Authors: Miguel Syjuco
Salvador left Manila in 1972, a day before Marcos declared martial law. He hoped to make a name for himself in New York City, but success there was more coy than he would have liked, or was used to. He lived in Hell’s Kitchen, in a coldwater studio “so sordid even the
buzzing neon sign outside my window no longer lighted up.” To make ends meet he took a job at the Petite and Sweet Bakeshop in Greenwich Village. At night he wrote short stories, some of them finding print in small magazines like
Strike, Brother!
and
The Humdrum Conundrum.
His next milestone came with publication in the March 12, 1973, issue of
The New Yorker
, of the short story “Matador,” a piece reportedly “not disliked” by the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, but pointedly chosen for its relevance to the ongoing war in Vietnam. An allegory about the toll of neocolonialism, “Matador” drew on Salvador’s experiences as a banderillero in Barcelona during his youth, presenting the United States as the matador and the Philippines as the brave but ultimately doomed bull named Pitoy Gigante.
*
After this success, Salvador had hoped closed doors would open, but his agent and publisher queries returned slowly, each demurring, though expressing interest if he should happen to have a novel. He started work on a new manuscript. A book attempting to provide a vivisection of loneliness, it was to be based on the unwitnessed drowning of a close friend and the effect the death had on the Salvador family.
In May of 1973, Salvador fell into a tempestuous relationship with Anita Ilyich, a Belarusian ballerina, disco queen, and early advocate of the swinging lifestyle. One stormy autumn morning following a party at The Loft, the couple, each of them reportedly under the influence of one too many gimlets and Quaaludes, had a jealous and theatrical fight there on Broadway in front of David Mancuso’s apartment building. Salvador, convinced it was “just another one of those tiffs,” returned to their home after a palliative walk to find his possessions dumped on the sidewalk to soak. Among his stuff were the translucent pulpy pages of his nearly completed novel.
That afternoon, Salvador quit New York for Paris, a city he’d frequented during his university studies. He swore off both women and literature, settled in a leaky
chambre de bonne
in the Marais, and worked as an assistant to a pastry chef’s assistant. Soon after, he
broke his vow to teetotal the comforts of the softer sex, but it would be two full years before he returned to literature. Ultimately, both poverty and his restless spirit brought him back to writing in the summer of 1975; he took freelance assignments for
The Manila Times
and
The
International Herald Tribune
and began work on what would become his popular
Europa Quartet
(
Jour
,
Night
,
Vida
, and
Amore
).
*
Written one after the other between 1976 and 1978, the quartet follows the life of a young mestizo gadabout in 1950s Paris, London, Barcelona, and Florence. It was a hit with housewives in three countries.
Buttressed by new success, Salvador returned periodically to the Philippines to undertake research, appear on panel discussions, stump for election campaigns, and work with other artists. In 1978, he began “War & Piss,” his long-running weekly column in
The Manila Times.
His recently out-of-print travel guide,
My Philippine Islands (with 80 color plates)
,
†
despite its unabashed subjectivity, was described by
Publishers Weekly
as “the definitive book on the Philippines [
sic
] people . . . entertaining and brave, chock-f of vivid anecdotes infused with a local’s intimate knowledge . . . It situates the tropical country in the context of the rest of the world, retrieving it from the isolation and exoticization it is oftentimes suffered to endure.” Later, in 1982, Salvador published
Phili-Where?
,
‡
a satirical travel guidebook that charted his country’s fall from “gateway to Asia” and proud U.S. colony to a plutocracy ruled by an “incontinent despot.” The book was banned in the Philippines by the Marcos regime and thereupon enjoyed decent sales abroad.
The 1980s—the decade of global stock market greed, of beehived matrons meeting for weekly Jane Fonda workouts, of Corazon Aquino’s People Power Revolution—was a new dawn for the Philippines. It was in that climate of moral contrasts that Salvador finally found the respect for which he’d intensely yearned. He published widely and often. His career peaked in 1987 with the publication of
Dahil Sa’Yo
(
Because of You)
,
§
an epic account of the Marcos dictatorship
that included a pointed indictment of the opportunistic cronies responsible for the couple’s rise and fall, epitomized by Ding-dong Changco, Jr.
*
Salvador re-created the tumultuous era through a mixture of press clippings, radio and TV transcripts, allegories, myths, letters, and vignettes from the various points of view of characters, factual and fictional, intended to represent Filipinos from all walks of life. The book spent two weeks at the bottom of the
New York Times
bestseller list; it was reprinted three times and translated into twelve languages. It earned acclaim abroad, and therefore also in the Philippines, and placed him on the long list for the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature (he thereafter often said: “I’m the first and only Filipino to be in contention for a little award called the Nobel Prize for Literature”).
†
The award went to Naguib Mahfouz.
Salvador, like other prolific writers of extraordinary breadth and reach, was well acquainted with such disappointments, as exemplified by the various publications that made the literati doubt his abilities. Critics consistently judged the less successful works to be long-winded, messianic, or derivative. (Avellaneda called his oeuvre “a dirty cistern filled with feces that has not been well formed. Objectively speaking, it’s the sort of crap that sparks fears of outbreaks of amoebic dysentery.”) The most memorable of these unmemorable works were: the 43,950-word essay
Tao
(
People
),
‡
which Salvador meant as “a catalog and homage to the glorious diversity of our race, our rich customs, and our beautiful women”;
Filipiniana
,
§
an ambitious but idiosyncratic survey of Philippine literature in English, which included most of Salvador’s short works, but only one each from other writers; and an early book-length epic poem about Magellan’s cartographer and translator, Antonio Pigafetta, entitled
Scholarly Plunder
.
||
Attempts to justify the latter in 1982 by transforming it into
All Around the World
, a disco opera, resulted in bankrupting failure.
What irked Salvador most—more even than Avellaneda calling his life abroad “a metaphor for an anonymous death”—was the critics’ claim that
Because of You
was his literary swan song. And so began whispers about an epic book that had been in the works since the early 1980s:
The Bridges Ablaze
. But what Salvador published next surprised the country, establishing him as a much-read writer but giving credence to what local books columnists called his “flimsy literary prowess.”
Manila Noir
,
*
the most popular of his crime novels, presented Antonio Astig, a swashbuckling mystery author investigating Jack the Ripper–style killings of pretty women from shantytowns (the real-life murders were a sensation in 1986 and ’87: the police investigation was regarded as a sham and the murderer rumored to be a prominent “confirmed bachelor” politician).
The Bloody Sea
,
†
a five-hundred-page rip-roaring nautical saga set in the Philippines of the 1500s, pitted the dastardly Chinese pirate Limahong against the dashing Spanish captain Juan de Salcedo, and proved to be amazingly successful at home and in Britain. (The book, along with rumors of a sequel and prequel, fueled, to Salvador’s delight, public disdain from Patrick O’Brian.) And aiming to reach younger Filipinos, Salvador wrote the
Kaputol
(
Siblings)
trilogy,
‡
a magic-infused offshoot of the YA tradition of Franklin W. Dixon. Following the adventures and coming of age of Dulcé, the tomboyish leader of a group of young boys in martial law–era Quezon City, the trilogy became his most enduring work, remembered and loved by a new generation of readers.
That period of his life, full of prolificacy but lacking in gravitas, plunged Salvador into a deep depression that made him lash out indiscriminately, though his behavior during both defeat and success had long elicited eager mockery. His mania for collecting subjected him to accusations of being “a closet bourgeois.” He famously wrote letters in purple ink, in grandiose longhand. With the advent of e-mail, to which he took early with extreme enthusiasm, he began sending long tirades to newspapers—intent on skirting the judgment
of the editors of his column at
The Manila Times
—placing in his crosshairs such targets as our cultural crab mentality, or the hope that expatriate Filipinos will help rather than abandon their country, or the bad service at the Aristocrat restaurant and how in such an old institution it represented the passing of a more genteel society. The periodicals refused to run his missives, so he collected and self-published them in the book
All the News the Papers Are Afraid to Print
.
*
Salvador’s fastidiousness of manner also opened him to rumors of homosexuality, yet he was criticized for being a womanizer “with the lascivious energy usually found in defrocked clergymen.” And he could never live down his 1991 TV commercial which showed him being served lunch in a book-lined study, shaking a cruet over his food before turning to the camera to deliver the now immortal words: “Silver Swan Soy Sauce, the educated choice.”
On June 2, 1994, Salvador held a book launch at La Solidaridad Bookstore in Manila. The event had been wrapped in secrecy, and excited literary watchers expected
The Bridges Ablaze
. Salvador instead unveiled
Autoplagiarist
, yet another self-published book, a memoir that refracted through his life’s story a history of the Philippines from the start of the Second World War to the end of the millennium. The 2,572-page volume, perhaps the most ambitious and certainly the most personal of his books, won him angry responses. One local critic said: “The Oedipal impulse was so ambrosial, [Salvador] fucked his father and killed his mother.” Another said: “Dear old Crispin might have done better had he put his money where his mouth is and cleaned up Smokey Mountain [garbage dump].” Abroad, Salvador’s literary agent could not sell
Autoplagiarist
to publishers, and even ultimately terminated their professional affiliation. Worst of all, the memoir’s frankness destroyed what had long been a tenuous relationship with his family and friends at home. Salvador was suddenly a true exile. “You’re lucky your parents are dead,” he once told me. “The people who love you,” he said, while moving his bishop to take my queen, “will only see their deficiencies in your work. That’s the strength of good writing and the weakness
of the human ego. Love and honesty don’t mix. To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.”
The cut ties saw Salvador settle permanently in New York, and inexorably into a period of deep silence. He dropped his newspaper column. He gave up writing. That he became well known as a teacher attests to his oh-so-very-Filipino resilience. As he said in “War & Piss” on many an occasion: “If life gives you lemons, have your maid make some lemonade.”
Much of his life was apocryphal, so it may well be that this next bit was, too. Shortly after clipping the last review panning
Autoplagiarist
and pasting it into an album, Salvador went out by the Hudson River and burned the scrapbook, along with his diaries, in a public trash receptacle. It was in the wee hours of a summer night. Two policemen happened upon him while he was relieving himself into the conflagration. “I’m just trying to put it out,” he told them. Salvador was taken downtown and charged with misdemeanors for drunkenness and public urination. The event was somehow reported in the Manila papers and elicited the habitual snickers from those who remembered him.
But it was in that fire, Salvador later told me, that he rediscovered what it is like to be intoxicated by your own anger, to find the solace of destruction. The following morning saw him returned to his desk with frightening intensity. He had retrieved, from a locked drawer, the three black cardboard boxes containing the unfinished manuscript of
The Bridges Ablaze
.
*
At the end of the first week of last February, Salvador left for home. The purpose of the visit, his first in years, was for him to accept the Dingdong Changco, Sr., Memorial National Literary Lifetime Recognition Prize, or, as it is widely known, the DCSMNLLR Prize. The afternoon he arrived in Manila, Salvador ate a late lunch at the Aristocrat restaurant before going to their comfort room to change clothes. In front of the mirror, he adjusted the collar of his formal barong and practiced his speech. Outside it was raining heavily, and he took a taxi to the Cultural Center of the Philippines. The audience was composed of the old guard, mostly members and officers of
PALS, the Philippine Arts and Letters Society. They leaned back in their plastic monobloc chairs, smirking magnanimously, faces serene and satisfied, as if at a much-awaited funeral. (The DCSMNLLR Prize is historically given to writers at the end of their careers.) Salvador bounded up the steps onto the stage, shook hands, posed for a picture with PALS deputy vice president Furio Almondo, and stepped to the podium. He looked admiringly at his gold medal—an ornately filigreed circle made of sterling silver. He poured himself a glass of water and drank it. Finally, he spoke. “Literature,” he declared, “is an ethical leap. It is a moral decision. A perilous exercise in constant failure. Literature should have grievances, because there are so many grievances in the world. Let us speak frankly, because we’re all peers here. Your grievances with me are because you say I have failed. Though I only failed because I extended myself further than what any of you have ever attempted.” The boos and jeers came suddenly, then peaked savagely, as at a crucifixion. “I accept this award,” Salvador continued, shouting to be heard, “ahead of what I will achieve. Next year, I will publish my long-awaited book. Then you will see the truth of our shared guilt.” The boos and jeers turned into laughter. “History is changed by martyrs who tell the tru—” The microphone was disconnected.