. Few other words/names for me approach as closely what the French Symbolist poets call the evocative property of words, the magical ability of words to make something absent present. As a boy it seems I already recognized the mysterious quality of words. Certain words touched me—entered the pores of my skin, got into my bloodstream. I actually invented some words, although invented is hardly the right word for it, inasmuch as those words just came to my child’s mind. And they were words that meant nothing, as they had not been meant to mean anything. I’d keep uttering these mutant words to myself, like an idiot, and they had a very strange, active effect upon me indeed. They were a child’s strangest toys. In adult years I would suffer from a certain paralysis of the will. So indecisive. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is only fiction, though his author happens to be the world’s greatest fictionist. I’m more Hamlet than Hamlet. I’m the real Hamlet. History ordained that I should be the first truly undisciplined and indecisive human being. Before me every living thing was a knight errant. In my fourth year in high school I drove a thousand miles beneath all that had hitherto been called lack of discipline. Etcetera, etcetera. Apologies to the poet who wrote Ecce Homo. I was born in Tangub, Misamis Occidental, in the early forties, a first-born. No mother was as scared of delivering as my mother, so the old folks liked to re-tell. The story continues that scarcely had I let out my cry (unlike Zoroaster and like everybody else I didn’t laugh when I was born) when Jap planes roared in the direction of my birth. Air raid! That is to say, fireworks at my bitch, and more impressive than a fifty-gun salute. Happy birthday! World War II was, of course, no time to laugh—though I’ve sometimes been told otherwise by our historians—Zoroaster or no Zoroaster. Some details of the scene: my mother carried on a stretcher and I in my grandmother’s arms, umbilical cord and all, as we—we!—ran for cover. Holy Mother of God, but no Jap plane is going to rob the world of a future exponent of the free style, the Skew Benoni, and the sexy dithyramb, especially one whose reverence for women resides in his nostrils. The map of Mindanao outlines the figure of a circus elephant. In a way therefore, the story of my early life is an elephant’s head hung sidewise on the wall. My mother was a Cebuana lass who spent her maidenhood in Oroquieta, a lovely coastline town at the top of the elephant’s head; my father, an adventurous lawyer who upon finishing his studies at the U.P. and passing the bar had straightaway left his Ilocano roots in Luzon to settle in Lanao where he fancied himself a Moro. Seven years ago on the shores of Lanao, I once gazed at the awesome mountain that is the province of Misamis Occidental. Often must have this sheer wall of a mountain bewitched my father, with its stories of giants on Mt. Malindang, and when chance brought him to Oroquieta, Jack-be-nimble’s story began. In 1941 the municipal judge of Iligan wooed the town queen of Oroquieta, a high school girl. They both wrote poems—he, in English and Ilocano; she, in English and Cebuano. I write solely in English, perhaps from an unconscious wish to honor


the language they had in common. Besides I don’t know Ilocano; and Cebuano, well, it doesn’t know me. Panguil Bay is the sea one has to cross between Lanao and Misamis Occidental. It was here where my father perished with his two lieutenants. Falling into the hands of the Japanese, they were made to dig a hole in the land and executed. I once accidentally came upon one of my father’s letters to my mother, in which he spoke of a tactical favor to the guerilla who operated by water. A knowledge of Niponggo must have augmented his overconfidence. His mother wouldn’t believe he was dead. Not even when, years after, the three skeletons, facing each other in a circle, was discovered. A little after the war my mother re-married. My step-father was another soldier, a Zamboangueno assigned in Misamis Occidental. One day, about two years old, I stretched my smiling hand to a mother and child eating together. This was in the mountains among other evacuees. I got snubbed. In tears my mother set out for the nearest town to buy rice. The problem had been, for the evacuees who were running out of food, a band of guerillas cordoning the just liberated town. But the tearful young mother wouldn’t be barred. The terrible officer from Zamboanga relented after a furious argument. She must have been equally terrible for their courtship began soon after. The family moved to Pagadian. This is the town of my childhood; whereas Zamboanga is the town of my adolescence. My childhood and adolescence, that’s to say, were spent like an elephant’s tusks. Pure ivory. I have distinct memories of first times that antecede our coming to Pagadian. Sitting in the yard in some obscure barrio in Misamis Occidental—my first misadventure. In the same yard I danced to a passing band. The dance consisted of going on tiptoe and back, back and forth—my first experience of formal rhythm. Third was straying, in Labuyo where my sister was born—a blue baby until my grandmother breathed the breath of life into her, mouth to mouth—into a room where my godfather was giving it to his wife at noontime. Of course I didn’t know what it was until now I still can’t figure out how on earth I had found the Cebuano word for it as I narrated what I saw to an amused group of elders—my first experience of narrative. Forth was crossing the sea of Pagadian. A big sail boat that carried about twenty people. The boat sank somewhere. We were not too far from the shore, I learned later on. Another banca rescued us, and this is the part I can recall. I remember the man, including my step grandfather, formed chainwise in the water, passing into the other banca cargos and children. I remember being lifted or shoved onto the boat, my face almost smacked into a little girl’s exposed buttocks. My first experience of the opposite sex, discounting Freud’s idea. There was a time in boyhood that I insisted I remembered the time I was born. My oddest notion ever. When the time came for my stepfather to take his booty of a family home to Zamboanga, my mother’s mother, an uncommonly intense silent little old woman, the same one who carried me on air raid and wrenched my sister fro death at birth, clung to me like a demon. The instabilities of the war years had caused my mother to leave me occasionally to her care and I had become her treasure. She had become my other mother. In fact, my child’s mind had awakened to her as my mother, that is, my mother had become my other mother, you have a mother, they used to tell me, she’s in Zamboanga but she’ll come for you soon. She’s very beautiful. Elsewhere, another tune—from my father’s mother who also had come to live in Pagadian with one of my father’s youngest half-sisters: Your father is not


dead. He’ll be back. I believed the one about having a mother, that would come soon—this beautiful utter stranger who, I was told, love me above all. But the one about my father eventually showing up—alive and not in his mother’s dreams—the child intuitively knew as a fabric of a prayer, a hope. I knew from the family circle I grew up in, my maternal grandparents and y mother’s younger half-sister, that my father was dead, killed by the Japanese. But the strange, white-haired old woman kept saying my father was alive, and he’ll soon come back for the two of us. She spoke the littlest Bisayan which had a way metamorphosing into smatterings of Tagalog until I finally became Ilocano which made me speechless and the oddest good listener in the world. It was not until I was twelve when she declared: Your father is dead. And for a while that one too sounded like a prayer, a prayer that no longer hoped. In my twenties, in Misamis Occidental where she lived with another of my father’s half-sisters, she showed me his skull which he kept in a beautiful brown chest, wrapped in a green cloth, and which she carried with her to the grave. She was my lola. I didn’t call my other grandmother lola; she was Mama to me-I had two Mamas. As a young mother, my lola had suffered the grief of losing her first two babies in infancy. She was adviced to devote herself to San Vicente. Upon the death of her second baby, she had shocked her family, announcing her intention to turn Protestant. When my father was born he was named Vicente. He, too, was sickly as a child, and his mother prayed fervently for him, to the saint who patroned his birth and after whom he was named. I don’t suppose Pagadian, now a chartered city, looks considerably different from the way it did when I was a child. The last time I saw it was seven years ago, one summer on a short visit. It’s more populated now naturally. In the sixties the construction of the highway linking it to Zamboanga was completed. It’s accessible by land now from both west (Zamboanga) and east (the rest of Mindanao, the rest of elephant). The Town’s terrain is Hongkong-like. If you approach it by boat (Illana Bay) its night veiled to loveliness is quite deceiving. In the morning in the streets where nostrils meet the harsh assault of dust and backwardness. No Spanish quaintness nor American quantum here. The buildings have a tentative look about them, as though expected to be razed down for the nth time. It’s still the fledgling municipality that it was when I knew it in childhood, right after the war. This of course is a bit of an exaggeration. But I think I’m essentially right. Nevertheless the elements were complete: the town, truly beautiful. I sometimes think that people born in bred in big cities are incapable of nostalgia. In The Drunken Boat, Rimbaud ends with a moving nostalgia for the universe of childhood: a puddle and a toyboat. The streets and poblacion and houses were only a segment of the Pagadian I knew. There were small rivers and marshes and forests untouched by any beautification project. I left the town over fifteen years ago, in the fifties. On summer vacations I would come home for a visit, and as the years went on I would come home more and more a stranger. The town had two main streets that crossed each other: the highway and the street from the foot of the town, the war, going up. The other streets, by today’s standards, were not really streets.


It might not have been noticed by the townspeople, by this cross-like framework certainly symbolizes the town’s misfortunes: the parish priest, endeared to the laic, excommunicated in the wake of the forties, a popular mayor murdered mysteriously in the early fifties (to this day the killing is a mystery—the gunman never found out), the young man who almost all invariably did badly in school, too much given to heavy drinking ( they can outdrink anybody in the country)and dissipation, the three fires that burn it to the ground in the late fifties, and early sixties. When I was nearing my teens early fifties, the town became violent. Men and very young Men got either stabbed or shot to death fairly frequently. Soon the town was third-placer in a national survey of violent towns. At thirteen, I went to Zamboanga to live for good with my mother and stepfather and half-sister and two half-brothers. I left an old Mama who was hopelessly sick with asthma and resigned to losing me forever. Summer’s were the last sunshine of her life, when I would come for a visit. To this day I can’t forgive myself for not having the slightest inkling of how horribly lonely she was and for not crying when I came home, home, on her death. I was eighteen and I did cry, but not the way I cried for her when I was a child, for I live as a child in continual terror of her dying. They would playfully ask me which Mama I love more. I was about three, I don’t know if that question had killed one of my brain cells then. Strange question, blank mind. I couldn’t answer. I love my old Mama with a love as strong as death, but just who was this other one with an indefinable power over me? She existed and how strange the knowledge of her existence was. She would come and I would see her soon. Once, instead, she sent us a picture of my little sister at one year. This is Rose, your sister. My reaction earned me my first spanking: I bit the baby, the picture, and the imprint of my teeth bequeathed to her a sort of inverted crown. Wicked child. I don’t know if either my mother or sister ever found out about it. My old Mama must have been careful to hide it from Zamboanga. I remember her in slacks, very fair and slim. We were walking the wharf and the people all looked at us, at her, and I was very proud of her. She was holding my hand. It’s all I remember. Al I remember of her visit. “I’ll jump!” Perhaps the first threat I ever uttered. A little child of the Furies, I threatened to jump from the boat bound for Zamboanga. My mother was leaving, taking me with her. But as the siren signaled the boat’s departure: the jolt of learning that my old Mama was not coming with us. I couldn’t live without her. “I’ll jump!” The child must have frightened everyone for they finally took me away from the boat—who knows if the poor little devil wouldn’t indeed jump from the boat later on—but this time they had to pull me away—I couldn’t let the other go! And I lashed away like a typhoon. They couldn’t kill the little typhoon that would rage all day. Not until they had taken me to a movie. And that was the first time I saw a movie. The magic of motion picture quelled the typhoon. I can’t remember this initiation to mimesis, nit the vaguest detail. In fact, I don’t remember anything of what happened that intensest day of my life. Total void. The pain must have knocked me out, forever. Zambanga. Zamboanga. There’s a good rhyme to believe I’ve been going about all my life a somnambulist since then. And movies. Old, old memories of old movies, Robert Taylor, his widow’s peak, in Billy the Kid, concluding scene where he is gunned down, an ending I couldn’t comprehend. Tyrone Power, Captain Blood—I’d cry whenever Auntie Guiling refused to call me Captain Blood; Johny Weismuller eating crocodile eggs in one Tarzan movie and surviving from a fall when the villain


snapped the vine with a bullet. Leopoldo Salcedo, which I pronounced Ropoldo Salcedo. Lilia Dizon, whom my other resembled, in Encantada, opposite the dimples of Jamie de la Rosa. This last I remember with fondness. I saw it with Grandmother and Auntie who were Lilia Dizon die-hards, along with Rosa del Rosario, whom I rather loved. I was enjoying the film, too. But whenever the full moon came and Lilia Dizon turned into a monster, I broke in terror. The scene where the waterfall that could restore her looks had dried up and she desperately claws the rocks for the precious drops was too much. I ran out of the theatre and yelled for them to come out, let’s go home. And when they wouldn’t I started stoning the theatre with good results. I often wish I had turned out to be that sort of critic later in life. But most of our movies today don’t even deserve to be stoned. That would honor them too much. Besides what a milksop I have turned out to be in literary criticism. I was, in this regard, not quite the father of myself. The boat trauma had a way of recurring. I’ve forgotten her name now, my yaya. She was thirteen of fifteen and I, barely four, was her sweetheart. How erotically I loved her. Whom will you marry? They’d ask, and from the nethermost cup of my heart fell the sweet mountain dewdrop of her name. A modest, humble shy name, a yaya’s name, not at all anything like Lenore or Lolita, nameless here forevermore and light of my life, fire of my loins. Then one day her father came to take her away. What could a child do against the universe? I cheer myself with the thought that people were clamping their ears among the Angelic orders once more that day. I had a pet a tortoise. It rained heavily one day, the rain falling like it were that father of the tortoise. That, too, made me cry. From the wharf the vertical street goes up for about a kilometer. At the top was heaven. I mean the Holy Child’s Academy, an institution founded by the parish priest who would later be excommunicated. Father Reyes was a Filipino Jesuit, Ilocano, with Spanish blood, educated in Spain. I studied here, grade one to four. We knelt in school a lot and got terrified by hellfire a lot in the mouth of out teacher in grade two. He would say, with an energy I distinctly remember, “Try touching a candleflame, for a second. Can you bear the pain? You cannot. Hell is a billion times hotter than a candleflame, a billion billion times, and you burn thee forever.” The first lesson I learned by heart, anyhow, was one plus one equals two. That remains to this day a foundation of my personal poetics. Poetry is profoundly one plus one equals two. May I venture to suggest that the reason why there are so many bad modern poets among us is that they haven’t quite realized that poetry is one plus one equal two? Fortunately Victor Jose Penaranda, Alfred Aguinaldo Yuson and I have, and in us the principle has become sheer incandescence. (Of course it is odd that we have not taken a step further and see that it’s really one plus one equals three.) I remember the beautiful Carmencita in grades one and two. Eros stirred among the more precocious, and with the possible exception of our grade two teacher we were all precocious. Thus in grade two I belonged to a certain religious circle of grade school boys whose principal ritual was worshipping her name and image in trees, a ritual that would certainly make Freud smile in Dantesque beatitude at St. Paul. All the same my surviving piety compels me to be reticent on some of the details.


Carmencita, five years later, was married. Before she was thirteen. Father Reyes spoke Cebuano flawlessly, though with a sort of patrician accent. Bespectacled, he made multitudes cry with him on Good Friday, as, brokenvoiced, he recounted the Lord’s passion, the fragments of his voice scattering from the Santelmo-inhabited promontory of Dumaguk to the fish-rich waters of Illana Bay. No one listening to Father Reyes ever doubted that the Son of God was a Cebuano. The financial aspect must have played a major part, of course. But it won’t be too naïve to believe that Father Reyes disobeyed orders from above and refused to leave Pagadian, to transfer to another parish, because he had come to love the town. That he was jealous of the town which had been so much swap and forest when he came to it. The word was anyone who went to “his” church was committing a mortal sin. A “true”, church was established, in rivalry with Irish priests coming and going through the years, while Father Reyes went on doing a Gethsemane every Holy Week. People felt and observed that he wept more intensely, a hint bitterly. The poor folk went to Father Reyes’ church. The haves went to the legitimate church, where Cebuano slid away upon the rocks of Celtic centuries. In other words, Father Reyes retained the multitudes. A more private misfortune had foreshadowed Father Reyes excommunication.

Father Reyes had an adopted son—a most strangely spawned gifted child he took in when passing through Lanao. The child’s mother was a Siquihudnon (a native of Siquijor). The father, a Mindanao tribal native converted as a grown man. The child, every physical thing about him, was bafflingly Caucasian—skin, eyes, hair and all. Some people believed the child to be the offspring of Morgan, a dreaded American guerilla in Mindanao, whose savageness in war even the Maranaos. My mother for one swears that the boy was a diamond copy of Morgan. On the other hand, my stepgrandfather maintains that the child was two when Morgan first saw him. Under Father Reyes tutelage, the child grew up into a monster of eloquence. No other man looked to me so physically godlike as this miracle of nature, though his face was to be swollen with pimples later on, not even Jeffrey Hunter whom I saw in a barber shop in Zamboanga over a decade ago. And no one as rockhard and rock-closed Catholic. The legend is he had thoroughly learned Latin ion grade school, finished an equivalent to a Bachelor’s degree at thirteen, and, formally unable to taste college, finished reading the law books in one night to defeat a seasoned lawyer in a case that began in court the following morning. “You are my son.” “How can that be, Father? You are a priest.” “True. But God has strange ways. He willed it to be like this. You truly are my son.” “Perhaps I’ll understand that someday, when I have become a man.” “Nonsense. You are already a man. All true men are born instant men. You are a man, always remember that.” And Ah, que un hombre as Miguel said of Soren, if memory and my sprained Spanish serve me well. Or as Napoleon said of Goethe when the latter entered his court: But here is a man. I won’t dare quote the original. Here my memory and French are worse than boneless, it’s unincarnate to the last, or is it first, follicle.


The last time I saw him, when I was near the middle of my twenties, I always felt in his presence like the elder Monson did in the presence of his father the Old Monson in Nick Joaquin’s Three Generations. Were I to be in his presence this very moment, I have little doubt that I would fall back again into that reversion which I dread so much. When I would become what I am: a boy. At eight, made to deliver a speech written for him by his “father”, the boy had undeniable charisma. There was only one person in the audience: Father Reyes. Only the boy could make the old priest weep, this time among an invisible audience, and weep with joy. He would hug the boy when the boy had finished and bear him aloft like an extra-eucharist hostia. My son, my son. Father Reyes trained his son in privacy. No public exposure of the boy’s brilliance. Recounting this all from a boy’s memory, I would have to dig, systematically, into the past for the complete facts. But any lack of resemblance to the facts in this bit of autobiography is purely coincidence. The protégé’s first audience or society came when he was sixteen. That was when the Senoras, the priest’s sisters, came. And that was when Father Reyes and his son split. The Senoras. I never saw them. They are a sort of Chorus that throughout the play is totally speechless. Not in the slightest could the Senoras share their bother’s enthusiasm for the lad. From inevitable contact with the other young men of the town, Dionisio had learned to drink. Drink, smoke and tomcat. “Either him or us!” shook the Chorus. Not verbal. Body or metabody Spanish and Ilocano. At seventeen Dionisio had the bullheadedness of a Rimbaud. When they split it was not just a case of a father disowning a child. The child made his exit with the poise of a rebel angel, disinherited and all his diplomas burned. Blood is thicker than water, led him, he would sum it up later. I’d say thicker than holy water. He cursed back, cursed the Senoras, cursed his priest father. Less than a year after, the Senoras were killed in a car accident and Father Reyes excommunicated. He was particularly fiery when recounting these two incidents. And he would call Father Reyes a devil. Twenty years had passed when he went to see the old priest in the latter’s house at the Holy Child’s Academy. One visit and no more, everything forgiven. He had forgiven Father Reyes and he had gone to see him one last time. I really don’t know the circumstances—how Dionisio, Noy Isyong as I came to live with us for almost a year. But that’s what happened next, en seguida. I was four or five. He would talk non-stop, spellbinding everyone with stories from the Bible, from the Greco-Roman myths, and from Ancient History. In the latter years, on my summer visits to Pagadian that sometimes coincided with his visits, it was to be stories from the lives of people in Zamboanga del Sur. He told me the origin of my name, of Julius and Augustus Caesar. He said I was a bright boy, though he could never quite make me perform the job of writing my name correctly, my nickname Sawi. I just couldn’t perfect the initial letter. But in grade one he’d give me coins whenever I came home from school with good marks. When I came home from Zamboanga at sixteen, just graduated from high school without honors, not as he predicted, he told me I had a delinquent’s face. Well, if he was Dionysus, I could be Julius the Fourth, counter-author of that celebrated twenty-first century novel. Jehrameel’s Journey, the most casual reading of which traces the path of a Roman eagle as it bursts forth from a Chinese box of dreams and chess variations of dream each move of which is a glassbead, a rock, a


meadow, a hydrogen of poetry. Once we were left alone in the house. I cried and cried and he was at his wit’s end how to make me stop. Suddenly, he started telling me, impromptu, the story of a man swallowed by a snake that was in turn swallowed by another snake and how the man had to slit his way out of two snakes. That hushed up Julius the Fourth, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Through the years, I never wavered in my hero-worship of Noy Isyong. Even his becoming a dipso was an added, nay a finishing, touch of Homer. In my twenties I’d discover for myself Lowry’s Under the Volcano and I thought of him, destroyed by Sio Ho Tong. Imagine my surprise when seeing Lowry’s picture in Time or Newsweek for the first time I saw a strong feature-for-feature affinity between the two, hair, facial formation, stance, torso, arms, befuddled liquor smile, loose cut of clothes. In the summer of 1972 on a hike to my grand-father’s land in the mountains in Negros Oriental I asked my little cousin to tell everything he could about Pagadian which I had stopped visiting for years. I was particularly interested in the events at the turn of the decade—when the war between the Ilagas and the Barracudas was raging like a curse. Joy, who was born when I was fifteen, was a tireless story-teller, considering we had to walk a good twenty kilometers uphill. Names, remembered faces. Others I didn’t know, never saw. Moments Joy and I did not meet. Moments we did. A soldier turned brigand. Kids on their bellies upon hilly sides, beholding actual battle, the actual sound of gun and machine-gun fire. A legendary town toughie and killer strolling comically mortal on mortal territory, unscathed. The Ilocanos who farmed in the barrio of Tawagan, to the elephant’s neck, refusing to budge an inch from the land for which they had forsaken Luzon, arming themselves and gaining the virile respect of the Barracudas. The townspeople set to evacuate en masse, to sail back to the Visayan islands from where their fathers and mothers had come, tears, embraces. “What happened to Fidel?” “Fidel.” “Fidel. I don’t know him. Who’s he?” I laughed. Of course he didn’t know Fidel. Three years before Joy was born, just before I left for Zamboanga, a Chinese merchant was passing through Pagadian and lodged in our house. His Christian name was Fidel. I was in fifth grade. A florid-faced Chinese, toothless, bent, ungainly, physiologically incapable of composure and fresh saliva—in lieu of that sprang spittle that was more nicotine than spittle. At times he could make Fyodor Karamazov a pretty decent chap. Rasping, he would send me to buy arroz valenciana for merienda. Those were days when we were left in the house. I liked those days. Somehow he was convivial. Vibes. Brother Long Ears, buffoon, Dissolution. When drank, he would become a Buddha upside down, announcing to me step-by-step, with the crudest sense of sequence imaginable, the four most delicious things in life: liquor, arroz valenciana, riding an airplane, and—this with an incomparably debased manner of laughing—that dirty, dirty word. His Four Baskets which came, except for the wheezing last one, in any order. He didn’t include tobacco, perhaps unconsciously knowing that he was born with nicotine in his glands. He’d send me to buy his favorite juice: blue-label mallorca. With a wicked glee I’d watch him guzzle it and recoil in a fit of coughing. Sometimes he would hardly touch the just bought liquor, too drunk, and leave the bottle open to my curiosity. When he was not watching I’d take a swig and run to the faucet, throat and stomach frightfully on fire.


The Chinaman, too, must be dead now, buried in Maranding where he came from, as dead as the one I hero-worshipped, whose mother he disowned for being mad, for telling people he was the son of Morgan. One morning Noy Isyong, I was told, didn’t get up to answer the knocking on his room and they had to break the door, and they found him dead, he whom I can easily perceive to be really sprung from the race of Bismarck, though in culture he was a perfect specimen of the Bisayan and made Cebuano sound like Cebuano had something of genius. The Chinaman had an imagination that could not go beyond the airplane—or rather he had a love for an airplane that was an insult to imagination, to the airplane; Noy Isyong, a secret passion for archangels. Upon his death, his wife, a Boholana, brought their daughters back to Bohol. She must be fifteen now, the elder one, whom I remember as a baby girl with pale blue eyes named, his father swelling with pride, Maria. When the weather allowed it was a revere, the boat trip from Pagadian to Zamboanga, forty-eight hours when crooked or curved or punctuated, only you might have been too young for revery. But the mist and the languor and the sweetness and the sadness were there and the unhurried and invisible kisses felt during convalescence, only that you had never been sick at all except then, a little, of the gliding sea, and in a long long to come tomorrow when you would say, in complete silence, you were the broken wing of an angel, strange cargo for the boat that pulled off at eight, evening. And you drank the sound of the siren. You looked, discovering the pleasant experience that you cloud, at the town and hanged on to the ghost, all pale and dark, with your eyes. You lay back. It’s a small boat. Princess of Basilan. Princess of Zamboanga. Don Paterno, Don Pedro. Don Victorino. Donya Victoria. Donya Josefa. Perhaps, again, you were too young to be curious about the names of those boats. The whimsical, wistful legendary they might bear. You fell asleep. When you woke up you were on a moving islet, moving upstream. The Rio Grande of Mindanao which led in less than a long, long hour to the city of Cotabato, wonderful enough to be an exclamation point. The islet then became a tiny rocking promontory, but only for two or three hours, just time for you to eat a pie and drink an orange with your old Mama in a small restaurant, and then the tiny promontory became a moving islet again, moving down this time, to the mouth of the river and into the sea where finally it became what it had been all the time, a little princess or don of a boat whose name now you cannot remember, only that it was bound to Zamboanga, buoyant with gossamer raindrops, the lavender of Alpine evaporated, kisses, clear water, the salt of childhood tears. Where was your name? did it, too, trail behind and away in the sea—float with that empty tin Alpine, violet, a foundling among the flying fish? It’s all sea and sky and the elements did not even laugh at the smallness of the boat, did not even ripple, much less at the foundling, and at your name that was all you left, trailing back to Pagadian, and all you looked, all you were amoeba-fashion in Zamboanga Zamboanga Zamboanga. Manila, 1976


The Reader

[Version 1. From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] A Close-up of the Reader The reader is snoring. If you didn’t hear him snoring you would think that he was wide awake. For his eyes are wide open. Moreover, he is reading a story. The word for it is somnambulism. But the reader is not walking about. He hates walking about. He just likes to read. So it’s not somnambulism. It is something else. A Partial Description of the Reader’s Syndrome The moment he reads he falls—he has fallen—into a dream. It is a dream so deep and so life like it never occurs to him he is dreaming. Not for a moment. Presently he begin to snore with eyes wide open. Of Time and the Reader It was late in the morning when the reader woke up. Through the open window he could tell that the sun was high up—-though he couldn’t see it—-because it was, if the expression may be allowed, raining daylight. It must be eleven-thirty, he calculated. He rose, wobbled, poked his head out of the window to look at the sun’s position in the sky first when his watch was within reach—but he looked at the sun, just the same, with in fact some insolence. Smitten, he plunged back into the room’s soft shadows and sat on his bed with a moan. He shut his eyes, pressed his eyelids with his palms, and waited for the clash of eyes and sun to subside. Then he reached for his watch. It was eleven-thirty. The reader bottled up. 1. He is late for an appointment. 2. Or amazed that he was able to guess the time. 3. And/or. He brushed his teeth of omens. Of, though it was quiet, voices in the air. He brushed his teeth energetically. Then stopped to look at his toothbrush. He suddenly remembered times when he had inadvertently used somebody else’s toothbrush—a weird experience, as readers who have at one time or another made the mistake will attest. He looked at his toothbrush a rejoiced that it was his. At the certitude that it was his. He brushed his teeth mightily, magnificently. Magnificence by Estrella Alfron, he thought. After Donald Barthelme He is reading Henry David Thoreau. At random: “Men learn to read to serve a paltry convenience—as they learn to cipher in order to keep accounts—but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little. They dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading.”


The reader stands up and looks at himself in the mirror. Described by a Lady Writer “I met him only once. It was at an Odette Alcantara party in Cubao. He was shy. He sat quietly though the evening hardly saying a word or doing anything that would steal your attention. But he was intense all right. He sat in his chair like Ygdrasil, the tree whose roots and branches bind together earth, heaven and hill. And when he looked at you he was appealing in his own way. Galactopoietic. Tending to promote the secretion of milk. The Reader As Poet “It was many and many a year ago/ In a castle by the sea/ That a vampire there lived whom you may know/ By the name of Christopher Lee.” Has the Reader Eaten? Readers over the centuries have universally admired a detail in Homer’s Mad which, so the perception goes, is the touch that makes Homer the supreme poet, the supreme story-teller, of humanity. The reader is no exception. He knows by heart the key to Homer’s greatness as found in Book XXIV of the lliad. Achillers, after the confrontation with Priam over the fate of Hector’s body—a scene so full of pathos, so overflowing with Homer’s tragic vision of life, so fraught with a final sense and humiliation, of passion and compassion, of the hubris that elevates and topples, topples and elevates—bounds up as if he might seize Priam by the throat or as if he might sommerssault out of the very page saying, to Priam, that it is time to eat. “Allmango,” the reader ordered. The Story of Pax Lazarus It was by all standards a late lunch. Even so it was the reader’s breakfast. In contrast, two men two tables away were having an early beer. One was telling the other a story: how he was not able to cash a check at the bank that morning because he’d forgotten to bring his ID. The reader, overhearing the conversation, followed the story with secret interest. Felt an immediate sympathy—that had happened to him too a number of times: place insisting on his ID and he didn’t have it—for the man. Who turned out to be Pax Lazarus of DDT. —I’m the same Paz Lazarus you hear every morning on DDT. Earliest morning newscast on television throughout the county. If you’ve watched it, I don’t have to show you my ID, do I? —I don’t have a tv set, sir. Not having a tv set either, the reader’s symphathies got mixed up somewhat. “Finally I just said ‘But I am Pax Lazarus!’ and left.” The other man nodded. “I’m of the mind to put that in my news tomorrow. What if I do that? I’ll say ‘Good morning friends nationwide. This is Pax Lazarus with the top national and international news. But first let me tell you a little story.’ Then I’ll relate it. I’ll look at the camera and talk straight to the teller.”


Pax Lazarus’ companion grinned. “You’re forgetting that he doesn’t have a tv set. “On the way home I actually, for one moment, doubted if I was Pax Lazarus. You won’t believe it. I was waiting for a taxi when it happened. I suddenly found myself thinking: What if I really am not Paz Lazarus? The idea was so funny that I laughed. I laughed aloud. People looked at me and laughed too. One of them said ‘That’s Pax Lazarus of DDT!” “But Paz, the teller was only protecting your money. Suppose someone else goes in and says he is Pax Lazarus—and suppose that teller believes him. There goes your money. That’s the noble idea of the ID, to protect us from impostors, I wouldn’t want anyone to go around claiming he’s me!” I don’t know about that, the reader thought. If someone posed as me I’d feel flattered. The Reader in Love

-

— Hello. - Yes? - May I speak to you? - Who? - You. - Would you like to talk to my mother? - How old is she? - She’s only in her late twenties. - You must be precious. - No. She was. - That’s clever. What’s your name? - Name. - Yes. - You don’t understand. My name is Name. - Name? Name’s your name? - Yes. - Name! Could be. Of course that’s your nickname. - Yes. - Nick nickname. Very original. So what’s your real name? - Nickname. - Nickname! - Yes. - Nickname’s your real name and Name’s your name! - They couldn’t call me Nick because Nick’s a man’s name. So it’s Name. For short. - Well, I’m Alfredo. - Alfredo. Alfredo who? - Alfredo. - Yes. Alfredo who? You don’t understand. Alfredo Alfredo. My first name is Alfredo and my family name is Alfredo. In fact it’s Alfredo Alfredo Alfredo, my mother’s maiden name being Alfredo too. No relation. Just happened to have the same family name. Now when Mr. Alfredo and Mrs. Alfredo (mee Miss Alfredo) had their first child, a boy, they decided to name him Alfredo. Me. It sounds very persistent. Like memory itself.


-

-

-

-

-

- It’s unbeatable. I don’t know about that. There’s a lady in the neighborhood. Her name is Miss Vierness Sabado. She’s getting married next week, to a Mr. Domingo. After the wedding she’ll be Viernes Sabado Domingo. - Sounds like a very busy lady. - Not yet. Not until next week. She believes in virginity. - Well I’m busy and I don’t. If you don’t mind. - You mean you’re not a virgin? I do mind. A little. Precious little. - Goodbye. - Wait! It’s terrible. - What’s terrible? - Don’t you think it’s terrible? - What don’t I think is terrible? When people whose lines cross decide to talk for a while sharing the world’s most original names and it ends like that. Not even knowing each other’s name—no matter how unoriginal. - It happens all the time. It happens all the time—but it’s terrible nonetheless. In fact, that makes it doubly terrible. Here I am talking to you. Hello. - Hello. And there you are talking to me. We’re talking and while we’re talking there’s nothing more real to us than us. It’s not possible to do anything else when you’re on the phone. Unless you’re a whiz at simultaneous loading like Richard Jenkins. Burton. Nothing is more jarring than when someone else comes along and says something to you—something lengthy—and you try to accommodate him. The phone demands total concentration. Right now I am reality to you. And nothing else is. Because I have all your attention. Then you hang up or I hang up. What happened? A complete reversal. You drop back into the void. - The what? The void. They call it the void. Meaning nothingness. You drop back into nothingness. You become to me, nothing. And vice-versa. We’ll be to each other no more than a dream. But of course we are not. That’s what makes it terrible. You will still be in some place, some village some street in this terrific city that I don’t know. Even if were there. For we might even cross paths, brush up against each other who knows in some corner, a sidewalk, and we would be no more aware of it than zombies, unless perhaps God intervenes. So that it’s perfectly right to say either of these two contradictory things: we are and we are not. That’s it. That’s what happens when you hang up. It gives you an insight into things as they are. Or maybe I should say things as they are not. This big, terrific city is really for all its terrific bigness nothing. And all it takes is a gentle hanging up of the telephone. - You’re funny. You sound ready to be friends. But let’s not do it. Let’s not be. First, it might sound as if merely wanted us to know each other is all. That would make my metaphysics insincere. Second, it would be a cliché. Two strangers meeting by chance and becoming friends in the end. Cliché. Makes the whole thing, he-ha-ho-he, unreal. The real thing is to hang up without getting to know each other. We shall, at the very least, have the insight I was telling you about. That people in their ordinary telephone insensitivity don’t even have a glimmer of. We’ll be privileged. We’ll have it to add to our treasury of strange memories. We will, for the rest of our lives, be saying—you: “I once talked to a strange man who sounded both desperately lonely


-

-

and incomparably calm at the same time and I never got to know his name.” Me: “I once talked to a girl with a voice like honey and I never got to know her name, much less hold her hand (John Lennon) or nuzzle in her hair (Jun Lansang).” You: “He seemed normal enough and nice enough, nonetheless. Really I wouldn’t have minded if we had become friends.” Me: “She seemed friendly enough. If I had not been too complicated, perhaps I would have known her.” You: “He was funny. He seemed to be groping for something to say all the time and yet I could see him holding a script with his two hands, cradling the phone between his ear and shoulder.” Me: “She had the treacherous docility of toy balloons that could, in one careless lapse, slip from your hands and recede into the afternoon—for it was afternoon—sky forever.” You: “I miss him.” Me: “What the hell.” - Don’t take it so hard. - Let me try and guess your name before we hang up. Just a game. - Okay. - Esme? - No. - Rima? - No. - Catherine? - No. - Dulcinea. - No. - Gretchen. - No. - Penthesilea. - Goodness, no. - Lara? - No. - Egypt. - What? - Egypt? - Natalia. - Yes! How did you guess? - Alam mo naman tayo. - No, really, how? Those were names from books. Dulcinea’s from Don Quixote. Gretchen from Faust. Rima is from Green Mansions and Esme from s short-story by J.D Salinger. To Esme With Love and Squalor. Lara comes from Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak; Penthesilea, from Heinrich von Kleist, the German poet, a most astonishing man. So does Natalia. She’s the girl in Kleist’s masterpiece. The Prince of Homburg. Princess Natalia of Orange. Except that you have the same name and so I guessed right. What Anthony Burgess, a living novelist, means perhaps when, first page of his promise-fulfilling Earthly Powers, he says “actuality sometimes plays into the hands of Art.” Apparently you did. Or rather your name did. If it didn’t I would have rattled on. Catherine is from Wuthering Heights of course. - And Egypt? Shakespeare. That’s what Anthony called Cleopatra at the end, as he was dying. He called her Egypt. I’m dying, Egypt, dying. [MISSING PAGES, BAD ITALICIZATION]



The Reader

[Version 2. From Checkmeta, 2004] A Close-up of the Reader The reader is snoring. If you didn’t hear him snoring you would think that he was awake. For his eyes are wide open. Moreover he is reading a story. The word for it is somnambulism. But the reader is not walking about. He hates walking about. He just like to read. So it’s not sonambulism. It is something else. Partial Description of the Reader’s Syndrome The moment he read he falls—he has fallen—into a dream. It is a dream / so deep and so life-like it never occur to him that he is dreaming. Not / for a moment. Presently he begins to snore with his eyes wide open. Of time and the Reader It was late in the morning when the reader woke up. Through the open window he could tell that the sun was high up—though he couldn’t see it—because it was, if the expression may be allowed, raining daylight. It must be eleven thirty, he calculated. He rose, wobbled, poke his head out of the window to look for the sun. There it was. It was a little odd that he should look at the sun’s position in the sky first when his watch was within reach—but he looked at the sun just the same, with in fact some insolence. Smitten, he plunged back into the room’s soft shadows (end page 12) (start page 13) and sat on his bed with a moan. He shut his eyes, press his eyelids with his palms, and waited for the clash of eyes and sun to subside. Then he reached for his watch. It was eleven-thirty. The reader bolted up. 1. He is late for an appointment 2. Or amazed that he was able to guess the time. 3. And/or. It seemed a day of omens. Of, though it was quiet, voices in the air. He brushed his teeth energetically. Then stopped to look at his toothbrush. He suddenly remembered time when he had inadvetently used somebody else’s toothbrush—a weird experience, as readers who have at one time or another made the mistake will attest. He looked at his toothbrush and rejoice that it was his. At the certitude that it was his. He brushed his teeth mightily, magnificently. Magnificence by Estrella Alfon, he thought.


After Donald Barthelme He is reading Henry David Thoreau. At random: “Men learn to read to serve paltry convenience—as they learn to cipher in order to keep accounts—but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know the little. They dissipate their faculties in what we called easy reading.” The reader stands up and look at himself in the mirror. Described by a Lady Writer “I met him only once. It was at an Odette Alcantara party in Cubao. He was shy. He sat quitely through the evening hardly saying a word or doing anything that would steal your attention. But he was intense all right. He sat in his chair like Ygdrasil, the tree whoose roots and branches bind together earth, heaven and hell. And when he looked at you he was appealing in his own way. Galactopoeitic. Tending to promote the section of milk.” The Reader as a Poet It was many and many a year ago In a castle by the sea (end page 13) That a vampire there lived (start page 14) whom you may know By the name of Christopher Lee. A Reader’s Digest Readers over the centuries have universally admired a detail in Homer’s Iliad which, so the perception goes, is the touch that makes Homer the supreme poet, the storyteller of humanity. The reader is no exception. He knows by heart the key to Homer’s greatness as found in book XXIV of the Iliad. Achilles, after confontation with Priam over the fate of Hector’s body—a scene so full of pathos, so overflowing with Homer’s tragic vision of life, so fraught with a final sense of terror and the beauty and the madness of it all, of grandeur and humiliation, of passion and compassion, of the hubris that elevates and topples, topples and elevates—bound up as if he might sieze Priam by the throat or as if he might somersault out of the very page saying to Priam, that it is time to eat. “Alimango,” the reader ordered. The Story of Pax Lazarus It was by all standards a late lunch. Even so it was the reader’s breakfast. In contrast, two men two tables away were having an early beer. One was telling the other a story: how he was unable to cash a check at the bank that morning because he’d forgotten to bring his ID. The reader, overhearing the conversation, followed the story with secret interest. He felt an immediate sympathy for the man—that


happened to him too countless times: places insisting on his ID and he didn’t have it —who turned out to be Pax Lazarus, the TV newscaster. -I’m the guy you see and hear every evening on TV. The number one newscast on television throughout the country. If you’ve watched it , I don’t’ have to show you my ID, do I? —I don’t have a TV set, sir. Not having a television set either, the reader’s sympathies got mixed up somewhat. “Finally I just said But I am Pax Lazarus! and left.” The other man nodded. “I’m of the mind to put that in my newscast tonight. What if I do that? I’ll say Good evening friends nationwide. I’m Pax Lazarus with the top national and international news. But first let me tell you this story. Then I’ll relate it. I’ll look at the camera and talk straight to that teller.” Pax Lazarus’ companioned grinned. “You’re forgetting that he doesn’t have a TV set. “On the way home I actually, for one moment, doubted that I was Pax Lazarus. You won’t believe it. I was waiting for a taxi when it happened. I suddenly found myself thinking, What if I am not Pax Lazarus? The idea was so funny that I laughed. One of them said That’s Pax Lazarus, the TV newscaster!” “But Pax, the teller was just protecting your money. Suppose someone else had gone in claiming he was Pax Lazarus–and suppose that the teller believed him? That’s the whole idea of the ID, to protect us from impostors. I wouldn’t want anyone to go around and claiming he’s me!” I don’t know about that the reader thought. If someone posed as me I think I’d fell flattered. The Reader In Love –Hello. —Yes? —May I speak to you? —Who? —You. —Would you like me to talk to my mother? —How old is she? —She’s in her late twenties. —You must be precocious. —No. She was. —That’s clever. What’s your name? —Name. —Yes. —You don’t understand. My name is Name. —Name? Name’s your name? —Yes. —Name! Could be. Of course that’s your nickname. —Yes. —Nice Nickname. Very original. So what’s your real name? —Nickname.


—Nickname! —Yes. —Nickname’s your real name and Name’s your nickname! —They couldn’t call me Nick because Nick’s a man’s name. So it’s Name for short. —Well, I’m Alfredo. —Alfredo. Alfredo who? —Alfredo. —Yes. Alfredo who? —You don’t understand. Alfredo Alfredo. My first name is Alfredo and my family name is Alfredo. In fact, it’s Alfredo Alfredo Alfredo, my mother’s maiden name being also Alfredo. No relation. Just happened to have the same family name. Now when Mr. Alfredo and Ms. Alfredo (nee Miss Alfredo) had their first child, a boy, they decided to name him Alfredo. Me. Alfredo Alfredo Alfredo. It sounds very persistent like memory itself. —It’s unbeatable. —I’m not sure it is. There’s a lady in the neighborhood. Her name is Miss Viernes Sabado. She’s getting married next week, to a Mr. Domingo. After the wedding she’ll be Viernes Sabado Domingo. —Sounds like a very busy lady. —Not yet. Not until next week. She believes in virginity. —Well I’m busy and I don’t. If you don’t mind. —You mean you’re not a virgin? I do mind. A little. Precious little. —Goodbye. —Wait! It’s terrible. —What’s terrible? —Don’t you think it’s terrible? —What don’t I think is terrible? —When people whose lines cross decide to talk for a while—and it ends just like that. —It happened all the time. —It happens all the time—but it’s terrible nonetheless. In fact, that makes it doubly terrible. Here I am talking to you. Hello. —And there you are talking to me. We’re talking and while we’re talking there’s nothing more real to us than us. It’s not possible to do anything else when you’re on the phone. Unless you’re a whiz at simultaneous loading like Richard Jenkins. Burton. Nothing is more jarring than when someone else comes along and says something to you—something lengthy—and you try to accommodate him. The phone demands total concentration. Right now I am reality to you. And nothing else is. Because I have all your attention. Then you hang up or I hang up. What happens? A complete reversal. You drop back into the void. —The what? —The void. They call it the void. Meaning nothingness. You drop back into nothingness. You become to me nothing. And vice-versa. We are alone. Face to face with the void, vis-à-vis the abyss. We’ll be to each other the no more than a dream, unreal. But of course we are real. That’s what makes it terrible. You will still be in some place, some village, some street in this terrific city that I don’t know. Even if I were there. For we might even cross paths, brush up against each other who knows in some corner, a sidewalk, and we would be no more aware of it than zombies, unless perhaps God intervenes. So that it’s perfectly right to say either of these two


contradictory things: we are and we are not. That’s it. That’s what happens when you hang up. It gives you insight into things as they are. Or maybe I should say things as they are not. This big terrific city is really for all it’s terrific bigness nothing. and all it takes is a gentle hang up of the telephone. —You’re funny. —You sound ready to be friends. But let’s not do it. Let’s not be. First, it might sound as if I merely wanted us to know each other ia all. That would make my metaphysics insincere. Second it would be a cliché. Two strangers meeting by chance and becoming friends in the end. Cliché. Makes the whole thing, he-ha-hohe, unreal. The real thing is to hang up without getting to know each other. That is getting real. W shall, at that very least, have the insight I’ve just been telling you about. That people in their ordinary telephone insensitivity don’t even have a glimmering of. We’ll be privileged. We’ll have it to add to our treasury of strange memories. We will, for the rest of our lives, be saying: You: “I once talk to a strang man who sounded both desperately lonely and incomparably calm at the same time and I never got to know his name.” Me “I once talked to a girl with a voice like honey and I never got to know her name, much less hold her hand (John Lennon) or nuzzle in her hair (Jun Lansang).” You: “He seemed normal enough and nice enough, noneless. Really I wouldn’t have minded if we had become friends.” Me: “She seemed friendly enough. If I had not been too complicated, perhaps I would have known her.” You: “He was funny. He seemed to be groping for something to say all the time and yet I could see him holding a script with his two hands, cradling the phone between his ear and shoulder.” Me: “she had the treacherous docility of toy balloons that could, in one careless lapse, slip from your hands and recede into the afternoon—-for it was afternoon—-sky forever.” You: “I miss him.” Me: “What the hell.’ —Don’t take it hard. —Let me try guessing your name before we hang up. Just a game. —Okay. —Esme? —No. —Dulcinea. —No. Pa\enthesilea. —Goodness, no. —Calliope. —No. —Tatyana. —Sounds Russian. —It is. Chikako. —Japanese, yes. Plurabelle? —No. —Egypt. —What? —Egypt? —No. —Natalia. —Yes! How in the world were you able to guess? —Natalia is your name? Really? —Yes! —Incredible. But it happens. It just happened.


—Where did you get all those names from? —From books. Esme is from a short-story by J.D. Salinger. To Esme with Love and Squalor. I pronounce that letter s, buy I’ve been told that it’s silent. Plurabelle is from Finnegans wake by James Joyce. Actually it’s Anna Livia Plurabelle. I foreshortened it. Calliope is from Greek myth. Tatyana is from Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin. Chikako is from The House of the Sleeping Beauties by Japanese novelist, Yasunari Kawabata. Let me quote an exquisite sentence from the book, “Whenever he thought of Chikako, even at night, she was wrapped in the blinding light of midsummer.” —Wow! –Penthesilia though originally from Greek myth, is from a play by Heinrich von Kliest, the German poet. So is Natalia. She’s the girl in Kleist’s masterpiece, The Prince of Homburg. Princess Natalia of Orange. What Anthony Burgess means when, first page of his promise-fulfilling Earthly Powers, he says “Actuality sometimes plays into the hands of art.” However, in the case, it appears to be the reverse, i.e. “Art plays into the hands of actuality.” —And Egypt? —Shakespeare. That’s what Anthony called Cleopatra at the end, as she lay dying. He called her Egypt. “I’m dying Egypt, I’m dying.” English in the Philippines/ English from the Philippines Philippine literature in English must be distinguished from Philippine literature in England. The former is literature written in English by Filipinos, two of the best anthologists are T. D. Agcaoili and Leopoldo Yabes. It had its beginnings at the turn of the century when the Americans came to take the place of the Spaniards. Not without a touch of melancholy, Nick Joaquin is of course the most compelling conscience. A Gulliver among Lilliputians, as Teodoro Locsin in happier days described him—a description that some two or decades later, in the 80’s, assumed a melancomic dimension whenever Domingo Landicho, enemy of Philippine literature in English, stood up and took the floor at writers workshops and conferences, Nick Joaquin in the panel fuming. 1 Philippine literature in England is more recent and even more isolated. Ass may you have guessed, it is, quite simply, literature written by Filipinos living in England and written in any of our dialects. It is a very lonely literature but it is not lacking in talent. Offhand one can mention in the stories of the Cebuano Old Testament scholar and verbal magician Noahng Niwang Nawong and the critical essays of Mrs. Nemesis, from Pampanga. Of course it maybe written in English too, in which case it belongs to both categories. It is Philippine literature in England and it is Philippine literature in English. There are quite a few writers residing in Cortez Medalla, to name just two. The most famous, of course, is the London-based poet Zamboangueno poet, Tonio Bonini. As if things in the world were not complicated enough, there is the queer case of British writer, Mr. Manchester Winchester. Mr. Winchester lives in the Philippines—has been a resident of the country for two decades, though about half of that time is actually spent in Belgium since he scuttles back and forth between these two countries. As a young novelist in England, he acquired some notoriety with his autobiographical MW, an amazing novel of some nine-hundred pages all devoted to the description of a single coital


position. “A physical miracle!” said in one critic. “The book can be read upside down!” “Irreverent,” said another. “Full of malice, Mr. Winchester writes as though he’d shoot everything in creation.” “Son of gun!” said third. (Mrs. Mimesis Nemesis, then already living in England, is known to have ignored the book altogether, apparently unable to find words in which, really a Victorian despite her modernist and even postmodernist pretensions, she could properly express her indignation) Like Samuel Beckett, THE Irishman who went to Paris and wrote his works in French, Mr. Winchester somehow found his way to our islands in the fifties and after only five years was writing a novel in—hold your breath—Pilipino. What we have here, incredible as it may seem, is English literature in Pilipino. Our writers did not know how to take it. Then and now. To this day neither our most mellifluent writers in Tagalog nor our least monosyllabic ones in English have uttered anything apropos of Mr. Manchester Winchester. Let alone Mrs. Mimesis Nemesis. Who, at the turn of the fifties, had come with husband Mr. Nemesis and even met, the literary world being very small, Mr. Winchester. Would she react this time? She certainly had no more reason to. Mr. Manchester Winchester seemed (who knows?) to have had her partly in his dirty mind when he made Angeles City in Pampanga the setting of much of the action in the novel which he entitled One Hundred karats. Only the title was English. The entire novel was written in Pilipino. Mrs. anyhow didn’t. It took another Englishman, or rather American—the best-selling science writer Horatio Algae—to say something on the phenomenon of Mr. Winchester. Algae was touring our university campuses lecturing and autographing copies of his book Is There Life? for fanatical fans. The two met up in UP Bagiuo. Then they met again in Maryknoll. And again in Silliman. and again in Ateneo de Zamboanga. They met again and again, everywhere. They even met in the same place twice. “Lightning!” they said. They met in places they were likely to meet, like Pantranco, as well as places they were unlikely to meet, like the Woody Allen fans Club. Neither believed Woody Allen to be, as his admirers claim, a giant of contemporary humor. When Algae left for the States he had written, under Mr. Manchester Winchester’s nose, an article dealing with the English Filipino. Algae’s main point was that he could imagine Mr. Manchester Winchester as having been in a former existence an Aeta but he could not understand, not in his wildest dreams, why writer born (reborn?) into the language of William Shakespeare could forsake the language for one that was beg your pardon primitive—one with which he had, moreover, only a five year like it or not stuttering acquaintance. There could only be one explanation, Mr. Algae hinted and that was lack of talent Mr. MW replied that only one thing he had written in English in years: There Are More Things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, Then Are Dreamt of in English. The article was written with near homicidal, albeit repressed, anger. You could see that the author’s eyes almost popping out of his head like a pair of baby dinosaurs while the rest of him remained rigid as Stonehenge. Mr. Algae’s essay, was published when he was gone, seemed a creping treachery indeed. There were reports reaching Mr. MW that Algae had been seeing Mrs. Mimesis, MW’s Nemesis. Mr. Winchester’s article re-appeared and re-appeared in journal after journal. He spent years and years refining and refining it. In his third version, it underwent a change in title in the title, becoming now What’s It All About, Algae? People thought he had, despite what his article was saying, abandoned writing in Pilipino, thanks to Mr. Algae. The article came out in its definitive version under yet another title: The


Novel is Dead And So Is English. But how come it’s still written in English? The answer was not long in coming. In the late sixties, Mr. Manchester Winchester regaled our literati, as well as non-literati, with the hair-raising Olongapo rock opera Bulbul. “Genius!” raved the Clark air base resident physician, Dr. Isaac Honey Cruise. “Bulbul is a work of genius—or at least a work by a genius. True, there is a difference. But what matters in the end is genius and what is genius? Who can say? How explain the inexplicable> Genius is genius. Genius is bulbul. Or to put it a la Gertrude Stein (a genius)—a genius is a genius is a genius.” Did Algae back in the U.S. of A., hear of it? By then it didn’t matter to Mr. Manchester Winchester anymore who, around this time, contemplated doing his writing, from hereon, in Ilocano. It didn’t bother him either that our writers still did not know what to do or how to even feel about the presence in their midst of an English writer who wrote in Pilipino, let alone contemplated doing his writing hereon, in Ilocano. “From the bottom of my heart,” said Mr. Manchester Winchester with a strange accent, laughing. The Quest of the Historical Reader When the reader disappeared people thought he did a Tyrone Slothrop. Tyrone Slothrop was one of his favorite fictional characters. He is the London-assigned American lieutenant in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow who had this funny erection whenever a German rocket hit London. The erection came before the rcket —which came before its sound. But it was not this that the reader, his friends said, sort of imitated or emulated. It was the other funny thing about Slothrop. Slothrop at the end of the novel disappears. If you remember, he was chase by Major Marvy all over Europe. It’s lieutenant’s wildest chase. You follow Slothrop as he rides his buddy’s beautiful balloon went out of the blue—or is it right there, in the heart of the blue—there materializes a reconnaissance plane serenading them first with son then with bullets. Slothrop and buddy fight back with custard pies and bring the bloody reconnaissance fucking plane down... …Gets gagged with every known English confection, fights, wearing a sexy Hawaiian polo shirt, an octopus from beneath the sea, ships across the Baltic, travels in Europe on foot with a pig, explodes inside every girl he meets—a whole, veritable map of them—not the least willing of whom is an eleven—year-old nymphet. Major Marvy’s mission was to capture and castrate him—take his, Slothrop’s, testicles to Pointsman the Pavlovian who intended to study them and thereby find a way to neutralize the German rockets. Well, Pointsman, by sheer unluck, got his, Marvy’s—testicles instead. They never caught Slothrop. Or did they? Slothrop just disappeared. In more than the usual sense of word. For how could you even disappear if you wete never in the first place. You find out at novel’s end that—pop! —there really has been no Lt. Tyrone Slothrop all along. Some of Slothrop companion saw it coming though they did not know what it was, let alone know in Pynchon’s knowing technical terms. They notice how his temporal bandwidth was shrinking, getting thinner and thinner. “Temporal bandwidth,” says Pynchon, “is the width of your present, your now. The more you dwell in the past and the future, the more solid you persona. But the narrower you sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.”


The reader, according to Baguio painter Darnay Demetillo’s account, was desperately racing with one morning after breakfast in search of something as he was leaving for school. He surveyed every conceivable angle of the house in vain, going back and forth, back and forth “What is it?” early to rise early to gin Darnay Demitillo asked. “The book I’m reading, God—I was just holding it a while ago.” “You’re carrying it, the one against your thumb.” So, some five years later, towards the end of November 1981, the story was the reader did a Slothrop. Nevertheless the truth of his whereabouts, though incomplete, surfaced not so long after he vanished. The reader had gone into seclusion. What for? To read a story. What story? It is not known. Until now. What is known is that he is reading it with intensity unprecedented in his life. He’s been known to be maniac reader before. But maniac readers, when you get down to it, are a dime a dozen. It’s not a matter of mania. It goes beyond. There has never been a reading like this one. It is said that he was reading it like a matter of life and death—in fact, as if it were a matter of the afterlife and the second death. “As one should when one is reading,” remarks Willy Sanchez. “But why should it take so long?” Joecarr asked. “Why should one go into hiding—into location shooting, if I may put it that way—just to read a story?” “To read is to going into hiding,” says Willy Sanchez before Willie Arsena can open his mouth. “It’s not a story,” a Palnaca judged speaks out. “It’s an essay.” “A long essay, yes. Second Thoughts On Hindu Theosophy,”I chips in Boy Sampana. “He is reading it real slow,” says Erwin Castillo. “I know him. He’s slow.” “Except when he eats,” says Krip Yuson. His slowness shall leave speed laboring behind. There is a moment of silent as this unspoken wish runs through the reader’s mind—broken abruptly by the next speaker. “At this moment?” booms Nick Joaquin. “At this moment he’s at North Pole, reading. Reading me! I bet you don’t know where the North Pole is. The North Pole is in Dumaguete. What are you crazy?” “Sometimes,” Pepito Bosch, eyes around as the Second Coming: “I’am invaded by a feeling that what lies at the core of a person’s fate, whosoever’s, amounts to nothing more eventually than a bright addition to someone else’s erosoteric vocabulary. An orgiastic wordboy, an obsessive-compulsive punmonster, a born Webster’s New Dictionary! Not acquired or stolen. Where upon a dizzy series of feelings—better yet, a dizzying simultaneity of conterminous feelings, all lazy children of the vionary original, would swirl inside me like Jackson Pollock, all clamoring for legitimacy, sense, meaning, brightness, action. Metaphysical jailbreak. Imaginary convicts. Notes from the ground of being and nothingness. You know, I mean—” What? The story he is reading is the one he exist in. But if the story existed, the reader cannot possibly read it. Because then he’d be imaginary—resemblance to anyone is purely coincidental. And therefore the story does not exist. Nevertheless it does. And nevertheless he’s reading it. He sits in a corner of a two-way street watching his life go by. It’s five in the afternoon, past, and there’s not a face he knows. He feels unspeakably lonesome. He wonders how long he can hold on. It is April and love is full of brown leaves.


He feels as abandoned as Juan Serrano when the savage Cebuanos tattooed his penis with all sorts of figures. He has a vision of the beach on a wonderful Sunday filled with people all reading a paperback. He remembers Leon Kilat talking to Aya. ‘Aya-Bong, you’re gonna be a nervous person when you grow up. Your mother is very nervous and I’m very nervous. But just remember one thing. As long as you can sing in the bathroom you’re okay.’ The story of course, is fantasy. But the reader is not. He is, as he has always been and ever will be, real Or rather as long as he lives—and as long as he reads. For he is the man who’d read all, if only he had the time—including his thing and doing it in the only way he can. Impossibly. As male ants grow wings for love, as Einstein fused physics with mathematics.


The Seventh Floor [From Sands & Coral, 1996]

[MISSING]


Stories [Version 1. From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] What I am about to set down consists of three stories which I had originally wanted to write separately. How I came to think of weaving them together is not easy to answer. The first two were stories I had heard almost twenty years ago and could not get around to writing for such an unbelievable length of time. One day I understood that I’d never be able to write them and that perhaps this was the story I could write. I remember the occasion on which the idea occurred to me. I was talking to another literary person, in fact a gifted young girl from Manila well on her way to the writing vocation. I found myself telling her the two stories. I don’t remember having done it before, though I am fairly given to talking about stories I contemplated writing to friends. When I had finished I realized that what held my listener’s interest was not just the stories themselves but me telling them together. “Perhaps I should write them together,” I said with the enthusiasm of one who had faintly but unmistakably struck something. When days passed and the terror of the empty, white paper began to grow on me, when I began to suspect that this new story—the story of a writer and the two stories he could not get around to writing for twenty years—was headed for the same fate, the same limbo, I decided to hurl myself into the wilderness. In the confusion I involuntarily recovered two memories —one resplendent and the other shameful. I also tied in the third, which is the longest and of which I do not have to speak at this point. Back in 1972, when I taught at Silliman for the first time, I formed a companionship with four other young men with whom I had nothing in common but an addiction: chess. The friendship was so close we were soon addicted not only to the game but to being together. For days on end, when there would be a string of holidays, we would eat, sleep, talk, play chess, gallivant, do evil things together. Chess is more often than not the passion of a lonely man. In our case, the loneliness became collective, if such a thing can be conceived—we were a pack of lone wolves. Martial law, imposed by Marcos late that year, abetted it, as did the success of the solipsistic Bobby Fischer. I’ll heartlessly cut myself short on this part of my life to which belongs some of my fondest memories, since my business is only to relate where and how I got the two stories mentioned above. I heard them from two of my friends, on those nights when not even the fatigue of playing chess all day could relieve the torment of our own sap and we would spend the night talking about all sorts of things until dawn. The first came from Nestor Rimando and happened in Davao where he came from and where he is back. In the almost twenty years since our time in Dumaguete I have seen him again only twice—once in Manila and once when he visited Dumaguete in 1987. The second was told by Odelon Ontal, who lives until now in Dumaguete and who has forgotten his story. Both have married and have children; I have remained a bachelor, grown adept at gentle ways of coping with, in the phrase of Erwin Castillo, the terror of being unloved. Rimando’s story can be sketched in a paragraph. In Davao in either the late sixties or early seventies (Rimando was not specific) a madwoman slept her nights at the market, where the tables in the meat section provided her with a bed. Let us assign her the age of twenty-eight and long, lice-infested hair. You have seen her,


grimy, reposing on the pavement like an obscene bat, her eyes somehow never meeting yours. You never hear her voice either, even when she laughs and you wonder who knocked her teeth down. One day you see her with a swollen belly and although it comes as a shock you don’t find yourself wondering very long who the father is. Not even the coming baby mitigates her status as a nightmare, without substance. In Rimando’s story she gives birth to her child towards daybreak. The market vendors who had come early saw her deflated belly but were baffled that the child could not be found. Suddenly their minds froze, struck by lightning. They had not understood the blood on the table where she had slept and now they looked with horror at the dog sitting not far from where she was. As in Rimando’s case, Ontal had not actually witnessed the story he told us and which, as I’ve said, he has forgotten. A very young couple—the husband about fifteen and the wife fourteen or thirteen—had come to Dumaguete for the husband who was sick to be confined and treated in a hospital. They came with ample money, but one somehow got the impression that it represented all their possession. They took a common room, which explains how their story came to be known. On the first day of his confinement, a group of young girls, probably students from Silliman dropping in to visit another patient in the room, find themselves flocking around the boy-husband from the barrio. It is not hard to understand why they instantly take to him. They like his rustic ways; they are astonished, themselves not much older than he, to find one so young—just a little boy really— already married; they feel protective, motherly. Perhaps, too, the boy is dying. Let us call him Kip. It is five in the afternoon and Kip, waiting for his wife Moning to come back, has brightened up only too visibly. One or two of the girls are pretty. And Kip’s happiness, in turn, has set loose even in the shyer ones the floodgates of a hitherto unsuspected sweetness. It is in the midst of this that Moning comes back with a friend she has just acquired, a girl of eight, and the things they bought at the market. There is an awkwardness but Kip’s friends do not feel uncomfortable. They look at her with great interest and find her shyness just as poignant, except that of course she is not the patient and, moreover, they have to go. Moning goes out of the room soon after they do to see her little friend—who keeps throwing looks at Kip —to the gate. She does not return—neither in the evening as Kip keeps hoping she will, nor the next day, nor the day after the next until it is afternoon. Kip runs a whole spectrum of feelings—all shades of grey and black. First alarm, then anger, worry, fear, bewilderment, oppression, fury, pain. To assuage the torment, he imagines himself dead and the thought of Moning crazed with grief strangely revives his appetite to eat. It is an exaggeration to say that he ages in three days, but at certain moments we see a grown-up quality or manner that we failed to notice earlier, even when he’s not doing anything, propped up and stockstill, pensive in his bed. When Moning finally comes back, the joy he feels is outweighed, outwardly, by the need to express his outrage and maintain a touching dignity. He weeps at last and says, in a quiet voice, “Ako pay mamatay, ako pay ingnon mi!” (Roughly, “I’m the one who’s going to die and I’m the one who’s treated this way!”) Moning, eyes downcast, wants to hold and press his hand but his spare reproach totally wilts her. These were the two stories. When I first pondered Rimando’s story, I conceived of the following idea: The story would be seen through a third-person point of view. This person is gradually revealed to be the father of the baby, and the


revelation will be subtle, almost just hinted, but clear towards the end. I’m glad this didn’t materialize. It seems to promise bathos. My present attitude indicates that I wish to preserve the story’s gruesome quality. Despite the ironclad objection: what for should one write a merely cruel story? There are hundreds of other such incidents, dizzying in their fiendishness, that have happened and can happen on this planet. Even in the realm of fact, the number of such cases may well approach the infinite. Thus the absurdity of a news item with such a subject in which the reporter pretends to be moved by the uncanny. And yet I remain infatuated with Rimando’s story as is—raw, uninvented, fact. Why? Once in life I woke in the wee hours of the morning and heard from somewhere a baby’s cooing and laughter and knew it to be the most beautiful sound on earth or in heaven. Many years later I took to asking girls I liked what they thought was the loveliest sound they’d ever heard. A bird’s chirping was usually the answer. At other times, the sound of surf. Or early morning rain that made them linger in bed. There were others I’ve forgotten. Only one, if memory is not fooling, got it right—Emy. How could a baby deserve either such a grisly end or such a loathsome origin as had the one in Rimando’s story? What possible virtue is there in telling of how it was so literally wiped out the moment it was born? Ontal’s story, too, is disturbingly open-ended. Even if its tenderness tends to counterpoint, to allay the ferocity of the other. Ontal said no one seemed to know what happened afterwards when the young couple had gone back to the barrio where they came from. This open-endedness—Kip’s possible death—hovers over the story with the same menace that the woman’s madness, the unknown father’s lust, and the dog’s appetite in Rimando’s story hold for us. Here too my baby gurgles amid demons. Is this therefore why the two stories had been thrown into my hands —not by accident but because to me had been delivered the task of seeing them as connected? If Kip dies, the two tell the same story—Kip is the baby who is devoured by a dog—and I brood on the evil that unites them; Ontal didn’t have to tell his. If Kip lives, the two stories exclude—worse, annihilate—each other; Kip is the baby whose cooing, gurgling laughter work me up one magic, epiphanous night in my life —but Rimando, as well as Ontal, had to tell his. I must find a third. Unlike Ontal’s and Rimando’s, it is a story I have seen. In fact, it is a story I alone have seen. For the two people in it—a man and a woman who casually crossed my path quite recently (only late last year) never met, neither one knew the other existed. Moreover, one is mad and the other dead. I believe their fates conjoined, and that it was I who brought this conjunction about—or rather my old, black jacket. It seems like a delirium and perhaps it is. Before getting round to it, I add a few necessary details about myself. I am forty-three, I teach part-time in Silliman. I live with a maid and my two parents. My mother has had a stroke and asthma has wrought on my father an almost equal devastation. One afternoon I woke from a nap hearing some rock group on the cassette tape recorder and slowly making out the voices that drifted to my room. They were those of my father and a younger man, a man I didn’t know. The conversation was in Chabacano and my father was talking with more animation than usual. My parents have not lived in Dumaguete as long as I, and at their age do not get to meet too many people any more. Whenever someone happens along who comes


from Zamboanga, their spirit is buoyed up, as though old times had returned. I tarried in bed for a while more, unable to help from eavesdropping. I gathered that the visitor had come in to fix the tape recorder, that his name was William, that he was an ex-soldier, that he (rather vaguely) was a CAFGU, that he worked as radio technician and operator at the military headquarters in Agan-an. I couldn’t avoid meeting his stare at once when I opened the door, they were sitting right-across from my room and he was facing my way. He was a slight man who looked as boyish as his voice, but the face, with its high cheekbones, had a menacing quality that impressed me greatly. He had the eyes of a man who lived with evil smells, or who was used to the sight of gore. But perhaps the cold, removed stare came from sheer hard times and I had overlooked it. I dwell on it at length because it was the only time I really looked at his face. He was to be seen in the house often after that, gladly fixing—after the tape recorder—the television set and the walkie-talkie which he had dug up while puttering around the storeroom. He always declined to join us whenever he happened to be around at mealtime, settling instead for a cup of coffee. Sometimes he’d doze off on the bench in the kitchen when, apparently exhausted from staying up late at some gambling place, he’d show up early in the morning. At other times, he’d spend the night at our place, sleeping on the bench which had become his bed. We soon realized, though we never asked him, that he was not living in any particular place—that there probably were other houses where he could sleep from time to time. But once a man who knew us asked me if it was true William was living with us. William had given our place as his address, care of my father who was a retired police major. And indeed he did his laundry at our place and kept some clothes in the storeroom. I do not know if those were all the clothes he had. William told us he was a widower. He said his wife had died of tuberculosis. At the time he said this I thought it sounded like a good forecast of how he himself was going to die soon. He was very thin and always looked overwrought. He did die soon after, but not as I thought. His wife left him no child. He said his wife’s parents were from Negros and lived in the nearby town of Valencia, and that his own mother, who was in Zamboanga, originally came from Dumaguete. We believed him. He spoke Chabacano and Cebuano very fluently—both with a rural accent, which astonished my father who is a Zamboangueño and my mother who is a Cebuana—oblivious that, though it’s true it was unusual, so did I, though neither with a rural accent. This will do for William. He is a dead man when I take him up again. Vastly different, we did not become friends. The only form of closeness we had was my lending him small sums which he was too shy to borrow from my parents. He never paid and I never expected him to. Just as we never paid him for fixing the television set and the tape recorder and the walkie-talkie and he never, I’m sure, expected us to. For certain episodes in the past that we carry through life, memories is an inaccurate word; rather they constitute an ever lingering, bright present, separation or estrangement from which we are forced to admit only by the unappealable decline of our physical bodies. And then we feel as if perhaps we already have died. Others are matters of complete indifference. They could be as recent as a year ago but the faces that beam at us on a chance re-encounter are veritable abysses. As are the names. “Ester Lim?” “She says you were together in some writers conference in Manila.” “Is she going to be in the program?”


“She’s just passing by. She’s on her way to Manila. She was looking for Marj.” “If she didn’t know Marj is the Manila, she may have been just checking her out, too, from way back when.” “Yes, that seems to be it. When I told her Marj is in Manila she appeared very excited and took her address. And then she sounded like she was going to Manila just to see her.” “I’ll get back to the office. They might be there.” “Lina was giving her directions to your house. She’s probably there now. That was almost two hours ago.” “Oh. Okay, I’m going home then.” “You can see that she’s odd, but she’s all right I think. Most people will get a more extreme impression after talking to her. She’s been through some terrible time. She’ll be telling you.” “I’d have preferred to talk to her somewhere else though.” “Lina told her to go back to her if it’s no go at your place. I would have taken her in but you know there’s literally no room for her here.” “It’s going to be difficult. You don’t know my father. He’s a cop. But I know where we can take her to.” By ten in the evening Ester Lim was out of my hands. I had ample opportunity, that evening, to know just how mad she was. She was in her late twenties and I wondered why I absolutely couldn’t recall her from the writers seminar that we attended together. At the least, she must have been a pleasant kid to look at, and even now hell, which it was clear she was wobbling in, hadn’t taken away the sparkle from her eyes. She had a vague expression of physical pain on her face that became oddly pronounced when she smiled, which was often. After speaking, she would bend her forehead slightly forward—and somewhat askew—as if swallowing, her eyes not leaving yours and smiling with the queer pain. Perhaps reading my mind she explained that she had inflamed sinuses. I found out that she had stomach spasms besides. My hair almost stood at the way she consumed the entire loaf of sliced bread when I bought her a snack, ignoring the canned fish and the noodles which she ate after. At nine there are no more cheap eating houses open in Dumaguete and I didn’t have much money. Also, I was hoping Mrs. Tan, in whose house she would be staying, would feed her. (It amused me that she was Miss Lim and her hostess was Mrs. Tan. Mrs. Tan was head of some fundamentalist church organization on the campus.) Ester Lim was going to Manila to seek help over a nephew whom she claimed her brother, the father, physically tortured. She said her nephew wanted her to take him but there was no way she could fight her brother. He had many connections in their place and was able to convince everybody that she was insane. I asked her what exactly it was she wanted done about her nephew. If she wanted custody, I said, she was certain to lose. She said of course that was the sure way to lose, and went into a detailed explanation of her plan which struck me for its legal shrewdness and clarity. I realized later that this lucidity, which must have impressed people she met for the first time, could be seen in a more sinister light. But at the moment I must have been visibly impressed, for her manner assumed a certain preening and soon she was telling me that her fight wouldn’t end with her nephew. She was going to start her crusade against child abuse. I cleared my throat and told her surely there was some organization in Manila doing that sort of thing and it shouldn’t be too hard for her to find her bearings there after all. This seemed to please her further, but at the same time I couldn’t


help feeling she was holding back some tremendously good thing that I was not even beginning to understand. I wasn’t wrong. And I was not kept waiting. She began to tell me about the evil in her place, La Carlota, and my mind involuntarily flitted back to the half-amused, half-bewildered face of my mother earlier in the house when I had gone home and found her with Ester Lim. “As long as the Beast is loose, the children of the world will suffer.” Mrs. Tan’s house was in the outskirts of the town and tricycles would go only up to a certain point. There was no moon (missing emblem of madness) but the light from the electric posts made the green grass in the vacant lots all around us visible. Ester Lim continued: “I can’t lose, it’s in the Scripture: And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars....” She had turned her face to me and it bore the same expression, only more outrageous: it was as if she was looking at me and smiling though her tears. I heard my voice saying, “Don’t say a word of that to Mrs. Tan’s family. They’re very nice people; realize that they are taking you in, a stranger, out of kindness. You’re lucky, but if you tell them that, it could make things unpleasant.” “Why?” she asked. I saw that I was unnecessarily taking a further step in getting mixed up with a lunatic. “Do you really care for your nephew?” I asked. “Yes,” she said. “Then don’t say what you’ve just told me to anyone. Keep it to yourself or else, believe me, you are going to fail. You won’t even survive in Manila.” “Why?” she asked again, and finally I said, “They’ll think you mad. That’s what happened back in your place. With that story you yourself, not your brother, convinced them you’re mad.” I uttered the word mad casually, to make it sound as if I was very far from believing it. “I see,” she said thoughtfully, slowing down her steps somewhat. “It’s a real problem.” She seemed to brace herself before going on and then she asked me, “Do you believe what I just told you?” Crazily polite (allow me some madness of my own), I groped. “I don’t know. Yes and no perhaps. You’re entitled to what you believe is your vocation. But you can’t be literal about these things. Anyway it’s out of my range. It’s a thing between you and God.” This must have satisfied her for she changed the topic. “You’re right about Mrs. Tan and her family. I never knew such people existed. But that little child of hers—there’s something troubling her. Her eyes look disturbed.” A horrible thought entered my mind, but I quelled it. “You really didn’t have to trouble yourself too much over me. I just wanted to find out how you are after all these years.” She was rambling, somewhat sprightly all of a sudden. But Ester Lim fired her last shot for the evening and I was not prepared for it. “I feel cold,” she said. “Please hold me.” Or perhaps I was. Without a moment’s hesitation, I took off my jacket and gave it to her. All the repulsion that had been gathering inside me now slapped me like a wind. I knew even then that I wouldn’t be wearing the jacket any more. It was an old black jacket and it seemed to me as though its color, which sometimes made me uneasy, had finally fulfilled itself. I took measures not to run into Ester Lim by any chance, kept in touch with Mrs. Tan like a fugitive, and helped put together enough money for Ester Lim to get a passage to Manila. Ester Lim did not cause a headache during her two days with


Mrs. Tan. But Mrs. Tan’s little daughter wouldn’t go near her. “She’s stranger,” she said the first time she saw Ester Lim. Not very long after this, our maid told me as I ate a late breakfast that William, who had not shown up for some time, had been in the house early and taken the black jacket which I had put away in the storeroom, leaving her word to tell me that he was borrowing it. My father, who dislikes familiarities of this sort, told me to remind William at once about the jacket if he forgot to bring it back the next time he came. I told him the maid had said he was returning it later in the evening. The old man said he doubted it. When after two weeks William had not returned, he said. “I told you. Now you’re the one without a jacket.” I had others. But he was wondering why I didn’t seem to care much. “Perhaps he’s with his in-laws in Valencia,” my mother said. The weeks went by and we forgot about William. One morning my father very casually told me, as I prepared to go out, to find out about William who had been stabbed to death, at the Eterna, the funeral parlor whose owner we knew. “When?” I asked, sounding just as subdued. “I don’t know—find out.” I went to the funeral parlor in the afternoon. Chit, the owner’s wife whom I knew from way back in the early seventies, was there. I went to it at once: “Did you have a stabbing victim recently?” She turned on an expression that became more and more quizzical as I gave details. “The name is William Angeles. He was stabbed at the cockpit. He was from Zamboanga. A soldier....” At this she suddenly remembered. “That was last week!” And then we went into an incoherent exchange. “Why?” “Nothing. I happened to know him. Who stabbed him?” “He may have left the hospital already.” “What? You mean he’s alive?” “Yes, his wound was not serious.” “But I thought he was brought here?” “No, I mean the man who stabbed your friend.” William was able to pull out his gun and shoot back. I gathered from another person later—the man who once asked if William was living with us—that William was jumped by his assailant as he entered the cockpit and was reeling from several stabs when he pulled out his gun and fired. He hadn’t seen the incident. Chit had seen the body when it was brought to the funeral parlor. I asked her, inevitably: “Was he wearing a black jacket?” She looked, I thought, startled. “Why, yes!” William had been buried in Valencia. For us there remained the problem of what to do with his clothes. Mother had said, “They must be made to pay! The poor boy! He was with us!” Her outrage was sudden and brief but it moved me— though I remained indifferent to William’s death. As I burned the clothes I wondered why she spoke of William’s murderer in the plural. Now I understand better the look in his eyes the first time I saw him. They were the eyes of a man who had seen his own gore. It was he who had copulated with the madwoman in Rimando’s story. But his murder had made him the baby, made him Kip. William’s killer was as much an instrument as the knife with which William was slaughtered—and redeemed. The force came from Ester Lim who, with equal mystery, had without her knowing it fulfilled her hallucination—that she was the dazzling woman promised in Revelation, who shall crush the Beast by giving birth to her child. Of course, William is dead and


Ester Lim repeats, God knows in what foul hole in Manila, the cycle of the madwoman. To me, who haven’t cared, is allotted the notion that the madwoman’s child had been engendered and obliterated so I could be forty-three, so I could use the word “resplendent,” so I could love Emy. “I’m sorry about the jacket.” I am almost unable to finish saying this, hearing William saying it too at the same time. We meant differently. He was apologizing for not being able to return the jacket, or for having taken it without my knowledge, or because it now bore two or three holes. I was sorry I had not been able to warn him that it was fatal. I looked at his face in the dusk and felt relieved that he did not seem to bear the funeral parlor’s grooming and cosmetics. But I also felt his inconsolable sadness. “It was lovelessness. You were spared because you were less loveless than I.” I realized with a chill that William and I had certain resemblances. “Did it ever occur to you that your parents have felt the terror of your life? That you are Kip whose haplessness saddens them more than their infirmities? They’d have wished that you drifted less and fathered a child—a gift that could make them gentler with their slow annihilation. No matter. The memory of the baby’s laughter has served you well. Even Rimando’s story has served you well, for though you wanted to exploit its horrible aspect, you’ve been unable to write it. Love has served you well. It served you well when Emy could not love you. It served you well when you recoiled from Ester Lim, from me. It would not have abandoned you if you had gone and consummated your urge for the laundrywoman, old and ugly, with whom you found yourself alone one night when you were a much younger man, fighting the strange tide that drew you to her as the dog had been drawn to the messy, blood-covered thing in Rimando’s story—if you had been the baby’s father which, in a way, you are. Perhaps it’s not me but you. Or why should you let a dead man—moreover, an unlettered one—speak your final words?” Dumaguete ,1989


[Version 2. From Checkmeta, 2004] What I am about to set down consists of three stories which I had originally wanted to write separately. How I came to think of weaving them together is not easy to answer. The first two were stories I had heard almost twenty years ago and could not get around to writing for such an unbelievable length of time. One day I understood that I’d never be able to write them and that perhaps this was the story I could write. I remember the occasion on which the idea occurred to me. I was talking to another literary person, in fact a gifted young girl from Manila well on her way to the writing vocation. I found myself telling her the two stories. I don’t remember having done it before, though I am fairly given to talking about stories I contemplated writing to friends. When I had finished I realized that what held my listener’s interest was not just the stories themselves but me telling them together. “Perhaps I should write them together,” I said with the enthusiasm of one who had faintly but unmistakably struck something. When days passed and the terror of the empty, white paper began to grow on me, when I began to suspect that this new story—the story of a writer and the two stories he could not get around to writing for twenty years—was headed for the same fate, the same limbo, I decided to hurl myself into the wilderness. In the confusion I involuntarily recovered two memories —one resplendent and the other shameful. I also tied in the third, which is the longest and of which I do not have to speak at this point. Back in 1972, when I taught at Silliman for the first time, I formed a companionship with four other young men with whom I had nothing in common but an addiction: chess. The friendship was so close we were soon addicted not only to the game but to being together. For days on end, when there would be a string of holidays, we would eat, sleep, talk, play chess, gallivant, do evil things together. Chess is more often than not the passion of a lonely man. In our case, the loneliness became collective, if such a thing can be conceived—we were a pack of lone wolves. Martial law, imposed by Marcos late that year, abetted it, as did the success of the solipsistic Bobby Fischer. I’ll heartlessly cut myself short on this part of my life to which belongs some of my fondest memories, since my business is only to relate where and how I got the two stories mentioned above. I heard them from two of my friends, on those nights when not even the fatigue of playing chess all day could relieve the torment of our own sap and we would spend the night talking about all sorts of things until dawn. The first came from Nestor Rimando and happened in Davao where he came from and where he is back. In the almost twenty years since our time in Dumaguete I have seen him again only twice— once in Manila and once when he visite Dumaguete in 1987. The second was told by Odelon Ontal, who lives until now in Dumaguete and who has forgotten his story. Both have married and have children; I have remained a bachelor, grown adept at gentle ways of coping with, in the phrase of Erwin Castillo, the terror of being unloved. Rimando’s story can be sketched in a paragraph. In Davao in either the late sixties or early seventies (Rimando was not specific) a madwoman slept her nights at the market, where the tables in the meat section provided her with a bed. Let us assign her the age of twenty—eight and long, lice—infested hair. You have seen her, grimy, reposing on the pavement like an obscene bat, her eyes somehow never meeting yours. You never hear her voice either, even when she laughs and you wonder who knocked her teeth down. One day you see her with a swollen belly and


although it comes as a shock you don’t find yourself wondering very long who the father is. Not even the coming baby mitigates her status as a nightmare, without substance. In Rimando’s story she gives birth to her child towards daybreak. The market vendors who had come early saw her deflated belly but were baffled that the child could not be found. Suddenly their minds froze, struck by lightning. They had not understood the blood on the table where she had slept and now they looked with horror at the dog sitting not far from where she was. As in Rimando’s case, Ontal had not actually witnessed the story he told us and which, as I’ve said, he has forgotten. A very young couple—the husband about fifteen and the wife fourteen or thirteen—had come to Dumaguete for the husband who was sick to be confined and treated in a hospital. They came with ample money, but one somehow got the impression that it represented all their possession. They took a common room, which explains how their story came to be known. On the first day of his confinement, a group of young girls, probably students from Silliman dropping in to visit another patient in the room, find themselves flocking around the boy—husband from the barrio. It is not hard to understand why they instantly take to him. They like his rustic ways; they are astonished, themselves not much older than he, to find one so young— just a little boy really— already married; they feel protective, motherly. Perhaps, too, the boy is dying. Let us call him Kip. It is five in the afternoon and Kip, waiting for his wife Moning to come back, has brightened up only too visibly. One or two of the girls are pretty. And Kip’s happiness, in turn, has set loose even in the shyer ones the floodgates of a hitherto unsuspected sweetness. It is in the midst of this that Moning comes back with a friend she has just acquired, a girl of eight, and the things they bought at the market. There is an awkwardness but Kip’s friends do not feel uncomfortable. They look at her with great interest and find her shyness just as poignant, except that of course she is not the patient and, moreover, they have to go. Moning goes out of the room soon after they do to see her little friend—who keeps throwing looks at Kip —to the gate. She does not return—neither in the evening as Kip keeps hoping she will, nor the next day, nor the day after the next until it is afternoon. Kip runs a whole spectrum of feelings—all shades of grey and black. First alarm, then anger, worry, fear, bewilderment, oppression, fury, pain. To assuage the torment, he imagines himself dead and the thought of Moning crazed with grief strangely revives his appetite to eat. It is an exaggeration to say that he ages in three days, but at certain moments we see a grown-‐-up quality or manner that we failed to notice earlier, even when he’s not doing anything, propped up and stockstill, pensive in his bed. When Moning finally comes back, the joy he feels is outweighed, outwardly, by the need to express his outrage and maintain a touching dignity. He weeps at last and says, in a quiet voice, “Ako pay mamatay, ako pay ingnon mi!” (Roughly, “I’m the one who’s going to die and I’m the one who’s treated this way!”) Moning, eyes downcast, wants to hold and press his hand but his spare reproach totally wilts her. These were the two stories. When I first pondered Rimando’s story, I conceived of the following idea: The story would be seen through a third-person point of view. This person is gradually revealed to be the father of the baby, and the revelation will be subtle, almost just hinted, but clear towards the end. I’m glad this didn’t materialize. It seems to promise bathos. My present attitude indicates that I wish to preserve the story’s gruesome quality. Despite the ironclad objection: what for should one write a merely cruel


story? There are hundreds of other such incidents, dizzying in their fiendishness, that have happened and can happen on this planet. Even in the realm of fact, the number of such cases may well approach the infinite. Thu the absurdity of a news item with such a subject in which the reporter pretends to be moved by the uncanny. And yet I remain infatuated with Rimando’s story as is—raw, uninvented, fact. Why? Once in life I woke in the wee hours of the morning and heard from somewhere a baby’s cooing and laughter and knew it to be the most beautiful sound on earth or in heaven. Many years later I took to asking girls I liked what they thought was the loveliest sound they’d ever heard. A bird’s chirping was usually the answer. At other times, the sound of surf. Or early morning rain that made them linger in bed. There were others I’ve forgotten. Only one, if memory is not fooling, got it right—Emy. How could a baby deserve either such a grisly end or such a loathsome origin as had the one in Rimando’s story? What possible virtue is there in telling of how it was so literally wiped out the moment it was born? Ontal’s story, too, is disturbingly open-ended. Even if its tenderness tends to counterpoint, to allay the ferocity of the other. Ontal said no one seemed to know what happened afterwards when the young couple had gone back to the barrio where they came from. This open-endedness—Kip’s possible death—hovers over the story with the same menace that the woman’s madness, the unknown father’s lust, and the dog’s appetite in Rimando’s story hold for us. Here too my baby gurgles amid demons. Is this therefore why the two stories had been thrown into my hands —not by accident but because to me had been delivered the task of seeing them as connected? If Kip dies, the two tell the same story—Kip is the baby who is devoured by a dog—and I brood on the evil that unites them; Ontal didn’t have to tell his. If Kip lives, the two stories exclude—worse, annihilate—each other; Kip is the baby whose cooing, gurgling laughter work me up one magic, epiphanous night in my life —but Rimando, as well as Ontal, had to tell his. I must find a third. Unlike Ontal’s and Rimando’s, it is a story I have seen. In fact, it is a story I alone have seen. For the two people in it—a man and a woman who casually crossed my path quite recently (only late last year) never met, neither one knew the other existed. Moreover, one is mad and the other dead. I believe their fates conjoined, and that it was I who brought this conjunction about—or rather my old, black jacket. It seems like a delirium and perhaps it is. Before getting round to it, I add a few necessary details about myself. I am forty-‐-three, I teach part-‐-time in Silliman. I live with a maid and my two parents. My mother has had a stroke and asthma has wrought on my father an almost equal devastation. One afternoon I woke from a nap hearing some rock group on the cassette tape recorder and slowly making out the voices that drifted to my room. They were those of my father and a younger man, a man I didn’t know. The conversation was in Chabacano and my father was talking with more animation than usual. My parents have not lived in Dumaguete as long as I, and at their age do not get to meet too many people any more. Whenever someone happens along who comes from Zamboanga, their spirit is buoyed up, as though old times had returned. I tarried in bed for a while more, unable to help from eavesdropping. I gathered that the visitor had come in to fix the tape recorder, that his name was William, that he was an exsoldier, that he (rather vaguely) was a CAFGU, that he worked as radio


technician and operator at the military headquarters in Agan-an. I couldn’t avoid meeting his stare at once when I opened the door, they were sitting right-across from my room and he was facing my way. He was a slight man who looked as boyish as his voice, but the face, with its high cheekbones, had a menacing quality that impressed me greatly. He had the eyes of a man who lived with evil smells, or who was used to the sight of gore. But perhaps the cold, removed stare came from sheer hard times and I had overlooked it. I dwell on it at length because it was the only time I really looked at his face. He was to be seen in the house often after that, gladly fixing—after the tape recorder—the television set and the walkie-talkie which he had dug up while puttering around the storeroom. He always declined to join us whenever he happened to be around at mealtime, settling instead for a cup of coffee. Sometimes he’d doze off on the bench in the kitchen when, apparently exhausted from staying up late at some gambling place, he’d show up early in the morning. At other times, he’d spend the night at our place, sleeping on the bench which had become his bed. We soon realized, though we never asked him, that he was not living in any particular place— that there probably were other houses where he could sleep from time to time. But once a man who knew us asked me if it was true William was living with us. William had given our place as his address, care of my father who was a retired police major. And indeed he did his laundry at our place and kept some clothes in the storeroom. I do not know if those were all the clothes he had. William told us he was a widower. He said his wife had died of tuberculosis. At the time he said this I thought it sounded like a good forecast of how he himself was going to die soon. He was very thin and always looked overwrought. He did die soon after, but not as I thought. His wife left him no child. He said his wife’s parents were from Negros and lived in the nearby town of Valencia, and that his own mother, who was in Zamboanga, originally came from Dumaguete. We believed him. He spoke Chabacano and Cebuano very fluently—both with a rural accent, which astonished my father who is a Zamboangueño and my mother who is a Cebuana—oblivious that, though it’s true it was unusual, so did I, though neither with a rural accent. This will do for William. He is a dead man when I take him up again. Vastly different, we did not become friends. The only form of closeness we had was my lending him small sums which he was too shy to borrow from my parents. He never paid and I never expected him to. Just as we never paid him for fixing the television set and the tape recorder and the walkie-talkie and he never, I’m sure, expected us to. For certain episodes in the past that we carry through life, memories is an inaccurate word; rather they constitute an ever lingering, bright present, separation or estrangement from which we are forced to admit only by the unappealable decline of our physical bodies. And then we feel as if perhaps we already have died. Others are matters of complete indifference. They could be as recent as a year ago but the faces that beam at us on a chance re-encounter are veritable abysses. As are the names. “Ester Lim?” “She says you were together in some writers conference in Manila.” “Is she going to be in the program?” “She’s just passing by. She’s on her way to Manila. She was looking for Marj.” “If she didn’t know Marj is the Manila, she may have been just checking her out, too, from way back when.”


“Yes, that seems to be it. When I told her Marj is in Manila she appeared very excited andtook her address. And then she sounded like she was going to Manila just to see her.” “I’ll get back to the office. They might be there.” “Lina was giving her directions to your house. She’s probably there now. That was almost two hours ago.” “Oh. Okay, I’m going home then.” “You can see that she’s odd, but she’s all right I think. Most people will get a more extreme impression after talking to her. She’s been through some terrible time. She’ll be telling you.” “I’d have preferred to talk to her somewhere else though.” “Lina told her to go back to her if it’s no go at your place. I would have taken her in but you know there’s literally no room for her here.” “It’s going to be difficult. You don’t know my father. He’s a cop. But I know where we can take her to.” By ten in the evening Ester Lim was out of my hands. I had ample opportunity, that evening, to know just how mad she was. She was in her late twenties and I wondered why I absolutely couldn’t recall her from the writers seminar that we attended together. At the least, she must have been a pleasant kid to look at, and even now hell, which it was clear she was wobbling in, hadn’t taken away the sparkle from her eyes. She had a vague expression of physical pain on her face that became oddly pronounced when she smiled, which was often. After speaking, she would bend her forehead slightly forward—and somewhat askew—as if swallowing, her eyes not leaving yours and smiling with the queer pain. Perhaps reading my mind she explained that she had inflamed sinuses. I found out that she had stomach spasms besides. My hair almost stood at the way she consumed the entire loaf of sliced bread when I bought her a snack, ignoring the canned fish and the noodles which she ate after. At nine there are no more cheap eating houses open in Dumaguete and I didn’t have much money. Also, I was hoping Mrs. Tan, in whose house she would be staying, would feed her. (It amused me that she was Miss Lim and her hostess was Mrs. Tan. Mrs. Tan was head of some fundamentalist church organization on the campus.) Ester Lim was going to Manila to seek help over a nephew whom she claimed her brother, the father, physically tortured. She said her nephew wanted her to take him but there was no way she could fight her brother. He had many connections in their place and was able to convince everybody that she was insane. I asked her what exactly it was she wanted done about her nephew. If she wanted custody, I said, she was certain to lose. She said of course that was the sure way to lose, and went into a detailed explanation of her plan which struck me for its legal shrewdness and clarity. I realized later that this lucidity, which must have impressed people she met for the first time, could be seen in a more sinister light. But at the moment I must have been visibly impressed, for her manner assumed a certain preening and soon she was telling me that her fight wouldn’t end with her nephew. She was going to start her crusade against child abuse. I cleared my throat and told her surely there was some organization in Manila doing that sort of thing and it shouldn’t be too hard for her to find her bearings there after all. This seemed to please her further, but at the same time I couldn’t help feeling she was holding back some tremendously good thing that I was not even beginning to understand. I wasn’t wrong. And I was not kept waiting. She began to tell me about the evil in her place, La Carlota, and my mind involuntarily


flitted back to the half-amused, half-bewildered face of my mother earlier in the house when I had gone home and found her with Ester Lim. “As long as the Beast is loose, the children of the world will suffer.” Mrs. Tan’s house was in the outskirts of the town and tricycles would go only up to a certain point. There was no moon (missing emblem of madness) but the light from the electric posts made the green grass in the vacant lots all around us visible. Ester Lim continued: “I can’t lose, it’s in the Scripture: And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars....” She had turned her face to me and it bore the same expression, only more outrageous: it was as if she was looking at me and smiling though her tears. I heard my voice saying, “Don’t say a word of that to Mrs. Tan’s family. They’re very nice people; realize that they are taking you in, a stranger, out of kindness. You’re lucky, but if you tell them that, it could make things unpleasant.” “Why?” she asked. I saw that I was unnecessarily taking a further step in getting mixed up with a lunatic. “Do you really care for your nephew?” I asked. “Yes,” she said. “Then don’t say what you’ve just told me to anyone. Keep it to yourself or else, believe me, you are going to fail. You won’t even survive in Manila.” “Why?” she asked again, and finally I said, “They’ll think you mad. That’s what happened back in your place. With that story you yourself, not your brother, convinced them you’re mad.” I uttered the word mad casually, to make it sound as if I was very far from believing it. “I see,” she said thoughtfully, slowing down her steps somewhat. “It’s a real problem.” She seemed to brace herself before going on and then she asked me, “Do you believe what I just told you?” Crazily polite (allow me some madness of my own), I groped. “I don’t know. Yes and no perhaps. You’re entitled to what you believe is your vocation. But you can’t be literal about these things. Anyway it’s out of my range. It’s a thing between you and God.” This must have satisfied her for she changed the topic. “You’re right about Mrs. Tan and her family. I never knew such people existed. But that little child of hers—there’s something troubling her. Her eyes look disturbed.” A horrible thought entered my mind, but I quelled it. “You really didn’t have to trouble yourself too much over me. I just wanted to find out how you are after all these years.” She was rambling, somewhat sprightly all of a sudden. But Ester Lim fired her last shot for the evening and I was not prepared for it. “I feel cold,” she said. “Please hold me.” Or perhaps I was. Without a moment’s hesitation, I took off my jacket and gave it to her. All the repulsion that had been gathering inside me now slapped me like a wind. I knew even then that I wouldn’t be wearing the jacket any more. It was an old black jacket and it seemed to me as though its color, which sometimes made me uneasy, had finally fulfilled itself. I took measures not to run into Ester Lim by any chance, kept in touch with Mrs. Tan like a fugitive, and helped put together enough money for Ester Lim to get a passage to Manila. Ester Lim did not cause a headache during her two days with Mrs. Tan. But Mrs. Tan’s little daughter wouldn’t go near her. “She’s stranger,” she said the first time she saw Ester Lim.


Not very long after this, our maid told me as I ate a late breakfast that William, who had not shown up for some time, had been in the house early and taken the black jacket which I had put away in the storeroom, leaving her word to tell me that he was borrowing it. My father, who dislikes familiarities of this sort, told me to remind William at once about the jacket if he forgot to bring it back the next time he came. I told him the maid had said he was returning it later in the evening. The old man said he doubted it. When after two weeks William had not returned, he said. “I told you. Now you’re the one without a jacket.” I had others. But he was wondering why I didn’t seem to care much. “Perhaps he’s with his in-laws in Valencia,” my mother said. The weeks went by and we forgot about William. One morning my father very casually told me, as I prepared to go out, to find out about William who had been stabbed to death, at the Eterna, the funeral parlor whose owner we knew. “When?” I asked, sounding just as subdued. “I don’t know—find out.” I went to the funeral parlor in the afternoon. Chit, the owner’s wife whom I knew from way back in the early seventies, was there. I went to it at once: “Did you have a stabbing victim recently?” She turned on an expression that became more and more quizzical as I gave details. “The name is William Angeles. He was stabbed at the cockpit. He was from Zamboanga. A soldier....” At this she suddenly remembered. “That was last week!” And then we went into an incoherent exchange. “Why?” “Nothing. I happened to know him. Who stabbed him?” “He may have left the hospital already.” “What? You mean he’s alive?” “Yes, his wound was not serious.” “But I thought he was brought here?” “No, I mean the man who stabbed your friend.” William was able to pull out his gun and shoot back. I gathered from another person later—the man who once asked if William was living with us—that William was jumped by his assailant as he entered the cockpit and was reeling from several stabs when he pulled out his gun and fired. He hadn’t seen the incident. Chit had seen the body when it was brought to the funeral parlor. I asked her, inevitably: “Was he wearing a black jacket?” She looked, I thought, startled. “Why, yes!” William had been buried in Valencia. For us there remained the problem of what to do with his clothes. Mother had said, “They must be made to pay! The poor boy! He was with us!” Her outrage was sudden and brief but it moved me—though I remained indifferent to William’s death. As I burned the clothes I wondered why she spoke of William’s murderer in the plural. Now I understand better the look in his eyes the first time I saw him. They were the eyes of a man who had seen his own gore. It was he who had copulated with the madwoman in Rimando’s story. But his murder had made him the baby, made him Kip. William’s killer was as much an instrument as the knife with which William was slaughtered—and redeemed. The force came from Ester Lim who, with equal mystery, had without her knowing it fulfilled her hallucination—that she was the dazzling woman promised in Revelation, who shall crush the Beast by giving birth to her child. Of course, William is dead and Ester Lim repeats, God knows in what foul hole in Manila, the cycle of the


madwoman. To me, who haven’t cared, is allotted the notion that the madwoman’s child had been engendered and obliterated so I could be forty-‐-three, so I could use the word “resplendent,” so I could love Emy. “I’m sorry about the jacket.” I am almost unable to finish saying this, hearing William saying it too at the same time. We meant differently. He was apologizing for not being able to return the jacket, or for having taken it without my knowledge, or because it now bore two or three holes. I was sorry I had not been able to warn him that it was fatal. I looked at his face in the dusk and felt relieved that he did not seem to bear the funeral parlor’s grooming and cosmetics. But I also felt his inconsolable sadness. “It was lovelessness. You were spared because you were less loveless than I.” I realized with a chill that William and I had certain resemblances. “Did it ever occur to you that your parents have felt the terror of your life? That you are Kip whose haplessness saddens them more than their infirmities? They’d have wished that you drifted less and fathered a child—a gift that could make them gentler with their slow annihilation. No matter. The memory of the baby’s laughter has served you well. Even Rimando’s story has served you well, for though you wanted to exploit its horrible aspect, you’ve been unable to write it. Love has served you well. It served you well when Emy could not love you. It served you well when you recoiled from Ester Lim, from me. It would not have abandoned you if you had gone and consummated your urge for the laundrywoman, old and ugly, with whom you found yourself alone one night when you were a much younger man, fighting the strange tide that drew you to her as the dog had been drawn to the messy, blood-covered thing in Rimando’s story—if you had been the baby’s father which, in a way, you are. Perhaps it’s not me but you. Or why should you let a dead man—moreover, an unlettered one—speak your final words?” Sublunary Advertising [From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] To the end you wouldn’t relent, even when I challenged you to dare me into giving you the moon in exchange for, her, your own moonlike body. And when, angered that even then you wouldn’t humor me, I changed the street, the coffeeshop, the whole place into a shining crater you merely smiled and looked at me with a droplet of compassion. Yu said it was a trick, that I was using magic or hypnosis. I could have replied that love is magic and hypnosis, but then that was one word I, your word-happy fool, could never speak. Besides you had quickly recovered, pointing out a detail I had overlooked and demanding sweetly for an explanation. I had forgotten that the moon shines only from afar, from earth—that when you’re on the moon, the moon doesn’t shine. On the moon, there is no moon! What could I say? What else but S’yempre naman, Johnson ‘ata yan! Manila, 1979


A Tale of Two Diaries [Version 1. From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] [MISSING]


[Version 2. From Checkmeta, 2004] One of the first book to come out in the post-Marcos period, The Diaries of Mojud Romontado: 55 Days in Dumaguete begins thus: After first year of wondering not so much what I am doing in Dumaguete as how I ever got stuck in this town in the first place, I feel myself suddenly in the thick of things again. A new winds is bolwing. The book consist of diaries extending from February 6 to April 1, 1986, which explains the sub-title, 55 Days in Dumaguete. The opening words were penned on the eve of the snap election, when the author had just seized upon the idea of keeping a diary in connection with the coming events. Reader who have read the well-selling Mijares, Pedrosa, Rotea and Psinakis. Books of the Filipino dictator may not give this book even a second browsing. Dumaguete is an importable setting for an exciting story on the revolution. This is not an inside story sort of book that is sure to sell. Even people interest in what those days were like in the more placid provinces, particularly in such a politically insensitive area as Dumaguete, where the only visible excitement was the crowd that jostled in the newsstands, will blink. The book read queerly. It’s not literary, and even that is lost on everyone but the literary. Its subject is not really “what it was like in Dumaguete” as the blurb says but the diarist himself, Mojud Remontado, a man whose obscurity (who he?) makes his limitless self-absorption, given the times, somewhat impertine. However, the spate of initial reviews indicated that the book was received well. One reviewer said: “The book has no pretentions to history. It falls under the category of spiritual autography and despite occasional lapses into solipsism, is sure to appeal to all those who have consciously suffered under the Marcos regime.” We may take issue with this view on the ground that history, as a historian himself once put it, is not so much the record of events as it is record of what people have felt and thought of those events. Literary on the other hand is quite correct and offers the best orientation to the book. For some portions of the book are in fact not diaries at all but outright literary avant-gardism. Just who is Mojud Remontado? The most revealing sentence in the diaries confessed that he is a poet. And “Mojud Remontado” is so obviously a nom de plume, more precisely, a nom de guerre—as obvious a case as the mysterious poet Constantine Christos Bazakas, who graced the pages of Malaya (April 4, 1986 issue) with a tantalizing riddle constructed somewhat after the manner of the 18th centtury English couplet, thus skillfully concealing an anagram that says “Marcos dictator Hilter.” “Mojud” is unmistakably Arabic but on the other hand “Remontado” guarantees that he is not a Muslim. Mojud is a character from a Sulfi work, HikayatI-abdalan, which sounds Cebuano to me except that it isn’t. It means “Tales of the Transformed Ones.” What this seems to tell us is that our diarist has changed his name for a symbolic reason, namely, to signify that he is a change man, a man transformed. As for the answer to what the change or transformation is, we have to go o the second name. Remontado is a relic of a word from our Spanish past; it


means a man who can no longer countenance the government, literally meaning one who has gone to the hills or, figuratively, because he keeps his rebel heart secret, a man invisible among his fellow towndwellers, a type kinder to Shakespeare’s definition of poets as “God’s spies.” There is mention, in the diaries, of a German sociologist friend, an exchange professor at Silliman. The mention is very casual and without any seeming significance. But it doesn’t take perspicacity to imagine how circumstances. However, his own publisher, the Leon Kilat Publishing House, demolished-or illuminated, depending on how you take it-all this with a bolt from the blue when it released a cryptic announcement of its own saying that (1) Mojud Remontado by any other name would be Mojud Remontado, (2) he speaks hilarious Spanish, and (3) he eats only pork and beans. But to come to more serious problem. The number of days actually covered by the diary of fifty-three, not fifty-five, and that’s because there are two diaries without entries. The sub-title, 55 Days in Dumaguete, is therefore inaccurate. A note here on the sub-title is very important. According to the editors of the Leon Kilat Publishing House, Remontado had insisted on one intransigent term: that the text be published exactly as I is, except where it is a question of grammar or mechanics. Romontado had submitted two documents: the manuscript for publication, immaculately prepared, and a Xerox of the original diary which served as authenticating holography. From correspondence with Leon Kilat we gleaned that the sub-title is the only differce between the manuscript submitted for publication and the Xerox of the diary. Thus we know for certain that it is not an additional or insertion from the publishers and the error is entirely Remontado’s. There are three ways of looking at this. First, the author did not mind the inaccuracy since what he was after was the catchy allusion to 55 Days in Peking, a Hollywood movie in the sixties which tells the story of another revolution. Second, the author wanted to convey or simulate the effect of a real, ordinary diary in which now and then a date may be left vacant. Third, it is a simple oversight. The truth, however, is that the error is deliberate and meant to provoke. The vacant, unfiled dates happen to be February 25 and 26! How could a diary kept in dazzled response to unfolding events have missed out on those two dates-of all dates to skip? In the April 1 entry, which is the final one, the diarist tells us that February 25 and 26 had in fact been filled out but that he decided to scrap them. Why? Therein is the crux of our review, as its title indicates. The error in the book’s sub-title is purely a numerical ruse. With it, the diarist is really alluding to the missing twin diaries; and since we know that February 25 and 26 had, under a flirty magical moon, melted and fused into a single night beyond calendars, The Diaries of Mojud Remontado: 55 Days in Dumaguete, is really not a diary but the story of a lost one. But we much backtractk and take a look t the lesser diaries. In lieu by the way of the ideal book review which, according ti the principle of Jorge Luis Borges, is a word-for-word reproduction of the book being reviewed—nothing added and nothing taken away—we shall do what is perhaps the next best thing: quote amply and, in thwarting spirit of Remontado’s book, pepper the next best review with our own Remontadoism, as in fact we already have, if the reader, or Remontado himself, has noticed. As they say the greatest compliment one can give to an author is to imitate him. Those who have an interest in Dumaguete, either because they have


never been to this southern city but have heard ire read so much about it for a long time, will because they have been to the place but have not seen it for a long time, will feel let down. A sense of place is definitely not one of the author’s strong points. There are many times when the vagueness is more than just vagueness— Dumaguete actually disappears. And these are the very times when, to use his own words, “I feel myself suddenly in the thick of things again.” For what he really means is that he is glued to the newspapers and the radio and with that even your sense of furniture, of what you are sitting on, may go. You are transported. He described this strikingly in the February 24 diary which he puts under the heading A La Recherche du Veritas Perdu, as funny a French as any, though the English, one might say, is beyond good and evil: Neither the newspapers or television can become an embedded part of our national psyche. When they smashed Radio Veritas they were smashing at deep memories. During World War Two it was the radio for a voice to come. How many men and women must have crouched and listened, their faces like hungry children’s, their hands, as they fumbled with the set, a sooty silence clutching at your heart . How appropriate therefore that the radio set is, in this war, our humble weapon pitted against the giant television channels booming the voice of Darth Vader, Ilocano edition. We wait for Copy’s voice and when it comes we are drunk with history, even have a taste of apocalypse. The lyricism running through the book, which turns to extravagance and abandon when Cory’s name occurs, tenses to near hysteria when the name of Marcos. Both name drive him crazy. This exacerbated crazy pitch is the most genuine item in the book—even the “literary” attempt to sound more philosophical that the author’s abilities warrant becomes appealing in the light. Remontado’s madness reflects, echoes, ours. Nay, the madness is ours. Or at least was. We were all plumed to the depths, frivolous Freudians might claim—see Alfred A. Yuson’s preelection article in Veritas (February 9, 1986 issue) section 3, “A Personal Diatribe Against the Man Who Would Still be King,” section 5, “A Second Diatribe,” and section 9, “Co-ree! Co-ree! Co-ree!” Remontado read this piece with pleasure, as his adoption two weeks later of the Darth Vader motif indicates. The situation is sufficiently Oedipal—a word he actually uses once—the very same situation described by Vladimir’s novel of chess, The Defense. Every chessplayer, suggests Nabokov, sees Mother in his Queen and Father in the opponent’s King. A statistical study of how the sexes voted in the snap election might yield results friendly to Freud. In any event, let us follow Remontado further. February 18. I have never seen him in person. I have dreamed of him twice and have been shocked to find out that in my


subconscious—or is it conscious—I seem to bear an amount of respect, even— horrors—tenderness—for the man! Perhaps this is to concede that he is after all a strong man? Perhaps Oepidal. The former interest me more. Some moral force in him. But what sort of moral force is it that only creeps and crawls into people’s dreams? Marcos, had he been under an oppressive himself—had he been under a Marcos regime—would have stood up, fought back, shouted yuch fou! Marcos would have given himself the finger. There would have been forty-two million cowards and two sons-of-bitches. Dialogue 1 –Mr. President, what would you have done under a Marcos regime? –I would have enjoyed it. In fact I’m enjoying it—I’m under a Marcos regime, as you put it am I not? –I mean, sir, what would you have done if you were somebody else? –First, I would have to be somebody else. But that is fantasy and I don’t take stock in fantasies. –May I rephrase my question Mr. President? –Shoot. –What would you do if you were to live under a dictatorship? This is a purely hypothetical question, sir. –Let’s just put it this way: I’ll cross the Pacific and say aloha when I get there. I told you my fantasies are not my glass of Fanta—how’s that for wordplay? You writers think you are the only ones who can do it. In the name of Alfred Yuson, Alfred Newman, and Alfred Prufock—I am Marcos; you are Marx’s cause— communists, what else? Your question implies that I am a dictator. When you say that, smile. Let’s have a little evidence, some substantiality. To be or not be. Can you prove that I am? Do that first and I’ll answer your question. I’ll not only answer your question, I’ll salute your question. We’ll have a parade. Pataasan ng lahi. Kasaysayan ng lihi. Whicever. –Without meaning any disrespect Mr. President, and I think I’m speaking for myself as well as for the rest of us here who are not in the medical profession, what is this lupus? –Lupus means wolf. You are the boy who carried lupus ! lupus! –Sir. it is felt by all that with the death of Ninoy Aquino, you lost your worthiest opponent and opportunity of winning the greatest fight in your career. How do you feel yourself over the veritable Greek drama that instead if Ninoy, you face his widow—an utter political innocent—something no one, but simply no one, has anticipated? –In the name of Pablo Picaso, Pablo Casals, and Pablo Neruda—ask me where I have been and I’ll tell you: I am in control. I know my metaphors. Granted, she makes good coffee. I, however dring it! –What will you do if she wins?


–I’ll climb to the highest mountain. Dialogue 2 –Remontado is trying to show us another side of Marcos—the flipside. He’s telling us, what if Marcos is in fact a flip? The quistessential Filipino, as a matter of fact, Romulo said—that means the quiessential flip! How could we have not come close to even suspecting it? Listen to him now in Hawaii—that taped message he sent us. That was Marcos, King of the Flips. –It’s not humor at all. Look at the face. The more flip as you claim he is, the more feral he becomes. He is teasing us, teasing at our pain to the limit bt the truly painful thing is that he can no longer laugh—never, never, never. –Well, flip or not he kept his word. And so he’s the newest “remontado.” –You are saying he’s now a dissident. –I mean more literally. Do you know the world’s highest mountain? –Mt. Everest. –No, it starts with an H. –That’s it. The Himalayas, topmost of which is Mt. Everest. –Not the Himalayas. Hawaii. Hawaii is the highest mountain peak in the world, if measured not from sea level but its base on the sea-floor –It figures. After years of rubbing elbows with the oculists he’s become somewhat clairvoyant himself. Everything could feel real for all that compared to this—through this, surely, is the moment of truth. But the word, ever too late or too soon, fails and falls. It escapes us; we will never quite know. His dreams precedes ours; ours follows his. Him: Can this really be? Am I really going? Us: Can this really be? Is he really gone? Him: Tell me I’m Willy Nepomuceno! Us: Perhaps it is ony Willie Nepomoceno. The April 1 diary reads: Cannot talk about it—February 25-26 must go. It behooves us as poets to leave this man to heaven. But Remontado we must pursue to the end, though he too disappears on his side of the apocalypse. We imagine him, vertiginous with insomnia and catharsis, listening to the radio as it brings pictures of the camp-fires in Manila, the Sinulog in Cebu. Boy to Girl: “Look, Halley’s Comet!” But it is only the paper moon—he, too, is lost in his own way in Dumaguete. And the April 1 diary continues: For those who wonder what I wrote that night I hope a description of the style will suffice. It was written with the oratory of Blast Opule, The uprightness of Lafayette Erecto, and the hitherto undisclosed recklessness and daring of Julius Pirata We do not know exactly how the diary was destroyed. The April 1 diary says nothing at the very end except that he was, in his own words, his own April Fool.


With a vengeance the stories ran wild. Some say he burned it, some that he tore it up. Some that he buried it, some that it was put in the Swiss bank. Some that he never even wrote it, which may well be truth. I favor the version which says he flung it down, in lieu of suicide, to where a river—like love, like magic—was waiting through no river ever waits. Like love it goes but stays. Like magic is there and isn’t there. [Version 3. Now titled: The Diaries of Mojud Remontado, 55 Days in Dumaguete] One of the first books to come out in the post-Marcos period, The Diaries of Mojud Remontado begins thus: “After years of wondering not so much what I am doing in Dumaguete as how I ever got stuck in this town in the first place, I feel myself suddenly in the thick of things again. A new wind is blowing.” The book consists of diaries extending from February 6 to April 1, 1986, which explains the sub-title, 55 Days in Dumaguete. The opening words were penned on the eve of the snap election, when the author had just seized upon the idea of keeping a diary in connection with the coming events. Readers who have read the well-selling Mijares, Pedrosa, Rotea and Psinakis books on the fall of the Filipino dictator may not give this book even a second browsing. Dumaguete is an improbable setting for an exciting story on the revolution. This is not an inside story sort of book that is sure to sell. Even people interested in what those days were like in the more placid provinces, particularly in such a politically insensitive area as Dumaguete, where the only visible excitement is the crowd that jostled in the newstands, will blink. The book reads queerly. It’s too literary, and even that is lost on everyone but the literary. Its subject is not really “what it was like in Dumaguete” as the blurb says but the diarist himself, Mojud Remontado, a man whose obscurity (who he?) makes his limitless absorption, given the times, somewhat impertinent. However, the spate of initial reviews indicated that the book was received well, with one exception. One reviewer said: “The book has no pretensions to history. It falls more under the category of spiritual autobiography and possesses a certain value to all those who have, in one way or another, consciously suffered under the Marcos regime.” We may take issue with this view on the ground that history, as a historian himself once put it, is not so much the record of events as it is a record of what people have felt and thought of those events. Literary on the other hand is quite correct and offers the best orientation to the book. For some portions of the book are in fact not diaries at all but outright literary avant-gardism. Just who is Mojud Remontado? The most revealing sentence in the diaries confesses that he is a poet. And “Mojud Remontado” is so obviously a nom de plume; more precisely, a nom de guerre—‘as obvious a case as the mysterious poet Constantine Christos Bazakas, who graced the pages of Malaya (April 4, 1986 issue) with a tantalizing riddle constructed somewhat after the manner of the 18th-century English couplet, thus skillfully concealing an anagram that says “Marcos diktador Hitler.” “Mojud” is unmistakably Arabic but on the other hand “Remontado” guarantees that he is not a Muslim. Mojud is a character from a Sufi work, Hikayat-i-


abdalan which sounds all Ilocano to me except that it isn’t. It means “Tale of the Transformed Ones.” What this seems to tell us is that our diarist has changed his name for a symbolic reason, namely, to signify that he is a changed man, a man transformed. As for what the change or transformation is, we have to go to the second name. Remontado is a relic of a word from our Spanish past; it means a man who can no longer countenance the government, literally meaning one who has gone to the hills or, figuratively, because he keeps his rebel heart secret, a man invisible among his fellow towndwellers, a type kindred to Shakespeare’s definition of poets as “God’s spies.” There is mention, in the diaries, of a German sociologist friend, an exchange professor at Silliman. The mention is very casual and without any seeming significance. But it doesn’t take perspicacity to imagine how a German friend would occasionally address him—‘surely, “Herr Remontado,” a pun on juramentado! The pun thickens in the February 14 diary containing a poem for Cory under the title Jurame. All this points to a man who is passionately aware of his country’s circumstances. However, his own publisher, the Leon Kilat Publishing House, demolished—‘or illuminated, depending on how you take it—‘all this with a bolt from the blue when it released a cryptic announcement of its own saying that (1) Mojud Remontado by any other name would be Mojud Remontado, (2) he speaks hilarious Spanish, and (3) he eats only pork and beans—‘“which has made his hair eerily greenish.” But to come to a more serious problem. The number of days actually covered by the diary is fifty-three, not fifty-five, and that’s because there are two diaries without entries. The sub-title, “55 Days in Siquijor,” is therefore inaccurate. A note here on the sub-title is very important. According to the editors of the Leon Kilat Publishing House, Remontado had insisted on one intransigent term: that the text be published exactly as it is, except where it is a question of grammar or mechanics. Remontado had submitted two documents: the manuscript for publication, immaculately prepared, and a xerox of the original diary which served as authenticating holograph. From correspondence with Leon Kilat we gleaned that the sub-title is the only difference between the manuscript submitted for publication and the xerox of the diary. Thus we know for certain that it is not an addition or insertion from the publishers and the error is entirely Remontado’s. There are three ways of looking at this. First, the author did not mind the inaccuracy since what he was after was the catchy allusion to “55 Days in Peking,” a Hollywood movie in the sixties which tells the story of another revolution. Second, the author wanted to convey or simulate the effect of a real, ordinary diary in which now and then a date may be left vacant. Third, it is a simple oversight. The truth, however, is that the error is deliberate and meant to provoke. The vacant, unfilled dates happen to be February 25 and 26! How could a diary kept in dazzled response to unfolding events have missed out on those two dates—‘of all dates to skip? In the April 1 entry, which is the final one, the diarist tells us that February 25 and 26 had in fact been filled out but that he decided to scrap them. Why? Therein is the crux of our review, as its title indicates. The error in the book’s sub-title is purely a numerical ruse. With it, the diarist is really alluding to the missing twin diaries; and since we know that February 25 and 26 had, under a flirty magical moon, melted and fused into a single night beyond calendars, The Diaries


of Mojud Remontado: 55 Days in Siquijor is really not a diary but the story of a lost one. But we must backtrack and take a look at the lesser diaries. In lieu by the way of the ideal book review which, according to the principle of Jorge Luis Borges, is a word-for-word reproduction of the book being reviewed—‘nothing added and nothing taken away—‘we shall do what is is perhaps the next best thing: quote amply and, in the spirit of Remontado’s book, pepper the review with our own Remontadoisms, as in fact we have, if the reader, or Remontado himself, has noticed. As they say the greatest compliment one can give to an author is to imitate him. Those who have an interest in Dumaguete, either because they have never been to this southern city but have heard or read so much about it—‘or because they have been to the place but have not seen it for a long time, will feel let down. A sense of place is definitely not one of the author’s strong points. There are times when the vagueness is more than just vagueness—‘Dumaguete actually disappears. And these are the very times when, to use his own words, “I feel myself suddenly in the thick of things again.” For what he really means is that he is glued to the newspapers and the radio and with that even your sense of furniture, of what you are seated on, may go. You are transported. He describes this strikingly in the February 24 diary which he puts under the heading A La Recherche du Veritas Perdu, as funny a French as any, though the English, one might say, is beyond good and evil. 1 Neither the newspapers or television can become an embedded part of our national psyche. When they smashed Radio Veritas they were smashing at deep memories. During World War Two it was the radio that was our fountain of hope as we waited for a voice to come. How many men and women must have crouched and listened, their faces like hungry children’s, their hands, as they fumbled with the set, a sooty silence clutching at your heart. How appropriate therefore that the radio set is, in this war, our humble weapon pitted against the giant television channels booming the voice of Darth Vader, Ilocano edition. We wait for Cory’s voice and when it comes we are drunk with history, even have a taste of apocalypse. The string of lyricism running through the book, which turns to extravagance and abandon when Cory’s name occurs, tenses to near hysteria when the name is Marcos. Both names drive him crazy. This exacerbated crazy pitch is the most genuine item in the book—‘even the “literary” attempt to sound more philosophical than the author’s abilities warrant becomes appealing in this light. Remontado’s madness reflects, echoes, ours. Nay, the madness is ours. Or at least was. We were all plumbed to the depths, frivolous Freudians might claim—‘see Alfred A. Yuson’s pre-election article in Veritas (February 9, 1986 issue) section 3, “A Personal Diatribe Against the Man Who Would Still Be King,” section 5, “A Second Diatribe,” and section 9, “Co-ree! Co-ree! Co-ree!” Remontado read this piece with pleasure, as his adoption two weeks later of the Darth Vader motiff indicates. The situation is sufficiently Oedipal—‘a word he actually uses once—‘the very same situation described by Vladimir’s novel of Chess, The Defense. Every chessplayer, suggests Nabokov, sees Mother in his Queen and Father in his opponent’s King. A statistical


study of how the sexes voted in the snap election might yield results friendly to Freud. In any event, let us follow Remontado further. February 18. I have never seen him in person. I have dreamed of him twice and have been shocked to find out that in my subconscious—‘or is it unconscious—‘I seem to bear an amount of respect, even—‘horrors—‘tenderness—‘for the man! Perhaps this is to concede that he is after all a strong man? Perhaps Oedipal. The former interests me more. Some moral force in him. But what sort of moral force is it that only creeps and crawls into people’s dreams? Marcos, had he been under an oppressive himself—‘had he been under a Marcos regime—‘would have stood up , fought back, shouted yuck fou! Marcos would have given himself the finger. There would have been forty-two million cowards and two sons—of-bitches. Dialogue 1 — Mr. President, what would you have done under a Marcos regime? — I would have enjoyed it. In fact I’m enjoying it—‘I’m under a Marcos regime, as you put it, am I not? — I mean, sir, what would you have done if you were somebody else? — First, I would have to be somebody else. But that is fantasy and I don’t take stock in fantasies. — May I re-phrase my question, Mr. President? — Shoot. — What would you do if you were to live under a dictatorship? This is a purely hypothetical question, sir. — Let’s put it this way: I’ll cross the Pacific and say aloha when I get there. I told you fantasies are not my Fanta—‘how’s that for wordplay? You writers think you’re the only ones who can do it. I am Marcos; you are Marx’s cause —‘communists, what else? Your question implies that I am a dictator. When you say that, smile. Let’s have a little evidence, some substantiality. Can you prove that I am? Do that first and I’ll answer your question. I’ll not only answer your question, I’ll salute your question. We’ll have a parade. Pataasan ng lahi. Kasaysayan ng ihi. Whichever.2 —Without meaning any disrespect, Mr. President, and I think I’m speaking for myself as well as for the rest of us here who are not in the medical profession, what is this lupus? —Lupus means wolf. You are the boy who cried lupus! lupus! — Sir. It is felt by all that in the death of Ninoy Aquino, you lost your worthiest opponent and the opportunity of winning the greatest fight in your career. How do you feel yourself over the veritable Greek drama that instead of Ninoy, you now face his widow—‘an utter political innocent—‘something no one, but simply no one, has anticipated? — In the name of Pablo Picasso, Pablo Casals, and Pablo Neruda—‘ask me where I have been and I’ll tell you: I am in control. I know my metaphors. Granted, she makes good coffee. I, however, drink it! — What will you do if she wins? — I’ll climb the highest mountain. Dialogue 2


— Remontado is trying to show us another side of Marcos—‘the flip side. He’s telling us, what if Marcos is in fact a flip? The quintessential Filipino, Romulo said—‘that means the quintessential flip! How could we have not come close to even suspecting it? Listen to him now in Hawaii—‘that taped message he sent us. That was Marcos, King of the Flips. — It’s not humor at all. Look at the face. The more flip, as you claim he is, the more feral he becomes. He is teasing us, teasing at our pain to the limit but the truly painful thing is that he can no longer laugh—‘never, never, never. — Well, flip or not he kept his word. And so he’s the newest “remontado.” — You are saying he’s now a dissident. — I mean more literally. Do you know the world’s highest mountain? — Mt. Everest. — No, it starts with an H. — That’s it. The Himalayas, topmost of which is Mt. Everest. — Not the Himalayas. Hawaii. Hawaii is the highest mountain peak in the world, if measured not from sea-level but from its base on the sea-floor. — It figures. After years of rubbing elbows with occultists he became somewhat clairvoyant himself. Everything was unreal for all that compared to this—‘though this feels most unreal. The moment of truth. But the word, ever too late or too soon, fails and falls. It escapes us; we will never quite know. His dream precedes ours; ours follows his. Him: Can this really be? Am I really going? Us: Can this really be? Is he really gone? Him: Tell me I’m Willy Nepomuceno! Us: Perhaps it was only Willie Nepumuceno.* The April 1 diary reads: Cannot talk about it—‘February 25-26 must go. It behooves us as poets to leave this man to heaven. But Remontado we must pursue to the end, though he too disappears on his side of the apocalypse. We imagine him, vertiginous with insomnia and catharsis, listening to the radio as it brings pictures of the camp-fires in Manila, the Sinulog3 in Cebu. Boy to girl: “Look, Halley’s Comet!” But it’s only the paper moon—‘he, too, is lost in his own way in Dumaguete. And the April 1 diary continues: For those who may wonder what I wrote that night I hope a description of the style will suffice. It was written with the oratory of Blast Opule, the uprightness of Lafayette Erecto, and the hitherto undisclosed recklessness and daring of Julius Pirata. We do not know exactly how the diary was destroyed. The April 1 diary says nothing at the very end except that he was, in his own words, his own April Fool. With a vengeance the stories run wild. Some say he burned it, some that he tore it up. Some that he buried it, some that it was put in the Swiss bank. Some that he never even wrote it, which may well be the truth. I favor the version which says he flung it down, in lieu of suicide, to where a river—‘like love, like magic—was waiting though no river ever waits. Like love it goes but stays. Like magic it’s there and isn’t there.


Touch Move [From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] In the game of chess, if it’s your turn to move and you touch a piece—whether by accident or by impulse or after much sturdy—you will [MISSING PASSAGES] duration a chess tournament requires. As a matter of fact no woman enjoys watching a man think for even five minutes. Unless of course it is her he’s thinking of. And even then, she’s rather that he acted. Action is what she wants. Lots of action. She hates paralysis and catatonics. She wants you to move! And not touch move, my foot. Yes, James, you’ve never even suspected the amount of revulsion she keeps to herself when she observes two men spend grueling hours trying to out-think each other dead wood! It’s also the nature of the game that women hate. Chess is logic. And women hate logic, particularly logic for logic’s sake. Woman is anti-logic. She loves, above all, contradiction. Another thing: a chess game calls for honesty on a high level. And that’s just it. With women, honesty is the worst policy. Love, unlike chess, does not need directors and arbiters. In fact, Love/Woman cannot tolerate them. They are a vexation to her spirit to her spirit. My advice to the chessplayer who has one eye open to women is that he cheat his opponent. Only then can he expect a little hope from women. Break the rules. Transfer your Knight or steal his Bishop when he’s not looking. A woman dislikes man-made rules. Because she is rule. I hope I never get to play a woman in a tournament. That will be my ending as a chessplayer. I will resign on my first move. In practice though, I apply myself to a certain strategy whenever I have the occasion to play a woman (now is the time to divulge a secret). I play to trap her Queen, not the King. Also I make all sorts of crazy moves. Too bad I still win these games. Force of habit, perhaps. My happiest moment in chess was when I once managed to trick a girl into mating my King with her Queen. Cesar Ruiz Aquino’s Greatest—in all seriousness—Chess Game. Last week, Franz Arcellana of UP asked me if I thought there is a relationship between chess and poetry. This was in his class and the topic was “The Political Novel.” I was seated between two other guests in the class: Jolico Cuadra and Erwin Castillo who, for some reason kept talking not about the political novel but about happiness. I turned around and stole a glance at the reason: a girl following the discussion with lively interest, a single flare of whose nostrils hinted of a happiness beyond politics, who seemed to be the incarnation of all the chess Queens I ever played, felt, touch moved. It was a moment. I was genuinely worried. The ever intelligent Franz obviously was hoping for an answer the would say yes, there is a relationship, a resemblance in principle between chess and poetry because. For years I have carried on a dispute with Castillo over the game’s value to the poet. Castillo thinks it is nil. I said there is no true relation. I meant it. Although I added that in one anthology of classic chess games you will find a game, played in splendid style, by


Leo Tolstoy. I could have added that Vladimir Nabokov loved to compose chess puzzles as intricate as his verbal games. That Borges was a devoted chess onlooker, that he wrote two chess poems which were sonnets. In chess, you see, you impose your will too much on the course of things that are happening. Will is all and you force matters. In chess, it’s win or nothing. You don’t want to lose. Fischer burst out once: “Don’t ever talk to me of losing!” Whereas when you write a poem you keep your willfulness to a minimum (though this minimum also exacts sweat, blood and tears—even more than chest!). Back of your mind is the ultimate recognition that you cannot force the Muse. If you succeed it’s because she has granted it. It is she, not you, who touches and moves. Manila, 1980


Two [From Chronicles of Suspicion, 1990] 1 The Wound When, as they lay quietly in bed, she told him that she was leaving, he knew it was F. Her voice was as small and soft as her hand that reached for his, but the words came like the quintessence of his life; the touch of her hand, the quintessence of his hurt. And then it was a though he waited for someone else in him to stir, to say something. But what was there indeed for him, or for her, to say? He felt some dark, secret shore of his being come alive with dwarves hauling the moon from the sea, or perhaps dumping it. Her hand pressing his was a knowledge of how he could never bring himself to touch her. It was a knowledge of how it made no difference if she and F. would never see each other again. If in fact F. was gone for good. She held his hand in a way that nothing could change even if eventually another man came into her life. Even if F. returned and then went away again. Even if F. had never come and there had never been in fact any F. F.’s aloofness, even to her, even when it seemed to be not really aloofness but a certain air, a certain cast of a manner that gave the effect of aloofness, had always seemed to spite him. Sometimes it seemed F., was reproaching him—reproaching him for the way he lived his life in general, and the way he tried to keep away from them, for her, in particular. How as it that F. could make him feel so guilty for going out most of the time, for the furtive wish that he did not have to come and had instead fled from it all, as if he, not F., were that child’s father—as if she belonged to both of them? Now he was carrying her, walking her about the yard when she said she wanted to go back inside, muttering as if half-asleep, but in the dark it seemed to him that her eyelids were a veil that shielded his heart for him. He felt a wave catch in his throat. The wound he hid from her, as she hid her knowledge of it. She was fifteen, soon to be heavy with child. One day he thought he saw the blue-green insect of his life elude him like the glimmer of a needle moon and it was her eyelashes that battled sweetly in his face. 2 The Scar He was dead. When he watched people in the streets, in buses, in elevators, in restaurants, his anonymity, while it kept him from being found out, was a slow waxing into the consciousness that he was dead. If he went home, he would have to answer greatly for it, having been dead all years. He thought of the one who would suffer the most from it. And then the thought of going home oppressed him. He thought of the scar on his elbow.


He had stumbled on broken glass when he was very small. It was a bad wound, and it took several stitches to sew it. But he was seldom if ever conscious of the scar, and that was because he never saw it where it was unless he purposely bent his elbow to look at it. Now he thought that if perhaps a way could be found to remove the scar, he could pass for someone else and he could go home. Then he dreamed he was crying over the scar in pity. And when he woke up the pain was there still. Dumaguete, 1974


Writers [From Checkmeta, 2004] In the later 1960s Proc Montecino was the editor of a Zamboanga monthly news magazine that he himself published and hoped, for a while, to circulate not just in our town but in others parts of Mindanao like Davao and Cotabato. The dream did not materialize and eventually his magazine even folded up. But there was a time in 1966-1967 when I frequented his office of the second floor of the Manuel Wee Sit Building. I was exceedingly welcome. I was the college kid who, in 1962, published two short stories a quick succession, first in Graphic and then in the Free Pres. When he wasn’t too busy, he would treat me to coffee—sometimes when he really had time, to beer—downstairs on the groundfloor. In time I knew his secret: he had a collection of rejection slips from national magazines for short-story attempts that died, so to speak, with their boots on. 1 The coffee and the beer sessions, where he went literary to his heart’s content, were a substitute for the elusive acceptance slip. But that’s not fair to Proc. Anyway, let me just shift to present tense. In one such session he gets me to promise writing a story for his magazine. 2 In another, a name crops up: T.E. “He’s a friend of yours?” “Yes.” “Maybe we should get together sometime.” “Exactly. He was here yesterday and we talked about you.” There were five or six people in Zamboanga apart from me who have published a short story or two in national magazines, all whom I haven’t read, including T.E. who is the least and rather impressive: he has produced about half a dozen in two years. Somehow I have a feeling that Proc is playing me off against the guy. I have not done anything since the stories in 1962. “What’s he like?” “He drinks like a black stallion.” Proc puffs at his cigarette, apparently relishing his queer imagery as much as he does his association with T.E.3 I haven’t seen the guy once, late at night, walking down Guardia Nacional with some friends, drunk and laughing raucously. 4 He is thirtyish, rather short 5, the sleekly dressed sort, down to the gloss of his shoes. I have a hazy understanding that he is a news correspondent from some national newspaper or other, and that he lives with his parents who are weel-to-do. Faint traces of the Spanish in his looks.6 Prominent stomach, eye glasses, a slight waggle when he walks. 7 It was my last year as a boy in Zamboanga The sequence was something like this: I study for Silliman for one semester in 1962. The next semester I quit school and go to Manila for the first time, to attend a seminar under Leonard Casper, the American literary critic, at the Ateneo Graduate School on Padre Faura. 8 When the nest school year opens I am back in Zamboanga. I finished ny A.B. at Zambonga AE College. Then I go back to Manila, go to the U.P. at Dilliman for graduate work in


Comparative Literature. I am twenty-one. I see James Dean for the first time at the Lyric Theater in Escolta. The movie is East of Eden and when the movie is over I want to bawl like a child inside the moviehouse’s comfortroom. I come home during the semestral break and beg to be allowed to quit school for a while and stay home. My mother will hear nothing of it. I do not have the courage to tell her I am a delinquent, more exactly a truant, in school and I know the second semester will go absolutely the same way. So she wins, I go back to U.P. and after a year she loses, though I can hardly say I’ve won—I leave university with no units earned except in one subject under Mrs. Dolores Feria. Now nothing can make me go back to school. My mother yields helplessly, as though I were ill. I am infact completely bewildered, sort of knock out on my feet. But I am back to my old habits in no time. I visit the public library in the mornings. From our house on Unreal Street, it is one short perpendicular street away—a small building from the American years. Its door faces north; one enters turning left, away from a now visible sea beyond the Fort and the acacia trees. In the afternoons I take to the steerts. I browse into two bookstores, Apostol & Sons and Golden Bell, very small but in the former I miraculously find a book each by Capote, Bellow, and Nabokov. One after another I buy all three. I ran into old friends, chiefly Willy Arsena. This goes on for months. in July, I join a radio station as casual announcer. I disc-jockey in the evenings. People wonder who the young man behind the voices is. At parties they are surprised to meet me. Naturally I am extremely good-looking on the radio, not to mention tall and dark. I become ser and shyer and more and more conceited at the same time. They can’t make anything out of in person. I am the ultimate in uncommunicativeness. But quite swaggering on the radio, and on the phone when the girls call up, who all flip over the voice. One can’t wait to meet me and comes to the station right after she calls. When she arrives I put on a longplaying album and take her outside the booth, away from the view of the technician, and proceed to at least partially fulfill her fantasies before they completely deserted. In March of the following year, I transfer to another station where, where in December, I get into a fight with a senior announcer, let go with a hail of bind blows one of which lands hard, sealing the end of our bxing match with a black-eye. Also the end of 1966, the end of my job, the end of my adolescence. The end of my life in Zamboanga. I have all the while kepy my real, secret self 9alive by retaining my melancholy habits and corresponding a little with Willy Sanchez in Manila. Writing has been torture. My vain opinion of myself contributes to my block, poisons whatever real ability I have. I don’t even know that it’s a writer’s block—what I know is that, though I think of writing all the time, I shirk the actual job of sitting down to work.10 The truant continues on his way. I dissipate myself on dreams. On the dream. I don’t even really read. I buy or borrow a book and keep it in my room like a miser, reading it like a little here and there, but never get to read though. I never get to finish the three books—Saul Bellow’s Herzog, Capote’s In Cold Blood, and Navokob’s The Gift. Yet I feel somehow I must be someone like Herzog (whatever he is), and I am killing the gift in the cold. I am hungry for life, but life as it is in the books. And I don’t want to just read it. I want to live it. Zamboanga will never read like a book. I will have to be a magician. Willie Arsena says we shall die talking in Chinese. It is 1967 and Manila is luring again. It is back of my mind all the time—Manila, the Henry Miller Paris of my dreams, the book of my life which I


dream of living and writing. I make up my mind to leave. Look for a job. Big city, I’m coming. I spiral, zigzag, fly, plummet, sink, resurface, float, loiter at Proc’s, meet T.E. One Sunday afternoon a little after lunch-time I get a phone call. It is T.E. drinking beer at all the beer garden on the groundfloor of the Manuel Wee Sit Building-the downstairs place from Proc Montecino’s office—and he is asking I care to join him. I am half-hour late. T. E. has two companions. Piled neatly to one corner of the table are the beer bottles they have emptied. There are four unopened bottles in front of the vacant chair—my “fine,” he says, as I sit down. Meaning I have to drink all four and catch up. T. E. then tells me he has been granted fellowship to the Silliman writers workshop in Dumaguete, scheduled in May, but he doesn’t feel like going all by himself so he is chucking it. Anyway, he’s heard I studied at Silliman for a while, was in the 1962 workshop—the very first—so can I tell him what Dumaguete is like and the workshop?11 I tell him he should go. I tell him Nick Joaquin and Franz Arcellana were in the 1962, the first workshop. Ed and Edith Tiempo were the hosts. Among the fellows was Wilfredo D. Nolledo.12 Before I know what’s happening I tell him we can go together. Soon we are talking like there is no doubt we are going to Dumaguete together. We split at about five o’clock. Back home, I tell my mother about it. She gladly gives her consent. I do not tell her of my plan to proceed, after the workshop, to Manila. 13 I visit T. E. in his house four days later. I met his mother, who is as excited as we are about the trip. Two weeks later, we take the boat. T. E. sees to it that we have a case of beer under our cots. It is the middle of April and the middle of sundown. After fourteen or sixteen hours, we are in Dumaguete. It is around eight in the evening. We take a room at Al Mar, on the boulevard a little past Silliman going south. Then more beer in the dining hall which is empty. T. E. calls Dr. Tiempo up. And after the formal greeting and self-introduction it is naturally: “By the way, Cesar Ruiz Aquino is here. He’s right beside me.” And so I hear the man’s voice again after almost five years. When I hang up, I am, in the blink of an eye, a fellow in the Silliman writers workshop. Beer and laughter—that is, the workshop has begun. At past ten we decided to go out. We flag a tricycle, amused by the red rose on the driver’s buri hat before he has stopped. Interesting too is the design of the tricycle: T. E. says it is a rocket ship. The driver says there’s a place near the airport. The rocket ship roars along the highway. We meet another tricycle. The two drivers recognize each other, slow down and stop. We u-turn. The second tricycle, less gaudily painted and designed, is a submarine—I tell T. E. The drivers talk, unfazed by all the laughing. There are two girls in the submarine—one a mermaid, the other a luna moth. T. E. gets down and trade places with the luna moth.


We head back for town. I see T. E. turn around laughing to look at us. The happy look in his face is so funny that I can almost forget that the drivers are racing. I try to kill the paranoia by thinking everything is moving. The planet itself is moving, and along with it the stars. But the thing gets worse. The whole universe could turn turtle. There is only one room. This does not deter us. And the light from the hall outside comes in through the gaps above the wall. We asked the attending boy if they can turn it off. Boy replies they can’t. This does not stop us either. I can’t help taking a look at T. E. and companion. I suppress a laugh. Like a stallion is right. Beneath the pot belly and the slight waggle, he is a horse. 14 They lie still. I keep recurring, tryingmy best to even things of somewhat. I fall asleep with a joke: I’ve outturn Proc Montecino’s black stallions, three Sundays to one. In myself I dream I am riding a horse in my grandfather’s land in the mountains and the horse is flying. The flight is slow. After a while, the horse is a giant butterfly. It becomes harder and harder to fly, we draw nearer and nearer to the ground. A woman is giving birth inside. From the foot of the stairs, I see the midwife come out of the room and talk to my mother. She is one our tenants. I go up and tell her my butterfly has sprained its wing, can she heal it. But that’s an airplane she says and runs for cover down in circles till I spot my target. I fly deftly between the branches and soar, then swoop down in circles till I spot my target. I hit the umbilical cord, splitting the child from its mother. A third woman, of bewitching beauty, wipes my perspiring face with a handkerchief that has a red rose painted, together with the baby’s smile, upon it. Then it is not a red rose but a red sun. T. E. makes fast friends with the writers who are mostly from Cebu: Nelson la Rosa, Eddy Yap, Ric Patalinhug, Jun Canizares, and Thelma Enage. The writing fellows from Manila are Romeo Virtusio, Mar Arcega, and Joy Dayrit. There are two nuns: Sister Delia and Sister Imelda. Who bears some resemblance to the third woman in my dream! 15 My roommate is Eddie Yap, who is most of the time high on Benzedrine. He wakes screaming one morning, sitting uo terrified as he looks upon his missing arms. Nightmare. His arms are very much there.16 The piece hat is taken up on the last day of the workshop—in the very last session in the afternoon—is a short story with Zamboanga for its setting. Glances, as the session begins, coming naturally in my direction and T. E.’s. Author can only be one of us. At the Silliman writers workshop, the identity of the author is not revealed until discussion of the work is finished. The story centers around a monster, a rich Spanish mestizo in his fifties who owns a coconut plantations both in Zamboanga and Basilan. Estranged from his wife and family, he has lived alone, for decades, in a house in Pasonanca with his cook who is also his gardener. The man is Bluebeard, Zamboanga edition. Buried in this fiend’s backyard are young women he ravished and then killed. He has no problem seducing them. He has wealth, good looks, a way with the ladies. The last being chiefly his diving prowess, amazing for a man past fifty, displayed on weekends at the Pasonanca Park swimming pool.


And he has no problem with the town’s knowledge of his deeds. He is able to silence everyone—victims’ relatives, judges, the press and radio. How? Through glitter. The glitter of money and the glitter of terror. This hush-up, sustained incredibly for decades, may have spawned exaggerations. It is whispered that he watched his little daughter drown at a beach and collected a fortune in insurance. He vacations once every two or three years in Spain with the secret purpose of surgically cutting his tail, which regrows. The story’s point of view, first-person singular, almost makes it a double story (the narrator is the author). The narrative is so constructed as to make either of the following observations equally correct. (1) The monster’s crimes etched against the day-to-day affairs of the narrator who leads an uneventful existence. (2) The day-today affairs of the narrator whose life is uneventful are etched against the monster’s crimes. Anyway the comeuppance: The man is driving his car along Cawacawa boulevard, south to north. He is headed for Pillar College, Zamboanga’s exclusive school for girls. Comes down. It is high noon. Suddenly—out of nowhere—a boy, a very young, sixteen or seventeen, is facing him. “When the gun cracked it was as if the sun, blazing out of Africa, had stuck and he saw everything spiral into a still point amid the blackness of his heart.” On the next day the gardener is found hanging from a tree. The same tree under which he once raped a girl in front of the devil who had told him to do so. The story instantly spreads that the devoted gardener, again, was only carrying out his master’s order, this time his “last will and testament.” Dr. Tiempo qualifies his admiration for the story by pointing out rather sensational material and the author’s apparent tendency to indulge in it. Sister Delia says she does not know which is the real horror—”the Spaniard demon” (she keeps saying this till the fellows smile) or the fact that the townspeople have been willing to live with his deeds for decades. Jun Canizares says as monstrous as “the demon Spaniard” (laughter from the fellows) is the fact that the author obviously enjoyed writing the story (more laughter). I ventured the remark that perhaps it would be interesting if the man’s having a tail, surgical removal of which he takes periodic trips to Spain for, were not just folk tale but actual. T. E. immediately answers that the author “couldn’t possibly fractionalize everything.” The piece, he says, is based on an actual story in Zamboanga. There is a general look of surprise on everyone’s face. T. E. and I have joined the discussion as if neither of us is in fact the author. “Did you see this man?” T. E. again: “I saw him dive at the Pasonanca swimming pool, the sound of the water as he cleaved it followed by the onlookers’ applause still in my ears as I say this.” “How come we’ve never read it in the papers?” I answer this: “That’s how weirdly far-reaching his sinister power was. Some people say he was practicing the occult—that he was in fact doing ritual murders. If this were the U.S.A. you can be sure a Truman Capote would be writing a book.” T.E. adds: “The story says he bribed and made death threats.” “What’s Africa doing in the story?” “Allusion—blackness of his heart echoes Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”


Someone criticizes the story for what appears to be blatant editorializing. This is the passage: The enormity of it all, if the stories are true, was so unspeakable it’s a wonder that for so long we were able to live with it, were in fact ready to live with it for the rest of our placid lives. These were tales of darkness that register the intensity ten on the metaphysical Richter. So dark as to be nightmare interpretations of what the city’s name based on two syllables means. “Boang,” mad. If the immediate news reports are true, the assassin assumes the status of an avenging angel; plummeting like Kleistian lightning from heaven when men fail to settle horrendous issues of justice among them. How significant that the gunman is a youngster—sixteen or seventeen years of age—what more firring visitor and emissary can we have from a future disconsolate with ours? Young boy with a 45 caliber pistol for flaming sword razing the judged man to the ground. “Well,” I smile, “that’s really from the editorial of one of the city’s papers.” A panelist look stumped. “Is it? I don’t remember seeing that. Besides I thought radio and press in the town played hear no evil, see no evil, talk no evil with regards to the whole matter.” “You’re right. Read the story again. The editor wrote an editorial that he didn’t publish.” Panelist: “Yes, but it’s nowhere indicated that the passage in question is that unpublished editorial.” “It’s sufficiently hinted.” “Was the gunman really a boy?” This is Sister Imelda.18 “He was,” T.E. answer her. “I can’t help wondering who he could have bee. It seems to be the final touch a story that’s—well—stranger than fiction.” There is a momentary silence in which everyone seems to be sorting through Sister Imelda’s remark mentally. Look who’s talking, I say inside me as I note once more this beautiful young nun’s uncanny resemblance to the woman in my dream. “Does the author intend to publish this?” When the workshop comes to a close, T.E. and I are each offered a graduate assistantship in the English department by the Tiempos. Manila bursts like a bubble. T. E. and I—and my brother Voltair—share a cottage inside the campus for one semester. It does not take long for us to see that our personal differences rule out a close friendship. I even begin to dislike him sometimes. His beery (even when he hasn’t had a beer) quality arouses my distaste. Above all he is not sympathetic— is the exact opposite in women. Unable to hold myself, I tell him he can’t possibly go on doing the way he does forever; a man ought to have a wife. I don’t know if this hurts him. He does not seem to be the sort who gets wounded visibly, never gets into a mood. But something between us is soured. We drift apart. He finds other friends. So do I. even here we are irreconcilable. We don’t take to the same people. Then fate plays like a joke: T.E. got married. 19 At the start of the semester we got to know a group of young ladies in a neighboring cottage. T.E. meets a music teacher. We visit the cottage together at first. After a while, he visits the place alone. I know it is the music teacher.


The first time he visited the cottage alone, he comes home near midnight. He comes in quietly but briskly, all potbelly as he takes off his shirt off. Before he can sit down, I ask him how the visit was, framing the question very rapidly. His eyes laugh, but to my surprise, he says he can’t answer my question—what if the lady becomes his wife. A week later, he comes home one night with her framed picture. I look at him in disbelief. Aware of my gaze, he does not meet my eyes at first. Then the happy smile comes on his face and we burst into laughter together. And so our paths diverged and the years burst like bubbles—whole balloons of memory that did not include T. E. in Dumaguete swallows and digests us separately. He becomes just one of the faces that I see on the campus from time to time. He and his wife move from the campus to Banilad, to the southern limit of the city. Their baby, a girl, is born. Space wheels, time drops like crescent moon. All of a sudden I ran into T. E. one Sunday evening. The night is young. It is October in 1972 and there are no memories. We are both teaching in Silliman. T. E.’s wife is in Spain. She is taking further studies and will be away for a year. I don’t know if their child is with her or with T.E’s parents in Zamboanga. T. E. is on his way to Looc, near the wharf. He asks me if I want to come along. The place is quiet when we arrive. It’s a small place with painted walls. The light is dim because of the colored bulbs. There are three girls. The girl who serves us beer drop a few coins into the jukebox and after pressing her selections sits with us and talks to T. E. T. E. introduces us to each other and tells the girl to sit beside me. After a while, she asks me if I care to dance. I shake my hands and offer her a beer instead. She gets up for it and when she comes back I rest my hand lightly on her lap. She keeps pushing my hand off her lap gently. There’s a cluster of empty beer bottles on the table when the girl we are waiting for shows up. She is fair-skinned and hefty. She stands beside T. E. and slings her forearm on his shoulder, their hands meeting in a clasp. He tells her to get some beer but she answer that she wants to go home. T. E. introduces me to her. She smiles at me. I reach out for a hand shake and T. E.’s eyes laugh when I kiss her hand. The four of leave the place and walk through an unlighted neighborhood. The house is not far. It has two storeys. The girl with me occupies the downstairs portion. She tends to the kitchen straightaway while the two sit down on a single upholstered seat, their hands still locked. I’m sitting on the bench wondering what the time is. She takes some eggs and a can of corned beef. We buy some more beer after dinner. After a while I ask what the time is. No one has a watch. She says it must be very near twelve. Twelve means we have to stay in or risk getting apprehended if we go home. I’m sure it’s only around ten-thirty. I drink my beer quietly, still trying to decide whether to go home or not. I can feel my body aching to get some sleep. T. E. and friend slip out to go upstairs. When they are gone, she tidies the bed up. There’s a smaller bed in the kitchen, folded up against the wall to which it is attached.


I sit on the bed, take my shoes off. She comes out of the kitchen with a blanket and makes for the door. I ask her where she is going. She says she will sleep upstairs. I get up, overtake her and close the door. Smiling, I tell her I’m dead tired and I won’t disturb her. I add that if she sleeps upstairs it will look like I’m driving her out of her own place and I won’t feel good about it. She yields. When the light is out, I lie trying not to moan. The night of staying up very late are telling on my body, I bury my face in the pillow as if my whole head is a wound and the pillow is the cool stream or balm. An hour passes. Another. All at once I know I will pass the whole night sleepless if I don’t get up and go to her. In the dark, I make her form out. She is lying on her side, facing the wall. I shake her gently. She stirs and half pushes against my arm, as if awakened forma doze she was just about to sink into. I tell her I want to know where the water is, I’m thirsty. She mumbles where it is. I grope for a glass on the table. I drink the water soundlessly but cant avoid sighing after emptying the glass. I go back to her bed, sit on the edge for a while. My eyes now adjusted to the dark, I watch her, relishing the light of her breathing deeply, tense with waiting. The bed is too small and it squeaks. She asks to transfer to my bed. We get up. She turns the light on. I feel funny standing, in more than one meaning of the word, as I wait for her to go onto bed. She strips the gown off. In the night I discovered that she is pregnant. Afterwards I strike the slightly swollen belly gently. My touch is hesitant at first. As if her belly were some strange animal that might bite. I ask her if she knows who the father is. She answer that she is not what I think she is. There’s a little girl washing clothes in the kitchen when I wake up. The little girl looks up at me quickly and shyly. I ask her who the little girl is. She says the girl is from the neighborhood who comes every morning to her place to wash. She tells me T. E. left early in the morning. I ask her what the time is. She says it’s past ten. I ask her in a whisper if the girl stays in the place all morning. She says the girl will be off in a little while. I make some coffee and smoke as we sit on table saying nothing. The little girl leaves, saying nothing and glancing at me again. I get up and lock the door. I pull her to bed. Afterwards I stroke the belly again. I have a strange urge to squeeze the rest of her body hard till it hurt. My hands stops and rest on her womb. I tell her to name the child Rima, if it’s a girl. Or Risa. Rima and Risa if it’s going to be twins. She laughs. Rhyme and laughter, I told her. If it’s a boy, I continue, Andre is a good name. She laughs again, saying the name as if the name was a puzzle, but adds that she doesn’t like Andres. I tell her it’s Andre not Andres. She asks if it’s English. I tell her the English is Andrew. Andre is French and it sounds better, special. I begin to aware that I am a hair’s breadth away from playing-acting to make her feel good but actually I have no intention of coming back. I suddenly regret that I have no money I can spare. I think of the food last night. Weeks pass before I got to see T. E. again. When I see him, he tells me the girl keeps asking about me. I say nothing and merely laugh with him.


Whenever we chance to sit at coffee together, the girl crops up in our talk inevitably. It becomes some kind of ritual. After a while we got over it. A year later I see the girl again. I am strolling on the boulevard with Butch Macansantos. Butch Macansantos is twittering, firing away at Nietzsche or is it Dostoevsky. Someone pokes me from behind. She gets past us in a half-run and not turning to look at me. I recognize her. I ask her where she’s going. She says she’s going home. I ask her if I can go with her to her place. She says an uncle is at her place. She is walking fast, as if the night is propelling his feet. I ask her about the child. She says she had it aborted. I walk back to Butch Macansantos. He asks me who the girl is. Butch Macansantos is a young poet from Zamboanga whom I recommended to the Tiempos for the fellowship at the 1972 workshop held in May. Now he is taking up his M.A. in English under their tutelage. I begin to tell him the story. I change my mind mid-sentence.but I have already mentioned T. E.’s name. I continue a little. Shift to Proc Montecino. Who is in Dumaguete and still at it, publishing and editing a weekly, wanting I’m sure to see me. And still wanting, I’m sure, to write. Albeit secretly. “Maybe we should get together sometime.” It is 1974. Memories dart like shadows as I stalk, through I am in fact the quarry. I stand waiting for the day when they shall be all over me.

I mean there’s a certain heroism in anyone who persists in a literary or artistic bent even when he knows his limitations. Proc, who is no longer around—may he rest in peace—persisted for I do not know how long. Possibly to the end. Despite this personal frustration, which must have been painful to him, I won’t ever forget (he was about a decade my senior): “Journalism has limits, kid believe me. Fiction has none. And I mean when it comes to presenting the truth, to reporting—yes. Believe me. The factionalist is Superman.” Let me put down here, to avoid giving wrong impression, that I can’t say we were great friends. We are not really even friends—but Zamboanga was a small town as was Dumaguete where, by sheer coincidence, we were both to be transplanted. 1

A promise I was unable to keep. It was not until 1969 when I finally broke into print once more with a short-story—a silence of seven years. And after that nothing again for half a decade. Perhaps in 1976, when I was writing a series of autobiographical fragments of Ermita, the magazine, I finally realized that I was incapable of writing the traditional short story. I was writing, at the rate of one every month, five pieces for that wonderful but short-lives outlet—pieces of the sort that are now called cross-over. 2

If this were a movie, creative use of cigarette smoke can be made by which will shift the scene to one in which T. E. is shown as he looked in 1966. 3

The physical details would come later—exactly when he “collected” or “settled” in my mind’s eye I do not know. 4

But taller than Proc who was short, though he could not in fact, as I have written elsewhere, be tall n some other sense. 5

If you have seen a sketch of him done by the Zamboanguneo painter, Ed Jumalon, and printed on the back cover of one of his recent books, you might object to the objective ‘faint,’—he looks quite Spanish, or at least Mexican. 7 That is, where did Proc Montecino’s metaphor or simile came from? 6


I had applied for a fellowship and was accepted. Leonard Casper, teaching at UP Dilliman and married to a Filipina writer, Linda Ty-Casper, was then an active part of the local literary scene. Casper invited a good number of writers to talk in the seminar. I remembered well Estrella Alfon, Greg Brillantes, Glida Cordero-Fernando, Amador Daguio, Emanuel Torres, Jess Peralta, and—I think—Franz Arcellana. For the life of me, I don’t know why I am not sure. 8

The one with my real voice, not quite found yet, but which Willie Arsena, perhaps, virtually alone in Zamboanga, had heard. 9

Perhaps there was a real block somewhere deep inside me, too deep for one at my age to understand. And perhaps it would be more accurate to say, rather, “My inability to write has been torment.” I was still far from the day when I would see that what may hinder a literary youngster from writing his own awareness of the masters, whom he aspires, alas, to write like. One prose writer I tried to write lie for instance was Lawrence Durrell of The Alexandria Quartet. A foredoomed attempt, naturally. 10

I did manage to write a story, The Case of Bernando Angelo. Very surrealistic, heavily influenced by Kafka, its final scene is a court trial in which the corpse of the murdered man is on exhibit. I mailed this to the Free Press and after months of getting no word from them the literary editor I sent an angry telegram saying “You had no right to throw my story into the trash can.” A prompt reply came from the country’s premier literary figure that said, “I kept your story for so long because I didn’t know what to do with it.” It wasn’t a telegram; it was a note that came together with a returned manuscript. Handwritten by Nick Joaquin, the rejection made me, nonetheless, very happy. This was time when the young writers of the 60s were entering their heyday (unfortunately cut down in 1972 by Martial Law). Winning prizes in successive years. Erwin E. Castillo’s Ireland, had won the top Free Press prize for best short-story in 1965, with superlative kudos from Nick Joaquin and franz Arcellana, two of the judges. In second and third places respectively were Greenwich Standard Time by Father Rudy Villanueva and Island by Resil Mojares, undoubtedly the best young writer then from the South. The following year 1966, Ninotchka Rosca won the top prize with Diablus of Sphere. And in 1969, Alfred A. Yuson with The Hill of Samuel. This, not the beer, blew m mind right then and there and then (I had a hard time catching up—by three o’clock I was drunk and still a bottle behind). I was suddenly in a dream again. It seemed so long ago, so far back. 11

12

T.E., then, only knew Nick Joaquin.

It would take me three decades to realize, because I have never thought about it until know, that T.E. had probably set me up. And three decades that my mother had consented instantly—to realize that she did because she was relieved, happy to see the radio madness gone and her son headed, once again, for university. 13

14

Vindicating, somewhat, Proc Montecono’s metaphor!

15

It is more correct to say, perhaps, that the woman in my dream resembled her.

He liked the mad world of writers and living it, though he hardly said a syllable, both during and away from the workshop sessions, mild and quiet in fact as little birthday card. When I met him again in Manila many years later, I could tell he was A-okay. He had a good job—with a drug company! Was married; had, by admission, stopped writing. Jun Canizares and Ric Patalinhug later became lawyers. Ric Patalinhug continues to write, but has shifted to Cebuano. Somehow he was always at loggerheads with Dr. Tiempo at the sessions. Though it was never in the open, since he wouldn’t argue after he had, say expressed a discordant view, it was pretty evident. Maybe they didn’t like each other. It was from Ric Patalinhug that I first heard the names of John Updike and Gunter Grass. He and Nelson la Rosa (who, not, Eddie Yap, turned out to be the really mad one) liked quoting passages from the great prose writers. In particular, a whole paragraph Hemingway’s auto biographical A Moveable Feast. 16

17

The story’s opening sentence is “John Fowles’ collector is nothing compared as to this one.”


18

Banning memory’s smoke and mirrors, this is the only time I can recall Sister Imelda speaking up.

The joke was on me and has prove to be one for life—I have remained single. Incidentally Sister Imelda, too, later left the nunnery and married. Or so I heard. 19


THE POEMS Advice to a Young Poet [From Checkmeta, 2004] First and last, as a garden celebrates The rest is confrontation. First fire and last fire In the middle Freeze Not, seize The day, Go The way Of all sap Flow, Let hap— Draw your own Flaming sword & make the word Flash Not batting An eyelash: The apple not the fall Is all Know the poet is one Hewn Three-fold: Of madness, is wickedness And sadness. All told, A fool Whose rule To the end Of his days Is never to mend His ways, Never to stay put Dialing as it were The Muse’s number But As the rest is conflagration First and last, like the greats Love her like a riddle In the middle of things


Agon [From In Samarkand, 2008] What happens when an irresistible force Meets an immovable object? A joke of course Draw? But how? You were chosen But I am the one God is the Referee But God is the nowhere man And everywhere woman.

All in All [From Sands & Coral, 1976] But speak to her and truly You will speak to her. All the moves, moves between you Or if it is still It is still between. But speak to her and fashion Your very empty Hands that fidget And if still you fidget. If your word die And you with it, with your word Speak to her no more and truly You will speak to her And the sky Is not between you


Alone [From In Samarkand, 2008; verseliteration (from D.H. Lawrence’s novel, Sons and Lovers] From his breast sprang the endless space. And it was there behind him. Everywhere on every side the immense dark silence. There was no Time only Space and he had no place in it. Whatever spot he stood on, there he stood alone at the core a nothingness and yet not nothing. There was his body. Where was he?

Amorous Support [From Silliman Journal, 2013] You cheering me was rather like hearing the sound of one hand clapping because I held the other

Anak Bulan [From In Samarkand, 2008] [NOTE: Dr. Aquino has a similarly titled story.] In my sleep I am riding a horse in my grandfather’s


land in the mountains and the horse is flying. The fight is slow. After a while the horse is a giant butterfly. It becomes harder and harder to fly. We draw nearer and nearer to the ground. When we land, there is a small nipa hut on the spot. A woman is giving birth inside. From the foot of the stairs, I see the midwife come out of the room and talk to my mother. She is one of our tenants. I go up and tell her my butterfly has a sprained its wing, can she heal it. But that’s an airplane she says and runs for cover under the trees. I fly deftly between the branches and soar, the swoop down in circle till I spot my target. I hit the umbilical cord, splitting the child from its mother. A third woman, of bewitching beauty, wipes my perspiring face with a handkerchief that has a red rose painted, together with the baby’s smile, upon it. Then it is not a red rose but a red sun.

Apologia [From In Samarkand, 2008] It is the horizon Pursues a child’s garden Of see-saw And the hee-haw The orison And the Gordian Knot Not The nut Horrendous

Araby Revisited [From In Samarkand, 2008] This is the post literate Signature and riddle of her


The neither Blake nor Waite, See ‘grey areas,’ I stand in awe of her gaze Who’s young enough to be an Only for a day, nay For a second, no second Chance, second spring Second second Incarnadine Reincarnation of my, Not Solomon’s nor David’s, Sheba Or Bathsheba Ah! Is it much better really To be plain red Or green or blue Of any hue But young Than well-read, Even Golden Dawn gold, But just a bit too old When the knot or the labyrinth Is tied and untied, entered And excited easily By transmigration’s Alexander Being neither ordain nor Cretan Though disarmingly ancient?

Ars Poetica [From the Sillimanian Magazine, 1993] [MISSING] [From Checkmeta, 2004] And if the bright day is brighter for her Make all days bright for her amusement Even rainy ones.


Baguio Blues [From Checkmeta, 2004] It is my nth time to nothing, January in this mountain city to whose fog Months ago I, thwarted Whether burnt or pale with fruitless chase As from a dread oracle was flung. No one knows me Here where mornings and afternoons Are shed like snakeskin like words that sometimes Slither from my brain Already the year turns, not a word from you. Sometimes the mountains are islands In a ghost of time, shineless sea And the Sun is your body Mineward.

The Ballad of the Ampersand [From In Samarkand, 2008] Before the land Was promised Was the sandbar & the ampersand Before oblivion Was the last stand & the grand Standing Ovation Before the thunderclap Was the hand & the clapping Was w/ one hand & the silence Was deafening Before the Roman


Empire was unholy Was the gladiator Of more than gladness Gloom Before the star Crossed the Great War Before the Ottoman Was Atman Before the autumn moon Was Ramadan The Gospel Before the Common Era According to Accordions The Gospel of Judy Garland El Canon Segun de Panday Pira Exploded Before it was loaded Before it was written Before it was pirated By the lost Command Of Roland Before the Last Countermand The Gospel of Least Reprimand Lust Lest you forget On the other hand Always has The upperhand Therefore understand Beforehand That the Gospel Even according To second-hand Sources will stand The test of rock band


& rock opera &cetera &cetera &cetera

Because the Woman Was Too Beautiful [From In Samarkand, 2008; verseliteration from Henry Corbin’s prose meditation] [MISSING]

Before You Could Imagine Heartbreak

[Uncollected]

If anything nice happened of late To you, say a bar of chocolate Sent, better yet handed, by someone Light on you, if not someone you like Who nonetheless was no bore, was gone Before you could imagine heartbreak— Here, re-live the moment, I hereby Say it’s still Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday...

The Birds [From In Samarkand, 2008; verseliteration from Dylan Nelson’s preface to Birds in the Hand] When birds fly, they show


to us we cannot. When birds seem innocent, we are

Botticelli Blues [From the Sillimanian Magazine, 1988] [MISSING] [From In Samarkand, 2008] And she springs straight from the sea horse’s mouth Lip-red in the light of the bright moon calf Knows her to be the day and the night mare At whose glance he catches fire flies Swears seeing in her hand the sun flower And at her feet the farthest star Fish Took her home once upon a time table When for years the land was without fruit cake And doves flew north of the wind bag’s sighing

The Camelephant [From In Samarkand, 2008]


(Reply to Volatair) Yes, brother, Egyptian mage & Hindu sage knew each other, ate & slept under one roof. Alas! God swept away the proof the moment it existed— the camelephant God was worth or flabbergasted when both wrote for the same girl, as if from a single starry eye, the same pearl of great price poem, twice born, signed between the lines. The 3rd or hundredth hierophant before Shah Jahan was shall see the Taj on fire & here it, heart & I broken by her passing pyre amid the pyramids on Mt. Age under Sarah Zipporah north of the Unicorn On any God-forgiven bright night the universe


travels full-circle on foot, italics mine, the line is a dig at free verse unless written w/ constellations at stake, a take on the infinite.

Caroline in Cubao [From Checkmeta, 2004] Fresh from a bath And no make-up on No handbag Bringing nothing Only a comb Which she clasps Absently The thumb out And her heart— No longer fond— Wandering From object To object In the windows [From In Samarkand, 2008] Fresh from a bath And no make-up on No handbag Bringing nothing Only a comb Clasped Like a weapon The thumb out And brave heart Moving From object To object


No longer mine In the windows

Cellphone Poem [From Checkmeta, 2004] So it equips my eyes not seeing, Not owning—keeping it all: A lover can always trace eternity’s line.

The College Sits Down [From In Samarkand, 2008, verseliteration from Malachi Martin’s novel, The Final Conclave] The scrutiny Is as follows: The Carmelango’s Face is inscrutable. Lohgren glances at him & then at Angelico, Angelico Is watching evrone, Delmonico Has his eyes cast down, looking at his table Ni Kan is doodling Buff is nodding Paternal and solicitous To Franzus. A montae Of faces! Imperious, Arrogant Kirchner, Tremuluos Sargent. Down, Desai Pellino Lortuko Venturi Lombardi Vigente Thule Is very calm and grave


Lynch rises: Today in this Conclave I announce death. The announcement is simple— The Christian world is dead, is gone, is no more Church Music, Chivalric Honor The Love Poem, The Dogmatic Voice, the Diocese The Latin Liturgy We are walking with ghosts, memories Ina still cemetery.” Lord Buff: There is a point in life When nothing will soothe the deep ache But a total break With all that it has become That is now for Rome This bureaucracy which is the Vatican This pomp that is Papal. There is something frightening about us— Celibates all Obedient as one man To invisible voices. Cardinal Pericle Vasari’s voice trembles In Rome we have an abiding presence That outsiders sense. Our preposterousness rings a bell The sound Of impossible Dream centering around A Fantastic idea That nearby a window has been Opened to a beauty never seen. Franzus (comes easily to him) “Last summer at the foot of the Hallow Hills in Lake Placid we walked fields of endless poppies. Suddenly look! We are on fire! We are Walking inside the sun! The sunburst of the Red Star! And yet, as Christians, we are not consumed. We do not perish, We flourish. Because Christ become human Communion is the only way—” “Satan!” “Treason!t”


“Hear him out!” “We all have something to contribute!” “Let the Holy Spirit Speak through the lesser of us!” Franzus: “Marxism is out to destroy Bourgeois man and his innate tendency To profound blasphemy— There is no other way! Domenico: “I take it you are therefore not against violence Say the violence in Latin America?” “Violence And counterviolence Yes yes yes— Love is tender But can give birth to horror. The Great God himself hates Sin. What do you think Hell Is? I advocate the Gospel!” Azande, slightly awkward, rises and makes his way To the speaker’s place. In his embarrassment He for gets to kbeel at the altar For the customary prayer. But his voice is strong and resonant. “In the Divine Chapel Michel— Angelo Covered the end-wall With the last judgment And on the ceiling he portrayed the Prophets. Very few May know that he increased a self portrait in a frasco— In fact, two Look! See the figure of one man Groping his way out of the tomb— Jesus has summoned The dead no rise, notice The joy on the face Of the man. That’s Michelangelo’s self portrait. It is a portrait of me emerging into the light Of some understanding.”


“The Holy Spirit has spoken from Africa!” “I think that that My Most Eminent Lord Cardinal Azande owes us an actual List of concrete changes and proposals. We are not here to gather wool.” “My God! Eminent Brothers, Oh my God! Good Jesus! Where have we got to! We need a Pope! The Church needs a Pope! Jesus wills us to have a new Pope! Ita!” A blaze Burns in the eyes Of Lord Cardinal Henry Walker. “We have a sacred duty to elect a successor To Peter The Lord’s vicar. We will fight against any attempt To exercise even the minimum Influence from outside. So help me, God!” Marquez: “I demand That the Cardinal clarify. Does he mean the Freemasons or the superpowers Behind Closed doors Here today?” “No. It is something far more sinister. More comprehensive, more subtle, farReaching. They have in mind a particular Destiny for this Church. For them Freemasons and Marxists are Puppets. “Walker stops, his lips are moving His eyes Raised. a silence too falls On the Cardinals. Pope Paul VI said, “Maybe the Church is fated to die.” But the Lord said, Fear not—it is I!


Color Her Muse

[Uncollected]

Albeit her fool, about what she wears I can’t say in all honesty which is truer: colors make her or she makes colors more beautiful.

Continuum [From In Samarkand, 2008] But if the day is brighter for her Merry maid with ass Unicorn by the sea Under acacia tree Make all days bright even rainy ones For her sake For no love is as disastrous as this That nothing like a mountain shook Nothing like a storm blew Nothing like a flood swept, Nothing like fire razed The lovers down And no one lived to tell


On the bright day That is a rainy day In the dark night That is a moonlit night

Continuum of Three [From In Samarkand, 2008, verseliteration from the prose of Wallace Stevens, Heidegger & Holderlin] Heidegger was written a work dealing with Holderlin. I am eager to find a copy. Can you find for me at Fribourg Horderlin is the poet of the poet from an excess of impetus, what he said of Oedipus [UNFINISHED]

Continuum of Two [From In Samarkand, 2008; verseliteration from Anthony Burgess’ Shakespeare and Ted Hughes’ Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being] If we accept the powerful Libido of Will, Cleopatra is the final personification of sexual allure. The consequences are: Multiple death and the fall of an empire. The hell. Shakespeare is on the side of passion the unworldliness of erotic love. The play is a theophany and enacts a love


god’s liberation from the Purtan. The lecher Anthony becomes Osiris— the Egyptian Dionysus the African Bacchus the black Adonis.

Dactyls at Twelve [From In Samarkand, 2008] Jesse James Dean Martin Luther Burbank

Dancers [From Sands & Coral, 1968] Kreutzer Sonata by the dragon’s Breast, faultlessly filed For noons—for the twilight dancer. Across the glass, barehanded, But beauty holds out the only bright Breath, striking man’s irises— —Voluptuous pain, a heave, higher. Out the blown blood’s radius, Where lies the beastless dancer?

Dedication [From In Samarkand, 2008] [MISSING]


Dream [From In Samarkand, 2008; verseliteration from Dag Hammarksjold’s diary, Markings] Really nothing was easier than to step from one rope ladder to the other over the chasm but in our dream you failed because the thought occurred to you that you might possibly fall

The Everyday of a Lark [From Sands & Coral, 1963] (With Apologies to my Poet-Elders) I was born, as all men know, In the faerilous forlorn Of some Minotaur, long ago— Many a year ago, I was born; And this Minotaur, As we all know, came inward With no other roar, no other war Than to devour and be devoured. Then, let me bleed then, to song, For O my meaning is the blunder Of all that was wounding long ago, Years ago, when all men Heard the Minotaur, blow for blow— Felt the Minotaur eat and eaten. Let me bleed then, I alone, As the evening jukebox spreads Like an impatience etherealized in a moan;


Let me go through certain heads Shaking, and nodding when I too nod— Let me smoke, and every coke Gulp to Beauty and the god Who, exulting, exalt Her with a poke. Do not ask, “Do you dare?” Then sternly, “You dare the rainbow?” O do not laugh, should I care For indeed I shall dare and throw Over the Academe my glow— The Academe and its disturbing bark Of steak-real, spoon-hard brow, Anti-rainbow and anti-lark. For indeed my loins ache and a numbness With frosty fins punishes my soul— As though a girl with the tenderness Of a pet looked at me and the mole In my right cheek—especially when Elvis With Dylanic fingers punishing the air Punishes the lyric liquids that kill These Letheward lover lips that dare. I have ached to long, longed so long, I shall break into a song. O lift me, lift me from the happy grass Of indecisions and my simple light! I was born, I was born to dream tonight, And dream I dare between the baffled vows Within this lilting house, in the aching Pride, or suicide, before the taking— Before gulping a toast of dry carouse; I dare disturb the Academe! Since I must bleed—I fail! I faint! I die! All. . . all within the taking of my pie— Should all this be but a monstrosity? I am young. . . I am young, easy and young, I roll bottoms up to a Presley song; Should this girl leave me to an empty glass? I should have been a pair of raging wings Scaling across reefs of unlicensed skies, Soaring while my unpremeditated heart sings, And the world should have been all eyes— Or all ears—do I scorn, do I scorn the ground? I see not what powers are under my feet,


But, in my inborn starkness, indeed guess The gash and gush, the lifebeat Of my race and time in this hardness; No, I’ve known the pavement pound for pound. But gold-blooded cool cats come and gnaw, As though Keats were always in the raw. I cannot more fear Love’s noise Though still quivers the mouth of me; I shall take a priest-high poise— As I ache, let me bleed with honey, Especially when the buffeting wind With frosty fingers pins me to punishment, Pokes the pure and the pain of my sober mind To my one own, my very own astonishment. By birth I’m prince, so a prince let me be— Let me apply to skies with my life’s beat Pulsed in the memory of some Minotaur, some sea Perilous with casements hard and sweet; Now, as I am young and busy, heating my seat, Let me pay for my coke and pie, I’m not immune, As I stamp my right foot to the tune Of King Presley—among the smoke-hazy and the Beat.

Eyoter [From Checkmeta, 2004] No need for a little bird to say it The wild things are not gone. I get the willies when I fly, which is why I’m stuck where I was Decades ago but I know Terror is half the triple will to write (Will Shakespeare, William Butler Yeats, Willybog) The new millennium is a chasm, A race w/ constellations to orgasm. You are still all that my nine lives lack Lady of the Elements may I add that you slew all nine insistead As if tlo spite Macarthur


Who always comes back This time as his namesake, the once & future Mac, whose AI He dazzled me from the dead Albeit a stranger to its rudiments The way I was, & still am, to yours, i.e. The ABC of you is just as beyond me As its CPU. The white glare is heaven, believe me It has unhinged me Then if then I was an idiot, now I am idioter & never so few: Rainman, Charly, Tom O’Bedlam, Eyoter. Five, male, Finland. Honestly a boy But more honestly still, Like Gary Oldman In Love Never Dies Decades, not years. & centuries, not decades O that this too, too solid flesh would melt Was how I felt When the sun hit me When it dawned on me That it was sunset. That I could hardly trust my feelings, That Feel my thrust, isn’t it hard? Was gone From here & now to kingdom come From who am I to Eyoter sum Nullum hominess a me alienum puto I am Eyoter; no other man do I deem As stranger—a quote from Don Miguel, but the dimWit waiter thought I wanted chicks, ordered puto & San Miguel But now I know Turning & turning in the whitening hair “No! I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be!” Was said by Hamlet not Prufrock! The rest is hard rock. The rest is restlessness. The rest


Is eternal rest Mr. Burton you are under arrest What do you have in coming w/ my typewriter? (A pause) You’re my type (Your laughter.) What do you have in common w/ my typewriter In menopause? You’re my archetype Hereafter Here I am, an old man writing like a boy Using a PC, Playing a CD But dropping coins into memory’s Jukebox of the Imagination The great self-imposter Eyoter Who’s Eyoter, what is he? One who eats peyote? The word is English, in fact English English Rhymes w/ my waiter, short for computer A computer that waits for inspiration An island in the river Nagual to w/c In Cebuano (ask Resil Mojares) It is the password Into w/c he can disappear twice Being bilingual, being plain Pintado in playin’ English A lover of words & a wonder of love Minimalist of the infinite Postmodern champion of Maria Clara & the rest of Rizal’s mujeres Read 7 infants de Susan Lara On condition they don’t bring to innocence Their feminism, but to feminism Their innocence Limasawa yes, Lama Sawi no Email address: urzion@aquiserca Installed circa Year 2000 Finland the land Of the end Where finished Philippine writers go To Helinski. E.g. Krip Yuson


Looking like go’s Kawabata But feeling like pool’s Efren Bata One midnight in the late, late 80s Found himself surrounded by an army Of Armis, Nordic beauties so beauteous So Warren Beatty’s He felt as if he had rounded a separate world Like Enrique when the latter reached Cebu Or was it Marinduque? Was it Masawa or Limasawa? Samar or Samarkand? Detroit or Carcar? America or Umarika? It was somewhere So terribly afar Thru no fault Of our charges d’affaires He could have written A History Of Finland From Virgilio Hilario To Alfred Yuson In w/c the former is his Virgil In the divine hilarious. Me, I may never see Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Greenland Let alone a world in a grain of sand. But to see a grain of sand in the world [From In Samarkand, 2008] No need for little bird to quote it O that this too, too solid flesh would melt If wish Was never how I felt Especially when the morning sun hit me Even when it dawned on me That it was sunset I trusted all the way & trust still I trust my feelings & feel my thrust Albeit hypothetical Because you’re gone— The wild things are not gone!


I get the willies when I fly Which is why I’m stuck Where I was half a century Ago, for I know From Will Shakespeare to William Butler Yeats To Willybog Terror is half the Triple Will to write. The new millennium is a chasm A race w/ constellations to orgasm & here’s the rub I think therefore I am Not out of it, You remain All that my nine Lives lack Lady of the bed & table Of the elements & may I add that you slew at least eight As if to spite Macarthur Who always comes back This time as his namesake The once & future Mac Whose AI He raised me from the dead Albeit a stranger to its rudiments The way I was, & still am, to yours i.e. The ABC of you Is just as beyond me As its CPU. The white glare is heaven, believe me It has unhinged me That if the I was an idiot Now I am idioter & never so few: Rainman, Charly, Tom O’Bedlam, Eyoter. Eyoter sum


Nullum hominem a me alienum puto. I am Eyoter; no other man do I deem A stranger A quote fron Don Miguel But the dimwit writer thought I order puto & San Miguel— I wanted chicks! No! I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be & the rest is not silence but hard rock. The rest is restlessness Or the rest is eternal rest. Mr. Burton, you are under arrest Even here in heaven For ham & let ham & let ham— I am; therefore I ham. Me, I eat ham. Suman & ham & other poems by Jun. I eat ham. I eat rahat loukoum I am hunger artist, starving poet Eat anything on Plato except Plutonic, Neo-Thomist tomato Catsup What’s up Doughnut Hole’s Heidegger? T.S. I have wept & fasted P.S. Moses manna, John locust & honey Ich habe metaphysisch Hunger. Unde malum, Ricky de Unger? Who ate through the doughnut? Whodunit? & the winner is Prince Ham Omelet Who came after Freud Chicken Before existence Preceded essence The Essenes preceded the existentialists! The doughnut precedes the hole W/out the doughnut there is no hole Yet the hole is the center, the core


Of it’s being, would it not seem therefore That the hole Is indeed its essence? A doughnut w/out a hole is like Sex w/out love The taste is different, to bite irreverent. You cannot have The thing in its munched & swallowed Self, let alone Digested, burped, gone. You cannot have your virgin & Eat her too. Stout Gertrude & lean Cortes (Carlos) Had it wrong: One thing leads to another, a thing Is another, arroz es arroz es arroz Caldo. The rest is pan de monium. Medusa di Lampedusa A la Firdausi A la Cardoso Who beat Sherwin And Bronstein in Portoroz Who beat Deep Blue Once upon a time in Portugal Or at least the latter’s ancestor Who beat Eyoter Who beat Fischer In my wildest Sonnet. But who can beat Erwin? Box lateral A la Recah, a la Rocky, a la Roco Know classic, romantic, baroque, rococo Know the winds, monsoon, vendaval, sirocco Have experience of the supernatural W/out help from hallucinogenic Substances, a natural Also good looks (or at least photogenic) Guns, bullets, collateral Eat Blair & Robertson for breakfast


W/ Achilles, Grendel, Hadji Murad? Geniuses all, we bore the sign Willybog tempted the devil, Jun Tera was perfect As a runt assassin Jorge Arago not quite pure consciousness yet But of course Borgesian Though not by any other first name. Erwin in love would remember That no one remembered to bring a camera So perhaps it was all a dream That Joecarr has forgotten. But who can forget you? I can feel you next to me Alone & utterly unreachable So close memory flees as if memories We pilgrim tigers. What do you have in common w/ my typewriter? Pause. You are my type. Laughter. What do you have in common w/ my typewriter? In menopause? You are my archetype Hereafter. Here I am, an old man writing like a boy Using PC, playing CD, watching DVD But dropping coins into memory’s Jukebox of the imagination. Who’s Eyoter, what is he? One who eats peyote? The word is English English English in fact Rhymes with waiter Short for computer. A computer that waits For inspiration! An island in the river Nagual to w/c In Cebuano (ask Resil Mojares) It is the password.


In w/c he can disappear twice Being bilingual, being plain Pintado in playin’ English. A lover of words & a wonder of love Minimalist of the infinite Post modern champion of Maria Clara & the rest of Rizal’s mujeres (Read 7 infantas de Susan Lara On condition they don’t bring to innocence Their feminism, but to feminism Their innocence) Limasawa yes, Lama Sawi no Email address [email protected] Installed circa 2000 Finland The land of the end Where finished Philippine writers go To Helsinki. E.g. Krip Yuson Looking like go’s Kawabata But feeling like pool’s Efren Bata One midnight in the late, late 80s Found himself surrounded by an army Of Armis, Nordic beauties so beauteous So Warren Beatty’s He felt as if he had rounded a separate world Like Enrique When the latter reached Cebu Or was it Marinduque? Was it Masawa or Limasawa? Samar or Samarkand? Detroit or Carcar? America or Umarika? It was somewhere So terribly afar Through no fault Of our charges d’affaires He could have written A History of Finland From Virgilio Hilario to Alfred Yuson In w/c the former is his Virgil In the divine hilaria.


Me, I may never see Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Greenland Let alone a world in a grain of sand. But to see a grain of sand in the world Why, that’s just as wonderful I’ll drink to that & eat My heart out, Cesar Aquino in pun y vino In Dumas Goethe A tale told by T.S. Elliot. This is the way it ends This is the way the ruba ends: He kisses a woman from head to foot & the end of his exploring Will be to arrive at where he started & know the place for the first time. “No need for a little bird to quote it.”

Execution Sight [From In Samarkand, 2008; verseliteration from Norman Mailer’s nonfiction, Executioner’s Song] They drove over together to the execution site. Schiller couldn’t believe what he now saw. is description had been accurate in every way but one. He had gotten the colors wrong. The black cloth of the blind was not black but blue, the line of the floor was not yellow but white, and the chair was not black but green. He realized that during the execution something had altered in his perception of color. He left the place a second time dazed by it all. It was as if he was saying good-bye to a man who is going to step into a cannon and be fired to the moon


or drop in an iron chamber to the bottom of the sea, a Houdini “I don’t what I’m here for.” “You’re going to help me escape.” Gilmore smiled, evil as a jackal. They put a waist strap on Gilmore and a head strap.

Figure of Orange [From the Sillimanian Magazine, 1968] [MISSING]

For Alexandra [From the Sillimanian Magazine, 1990] [MISSING]

Flaming Sword Poem [From Sands & Coral, 1997] Eve, daughter of man and the first morning Light, in whom alone I find the glory, Only she reveals the sun Veiled when rivers flow Vertical: She is the rainbow Eyes and all, returning Look or smile or word or story— Orange or apple or peach, each one Of these is Eden, eaten from her hand: Virgin mother of all living, no


Evil but at her feet coils along. Life self-dovetails. Death slips by. Love is its own storm warning Vortex eye and Eye vortex—and I her bright boy Of sorrow.

Flesh of Image, Image of Flesh [See: “Image of Flesh”]

For JL [From In Samarkand, 2008] Remember Jun Lansang— So keen a lyric Sense it was sixth. At—Traiq, Sometimes when you sang It was December In June And June In December.

For NJ [From In Samarkand, 2008] Land of my letters The sun has set Under the April trees My islands of song My mountain of dreams My river of tales My virgin forests The sun is gone


My moon of poems.

Fragment [From In Samarkand, 2008] As when the sleeper grinds his teeth, strange bird Of prey, so it is when lovers are blown To dust. Death is the gate that’s shaken, heard On both sides. And what shuts the fist? Time flown? The stems of bones and words herded by grief? O turn memory to nothing! She will rise With fireflies for hair, her fingers brief As lightning leave half-moons, wind are her eyes.

Genesis [From In Samarkand, 2008] [MISSING]

Girl on a Sandbar [From Sands & Coral, 2011-2013] I traveled a tunnel at whose far end Was near endless sea, she on a sandbar The last terra firma sinking second By second—shouted as I sank deeper Till the continents and islands returned And I woke, her face gone. Gone forever? It was her, shouting still as the shout turned Mine—not in disguise but under cover


Going Japanese (For Kauro) [From Checkmeta, 2004] Thanks for the go set. Can I see you? Can you teach Me the rudiments? Go must be like love Poems. Look in the mirror— What an opponent! I wish we could play. I wish to kiss you just once: A haiku. In go? [From In Samarkand, 2008; now titled: Going Japanese] Thanks for the go set. Can I see you? Can you teach Me the rudiments? Go must be like love Poems. Look in the mirror— What an opponent! I wish we could play. I want to kiss you just once: A haiku. In go?

Gold [From In Samarkand, 2008] [MISSING]

Glacial [From In Samarkand, 2008; verseliteration from Robert Ardey’s science book, The Hunting Hypothesis]


The hunter died when he achieved supremacy— no inquiry can ignore the paradox. How do you live when the tundra returns but not the reindeer, the aurochs our fellow animal species? We sailed the world, explored the universe, touched the moon demonstrated that life is one. Sooner or later it will all be gone. I shall miss the Seine the Uffizi in Florence, Picadilly Seattle’s garden homes, New York’s Madison Avenue, Rome’s Via Condotti, San Francisco’s Fisherman’s wharf. Paris. I shall be haunted by an icy horizon. Calliope.

Go Flying [From Sands & Coral, 2011-2013] Finishing the poem you hold the kite That flies true against half the infinite But whereas you cannot let the kite go The poem is yours to release, the text As part of the bargain—what happens next Nine out of eight you may or may not know (A line say holds half lying)


Green Poem [From Sands & Coral, 2001] Cat eye, when you show How the wild things return all at once Right where you stand Moon and sun run I don’t know how together nightlings and daylings Each out of nowhere… Antler, boar Narwhale, flying fish, luna moth Netherward snake, owl Eagle, bat… [From Checkmeta, 2004] Cat eyes, when you show How the wild things return— All at once Riht where you stand Moon And sun run, I don’t know how, together. Night creatures and day things Each out of nowhere All-time reem Noah’s Ark unicorn Next-door salamander Ex and future T. Rex… [From In Samarkand, 2008] Cat eyes, when you show How the wild things return— All at once Right were you stand Moon And sun run, I don’t know how, together. Night creatures & day things Each out of nowhere: All-time reem Noah’s Ark phoenix Next-door unicorn Ex and future T. Rex


X the salamander

Haiku Luck [From In Samarkand, 2008] She loves me. She loves me not. She loves me. She loves me not. She loves.

The Hunt for Plums [From In Samarkand, 2008; verseliteration from W.S. Merwin’s prose work, The Lost Upland] Gathering is older Than agriculture, On happier and calmer terms With the unforeseen . And gathering fallen fruit, the tree and the fruit Have made the decision Before you. You have to find Where the fruit has gone On its own In the autumn nights when there is no wind In the dark I could hear the plums.

Huntsman [From In Samarkand, 2008] [MISSING]


Idea [From In Samarkand, 2008] He drank the sea and vomited all The world’s history As if whispering is to a shell In the sand And bit the ___________ As if it were her hand When the ocean Had returned Everything forgiven Her absence the day Her nails the sunburn The shadows Her eyeshadows

Image of Flesh [From Sands & Coral, 1981-1982] His eyes the sea Demonic mirror, He crazily swallows The seawater for traces And bites the sea spray Seeing it is her hands. And the coral and pearl-doomed Fish and lotus mimer, As though bequeathing the as Os sated kisses To a shell on the sand, Vomits the glee That made her absence the day Her eyelids the shadows Half nails, half-mooned, What burnt his flesh [From Checkmeta, 2004; now titled: Flesh of Image, Image of Flesh] He would drink the sea—


water if it meant he coukd then vomit the past bequeath the ashes of love if then these could be whispered to the sand bite the seaspray as if it were hand, coral— and-pearl-doomed swimmer whose strokes make her absence the day, her eyes the shadows, her nails sunburn.

In Babel (For The Muse)

[Uncollected]

Ito naman ay aking dasal para sa mga makatang ikakasal sa paskong ito—sana bawat tulang inyong masulat ay ghazal pero di Persyano gasa nga kanimo igasa kung baga sa Cebuano bawat araw, pasko bawat gabi, noche buena en Español, oir los angeles O night divorce este, divine, sa Ingles wers wers wors wors meaning I love you of course


Indeed All Things Go [From Checkmeta, 2004] Indeed all things go Not for a reason Or a reason That we know And nowhere. I have learned To hide, My life turned Like a tide Of houses. Yesterday the moon went After the roses. Yesterday I said My eyesight has clearly Left, I have paid Dearly As cookies crumble Or so I feel, Berefit. Yet some could steal Poorly disguised Into my room just now. The moon, a shadow That linegers In my cup. The roses, the nightmare Of what I meant Revised and revised and Crumpled up All over the place. Your face this poem Almost done.


Almost someone else On my fingers That tremble.

In the Sign [From In Samarkand, 2008] That he was vates Of the Vatican I did not know But in his decrepitude And infirmity Beheld The man… “The earthwoman out of whom had issued the spirit whose passion had liberated God in man and man in God.” Franz Werfel. “There is no God and Mary is His mother.” Bernard Berenson. “Mary, my mother!” Lolek “Parkinson’s had caused the hand that held the keys of the blood to shake; that is why the assassin’s bullet missed it.” The last is by An author whose identity Similarly eluded us. Anonymous. But they could have met At the Inquisition. That the former was no Believer in Maya Or Kismet, Or that moons ago A crow Sang to the latter By the river Chao Phraya Of deathlessness And immortality Is neither vision Not leap Of faith Of quantum


Or genius Nor love Nor second guess.

Jerahmeel [From In Samarkand, 2008; noted as being in progress] [NOTE: Dr. Aquino has a similarly titled story.] The moon itself had shown no sign it was coming to an end. It appeared, waxed, shone full, waned, disappeared, returned as gossamer as it had gone, coming and going as ever like the wind, if subtler, as it stuck from a distance by it’s lover’s side. Then came the occurrence. Everyone was having a dream of the moon. A boy dreamed there was two. A fisherman, that the sea had gone to the moon and it rained fish. A crone, that she suckled a crowd in a nightmare drought of milk and honey. A chessplayer, that he saw her on the 65th square, virginal, untouched, yet with child. An electric light thief, that the moon never Existed, there never was a moon. And so on And so forth. Each dream, taken in isolation would have been occasion for psychiatric wonder; but occurring as they did, together, they transcended the dreamers. It was an epidemic of dreams. And hardly had people begun to talk about it when the dreams stopped. A back to normal and read to abnormal signal number two. For it’s one thing to say the dreams never happened—but never dreamed? Suddenly no one had a dreamof the moon anymore. Suddenly no one had a dream of the moon ever. Sleepers stirred, talked, shouted, moaned grew stockstill as if their doubles were marooned in a dream that floated, that was pure dream, there being no dreamer. It was then people caught on without catching on. This was how


the living grasped the end: no one gasped. As for the dead, they rose and wished they were dead seeing at last what the species must die for: moon, earth, sun, stars—in that order. But how could no one have missed the acronym? Not the hero of a thousand, he flew ( the word Sucks, he had been on the moon all the time, Had taken no journey: he was on top Of a rock formation in space, some poverty-stricken landscape of a once opulent imagination he had some time recognizing as his own) and there they were, the lost folk, the moon people, ourselves in nebula (I the dream it was “nebulum”). He had been in their midst, though newly come and when he saw the girl there was no one else—within that cavern without a wall! She seemed possessed of shyness, like a bride at her nuptial who is in truth just one girl among others in deeper shadow, in her case, from an inner eclipse. Nonetheless when their eyes met he was decimated, No longer a vortex, no longer like the Devil legion He was the one! The man—but no, a maiden as she was, power was in her, she was the power that fixed him as he was: child of the fatherless universe. He could gloat over an awesome identity: the man who saved the moon, but he was a boy! The boy in the legend, the boy who stopped the sea with his finger in the nether land who drew the sword from the stone, who riddled the riddle of the wind, who wrote the sultan’s new rubaiyat, who bore the ring at the moon-queen’s wedding when the old woman was dying quietly in a corner. He almost started but the resemblance came like moonlight. No, it was not the resemblance that nudged him— it was the smile: she floated on bottomless joy! Moon people die sweetly. Death to them is a honey, as wine, as nectar, as water whether drunk from some mountain stream or drenched in from a sudden summer shower. Alien to them is the idea of death as horror— As ornamental they wear the thorn, the lightning, the snake


As most certainly she did, the young one except just now, for among moon people to stress that the body is a jewel of the rarest make the practice is, in a rite, to go as bare as possible; thus the moon-queen was the one least dressed. Moonlight became her, yes, her skin cream, her lips red, her eyes bright—all from within. If she spoke, he imagined a birdcall would follow. If she drew an arm’s length closer he knew he would pick a scent from the world lightyears away, himself printed with attar. No one could be that beautiful and not love everything, even death, death the nightmare. Death, the last centipede or scorpion to tame, The last poison plant to sweeten inn all The sublunary realm from which the boy came— without the ring yet? The old one smiled. The ring-bearer does not have the ring but he brings it. The young girl did not. The old one’s glance was turned inward and saw all; the young girl met his eyes because her glance was outward. She was seeing things unfold; the old one had seen all this before, and therefore no longer watched. Or did she? It was not just a resemblance. He had missed it, how could he? How could he not? It was impossible to see them one. He was light as a leaf as a feather, everything was light and it was clear that he was not flying but gliding in space like a leaf, like a feather. A certain durations his decent was suspended and he was floating in midspace, and fired by a terrific volition made like an acrobat describing circlet after circlet, gift upon gift, the gift of moon! He was a moonbeam drawing nigh, and the night, the universe, was a minus— one symphony that caught him, no matter how random, no matter how soon or how late, no matter how mindless, how free his move was. No one was watching him of course, except he, and he had an elf’s awareness of this, that he was watching himself


while down below the mid-earth rejoiced: All things are moonlight, even the sun! there is only one shining in the dreams of the sleepers. For in one night once more the grass grew, the flowers bloomed. The stars fell, the sea travelled. A spider wove rival patterns to a somnambular insomniac’s steps as he paced his room.

Kalisud a la Auden [From In Samarkand, 2008] moon was all I wrote all I saw all the word I heard when I faerylanded upon the earth from an upper quote “in you eyes so much in you is true” but how often mine could open whenever truth a blackeye made a move as when the lord of women neither me nor no man’s enemy and my goodness what else she ran away

Kalisud a la Dante Varona [From In Samarkand, 2008] [NOTE: Dr. Aquino has a similarly titled story.]


Wish I could have stayed on Or jumped from San Juanico Bridge as we passed under but very sudden was the long silence I was sad beyond measure and when you spoke it made me sadder still I was sad beyond measure and silence it made me sadder still but when you spoke very long was the sudden Wish I could have stayed on Or jumped from San Juanico Bridge as we passed under

Kalisud a la Rizal [From Checkmeta, 2004] What shall I do if she suddenly asks Me for verses? Leave it to the weather? Describe the available moon whether Waxing or warning? Alas, the Muse basks In her absence! Invisibility Of invisibilities: all is in Visibility—the ability To begin only is amiss, no sin In itself except that by Hera she Is so mine to write, O so meant to be The word I cannot word, the nightmarish


Love of love of love by which I perish— What shall I do if she asks me for verses? Aye, how shall Death be if I cannot write? [From In Samarkand, 2008] What shall I do if she suddenly asks Me for verses? Leave it to the weather? Describe the available moon whether Waxing or warning? Alas, the Muse basks In her absence!Invisibility Of invisibilities: all is in Visibility—the ability To begin only is amiss, no sin In itself except that by Hera she Is so mine to write, O so meant to be The word I cannot word, the nightmarish Love of love of love by which I perish— What shall I do if she asks me for verses? Aye, how shall Death be if I cannot rhyme?

Kalisud a la Superman [From In Samarkand, 2008] Yes if the fire returns And yes Turns Around end to end The san Of time I’ll take your hand In mine Then like ghosts or sorcerers We shall Walk through wall Find the eye And park the whirlwind Tiptoe upon the waters

Kibitzer Kings


[From Silliman Journal, 2013] Borges was a chess kibitzer, Kawabata go, & Poe checkers

Lady Luck Doctor to Absurd Patient [From In Samarkand, 2008] “Would you like me to Tell you now?” He had asked her To tell him nothing!

Landscape w/ Figures [From In Samarkand, 2008; verseliteration from Henry Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion] In her tight-fitting Persian dress, with turban to match, she looked ravishing. Spring had come and she had donned a pair of long gloves and a beautiful taupe fur slung carelessly about her full, columnar neck.

Laugh/Tear [From In Samarkand, 2008]


How is it we can Laugh so? Isn’t it stranger Not stronger than tear?

Leonardo to ML [From In Samarkand, 2008] [MISSING]

Like the Moon [From In Samarkand, 2008] [MISSING]

The Line [From In Samarkand, 2008] [MISSING]

Lines Towards a Bigger Bang [From Checkmeta, 2004] Good thing the islands were not To be found in the maps yet. Since Spain and Portugal Had divided the world between them The noble, if mad, Captain might have thought This Country to be the crumbs And gone another way Say down to reach up


Smithereens it seems from the beginning What mystic smith could have forged These, at best, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle It behooves every Filipino to solve Not so much for origin as destiny? Quo valids, Pilipinas? Origin can be read everywhere Or where it matters, for instance Matter itself How Big Bang sent sharpnels flying outward That we call Stars And, in the Hindu myth, how Purusha The one, the Only Broke up, shattered into pieces that are the Many That are us That constitute Everything that exists The quintessence that precedes All existence That is co-existence Each one in island A lost one You were chosen But I am the one Nostalgic for the lost mother Continent A morning star longing for The first and the last Real Nowhere man God

Lost [From In Samarkand, 2008] [MISSING]

Lucida Console


[From In Samarkand, 2008] The would-be bright & witty If not lucid Ms. Lucida Who thanks to Derrida Leads her ilk In the Graduate School By the nose (Noose too is O.K.) Writes her work In a prose That reads like silk And a wool From Ukay Ukay (The capital of Karl Marx) City.

Lunar Petition [From Checkmeta, 2004] Moon was All I saw, but so grossly underestimated as it Raged in that faery land & Ice Age. How often those eyes could soften! Calliope’s mouth twisted As if beauty had gone berserk & would not stop Till I set her upon the seashell that once Held her aloft & I was busted Each time truth made a move—i.e. all the time, e.g. Right then & then In the moonlight when goodness, the Lord of women Neither me nor any man’s Enemy, & she ran away!

Manhole Blues


[Uncollected]

As an ode by Pablo Neruda would roll cosmic city cosmic airport cosmic road even kisame so cosmic so where manhole was nothing of the sort till led by an elf I fell & found myself in sewer country and saw an angel-like blue

Manifesto [From In Samarkand, 2008] October 12, 2006 To whom it may concern Sir/Madam: This is to certify that I am authorizing you to burn the check for six million pesos in my name from the National Headquarters of Hungry Writers (NHHW). Thank you very much. Yours truly P.S. Once I have the money Of course.


Man of Letters [From In Samarkand, 2008] A is Achilles or Agamemnon B can be either also, no telling, or C you see, Greek gifts: doodling on a stone, D ZBC, the Oral T., the voice of Vertigo… E is e is—Eiseis! kid sister of Briseis Far far away & long long ago G Minor Muse of the first H20. But O that I were I the way she rode the horses!

Marvel [From In Samarkand, 2008; verseliteration from Rebecca West’s travel book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon] Across one of the walls is shown the Falling Asleep of the Virgin— is rendered by the lax yet immutable line, by the Byzantine the marvel of death. Death that is more than the perishing of consciousness, that can strike where there is no consciousness. A tree a flower an ear of corn a star of light.

Memo [From Silliman Journal, 2013] a sonnet for Sonia an ode for Odette


for Tina a sestina for Marinelle a villanelle a quatrain for Katrina a couplet for Colette for Aiko a haiku a line for Caroline a terza rima for the twins Teresa and Rima a limerick for Lee Remick for Rose prose poem, free verse for Ms. Universe

Memories [From In Samarkand, 2008] Ang gugma’ng gibati ko Sa batan-on pa kita Ming’gamot sa panumduman ko One plus one equals cuatro (Cebuano) The love I sang When we were young Is still strong: One plus one equals four (English)

Memory [From Checkmeta, 2004] It seemed from the dead that I rose To receive my body As an executioner would His rope.


I looked at you, drowned But for the gaze beneath your Eyelids: the bright birds roosting Against your limbs. It is thus that our eyes would meet. Always. Always I’d look at you, long gone, and day Hoods my face like moonlight. [From In Samarkand, 2008] It seemed from the dead that I rose To receive my body As an executioner would His rope. I looked at you, drowned But for the smile beneath your eyelids Strewn all over the land That was neither yours nor mine But for the birdsroosting against us In the afterstorm. It is this that our eyes would meet. Always. Always I’d look at you, long gone And day Hoods my face lke moonliht

Midpoem [From In Samarkand, 2008] And when at last It’s certain hearts beat In a heartless Universe The whirl Voice will come, May, That so becomes The endless Silence saying


Nay, Not yours! Echo after echo, Face after face The girl Who never came Had she come On ever crescent feet Sooner Than you’re there Though you’ve been there Forever Like worlds falling Into place Beyond The second Full moon Of June or was it May.

Miguelitito [From In Samarkand, 2008] [MISSING] [From Dark Blue Southern Seas, 2009] The breakdown was my second, and like the first Was the strange-mindedness that is the effect Of sleep-deprivation. I had insomnia for days And in the night leaped from my window with a shout. One every twenty-five years, I thought, near bemused Upon recovery. I was fifty. I compared the two. This one was the opposite— I was not plagued by questions but burdened with answers. It was less painful, had not hurt me Except for the straitjacket And the fatigue in the morning when I woke. I was older. Rustum to Sohrab. I was an aging, aged Dream and hallucination champion, as it were: Three young friends, campus writers drawn to the old prodigal Poet, watched me as I fought the bind. My eyes Must have been both funny and scary, for they seemed To shift continually out of focus—my eyes


Not the young men standing at the door: Vic, Mickey, Mark Who were in fact normally crazier than I, particularly Mark Who was mad. “Miguelitito.” I spoke the name in chips. It seemed impossible to talk; I was not quite back yet. The boys, except Mark, had craned forward And strained greedily to hear. “The name,” I had said. “I have…the name.” They knew I had been somewhere. They sensed my urgency. That my words came from Deep within, that I feared forgetting the name. This was, after all, the man who thought he could fly And shift at will. Who thought he had figured out the equation. But when they had drawn closer I had a sudden Change of heart. It was mine. The name was mine. So I invented another and passed it false. “The name…give me…the name.” “Miguelitito,” one of them said.

The Morning After [From In Samarkand, 2008; verseliteration from Edward Fitzerald’s three renditions of The Rubaiyat] Awake! For the Sun Has flung The stars along The Sultan

Mr. Two Minds [From In Samarkand, 2008] How often I am of two minds? Enough to be convicted Of a habit And sentenced to Life. Or diagnosed as afflicted With some kind Of Hamlet’s Syndrome Unto death.


Or joke Keanu Reaves, aka the handsome Mr. Anderson He is the one— For God’s sake I am the two.

Much Ado About Ness [From Sands & Coral, 2011-2013] Are we not nothing while we live? Are not things their own darkness with all the lights on? Are we not our own shadows be it night or day? Must we find, before we are gone, ourselves, can we, possessing no knowledge the world is flat, and everywhere its own edge?

Name [From Checkmeta, 2004] If your name were something I could keep I would keep it like I were a sorcerer From Sorsoggon The wizard of Ozamiz Shazam in Zamboanga Or the Devil Himself To own you in such a manner: Utterly In a silence so pronounced, so Unspeakable a vow That I go full circle when Like Adam Kadmon spelling out The word of God I say your name. [From In Samarkand, 2008]


Were your name something I could keep I would keep is like a butterfly in my stomach like a sorcerer from Sorsogon the wizard of Ozamiz shaman inside Mandaluyong Mandalay Mandaue Manila in Manhattan Manchester the candidate of Manchuria our man in Germany from Katmandu to Silliman for whom the Great Work is to possess you utterly hot in a silence so pronounced so unspeakable an avowal you know me from Adam Kadmon

Near & How [From Sands & Coral, 2011-2013] The journey to where one already is Is by far the most difficult of all Journeys—in fact, the impossible one Postulates Keeping Still, hexagram Ken Of the Chinese Book of Changes—Be still And know that I am God, 46-10 Psalms. Stand still… moving spheres… That time may cease Kit’s The Tragical Dr. Faustus Abram: “I’m here.” “I was here,” if you will.


Notes for a Poem in April [From Sands & Coral, 1976] I remember I watched your eyelashes Quietly. Two souls. Bodies. Windows of the sea. Silence of birds. IN the sea. Green sea. Your name within the room Was silence without name. In my throat Within me. In the space without also. Then your hands that I loved. And pretended to read. Also silence without name. Without hands. [From Checkmeta, 2004; now titled: Notes Towards a Poem in April] I remember I watched Your eyelashes. Quietly. Teo souls. Bodies. Windows of the sea. Silence of birds in the sea. Green sea. Your name within the room was silence without name. In my throat. Within me. In the space without also. Then your hands that I loved and pretended to read. Also silence without name. Without hands [From In Samarkand, 2008; now titled: Poem in April]


I remember I watched your eyelashes. Quietly. Two souls. Bodies. Windows of the sea. Silence of birds in the sea. Green sea. Your name within the room was silence without name. In my throat. Within me. In the space without also. then your hands that I loved and pretended to read also silence without name. Without hands.

Notes Towards a Poem in April [See: “Notes for a Poem in April]

On a Sonnet by Rimbaud [From In Samarkand, 2008] The flowers no longer make his hot eyes weep. Hard to find a more lyrical Line that this in all Literature. A boy Who wept for joy And fell to the deep at the sight of flowers. But he lies fallen where he has always been. Sunlight is raining into his green bed and as if God took pity the poem never says he is dead: The sleeper in the valley


Origin of the Gazelles [From In Samarkand, 2008; verseliteration from Indries Shah’s The Sufis] His name “El Ghazali Also stands for “gazelle” generic for various types of antelope such as the Orys a literal homonym for “a lover” The three-letter Root GHZL Also produces GHaZaL which is the technical Arabic & Persian term For a lover poem, an amorous verse

P. & G. Revisited [From In Samarkand, 2008] She had the sense Before she touched him That at vey juncture He would create her In poem after poem Sixth sense After nonsense.

Panic [From the Sillimanian Magazine, 1968] ultimately she couple s with the sun,


however axes retrace their inevitable way— you roll beneath her superhuman lashes what can soothsay the wind emptying with desire? she couples swiftly with any man as gravity pulls as your heart walks the wire among terrible dangers. match her with crime and highest terror but in turn made mortal still to her nerves— drying she comes with the comet, however your shoes wear out [From Sands & Coral, 1989] Ultimately she couples With the sun— However axes Retrace Their way And heads Roll by the blade Of her eye You can say her honor Is as the sea rolls In extremies And all our words collate her, But when she moves Words Turn to words! And she’ll move


She’ll turn She’ll breathe She’ll be She’ll be what she’ll be What she is When she dances And who soothsay the wind? Who can walk the wire Leap Plummet Not playing Into her thighs? She couples swiftly With any man For gravity As the earth is One for this man’s grave And that man’s levity Ultimately she couples for fun On land On sea On air Undersea On the moon On the dark Or bright Side of the moon However the moon drawn down burns out And you Come like the comet like an angel nursing a nerve-end Avenging your truth Retracing her steadfast Big bang quick of love skies will gray skies will say they are redder for her mouth that is redder they are the colors of her colors whatever the time is, any day she couples with the sun.


[From Checkmeta, 2004] ultimately she couples with the sun however axes retrace their way & heads roll by the blade of her eye you can say her honor is as the sea rolls in extrimis & all our words confess her but when she moves words turns to words & she’ll move she’ll turn she’ll breath she’ll be she’ll be what she’ll be what she is when she dances & who can soothsay the wind? who can sooth the heart saying what she is walk the wire leap, plummet not playing into her thighs? she couples swiftly with the lucky man for gravity as the earth is one for this man’s grave and that man’s levity ultimately she couples for fun on land on sea on air undersea on the moon on the dark or bright side of the moon


howeverthe moon, drawn down burns out and she comes out like a comet like an angel nursing a nerve-end retracing her steadfast big bang quick of love. skies will gray skies will say they are redder for her mouth that is redder. they are the colors of her colors whatever the toime is, any day she couples with the sun [From In Samarkand, 2008] Ultimately she couples with the sun However axes Retrace their way And heals Roll By the blade Of her eye You can say she is the sea rolls In extremis And all our deed Confess her But when she moves Word turn To words And she’ll move She’ll run She’ll breathe She’ll be She’ll be what she’ll be What she is When she dances And who can soothsay the wind? Who can walk Who can sleepwalk the wire Leap Plummet Not playing Into her thighs?


She couples swiftly With any man she chooses For gravity As the earth is One for this man’s grave And that man’s levity Ultimately she couples for fun On land On sea On air Undersea On the moon On the dark or bright Side of the moon However the moon drawn down Burns out & she comes like a comet Like an angel nursing a nerve-end Retracing her steadfast Big Bang Quick of love Skies will grey Skies will say They are redder for her mouth The redder. They are the colors of her colors Whatever the time is, any day She couples with the sun

Parable [From In Samarkand, 2008; verseliteration from Juaniyo Arcellana’s prose work, “Parable of the Thrice-Fallen Star”) The first star was seen by Cesar on a cool April night amid the ruin of Fort Santiago. The second, by Jolico and Matiyaga. The third in Dumaguete


where lovers disappear. There was time when nothing could surpass my loneliness. I thought these stars were one and the same would find a way back to heaven having fallen in the quicksand hearts of poets of unwritten poems.

Pascoli’s Odysseus [From In Samarkand, 2008, verseliteration from Loren Eiseley’s essay, “The Ghost Continent”] Pascoli takes up tale when Odysseus, grown old and restless, sets forth to retrace his magical journey, the journey of all men down their youth, the road beyond retracing. Much as Darwin might have viewed the Galapagos in old age, Odysseus passes the scene of the voyage with all the obstacles reduced to trifles— Circe’s isle lies before the wanderer in the plain colors of reality, the hunger of home transmuted by Pascoli into the hunger for the forever vanished days The sirens no longer sings.


But Pascoli’s Odysseus understands them, carried in his death by the waves to Calypso who hides him in her hair: “Nobody” has come home to nothingness.

Party Poem [From In Samarkand, 2008] First and last, as a garden celebrates The rest is consummation. First fire and last fire In the middle FREEZE Not, seize The day Go The way Of all sap, Flow, Let hap Draw your flaming sword And take The word To make Flash, Neither the apple nor the fall Is all And the poet is one Hewn Three-fold: Of madness, of shyness And sadness All told, A fool Whose rule To the end Of his days Is never to mend His ways, Never to stay put Processing as it were The Muse’s number But As penultimate confusion


First and last, kiss her in the middle The rest is the riddle Of thins.

Personal Poetics

[Uncollected]

The days were bright because of her So for her sake Make The rainy ones, even the one Where she’s gone, Brighter

Personal Spell [From Silliman Journal, 2013] Said he at the SU Cafe: ‘Global warming sounds like a pranksterstein’s conspiracy warning but it’s true catastrophe is due. Only one place is safe. The Philippines.’


She: ‘Why?’ Because that’s where we are you and I

Philippine History [From In Samarkand, 2008] Since the islands were not In the maps yet When Spain and Portugal Divided all Between king and king, Magellan, Made mad by a sudden Diet of plantain And watermelon, Made a bet Of double Or nothing With Humabon. “Hasta luego!” He shouted across the gulls To Cebu &have meant The girls Though focused On Lapu-lapu. That was how Spain Lost so noble A captain As once again he & his men Went the opposite Way—this time not just west To reach east But down to reach up. “Fuego!”


The Pink Monk Writes [From Sands & Coral, 2011-2013] She can make day black., Night blacker. But her color Of colors is pink.

Plain Blues [From In Samarkand, 2008] It is my nth time to nothing, January in this mountain city to whose fog Months ago I, thwarted Whether burnt or pale with fruitless chase As if from a dread oracle was flung. No one knows you here, where mornings And afternoons are shed like snakeskin, Like words that sometimes Slither from my brain. Already the year turns, not a word from you. Sometimes the mountains are islands In a ghost of time, shineless sea And the sun is your body Mineward.

Poem [From Sands & Coral, 1973] [MISSING] [From Checkmeta, 2004] As when the sleeper grinds his teeth, strange bird Of prey, so it is when lovers are blown To dust. Death is the gate that’s shaken, heard On both sides. And what shuts the fist? Time flown? The stems of bones and words herded by grief?


O turn Memory to nothing! She will rise With fireflies for hair! her fingers brief As lightning leave half-moons! wind are her eyes! [From In Samarkand, 2008] And if I write another poem Of how insomniac night And somnambular day Conspire Be dream enough For me to see through The half Of you That veils her face And hear her voice And breathe her perfume And praise her taste And stroke the fire in me With her flesh [Uncollected] I never quite believed with too Many others, virtually all, That Nastassja Kinski was beautiful Until I saw you.

The Poem as a Flower, The Flower as a Poem [From the Sillimanian Magazine, 1993] [MISSING]

Poem at Fourteen [From In Samarkand, 2008]


Alone in a moonless Scarless night With my loneliness I am tonight. All joys over, All happiness lost Leaving me so somber With a haunting ghost. It is the ghost of sorrow That haunts me tonight And shall again tomorrow At the slumber of light.

Poem at Twelve [From In Samarkand, 2008] [MISSING]

Poem at Twenty [See: “Poem Written at Twenty and Never Going Beyond the First Two Lines Until Four Years Later”]

Poem Begun at Twenty [See: “Poem Written at Twenty and Never Going Beyond the First Two Lines Until Four Years Later”]

Poem in April


[See: “Notes for a Poem in April”]

Poem Written at Twenty and Never Going Beyond the First Two Lines Until Four Years Later [From Sands & Coral, 1976] [MISSING] [From Checkmeta, 2004; now titled: Poem Begun at Twenty] i am almost confirmed when i postulate death’s loneliness— something i’ll never know but fear so nonetheless the tao of now, the trinity of word & look & greatness of heart, daily bread angel bitch something, someone beautiful and bright being blasted by whose love will be natural enough her triple will be done, but sure as heaven or hell i’ll know if men have known deeply half their God— the empty page the empty grave [From In Samarkand, 2008; now titled: Poem at Twenty] I am most confirmed when I postulate death’s lonliness if men have known deeply half my spite really am I filled with graves


Poet and Girl [From In Samarkand, 2008; verseliteration from William Butler Yeat’s A Vision] Paul Valery in the cimetiere Marin describes a cemetery a spot he had known in childhood. Just when I am deeply moved he chills me. The angels peruade the poet that he is the light but he is not persuaded— rejoices that human life must pass I remember a girl singing words and music of her own at the edge of the sea in Normandy. She thought herself alone, stood barefooted between sand and sea sang with lifted head of the civilizations that had come and gone: “O Lord, let something remain”

Poetica Mon Amour

[Uncollected]


The creative act In that case Is a touch of Midas Wherein fact Turns to fiction, Aspires unconsciously To vision On the sly. But what Poem does not? The best rhyme Is random; The best nonrhyme, Design.

Point of View [From Sands & Coral, 1968] whatever wind i raise the point i raise is at your mind’s fine mercy, watch if you must my hand shaking the ice in the glass— the wine is good the air must bind us; as much as my face is here to see i know the point of being broken, human and so much more. in farther times the hand could fall with fire, bomber and all but we are free— whatever wind we raise is for our minds and the thunder only. [From Sands & Coral, 1976] [MISSING] [From Checkmeta, 2004]


whatever wind i rise the point i rise is at your mind’s fine mercy— watch if you must my hand shaking the ice in the glass, the wine is good the air must bind us as much as my face is there to see i know the point of being broken, human and so much more in further times the hand could fall with fire, bomber and all but we are free, whatever wind we raise is for our minds and the thunder only [From In Samarkand, 2008] whatever wind i raise the point i raise is at your mind’s fine mercy— watch if you must my hand shaking the ice in the glass, the wine is good the air must blind us as much my face is there to see I know the point of being broken, human and so much more in farther times the hand could fall with fire, bomber and all but we are free, whatever wind we raise is for our minds and the thunder only

A Portrairt of Picasso [From In Samarkand, 2008; verseliteration from James Hillman’s letter] There is a painting by Picasso done whe he was ninety-one, the year before he died.


Let Jeune peintre (the young painter) a darksharpand hallow-eyed, small, boyish face, a little impish starting out at you under a wide floppy hat a pallete board and brush in hand. The white on white gives it the feeling of a ghost, a clown, an angel caught on the canvas. “Here,”,it says, “this is who you are, Picasso, you are me, the ever-young painter I am the clown, the innocent, fresh eye, the dark eye, the quick-moving Mercurius, the sentimental, bluish little boy, Now you see who drives you, what has kept you fresh and eager, and how you can die.”

A Portrait of the Artist as a Mangyan [From In Samarkand, 2008] Beneath the mustache is a Mangayan But beneath the Mangayan is a mustache Man be Mr. Benito The name rings a bell


Mr. Benito the Mangayan Is unwell Mr. Benito the m\Mustache Must ache

Postscript [From Sands & Coral, 1996] Moon was all I saw, the moon voice All I heard stranded beyond Recall in the trangest land, In the seasons of primeral fire, the ice age Yet how often her eyes could soften, grow Childlike till I’d see it: Ireland’s face twisted As if beauty went berserk at the final touch: her mouth That she might feel the sea froth Half-girl, half-snake & I am busted Each time. Life in tow. Rhyme schemer. Seagull In the rain. Twelfth Night elf & lov E, scattered to the wind, is all.

Prayerful Tanka

[Uncollected]

Shepherdess of Chance, just this once make my nonsense sixth sense, sensuous and sensual and sensitive, tested for love—positive.


Provisional Revision of Panic [From Sands & Coral, 1973] [MISSING]

The Raider Raids [From In Samarkand, 2008] The work of a Po apparently not Chinese. A broken haiku from a Latinist? Certainly not Japanese but are we sure? to whom words are nothing if things were not words. A Po & a broken one.

Real the Dream

[Uncollected]

Some dreams are worth recalling, putting down for their spell, but we seldom do it, if ever. Jack be quick! if we take our own sweet time, a dream can fall apart, this lifeform is delicate, like a lit candle


that would quickly melt. Memory is all. Or is it? Come to think of it, isn’t real pretty much the same stuff? Hasn’t the tree that used to be in our backyard (a guava) been as much mist and shadow as the one that entered through the window in my dream, through the years? Happy New Year’d like clockwork when the ber months end, let’s beat real to the jump, write, love, be nimble.

Regrets [From Checkmeta, 2004] On the painted wall A thumbtack is dead, dreaming As I am, of skies. Of hands caught in hands— A chair, a slip of a girl Tiptoeing on it. Revery passes Through space unheard, like a time Of quiet country. The moon’s curved needle— The sweet sun in the white cup Sinking in seconds My heart remembers The lightness of boats, the wharf In Pagadian. Twenty-seven yers. A four-year-old knows the sea To have two face The left and the right Each constant as the other. Seven years ago I was twenty-four— I could have loved a girl named… Who could have loved me. I had tracked myself


Like a deadly fantasy On the wall of life. Now I am haunted By the wisdom of childhood And the girl’s bare feet. [From In Samarkand, 2008] On the painted wall A thumbtack is dead, dreaming As I am of skies. Of hands caught in hands— A chair, a slip of a girl Tiptoeing on it. Revery passes Through space unheard, like a time Of quiet cpuntry. The moon’s curved needle— The sweet sun in the white cup Sinking in seconds. My heart remembers The lightness of boats, the wharf In Pagadian. Twenty-seven years. A four-year-old knows the sea To have two faces The left and the right Each constant as the other. Seven years ago I was twenty-four. I could have loved a girl named… Who could have loved me. I had tacked myself Like a deadlu fantasy On the wall of life. Now I am haunted By the aisdom of childhood And the girl’s bare feet.


The Restoration [From In Samarkand, 2008; verseliteration from Norman Mailer’s nonfiction book, Executioner’s Song] They took pictures of his tattoes. “Mom” had been written on his left shoulder, and on his left forearm “Nicole”. They took his fingerprints and then they took the organs they did not\ need for dissection and put them back into the body and head cavities, and drew his face up, pulled it right back taut over bone and muscle, like putting on the mask again fit the sawed-off bonecap back on the skull and sewed the scalp and body cavity. When they were all finished, it looked like Garry Gilmore again.

Retro [From In Samarkand, 2008]


As a boy I had felt Death’s awfulness Like thunder in a picture Or a dream As a boy I had melted Into a woman like honey The sweetest I did not dream

Revealing the Secret [From In Samarkand, 2008; verseliteration from ___________________] A secret I shall not forger: All laws are female, The true male Is an our law— Outside the law.

Riddle [From In Samarkand, 2008] What is it that plays That Kreutzer Sonata and slays The dragon With o blood spilled But for the dawn And twilight shifter? Across the boundary, bringing Naught But his breath Which he holds, Afraid to make the slightest Move, lest The world stop spinning Without an answer


Riddle Inc. [From In Samarkand, 2008] The lightning struck And the thunder Cracked The riddle And all tried to read it On the sweetest voice The rain fell The wind blew The cricket flew The river flowed And the flower— Each one In turn A riddle

Riding the Cycle [From In Samarkand, 2008] C’s mouth was her best feature, twisted as if beauty had gone berserk and would not stop till I ser her upon the shell that, in Botticelli’s holds her amid the waves. The thing I was busted each time I hoped. Right from the beginning it was work that had come to nothing even when I wove mind and heart into an honest page readers, except her, may save for love’s ice age.


Romantic Manifesto [From Checkmeta, 2004] No love as disastrous as this That nothing like a storm blew Nothing like a flood swept Nothing like fire razed The lovers down.

Safe Conduct [From In Samarkand, 2008] Having intuited That he was heaven-sent He went To safed Feeling safe as my Own Diplomatic version Of Sabbatai. A Sevi Neither mystical Nor averse To genuine Free women verse, Pledged to write poem After poem Till the kingdom Cum Republic of love Is all around them And they see it According to him not me! Sawi generis, Copycat of the original Amoeba


Samarkand [From In Samarkand, 2008] [MISSING]

Senior Blues [From Checkmeta, 2004] Yet if the fire returns and yes Turns around end to end The sands of time I’ll take your hand in mine Then like ghosts or sorcerers We shall walk through walls Park the winds Tiptoe upon the water

Sensor [From In Samarkand, 2008] [MISSING]

Serpentine [From Sands & Coral, 2011-2013] (once more for Willie, il miglior midas) Tempting to attempt an essay showing The story of the fall is fallacious, That the snake is no snake, not by a stretch Nor is Eve all that deceived. The forked tongue


And the coils are metaphors for the Force (May it be with us) freezes and frees, is Love that whispers ophite orphic in our ear (I daresay be careful what we wish for) But look, the figged-up figure of Eve Puts to shame fashionistas and passionless Nudes. God too is serpent servant of verse Inversus who dresses down Eve: ‘Be fruitful.’ Whatever the meaning is, meaning is Serpentine, the word serendipitous.

Set-up [From In Samarkand, 2008] [MISSING]

Shall I Compare Us [From In Samarkand, 2008] Pieces from the Shores to the middle If of the rarest make, What mystic smith Had struck a Jigsaw puzzle? Parusha In the Hindu myth The Big Bang for God’s sake You Are the river Or the lake I will never Fit into.

She1


[From Sands & Coral—Writers in Their Environment Issue, 1997] She comes with horns and tail In nightmare. Made of air. Yet on film such Lissomeness she carries Heaven when she walks (On all fours she is The metamorphosis) Hair done or undone, True to the touch And true only to her looks Till she comes with horns [From Checkmeta, 2004] She comes with horns and tail Moon and comet North, east, south, west The sister Karamazov Our Lady of Ilium Ms. Universe Air and fire Nightmare and Dawn Merry-maid with assUnicorn by the sea Under acacia tree On this bright day that is a rainy day, On this dark night that is a moonlit night [From In Samarkand, 2008; now titled: She Comes With Horns and Tails] [MISSING] [From Dark Blue Southern Seas, 2009; also titled: She Comes With Horns and Tails] She comes with horns and tail And yet no nightmares made of air With such a gift She carries heaven when she walks On all fours she is


The metamorphosis Hair done or undone True to the touch And true only to her looks Till she comes with horns (not the moon) And tail (not the comet) Someone no woman has met In the mirror

She2 [From In Samarkand, 2008] She does not drop into a zero Like we do, the glow Remains and it is a slow Fading out. Whereas as after a shout We are emptied, Cut off from the fire, She retains the fire She is the fire The fire Of creation is inside Her. For to her the act Continues, in fact The physical process Continues in her body. She feels Spells Of a strange Seasickness As if voyaging Upon great depths In which she Is the depths.

She Comes With Horns and Tails [See: “She”1]


She Was Trance Itself [From Checkmeta, 2004] She was trance itself. A single glance at her Was pilgrimage—thought it were once in a New Moon, forever in a blue. She blew My mind. I’d fall invisibly behing, Rainmaker fool, and spring an ambush bushwhacked By her face—in Bethlehem, in Mecca. She was hush, she was twin sister of hello Hair curling to the hips. Fata morgana A smile on her lips, being all the while Hair-trigger, stranger, to flee. Pynchon’s V Except visible and in that sense, V-er. When will I see her gain, pretend Rain, of a sudden, made me run or turn Or stay—among the beasts, at the Kaaba? [From In Samarkand, 2008] She was trance itself. A single glance at her Was pilgrimage—though it were once in a New Moon, forever in a blue. She blew My mind. I’d fall inevitably behind Rainmaker fool, and spring an ambush bushwhacked By her face—in Bethlehem, in Mecca. She was hush, she was twins sister of hello Hair curling to the hips. Faca Morgana A smile on her lips, being all the while Hair-trigger, stranger, to flee, Pynchon’s V Except visible and in that sense, V-er! When will I see he again, pretend Rain, of a sudden, made me run or turn Or stay—among the beasts at the Kaaba?

Shock of Recognition


[From In Samarkand, 2008] I saw Miss Global Village in school Saw her disguise As she did mine No professor sage But the village Fool Next you’ll hear No mere Village lass She will soon Step on the moon And become famous As Miss Heaven.

Shout and Whisper [From Silliman Journal, 2013] In Robert Graves’ story ‘The Shout’ shout can wipe out armies, kill. Perhaps whisper can resurrect. A broken promise fulfill.

Sight [From In Samarkand, 2008] [MISSING]

The Sight


[From In Samarkand, 2008, verseliteration from Gary Snyder’s book of essays, The Practice of the Wild] Life in the wild is not just eating berries in the sunlight. The other side of the “sacred” is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots. Orpheus cannot help but look and lose her at Tower Lake in the Sierra.

Signs of the Times [From In Samarkand, 2008] Flood smile, lightning crow’s Feet, eye fire, earthquake touch, storm Signal in a move.

Sirius [From In Samarkand, 2008; verseliteration from Steven L. Beyer’s The Star Guide] During the second century B.C. Hipparchus devised “ magnitudes” to describe stars. The faintest Were assigned six. In 1856 Pogson refined the system. The star Vega was 0.00. -0.1 Arcturus -0.5 Sirius and the planet Venus


4.4 are brighter than Vega. The full moon -12.5, the sun -26.8. Sirius is the brightest star in the night an unmistakable sight. In ancient Egypt Sirius was worshipped. Its appearance in the predawn 25 degrees to Orion rejuvenated the valley. In 1718 Edmund Halley noted that Sirius had changed since the ancient Greek. Sirius SEAR-ee-us The name means “the trembling one.”

Sketch Towards a Portrait [From Checkmeta, 2004] Beneath the bristling mustache is a boy But beneath the boy Is a bristling mustache. Hard to agree whether he Is Mr. Bristling Mustache or Mr. Little Boy Blue. Maybe he is Mr. Beneath. Mr. Beneath, the bristling mustache. Mr. Beneath, little boy blue.

Solitaire


[From In Samarkand, 2008] Yes, Yes truly. Yes truly yes. Is yes truly yes? Yes truly yes is yes. Yes truly yes is yes always. Yes truly yes is yes always yes.

Song [From Sands & Coral, 1969] [MISSING] [From Sands & Coral, 1976] For I have fallen under the surface of your love Like a boat under the sea Like a boat I was old with desire And now my brows oldened still with magic. For in the depths of your joy are oldr things, Older are the elements lying deep under. Your smile was the ripple I made On your surface of eternal water. And so I lie at the bottom without a stir. I am contained in you-in the grey solstice. In your very face that shines with conception, An alien moon that is not dead but living. And I lie, beneath the water, as stone lies Though everything else from the dead is risen. I lie with everything that time has hoarded in your eyes Through nothingness, hazard, eternity. For dark is my conception of your beauty, and my soul Too is peacefully dark with good and evil


[From Checkmeta, 2004] For I have fallen under the surface of your love like a boat under the sea. like a boat I was old with desire and now my brows are oldened still with magic. For in the depths of your joy are older things, older are the elements lying deep under. your smile was the ripple I made on your surface of eternal water. And so I lie at the bottom without a stir. I am contained in you, in the grey solstice in your very face that shines with conception, hidden like an alien moon that is not dead but

living.

And I lie, beneath the water as stone lies though everything else from the dead is risen. I lie with everything that time has hoarded in your eyes, through nothingness, hazard, eternity.. for dark is my conception of your beauty, and my soul too is peacefully dark with good and evil. and I am lost unto the stone of my own submerged self, In your conception of all. [From In Samarkand, 2008] First I have fallen under the surface of your love Like a boat under the sea. Like a boat I was old with desire And now my brows are oldened still with magic. For in the depths of your joy are older things, Older are the elements lying deep under. Your smile was the ripple I made On your surface of eternal water. And so I lie at the bottom without a stir. I am contained in you, in the grey solstice In your very face that shines with conception,


Hidden like an alien moon that is not dead but is not living. And I lie, beneath the water, as stone lies Though everything else from the dead is risen. I lie with everything that time has hoarded in your eyes Through nothingness, hazard, eternity. For dark is my conception of your beauty, and my soul Too us peacefully dark with good and evil. And I am lost unto the stone of my own submerged self, In your conception of all.

Still Life [From In Samarkand, 2008, verseliteration from a letter of Wallace Stevens] This is not a still life in the sense the objects are a reddish brown Venetian glass dish containing a sprig of green on a table on which there are various water bottles, a terrine of lettuce a glass of dark red wine and a napkin. Note the absence Of mankind. It is a still life in which R. Cogniat speaks of his violence.

Stronger Than Love [From In Samarkand, 2008] If, at sea, he saw the harbor Of the Madonna of Harbors Unravel Mysteries of her navel Bind of zondiac


And trace the clasped self Of a crescent or half Moon, and harder Than Hercules’ twelve labors Bid the lunatic Jump, he would a thousand Times and All, But upon arrival!

Sun [From Sands & Coral, 1995] [MISSING] [From Checkmeta, 2004] I dreamt the sun no longer rose and set. it zigzagged, spiraled, yoyoed— Played possum when God stirred At midday, at the brightness it played tag with a moth and suddenly the colors came no flame. Hidden it gazed at pink sky and white moon And morning star. Long. Forever. As if gazing at itself, As if in the night it had seen us. It went sideways below the horizon Creating an endless sunrise and sunset a sun that played a hide-and-seek, peek-a-boo, whodunit with love and love and the shadows jumped and the fish and the birds. It played hooky, drifted away and wandered as if in search of its origin, farther and farther


till it twinkled and I heard you shout full-circle across a world That had gone into hiding that had fled within. I heard the river. The Grass The hand The mermaids I heard Pablo Ruiz Picasso (The Three Musicians) But the star was coming home In a dawn in which Sun moves towards us Not round. How can the sun do this? Wake as I might The miracle held out. I heard the cock crow. Awash in sleep Incredible in the light. [From In Samarkand, 2008] I dreamt the sun no longer rose and set It zigzagged, spiraled, yoyoed Played possum when God stirred At midday, at the brightness It played tag with a moth And suddenly No flame The colors came Hidden it gazed at pink sky and white moon And morning star, long, forever As if gazing at itself As if in the night it had seen us It went sideways below the horizon Creating an endless sunrise and sunset, a sun That played hide-and-seek peekaboo Whodunit with shadows It played hooky, drifted away and wandered As if in search of its origin, farther and farther Till it twinkled and I heard your shout Full circle across a world


That had gone into hiding That had fled within I heard the river The grass The hand The mermaids I heard Pablo Ruiz Picaso The Three Musicians But the star was coming home In a dawn in which Sun moves towards us Not round How can the sun do this? Wake as I might The miracle held out I heard the cock crow, you awash in sleep Incredible in the light.

Sweetest Stranger

[Uncollected]

[Free Verse Version]

Who were you who were sight for only a second or two, too sudden for the mind’s eye to keep? That was more than a year ago— coming from opposite directions we walked past each other and were gone, I guess, forever despite the pilgrim smile.


[Rhymed Version]

Who were you who were sight For a second or two? Too fast For memory, Too brief despite the sun Smile on your face Walking from opposite Directions, once past Each other, we were gone Mutually You without a trace I guess forever

Tarot [From In Samarkand, 2008] Every inch a fool But somehow safe every step Of the way. Foolproof.

Tendril [From In Samarkand, 2008] [MISSING]


Text Muse [From In Samarkand, 2008] Indeed all things go Not for a reason Or reason That we know And nowhere. I’ve learned To hide My life turned like a tide Like a flotsam And jetsam Of ghost Houses. Yesterday the moon went After the roses. Yesterday I said The world has lost That certain mist, I have paid Dearly, Or so I feel Spent. Yet how Suddenly They could steal Their way back The world is misty When I wipe my eye Glasses that I Wear today, wore Frightened at first That roses a burst On the floor, Pieces of white Bond Crumples up As I write And ransack


Without end. The moon a shadow In my cup. And the lifelong someone And no one, You for an instant On the phone

Three or a Hundred Solitudes

[Uncollected]

The Burning Bush was An acacia, according To Robert Graves’ White Goddess. Moses had a whiteHot mage’s imagination That which alone with The alone we can trust with Our life, according To Henry Corbin within The Creative Feminine If you like, which one?

To a Girl Remembered [From the Sillimanian Magazine, 1967] [MISSING]


Toad [From In Samarkand, 2008, verseliteration from Claude Levi-Strauss’ anthropological work, Tristes Tropiques] Here is the ‘Oracao de sapo secco’ The Prayer for the Dry Toad which verges on black magic to be found in a chapbook Called the Livro de Sao Cypriano. You must obtain the large toad And bury it in the ground up to the neck On a Friday: then you feed it Glowing embers All if which it swallows. The toad dries up. A week later, when you got to look For it, it has disappeared. In its place there sprouts a tree With three Branches, each of different colour. The white branch is for love The red of despair And the black mourning. The branch corresponding to the intention Of the celebrant is broken off and kept hidden from all eyes. The payer is uttered At the burial of the toad.

Translating Phiux Kabahar [From In Samarkand, 2008] Dan-ag ka sa aninipot, Suga’ng nagkipot-kipot Light of the firefly Fly, little fire, fly

The Tree Where Man Was Born


[From In Samarkand, 2008, verseliteration from Peter Mathieseen’s anthropological book, The Tree Where Man was Born] Enderlein is a handsome Sweden with a young officer’s moustache and mouth broken an one side by a fist of long ago. Though tall and strong, his eyes are restless. He looks haunted. Either he commits more time that will be wasted or he abandons al hope for the Yaida. “It’s the loveliest place in Africa. and it’s almost an ecological unit, too, much or so than the Serengeti— almost all its animals are non-migratory I hate give up but I’m thirty-one now I’m getting nowhere.” One night not long ago in Yaida Chini a young Hadza girl was pierced through the lungs by a spear hurled from behind. It is thought here that the girl was fleeing a Mangati admirer who was unable to resist a running target. The dying girl was discovered by Enderlein’s cook who, interpreting her gasps as evidence of helpless drunkenness took advantage of his opportunity and raped her. The cook, himself drunk, got covered with blood in which condition he was apprehended. He may stay in jail indefinitely and perhaps be hung. Today the day is beautiful my belly full— I am in Africa among Africans.


We understand almost nothing of one another yet we are sharing the same water flask, our fingers touching in the common bowl. At Halanogamai there is a spring and at Darashangan are red rock paintings— that is all.

Two By Two [From Silliman Journal, 2013] The two don’t agree he says it’s porpoise and she dolphin to a T And which more monstrous after metamorphosis porphin or dolpoise

Ultimately She Couples With the Sun [From Sands & Coral, 1974] [MISSING]

The Unprintable Word [From In Samarkand, 2008, verseliteration from Lewis Thomas’ The Lives of a Cell] It come from peig a crawling wicked Indo-European word meaning evil and hostile. It becomes poikos


then gefaihaz in Germanic and gefah in Old English, signifying foe. It turned from poik-yos into faigiaz in Germanic. and forge in Old English meaning fated to die, fokken in old Dutch. Somehow from these beginnings it transformed itself into one of the most powerful English expletives, meaning something like “Did before your time!” The unspeakable malevolence of the message is buried deep in the word out on the living message is buried deep in the word presents it self merely as an obscenity

Verb Lovely Flesh [From Checkmeta, 2004] [MISSING] [From In Samarkand, 2008] Verb lovely flesh Dance as mountain Mad with wine; Full, lave the soul Lovely, lovely flesh Your wastes are holy With design. On with your winds Mighty, fiery flesh For tempests are sublime And burn, burn Lovely flesh, burn Feed the soul with wounds,


Christ the soul Till staggering You collapse upon sunrise Wilting, The soul mourning With morning, flowering Into God’s waiting Mouthless smile.

W. [From In Samarkand, 2008] May there be no rainbow On the marrow When she leaves. Not dance, May the ocean Wear no feather For her glance— By the Revolution May her lips never Be painted. May she be protected By the ring she wears— May she know What I’d been granted Just saying the things I said to her (Storm signals In a way!) And this as her earrings Sway That she’s made for arrivals And departures.

War


[From In Samarkand, 2008; verseliteration autobiography, The Seven-Storey Mountain] The church of Our Lady of Angels where I often made the Stations of the Cross was empty. Two little candles flickered in the shadows. I knelt for minutes in the silence without attempting to grasp the immense. My train was in the evening and now the sun was up as if the town were asleep and I didn’t look where I was going and the cold winter rain streaked the windows of the train.

The White Sight

[Uncollected]

I ran into Liz. gee whiz after all these years (twenty-five) she’s still in love with you. & believe it or not (my reason doesn’t) she hasn’t aged a day, it isn’t right she is the White Sight

from

the

Thomas

Merton’s


The Wind [From In Samarkand, 2008] The wind that takes my Words away as I say them Will say them. Let it.

The Witness

[Uncollected]

It happened on my second breakdown my mind blown by sleeplessness existence & exhaustion I overtook the infinite literal mathematical the line was simultaneously lyrically vertical horizontal a spook


Words [From In Samarkand, 2008, verseliteration from Friedrich Heer’s historical work, The Intellectual History of Europe] Language is being reborn In the suffering of a few silent individuals. Out of their struggle A handful Of words will emerge. A few words will be a great gift.

Word Without End [From In Samarkand, 2008] Eve, daughter of the first morning Light, in whom alone I find the glory, Only she reveals the sun unVeiled when rivers flow Vertical: She is the rainbow Eyes and all, returning Look or smile or word or story— Orange or apple or peach, each one Of which is Eden, eaten from her hand: Virgin mother of all living, no Evil but by her leave coils along. Life that self-dovetails. Death slips by Love is its own storm warning Vortex eye and Eye vortex. And I her bright boy Of sorrow.

Workshop Algebra [From In Samarkand, 2008]


3 weeks of looking at the girl & the poem (John Gardner was wrong, Alternatives do not always exclude) & life becomes a double vision, A cloud Of unknowing, A hyperbole that is no hyperbole: Not a mere gap but the chasm, The abysm Of it. “The last word does not rhyme. It sticks out. It needs revision. Besides, go for the specific.” Shit. Everything but the x.

World [From In Samarkand, 2008] Without God Even death would Lose its proper Terror.

X Sight [From Checkmeta, 2004] Strange is your facelessness when I try to picture you. You don’t jell Not the faintist image. Worse, If I close my mind’s eye I might dream nothing. What if I heard Your name and it will ring no bell? Stranger and stranger until I’d run Into you and know of course This must be why? Here Is why. This face. This sheer sight that leaves no trace.


This strangest thing Now in the Sun. [From In Samarkand, 2008; two versions] First Version: [MISSING] Second Version: Strangest is your facelessness when I try As now, to picture you. You don’t jell, Not the faintest image, for all your bright Dark browns and eyeleashes. I’d close my eyes, Run the God of you down in my mind’s eye And see nothing, as if you ring no bell. Strange indeed. Until I’s run into you At sudden turns and know this must be why; A blazing sight of you, for real, true— Violet dress worn like the inviolate Explosion of chance, such sight as would run Dreamers to the dust and they never wake, Rude Muse who leaves no traces, coming like A flash, like a moon thing in the sun.


This project was prepared by Angelica Acosta Dinah Jem Jaluag Ryshyl Margaret So Honey Rochelle Ann Toro FIRST SEMESTER SY 2015-2016

Seth Nillon Dubal Johann Sebastian Delegero Jeff Enrera Al-Qhadzher Kabulay Cristel Joy Macas Eduardo Americo Sedillo II SUMMER 2016

Cesar Ruiz Aquino

Recommend Documents