Authors: Miguel Syjuco
When Crispin went on and on, I would sometimes tune out, watching his hands gesticulate. Each was scarred bizarrely. The tissue, the size of a dime, was raised and silky, right in the center on the front and back of each hand. Like stigmata. Such personal mysteries intrigued me.
When the conversation would inevitably lapse, we’d sit and stare at the large poster over his desk, Juan Luna’s masterpiece, the
Spoliarium—
its dead Roman gladiators being dragged across the floor of a coliseum’s subchamber, the faces of onlookers filled with grief, shock, disinterest, gothic fascination. At such times, I studied Crispin out of the corner of my eye, hunched, tired, in his squeaking chair in a tiny office that smelled like a goat wearing expensive aftershave, and I wondered about the road that had taken him to this point.
*
That evening, Erning Isip, the student from AMA Computer College, is still hanging out with his friends from Ateneo and La Salle. They drink and watch the Purefoods vs. Shell game in a beer garden near Padre Burgos, Makati’s red-light district. The student from Ateneo regales them with his dream of being a Supreme Court judge. The student from La Salle intimates that he’d like one day to run a shipping empire. Erning Isip tells them about how he’s behind in tuition payments. A particularly skanky girl passes, wearing a micro-mini denim skirt, a halter that reveals her muffin-top belly, long straight hair to the small of her back, and those precarious Plexiglas stilettos popular with dancers of the exotic discipline.
The Atenenista says: “My God! A veritable Whore of Babylon!”
The Lasallista says: “Nyeh! What a puta!”
Erning Isip stares at the woman for some time. Then he exclaims: “Uy! My classmate from Intro to HTML!”
*
“It’s been nearly a year,” Granma said. “Isn’t it time you made peace?”
“It’s only been eight months,” I said.
“Why don’t you come home and spend Christmas with us?”
“How’s Granddud?” The line was bad and there was a lag in our sentences.
“He’s still your grandfather,” Granma said. I heard the honking of a horn, the clicking of a turn signal. “Not here,” she said to the driver. “Enter at the Tamarind Street gate.”
“New York is beautiful, Granma. Fifth Avenue is all lit up for Christmas and it’s not even December yet. I wish you were here. How’s life as governor?”
“Hello, can you hear me? The line’s cutting out.”
“Granma? Hello? I said, how’s the governorship?”
“Great, actually. You would have enjoyed it. It would have made your grandfather so happy.”
“Granma . . .”
“And your father would have looked down from heaven and been so proud. Because you’d be a statesman, just like he was.”
“Granma, please, don’t—”
“It’s very fulfilling, you know. It keeps me awfully busy. Which is good. Especially in this season, when everyone wants something from you.”
“I heard about the president’s latest scandal.”
“Which one?”
“The links to the bombings.”
“Oh. That will pass.”
“There are others?”
“Each one is the same. They’re always trying to impeach him. Always suspecting him of being on the verge of declaring martial law. But their parliament of the streets is just mob rule.”
“So the scandals aren’t true?”
“What’s true?”
“That he’s on the verge of declaring—?”
“I meant, what’s true?”
“Aw, Granma, can’t you do anything? Aren’t there people in government who . . . I don’t know. People like you.”
“Oh, sweetheart. What can anyone do? That’s just the way things are. You really think you can change the world?”
“I can be part of the change.”
“What would you change?”
“Everything.”
“What would be different?”
“I don’t know. It would just be better.”
“I don’t think we can really change anything. It’s too difficult.”
“Granma, please don’t say that.”
“Anyway, I’m home already. Your grandfather’s home. I have to go before he sees me on the phone.”
“You don’t
have
to tell him it was me.”
“I better go. What time is it there in New York? You better get to bed.”
“Bye, Granma.”
“I love you, Miguelito.”
“Love you, too.”
*
But Dominador is like a bull. He pushes Antonio off with his powerful arms. With a press of the button, the villain unsheathes his switchblade. “I’m going to stick this in your gut,” he growls, “and turn you on like a tap.” Our hero reaches to draw his trusty pistol, but doesn’t. It wouldn’t be fair. Dominador sneers. “Where’s your big gun?” he says. Antonio smiles. “Here in my pants,” he replies. “But I don’t take it out for ugly pigs like you.” He assumes a kung fu stance and motions Dominador closer. His opponent closes in, slicing the air between them.
—from
Manila Noir
(page 57), by Crispin Salvador
*
I pass the night at a cheap pension near the Manila airport. My flight to Bacolod leaves early tomorrow.
The traffic was too heavy to venture farther. I sat in the back of a taxi as it inched along a cordon of traffic cones, across the broad highway from a wall of fire swallowing blocks of shanties. Black shades of men and their hulking machines moved and shimmered against the backdrop of wrestling yellows and reds and oranges. In
places, spires of brilliant blue leaped and twirled and fell and shifted colors. The taxi driver and I sat transfixed, our faces pressed to the warm windows. “Two more blasts,” said the Bombo Radyo announcer, in his rapid-fire Tagalog, “at the duty-free store outside Ninoy Aquino International Airport have resulted in fires spreading to nearby residences. Let us hope, my friends, and let us pray, that the rains will aid the brave firefighters in their heroic task.”
A couple of times when Crispin went on about his exile being heroic, I began to wonder. What was it really that kept him from returning to Manila? I even asked him once, and he said living abroad was harder. That it took more guts to be an international writer. But there was always a lack of conviction in his voice. A defensiveness. Could it be that he had just grown too soft for a city such as this, a place possessed by a very different balance? Here, need blurs the line between good and bad, and a constant promise of random violence sticks like humidity down your back. Wholly different from the zeitgeist lining the Western world, with its own chaos given order by multitudes of films and television shows, explained into our communal understanding by op-ed pieces and panel discussions and the neatness of stories linked infinitely to each other online. Had Crispin grown to love the mythology too much, the way Emma Bovary loved romances? Like a hermit with a credit card and a telephone, Crispin sat back and dismissed what was happening outside his door. “The beggars have changed, but the lash goes on,” he said, “and armchair guerrillas have taken to the jungles of cyberspace. Everything’s now so Hollywood, the world is lopsided. No wonder it revolves.”
I disagreed. Maybe because I was younger and post-postcolonial, I knew that even if it rotated askew, it was still one world. When a butterfly flapped its wings in Chile, a child soldier killed for the first time in Chad, a sale was made on
Amazon.com
, and a book arrived in two days to divulge the urgencies outside our lives. Sure, having moved from Manila to New York, I saw that the global village had made it, ironically, easier for me and my friends to continue with our lives unhindered: tuning out on iPods made in China; heeding the urgings to revitalize the economy by shopping; attending rallies only if we didn’t miss too many classes, because a competitive job
market or student loans stood like chaperones beside our consciences. But we also took fervid stances on issues burning up the blogs, even if engaged from the safety of our homes, our windows wrapped in plastic and duct tape. My friends and those like us monitored Fox News constantly, trying to understand the hypocrisy of the enemy, relishing our feelings of superiority before changing the channel to search for whatever subjectivity we found most satiating. Sure, we abandoned the Philippines, inhabited Manhattan, and claimed the deserted nighttime streets, always in an incredulous state of self-congratulation for what we would one day do. Sure, we went out constantly, driven by our fear of either missing out or dying lonely or simply growing old. Sure, we sat in Alphabet City bars, amid juke box music and cigarette smoke, sucking down PBRs and arm-wrestling each other in debates on homeland security and human rights in a country that still wouldn’t give us green cards. Sure, each night we staggered home, unfired, unglazed, already broken without knowing it. But at least we were trying.
Around that time the Philippines was listed by Western governments as a terrorist hot spot, though many Filipinos scoffed. Asphyxiating a poor country’s vital tourist industry because a handful of Muslim rebels are playing hide-and-seek in the southern jungles of Jolo is like warning tourists not to visit Disneyland because of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama. Crispin not only ridiculed the warning, dismissing it with the air of having seen it all before, but he also shrugged off the ubiquitous stories of quashed coups and extralegal killings that we in the know recognize as the more pressing, if less sensational, concerns.
And I forgave him that. Even if I thought he was running away from something by living abroad. Maybe I excused him because he was a man who’d already made many a stand, perhaps one too many, and it was now the era for people like me to step up. Or maybe I admired him because he had graduated into a different role. When Crispin spoke about his writing, he wielded adroitly a life sharpened by learning, defending a ferocious belief that merely being in touch with today is limited, even juvenile—in the way that this morning’s newspaper is revealed as tonight’s fish-and-chips wrapping when works like
One Hundred Years of Solitude
or, indeed,
Autoplagiarist
are picked off the shelf. A man with battered hands is shown to be a craftsman only when he puts them to work.
Yes, I gave him that. Because
TBA
was supposed to reach for more than a thousand young Turks like me ever could. But when the bombings reached the cities, when our relatives at home were afraid to go to the malls, then Crispin’s indifference really disappointed. We the young are necessarily impatient with our elders’ patience. How are they so serene when they have so much less time than we do? I hoped Crispin would have looked in the mirror one morning and said: You obsolete old bastard. And that would have spurred him to a final assault. But that time I questioned him about the toothlessness of exile, he paused, then replied: What can one do?
The scent of fire is pleasant. It wafts into my room at the pension, through the vent of the gargling air-conditioner unit. Despite myself, I enjoy it. The odor of burned homes, chilled by Freon, is wintry, like Vancouver memories of s’mores and campfire stories. I still can’t sleep. Two cockroaches climb the far wall, their antennae waving at each other. A drunk unheroic tenor belts Vita Nova love songs from the karaoke bar downstairs. I sit in bed, read my notes, and prepare tomorrow’s questions for Crispin’s sister, Lena. Later, the silence after closing time uncovers the cries of sirens still blazing in the distance. Thunder sunders all. Wind pelts rain on the jalousie windows with such force it sounds like a riot.
I sleep.
I’m on an island in the middle of nowhere. The tiny house is gathering dust. I watch it collect on the surfaces, on the objects. A red fedora. A gramophone. A framed photo of a little girl at First Communion with her parents. On the beach, I listen for a boat. The sea is reticent and raucous. How could I have never learned to swim in something so beautiful? Bangs of typewriter keys resound through the window. I rush back in and see an Underwood with paper in it. I search the house again, growing desperate with each successive pass. It’s been four days, I know. I doze in and out, unable to sleep, but trying desperately for some sense of normalcy. It’s getting hard to inhale, as if my breath is slowly evaporating. I stumble up to suck, in vain, at the faucet attached to a plastic drum in the kitchen. When I bang the drum it makes a noise like a bell underwater. I lie down
again, then have to rush outside to vomit. I lie down once more, then run out to shit diarrhea. I stagger to the bed, my heart pounding, and pain a new regularity in my head. I can almost feel my kidneys ache. One imagines strange things sometimes. My blood, I somehow know, is becoming more acidic. Hypovolemic shock. I heard the term on a medical TV drama. My blood is pulling moisture from my body tissue, from my brain. Knowing what is happening doesn’t mean you can do anything to stop it. The bedsheets are icy. Visions play with my mind. I’m raising an infant child in the air, tossing her up so that she’ll giggle with joy. I’m leaning out a car window and looking up as fireworks bloom and wilt. I’m waiting in line outside a museum, shaking my head at the inane conversation of tourists. I’m helping Madison sew name tags on the clothes of her grandfather the night before he is put in a home. I’m holding a phone receiver against my cheek, listening to the tone, looking at the familiar numbers on the old piece of paper in my hand. When the sun rises over the island, my throat feels like it has shut. With a panic like realizing your mother has left you in the supermarket, I know I am going to die.
I wake up. It is the accepting moment of a dying night, just before dawn, just before the roosters have awakened. I can’t believe I’ve remembered my dream. I lie in bed and try to recall it before it slips away. It must be the jet lag. Morning arrives, slowly, then noisily. The cockroaches, in their wisdom, have fled.
*
The boy had always been quickly on his way to becoming a character misled by his own good intentions and assurances of self, and perhaps interesting in that way.
And so, this is where he is declared our protagonist. The dramatic angle to his story begins with recurring images of him fidgeting in his own silence, in deserted subway stations, in classrooms surrounded by schoolmates, in a forenoon queue at MoMA. You can see in his face he is searching, hoping to dispel those things that nettle and diminish him, finding purpose in the conceit of himself as a modern-day member of the ilustrados—a potentiality owned by every expatriate today, a precedent granted by those first Enlightened Ones of the late nineteenth century. Those young Filipino bodhisattvas had returned home from abroad to dedicate their perfumed bodies, mellifluous rhetoric,
Latinate ideas, and tailored educations to the ultimate cause. Revolution. Many dying of bullets, some of inextricable exile, others subsumed and mellowed and then forgotten, more than a few later learning, with surprising facility, to live with enforced compromise. What’s the difference between them and him and all the other peripatetics, except that the ancestors had already returned? His thick, furled intentions and rolled-up plans would also be shaken out to flap alongside our national flag, one day. So he waited, just as they did, collecting himself into integrity, just as they had, anticipating the final magnetism of native shores.