Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco PDF

ILUSTRADO  ILUSTRADO * MIGUEL SYJUCO FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX NEW YORK  Farrar, Straus and Giroux 18 West 18th Street, New York 10011 Copyright © 2010 by Miguel Syjuco All rights reserved...

ILUSTRADO  ILUSTRADO * MIGUEL SYJUCO FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX NEW YORK  Farrar, Straus and Giroux 18 West 18th Street, New York 10011 Copyright © 2010 by Miguel Syjuco All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2010 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Syjuco, Miguel, 1976– Ilustrado / Miguel Syjuco.—1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-374-17478-1 (alk. paper) 1. Authors, Filipino—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 3. Experimental fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title. PR9550.9.S96I55 2010 823'.92—dc22 2009043083 Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott www.fsgbooks.com 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 For my siblings: J, C, M, C, and J. And of course, for Edith In response to the warnings received while researching this book, the author hereby states that all perceived similarities between characters and people living or dead are either purely coincidental or a skewered nerve in your guilty conscience. —from the extant title page of The Bridges Ablaze, by Crispin Salvador ILUSTRADO  PROLOGUE The Panther lurks no longer in foreign shadows—he’s come home to rest. Crispin Salvador’s fitting epitaph, by his request, is merely his name. —from an unattributed obituary, The Philippine Sun, February 12, 2002 When the author’s life of literature and exile reached its unscheduled terminus that anonymous February morning, he was close to completing the controversial book we’d all been waiting for. His body, floating in the Hudson, had been hooked by a Chinese fisherman. His arms, battered, open to a virginal dawn: Christlike, one blog back home reported, sarcastically. Ratty-banded briefs and Ermenegildo Zegna trousers were pulled around his ankles. Both shoes lost. A crown of blood embellished the high forehead smashed by crowbar or dock pile or chunk of frozen river. That afternoon, as if in a dream, I stood in the brittle cold, outside the yellow police tape surrounding the entrance of my dead mentor’s West Village apartment. The rumors were already milling: the NYPD had found the home in disarray; plainclothes detectives filled many evidence bags with strange items; neighbors reported having heard shouts into the night; the old lady next door said her cat had refused to come out from under the bed. The cat, she emphasized, was a black one. Investigators quickly declared there was no evidence of foul play. You may recall seeing the case in the news, though the coverage was short-lived in the months following September 11, 2001. Only much later, during lulls in the news cycle, was Salvador mentioned at any length in the Western media—a short feature in the arts section of The New York Times,* a piece in Le Monde† on anticolonial expatriates who lived in Paris, and a negligible reference at the end of a Village Voice article about famous New York suicides.‡ After that, nothing. At home in the Philippines, however, Salvador’s sudden silencing was immediately autopsied by both sides of the political divide. Both The Philippine Gazette and the Sun traded blows with Salvador’s own Manila Times, debating the author’s literary, and indeed social, significance to our weary country. The Times, of course, declared their dead columnist the waylaid hope of a culture’s literary renaissance. The Gazette argued that Salvador was not “an authentic Filipino writer,” because he wrote mostly in English and was not “browned by the same sun as the masses.” The Sun said Salvador was too middling to merit murder. Suicide, each of the three papers concluded, was a fitting resolution. When news emerged of the missing manuscript, every side discarded any remaining equipoise. The legend of the unfinished book had persisted for over two decades, and its loss reverberated more than its author’s death. Online, the blogosphere grew gleeful with conjecture as to its whereabouts. The literati, the career journalists foremost among them, abandoned all objectivity. Many doubted the manuscript’s existence in the first place. The few who believed it was real dismissed it as both a social and personal poison. Almost everyone agreed that it was tied to Crispin’s fate. And so, each trivial tidbit dredged up during the death investigation took on significance. Gossip cycloned among the writing community that Salvador’s pipe was found by the police, its contents still smoking. A rumor circulated that he long ago fathered and abandoned a child, and he’d been maddened by a lifetime of guilt. One reputable blog, in an entry titled “Anus Horribilis,” claimed extra-virgin olive oil was found leaking out of the corpse’s rectum. Another blog surmised that Salvador was not dead at all: “Dead or alive,” wrote Plaridel3000, “who would know the difference?” None among Salvador’s colleagues and acquaintances—he had real no friends—questioned the suicide verdict. After two weeks of conjecture, everyone was happy to forget the whole thing. I was unconvinced. No one knew what I knew. His great comeback was scuppered; the masterpiece that would return him to the pantheon was bafflingly misplaced and the dead weight of controversy buried in his casket. The only remaining certainty was the ritual clutter inherited by those left behind—files to be boxed, boxes to be filled, a life’s worth of stuff not intended as rubbish to be thrown out for Monday morning pickup. I just about ransacked his apartment searching for the manuscript of The Bridges Ablaze. I knew it was real. I had witnessed him typing away at it at his desk. He had spoken of it, puckishly, on many occasions. “The reason for my long exile is so that I could be free to write TBA,” Salvador had said, that first time, spitting out the bones of chicken feet we were eating in a subterranean Mott Street restaurant. “Don’t you think there are things that need to be finally said? I want to lift the veil that conceals the evil. Expose them on the steps of the temple. Truly, all those responsible. The pork-barrel trad- pols. The air-conditioned Forbes Park aristocracy. The aspirational kleptocrats who forget their origins. The bishopricks and their canting church. Even you and me. Let’s all eat that cake.” But what remained of the manuscript was only crumbs: the title page and a couple of loose leaves scrawled with bullet points, found sandwiched and forgotten in his disintegrating Roget’s Thesaurus. Missing was twenty years of work—a glacial accretion of research and writing—unknotting and unraveling the generations-long ties of the Filipino elite to cronyism, illegal logging, gambling, kidnapping, corruption, along with their related component sins. “All of humanity’s crimes,” Salvador said, spitting a bone atop the pyramidal pile in his bowl, “are only degrees of theft.” I, of course, believe the conspicuous lack of clues is stranger than the disarray of the domestic scene from which he was mysteriously absented. Ockham’s razor is chipped. Every bone in my body recoils at the notion Salvador killed himself. Walking through his apartment afterward, I saw his viridian Underwood typewriter loaded, cocked, and ready with a fresh blank page; the objects on his desk arranged in anticipation of writing. How could he have brought himself to the river without passing his conscience reflected in that Venetian mirror in the hall? He would have seen there was still so much to do. To end his own life, Salvador was neither courageous nor cowardly enough. The only explanation is that the Panther of Philippine Letters was murdered in midpounce. But no bloody candelabrum has been found. Only ambiguous hints in what remains of his manuscript. Among the two pages of notes, these names: the industrialist Dingdong Changco, Jr.; the literary critic Marcel Avellaneda; the first Muslim leader of the opposition, Nuredin Bansamoro; the charismatic preacher Reverend Martin; and a certain Dulcinea. * That you may not remember Salvador’s name attests to the degree of his abysmal nadir. Yet during his two-decades- long zenith, his work came to exemplify a national literature even as it unceasingly tried to shudder off the yoke of representation. He set Philippine letters alight and carried its luminescence to the rest of the world. Lewis Jones of The Guardian once wrote: “Mr. Salvador’s prose, belied by the rococo lyricism and overenthusiastic lists of descriptions, presents a painfully honest picture of the psychosocial brutality, actual physical violence and hubris so acute in his home country... His vital works will prove timeless.”*  In its efflorescence, Salvador’s life projected genius and intellectual brazenness, a penchant for iconoclasm, and an aspiration to unsparing honesty during obfuscated times. He was, even until his death, touted as “the next big thing”—a description he could never transcend. “From the early age of self-consciousness, I was told I’d been gifted gifts,” he wrote in his memoir Autoplagiarist.† “I spent the rest of my life living up to expectations, imposed by others but more so by myself.” Such pressure, and a strong belief in living a life worth writing about, led him through many roles and adventures. His autobiography read so much like a who’s who of artistic and political icons that readers wondered whether it was fiction. “I’ve lived nearly all my nine lives,” Salvador wrote. His work borrowed liberally from and embellished each of those lives: his upbringing as the son of a sugar plantation owner, the sentimental education in Europe, Mediterranean evenings spent womanizing with Porfirio Rubirosa or drinking zivania with Lawrence Durrell, the meteoric fame from his scoops as a cub reporter, training with communist guerrillas in the jungles of Luzon, the argument with the Marcoses during dinner at Malacañang Palace. The group of influential artists Salvador co-founded, the Cinco Bravos, dominated the Philippine arts scene for years. Yet it was the internecine intensities of the local literati that gossiped Salvador’s life into chimerical proportions. Among the stories: he gave Marcel Avellaneda that scar on his face during a duel with butterfly knives; he drunkenly, though surreptitiously, vomited in the seafood chowder bowl at a George Plimpton garden party in East Hampton; he danced a naked moonlit tango at Yaddo, with, depending on who is telling the story, Germaine Greer, Virgie Moreno, or a dressmaker’s dummy on casters; Salvador was even said to have insulted conductor Georg Solti after a performance at the Palais Garnier (it’s alleged he shook the maestro’s hand and chummily called him “a smidge off at the start of the second movement of Rach Two.” Note: I’ve been unable to confirm that Solti ever conducted the Second Piano Concerto at the Garnier). Salvador’s early work—most agree—possessed a remarkable moral vigor. Upon his return from Europe in 1963, he began building his name with reportage focusing on the plight of the poor—producing subversive stories famously at odds with his father’s philosophy of political toadyism as a means to the greatest social good. In 1968, Salvador declared his international literary ambitions with the publication of his first novel, Lupang Pula (Red Earth).* The story of the charismatic Manuel Samson, a farmer who joins the communist Huk Rebellion of 1946 to 1954, the book earned some acclaim and was later translated for publication in Cuba and the Soviet Union. (Salvador’s true first novel, The Enlightened,* released in the United States three years earlier, won prizes before it was published but could not live up to the fairy-tale hype. About his grandfather’s role in the 1896 Philippine Revolution and the subsequent war against American invaders, it was a work Salvador hoped would be forgotten. He once told me his portrayal of his grandfather had created “shoes too big for me to fill.”) Despite his having been unanimously awarded the Manila Press Club’s coveted Mango de Oro Trophy for his exposé of police brutality during the Culatingan Massacre, it was the young writer’s milestone essay in the January 17, 1969, edition of The Philippines Free Press, titled “It’s Hard to Love a Feminist,” which incited uproarious controversy. To his own surprise, the attention thrust him into the consciousness of Philippine pop culture. Radio talk shows nationwide carried his voice, its studied enunciations characteristically losing form and rising in pitch when excited; television screens bore the images of his lanky frame seated insouciantly with a leg tucked beneath him, black pomaded hair parted severely, finger wagging at the other members of the panel discussion—a grab bag of effeminate academic men and thick-waisted female activists. He energetically debated with feminists on the television and radio, delivering froths of invectives that at times required intervention by the host. Salvador justified his work as “not chauvinistic, but realistic for a poor country with greater bêtes noires than those raised at that recent symposium, ‘Changing Hisstory into Herstory.’” In October 1969, in the same magazine, Salvador published an essay, “Why Would a Loving God Make Us Fart?” This earned him the ire of the Catholic Church and further enshrined his intellectual infamy. 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-full 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 a t 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 b o o k 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. The author walked through the audience and out of the CCP building. When there was nobody to see him, he began to run, splashing headlong into the torrential rain. He caught a flight out that evening—just missing the unseasonable supertyphoon that would flood vast swaths of the city—and returned to New York via Narita, Detroit, and Newark. I saw him the morning of his arrival, the day before Valentine’s Day, when I rushed to his apartment on the pretense of dropping off a folderful of students’ essays from his missed classes. He was seated in his study, bedraggled but radiant, banging away at his typewriter. It sounded like machine-gun fire. He had not even bothered to change out of his ruined barong. Beside him, there it was: yesterday’s Philippine Sun, turned to the deaths and births page. Though the paper’s website had run an erratum, blaming an intern for accidentally running Crispin’s from their stock of prepared obituaries, you could almost hear the self-satisfied chuckles swooping in on the westerly tradewinds. I didn’t know how Crispin had taken it, so I asked if he’d had a good flight. And what had got him all fired up. Crispin smiled at me brightly. “Death,” he said, “in Manila. I apparently have nothing more to lose.” That was the second-to-the-last time I saw him. Then silence too soon for one whose most pernicious enemy was silence. If our greatest fear is to sink away alone and unremembered, the brutality that time will inflict upon each of us will always run stronger than any river’s murky waves. This book therefore shoulders the weighty onus of relocating a man’s lost life and explores the possible temptations that death will always present. The facts, shattered, are gathered, for your deliberation, like a broken mirror whose final piece has been forced into place. —Miguel Syjuco, en route to Manila, December 1, 2002 * Natalia Diaz, “Filipino Footnote,” The New York Times, May 6, 2002. † Carla Lengellé, “Les guérilleros de Paris: de Hô Chi Minh à Pol Pot,” Le Monde, July 22, 2002. ‡ Anton Esteban, “Grand Central Terminus,” The Village Voice, August 15, 2002. * Lewis Jones, “The Salvador of Philippine Literature,” The Guardian, September 21, 1990. † Crispin Salvador, Autoplagiarist (Manila: Passepartout Publishing, 1994). * Lupang Pula (Manila: People’s Press, 1968). * The Enlightened (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1965). * The story is renowned as the first fiction published by a Filipino in the magazine since Carlos Bulosan’s “The End of War” in the September 2, 1944, issue. Marcel Avellaneda called “Matador” “over-earnest faux Ernest” and “a chapter edited judiciously from The Sun Also Rises.” * Jour, Night, Vida, and Amore (New York: Grove Press, 1977–1981). † My Philippine Islands (with 80 color plates) (New York: Macmillan, 1980). ‡ Phili-Where? (London: Faber and Faber, 1982). § Because of You (New York: Random House, 1987). * Dingdong Changco, Jr., sued for libel. Salvador famously told the court: “Whatever truths you find in my fiction are only universal ones.” The book was banned in the Philippines after only 928 copies were sold nationally. † Interview by Clinton Palanca, The Paris Review, winter 1991. ‡ Tao (People) (Manila: Passepartout Publishing, 1988). § Filipiniana (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1990). || Scholarly Plunder (Manila: Ars Poetika, 1981). *Manila Noir (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1990). † The Bloody Sea (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992). ‡ Kapatid, QC Nights, and Ay Naku! (Manila: Adarna House, 1987–1990). * Crispin Salvador, All the News the Papers Are Afraid to Print (Manila: Passepartout Publishing, 1993).  1 A battered wooden chest in the bedroom, its inlay shedding, its key finally found in a locked desk drawer. Inside: A recent diary (orange suede cover, hand-burnished a smooth caramel [inside: translations, riddles, jokes, poems, notes, other]). First editions (Autoplagiarist, Red Earth, The Collected Fictions, The Enlightened, et cetera). A dilapidated overnight suitcase (white Bakelite handle; stickers from hotels long shuttered [the lock is forced open with a table knife: the scent of pencil shavings and binding glue, a sheaf of photographs {slouching at the edges}, his sister’s childhood diaries held together by a crumbling rubber band, pregnant manila envelopes {transcripts, newspaper clippings, red-marked drafts of stories, official documents }, a canvas portfolio {charcoal, graphite, ink sketches }, a battered set of Russian nesting dolls {the innermost missing}, other assorted miscellany {a Parker Vacumatic fountain pen, inherited medals from the Second World War, a lock of amber hair, et cetera}]). * My friend and mentor was quite alive the night before. The door cracked open, only his nose and eye visible. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.” The blue door clicked shut, unapologetically. The dead bolt slid in with a finality I did not at the time recognize. I left and had a bacon cheeseburger without him, irritated by his uncharacteristic rudeness. What could I have said to him? Should I have forced open the door? Slapped him twice across the face and demanded he tell me what was wrong? Days, weeks later, all the fragments still would not click together. The events seemed unreal, confusing. Some nights I’d tiptoe quietly out of bed, cautious not to wake Madison and risk igniting her anger; I’d sit on the couch, deep in thought until the sky turned lilac. Both suicide and murder seemed like two sides of the same prime-time seduction. In retrospect, this was healthy for me to feel. Clichés remind and reassure us that we’re not alone, that others have trod this ground long ago. Still, I could not understand why the world chose to take the easy way out: to write him off simply, then go home to watch TV shows with complicated plots. Maybe that’s the habit of our age. Then, at four weeks after Crispin’s death, I was telephoned by his sister (her voice as thin and pale as a piece of string) and asked to divest his life’s possessions; I entered his musty apartment as if it were a crypt. At four months, I found myself unable to sleep at night; I’d sit and listen to Madison’s breathing, thinking, for some reason, of the parents I never got to know, and how I missed Crispin, with his stupid fedora and strong opinions. At six months, I began Crispin’s biography; the long hours in the library, the idea that his life could help me with mine, somehow kept me sane. At eight months and one week, Madison left me for good; I hoped she’d call but she didn’t. Late in the night of November 15, 2002, nine months to the day after Crispin’s death, I was watching my in box for any e-mail from Madison. With a bing, three new messages appeared. The first was from [email protected]. It said, in part: “Sharpen your love-sword rubadub soundess. Help that breeds arousal victories. How to last longer making love and have more feelings.” The second was from [email protected]. It said, in part: “GET DIPLOMA TODAY!If you’re looking for a fast way to next level,(non accredited) this is the way out for you.” The third e-mail was about to be trashed when I noticed who sent it. The message said, in part: “Dear Sire/Madame... I was informed by our lawyer, Clupea Rubra, that my daddy, who at the time was government whistleblower and head of family fortune, called him, Clupea Rubra, and conducted him round his flat and show to him three black cardboard boxes. Along the line, my daddy died mysteriously, and Government has been after us, molesting, policing, and freezing our bank accounts. Your heroic assist is required in replenishing my father’s legacy and masticating his despicable murderers. More information TBA.” The sender was [email protected]. I brought up a blank message to respond. I wrote: “Crispin?” The cursor winked at me. I hit “send” and waited. The next morning, I bought my plane ticket. * See the boy getting on an airplane. He’s not a young boy, but a boyish man, as he would describe himself. He sits in his middle seat, notebook open, pen in hand, en route to Manila (I almost wrote “home,” he thinks with a smile). It is a trip he hates, both the voyage and arrival. He writes at this moment, “the limbo between outposts of humanity.” As the airplane is towed backward, he thinks of what he is leaving. Thinks of his lost friend and mentor, seated at the typewriter, working away in a slow accrual of letters, words, sentences, puzzling together pieces shed like bread crumbs on the path behind him. The boy will return, heartbroken, lonely, dejected. His three brothers and two sisters are all abroad, free from home—atop a hill in San Francisco, washed under the big Vancouver sky, hidden amid the joyful noise of New York City. His parents, whom he cannot remember, are in graves he cannot bring himself to visit because he knows their bodies are not there. The grandparents, who raised him as best they could, are in Manila, though he no longer has contact with them because of the emotional violence of their last departure. He is coming home, though he doesn’t dare admit it. He knows well what empty houses are and the mischief memories can play when cast among unfamiliar echoes. In the long hours spent in the airplane, he tries not to think about how his parents died, and therefore that is all he can think of. He flips through the Philippine newspapers, obsessively. He studies his files of notes, clippings, drafts. He unscrews the fountain pen he took from his dead friend’s possessions. Tries to write the prologue for Eight Lives Lived, the biography he wants to write about his mentor. He fidgets. Thinks. Observes his fellow passengers. Judges everyone, in the traditional Filipino sport of justifying both personal and shared insecurities. He reads some more, searching for a point of reference in a world that has never felt entirely his. He writes some more, trying to explain things to himself. He scribbles an asterisk. * Salvador was born to Leonora Fidelia Salvador in a private room at the Mother of Perpetual Help Hospital in Bacolod. Present were his eight-year-old sister, Magdalena (nicknamed Lena), his six-year-old brother, Narciso the Third (shortened to Narcisito), and their yaya, Ursie (no record of her real name). Their father, Narciso Lupas Salvador II, known to family and friends as Junior, was aboard the De La Rama Steamship Company’s M/V Don Esteban, en route from Manila, where he had been engaged with the Commonwealth Congress. The newest Salvador came into the third generation of family wealth, acquired through a blend of enterprise, sugar, politics, and celebrated stinginess. The four years before the Japanese invaded would prove formative: throughout his life the familial roots in the Visayan region represented something promising and pure.  —from the biography in progress, Crispin Salvador: Eight Lives Lived, by Miguel Syjuco *... eyewitnesses reported two explosions, the second occurring thirty seconds after the first, both on the third floor of McKinley Plaza Mall in Makati. According to a spokesperson for the Lupas Land Corporation, there were no fatalities. No group has claimed responsibility for the... —from Philippine-Gazette.com.ph, November 19, 2002 * INTERVIEWER: You wrote in the late 1960s, “Filipino writing must be the conquest of our collective self divorced from those we fear are watching.” Do you still think this true? CS: I used to believe authenticity could be achieved solely by describing, in our own words, one’s own fragment of experience. This was of course predicated on the complete intellectual and aesthetic independence of the “I.” One eventually realizes such intellectual isolationism promotes style, ego, awards. But not change. You see, I toiled, but saw so little improving around me. What were we sowing? I grew impatient with the social politics that literature could address and alter but had until that time been insufficient in so doing. I decided to actively solicit participation—you know, incite readers to action through my work. I think of the effect of José Rizal’s books in our own revolution against Spain a century ago. I think of the poetry of Eman Lacaba, who traded his pen for a gun and lived and died in the jungles with the communists in the seventies. “The barefoot army in the wilderness,” his famous poem called them. The epigraph of that piece was wonderful. Ho Chi Minh. “A poet must also learn how to lead an attack.” INTERVIEWER: Was there something that made you want to lead that attack? CS: Pride and fear of death. Truly. You smile but I kid you not. INTERVIEWER: Your return to the polemical is a criticism often cited. Did you... CS: It’s viewed as two steps backward. Erroneously. When you reach farther and farther, sometimes you come full circle. The task then becomes all the more difficult, false steps more likely—though the eventual outcome may become more pertinent. This of course opens you up to accusations of being quixotic or, worse—or perhaps better —messianic. Mind you, pretension and ambition are different words for the same thing. Truly, it’s the artist’s— the true artist’s—desire for causality that trips critics up. —from a 1991 interview in The Paris Review * Three more hours until I arrive. At Manila. I almost said “at home.” It’s a trip I hate, both the voyage and the arrival, the limbo between outposts of humanity. Remember when air travel was fun? Toy pilot wings and smiling stewardesses showing you the massive cockpit? Now they separate us from our valuables and herd us through security gates, shoeless and anxious; they scare us with tales of deep-vein thrombosis; they pack us in like animals, then run Keanu Reeves on screens on the seat backs to lull us into a squirming stupor. Soon after we fall asleep, they wake us. I bet anyone who is still a Marxist has never had an economy-class middle seat on a packed long-haul flight like this one. Around me, in this tin can, my fellow travelers: we, the acquiescent, unaware insurrectionists; we who have left and returned so constantly throughout history our language has given us a name—balikbayan. Sloped-shouldered we are, freighted by absence; our hand-carries bulging with items that wouldn’t fit in overweight luggage, all the countless gifts for countless relatives—proof our time away has not been wasted. These are my people. (Crispin once called them the “splay-toed, open-hearted.”) Beside me, a stocky, sturdy man in an acid-wash denim jacket and a slipping eyeshade, his head thrown back to snore efficaciously. Likely a construction worker, one of the millions-strong diaspora indentured by the persuasiveness of dreams. To my other side, two older ladies, sisters by the look of them, fidget and flip through the inflight magazine for the sixteenth time. Their inflatable pillows around their necks remind me of yokes on water buffalo, if that’s not too obvious a metaphor. One has a rosary wrapped around one hand. With the other, she turns the pages to the photographs. Her sister complains she’s going too fast. Across the aisle, a petite Filipina with towering shoes rests her blond head on the shoulder of a Texas-big American, his glasses low on his wedgelike nose, reading Dale Carnegie in a pool of light. A snake-and-dagger tattoo slithers up his forearm. Behind sits a spry, elderly Caucasian, his white hair, warm- up jacket, and khakis rumpled in the fashion of intrepid Jesuits or vacationing pedophiles. To his side, a duet of tirelessly gossiping domestic helpers continue their nine- hour run. Their heads, wrapped in eyeshades that hold back their hair, peck at morsels of hyperbole, like pigeons at rice dropped on the pavement of park promenades every Sunday, day off to the maids who flock by the thousands in the big cities of the world. I’ve twice heard about what Minda did to Linda and thrice cringed at the horrible thing Dottie said to Edilberto. I took notes, smiled, when I heard one complain: “She stabbed me in the back and my back wasn’t even turned.” The women’s bluster and brusqueness are crystallized by years of servitude, unconvincing confidence, irreconcilable distance from the things to which they once clung closely. I myself didn’t see what Crispin had become to me until he was gone. My own lolo, Grapes, had been always too remote, the way grandfathers often are, to make up for my father’s death. He was hardly more than a ghostly silhouette I’d glimpse through the glass doors of his home office, writing letters at his desk or reading ribbons of paper from his telex until mealtime, when he’d come to the table and kid with me. The jokes had always seemed forced, and I laughed because I yearned for a connection. I keep telling myself nobody’s to blame. They’d already raised their children. By some accounts, they failed even in that. And suddenly they have six more. New orphans from Manila, shipped wholesale to Vancouver, disrupting my grandparents’ premature retirement—an exile which they had just learned to love. Maybe the Filipino sounds in our English phrases, or the different ways we each looked like my father, reminded my grandparents too much of the life they had before the institution of martial law that drove Grapes from politics at the height of his career, that deprived Granma of her mahjong parties and battalion of maids, that turned them both into just another couple of doddering slant-eyed fools moving too slowly in the soup-cereal-baking aisle of Safeway. I had just turned five when we six arrived. My grandparents tried their best, gave up the small home they had built, moved into an ugly McMansion, hired a nanny to help with us. Grapes and Granma were intent on Canadianizing us, to prepare us for the melting pot into which we’d been thrown, and they prohibited us from speaking Tagalog lest we never master English. Even they cast off their traditional names, adopting my little brother’s mangling of “gramps” and “grandmom”: the man we knew as Lolo in the Philippines became Grapes (“sour,” he liked to say); Lola became Granma (“Like the boat that ferried Castro’s rebels”). As we all came to discover the limitations of assimilation, we grew closer as a family. I remember one time, after school, Granma and I stopped at St. Thomas’s to light a candle, as she did daily, for all souls gone and present and not yet born. A man sat up suddenly in a pew and started shouting at us. “Go back home, you gooks!” He must have been drunk or crazy, though at the time I didn’t know such distinctions. “We’re not gooks” was all my grandmother could say. “We’re Filipinos.” On the drive back to our house, Granma was quiet, ignoring my questions, as if I’d done something wrong. I also remember, years later, us six kids with our grandparents in front of the TV. Dinner on the table had long gone cold as we watched images of Edsa Boulevard thronged with people in yellow T-shirts, praying and singing, nuns linking arms to stop armored personnel carriers, a young girl placing a flower in the rifle barrel of a soldier who was struggling not to smile. The CBS anchorman was saying: “This could be as close as the twentieth century has come to the storming of the Bastille. But what’s remarkable is how little violence there has been.” A small woman in glasses was shown talking to the people. “That’s Cory Aquino,” Grapes explained to us. The anchorman continued: “We Americans like to think we taught the Filipinos democracy. Well, tonight, they’re teaching the world.” Helicopters land and soldiers join the singing masses, everyone smiling. Then Granma said, tears in her eyes: “We can go home.” I’ve been old enough for a long time, but only now do I begin to understand. Around me on the plane, I hear what she meant: the singsong of Ilonggo from the aisle seat nearby, the molasses accent reminding me of the way my grandmother said things. From farther down comes the clunking consonance of Ilocano by the lavatories, Bicolano by the bulkhead. A stewardess is speaking Tagalog to an elderly fellow, a man the age of my own grandfather, telling him all the places she’s been to. He nods at each, as if he’s been there, too. Maybe these people are coming home to make a difference. Maybe I can be like them. My seatmates glance at me as if I were a foreigner. I save my Tagalog words for the proper time, to surprise them with what we share. Their accented imperfections remind me of my own, like that time in class, my first day at Columbia, when I pronounced “annals of history” as “anals of history” and how I’d wanted to flee the room, though nobody had seemed to notice. I eavesdrop on my countrymen, on their tentative English spoken to the cabin crew, never quite perfected despite years in the West: f’s still often traded for p’s, vowels rounded, tenses mixed, syllables clipped—only the well-practiced Western colloquialisms wielded with conviction. Like those phrases, we’re a collection of clichés, handy types worn as uniforms over our naked individuality. We are more real than that philosophical conceit of humanity as the milieu of light: we are the milieu of sweat. Our industriousness, our inexpensiveness, two sides of our great national image. That image the tangible form of our communal desire for a better life. Someone kicks the back of my seat as a reminder to quit being so profound. On my left, my seatmate has long capitulated in the battle for the armrest (involving my performing many a subterfuge and feint, about which he didn’t even know), and I relish my elbow’s lebensraum. When I tell the stewardess my meal choice, I feel my neighbor observing me from the corner of his eye. He chooses differently, oppositely. When our food is passed down and unwrapped, I immediately regret my beef and covet his chicken. I slather my hands with alcohol disinfectant gel. My neighbor looks at me and smiles. I pass him my little bottle and he cleans his hands as well. Then he nonchalantly puts the bottle in his breast pocket. We eat our rectangles of food as if our elbows are fused to our sides. I pretend to be deep in thought and stare into the darkened screen of the TV in front me. On my agenda, visit Crispin’s childhood home. Interview his sister and aunt. Investigate those names found in his notes: Changco. Reverend Martin. Bansamoro. Avellaneda. Dulcinea. Sift through the ashes of the bridges that he burned. Reassemble his many lives. I know when we touch down in Manila my fellow passengers will all clap at the pilot’s landing skills. I know they will all jump, the plane still taxiing, to claim possessions from overhead compartments. I know a voice will reprimand them over the public address system and peeved stewardesses will swat at their upraised hands and shut the compartment doors. Always the same. That’s good, isn’t it? These fellow travelers have logged thousands more miles than most in the world, hugging hello and goodbye, working and saving, remitting money each payday, writing letters on onionskin paper to save on postage, telling their clan they’ll soon be home, finally; they’ll arrive unrecognized by unrecognizable children, to spouses whose kisses have become ostensible and indebted. It’s like that aphorism of Ovid’s that Crispin once shared with me: Everything changes, nothing ends. Me, I’ll arrive to nothing. That’s really how I prefer it. * He doesn’t know what he prefers. When the pretty stewardess rolls up with the drink cart, he wants a ginger ale but orders a “triple” scotch. Drinks on international flights, you see, are free. Thrilled like a child at having his own screen on the seat back in front of him, he forces himself to stay awake to catch up on the latest Keanu Reeves movie. As the end credits roll, he tastes that exasperation we all know after we’ve prostrated two hours of our lives to be pillaged. Again and again he pilgrimages to the rear galley, to avail himself of free ice cream bars and tiny bags of snacks. He turns on his overhead light, tentatively, worried it will glare and awaken his neighbors. He reads the in-flight magazine. In an article about Bali, the photographs of Eurasian girls in day-glow bikinis lounging on white sand and triangular silk pillows excite him visibly, and he squirms beneath his seat belt and holds the magazine strategically, feeling as if he were thirteen and not twenty-six. He looks around. A few rows down there’s a sexy Hong Kong Chinese girl he’d wanted to help stow her backpack as they filed into the plane. But he didn’t have the guts, and so he stood in the aisle and waited for her to finish doing it herself, surreptitiously studying her ass and the way her shirt rode up to reveal the tempting concavities above her waist. He cranes his head to see her now. He thinks, Something about cabin pressure makes me horny. He blames the long-haul boredom. Eroticism, after all, exists to break life’s monotony. What if—he thinks—she feels the same as me? What if I just took her hand and brought her to the lavatory? The worst she could do is say no. He looks over but cannot see her. He does spot her naked foot sticking out from where she’s tucked it under her leg and her armrest. He marvels at its rabbitlike beauty. Madison had manly feet. I haven’t touched another person in so long. The way Madison held him when they made love often seemed his main purpose for sex. It was like hands slowly being washed in warm water—needful, complete, and it cleansed him of that one thing he kept secret from her. He rubs his stubbly chin, a silent-film villain deep in thought, and his watch reflects a locus of light that flies onto the walls, the seat backs, the faces of his slumbering seatmates. He covers his wrist, worrying his neighbors will see the crown insignia, wondering if they’ll think it a Mong Kok fake. He examines it in the light. His grandfather had given it to him on his twenty-first birthday. This was years after the whole family had returned to the Philippines, years after things had begun to curdle, years after his grandfather had returned to his politics and his women. Stainless steel, pearlescent white face, Oyster Perpetual DateJust. His grandfather has one exactly like it. Almost. The boy’s is a counterfeit, even if premium—real beveled crystal rather than flat Perspex, but with Rado interior works. His grandfather had courageously followed a toothpick-chomping dealer, who he’d said reminded him of a hissing lizard, down an alleyway off Tung Choi Street and up three flights of narrow ramshackle stairs, to fork over two hundred U.S. dollars for the most real fake ever seen. A dedication to his grandson was later engraved on the back, and because of that the boy has treasured it. That and the savory memory of lost family dinners when the two would unclasp watches and trade and compare and marvel. The boy for so long now has passed his off as genuine that even he has forgotten and has allowed himself, along with everyone else, to be fooled. * He bursts in, like a bomb, the pearl handle of his Midnight Special glinting. “It is I,” he shouts, “Antonio Astig. Reach for the stars!” But the room is already empty. The window open, its panel swinging tauntingly. He crosses the room like a hungry tiger suddenly uncaged at lunchtime. Looking outside, on España Boulevard, he sees Dominador’s bald head bobbing below. He is swimming across the flooded street to a stranded flatbed truck. Dominador fights desperately against the raging current, debris hitting him at nearly every armstroke. Antonio hears shouts of men from behind him, the clatter of their shoes running up the stairs, down the hall. The police! Antonio leaps out the window and into the flood. The water tastes like the tears of all Dominador’s virgin victims. When he surfaces, he sees Dominador on the back of the truck, cutting the ropes of a tarp with his footlong switchblade knife. Above Antonio, police crowd the window, aim their pistols at him. He dips below, swimming like a shark. In the murky water, their bullets cruise past him like torpedoes. He surfaces in time to see Dominador pushing a yellow-and-red Jet Ski off the truck. Its engine roars like a grizzly and Dominador speeds away, weaving through the stranded cars and jeepneys. Antonio spots a second Jet Ski on the truck. He swims toward it. Bullets zip by. They make popping sounds into the water. Antonio pulls himself onto the truck. In a single motion he pushes the Jet Ski off and starts it. He speeds over the flood-water, the wind fresh on his face. Through foggy shop windows, panicked people watch the commotion. As Antonio blurs past, he gives them his most winning smile. —from Manila Noir (page 53), by Crispin Salvador * E-mail from me to Crispin: Gee whiz, Mr. Wilson! I can’t help but think Madison could’ve paid me half what she paid her therapists to diagnose her borderline personality disorder. It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness. My lolo was recently diagnosed with Freudian narcissism. He then had his secretary do research on the Net. Instead of finding all the bad in it, of course he saw only the good. “All great leaders are narcissists,” he exclaimed to my grandmother. So rather than buy all the books about how the disorder can be overcome, and how they hurt the people around them, he bought The Victorious Narcissist—a book about the triumphant qualities of Nero, Napoleon, Hitler, Saddam, etc. Hell, Grapes even bought a copy to give to President Estregan as a Christmas gift. LOL! Wonder how he’ll take it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not angry with my grandfather. To be angry implies you care. I just feel sorry for him. Anyway, I’ll be late for our bacon-cheeseburger date. You’ll have to tell me the gory details of your trip home and that speech at the CCP. I’m dying of curiosity. * “Fittingly, my father’s name was Narciso,” Salvador wrote in Autoplagiarist. “At one time, somewhere in the lineage before him, the name possessed the tragedy of the myth and the irony that such a name could be possessed by such a man so distinctly unnarcissistic. Upon my father, however, all such nuance had been lost: it was as if to him the name was bespoke, and the very act of christening him ‘Narciso’ authored a parody of a sacred sacrament, wherein one is named for his essence, for that worst characteristic by which he would be forever remembered. In fact, he is belittled further as ‘Junior,’ in that unabashed, and strangely Filipino, habit of giving ignominious nicknames. A self-fulfilling prophecy: try as he did, he was damned forever to be the tiny narcissus.” —from the biography in progress, Crispin Salvador: Eight Lives Lived, by Miguel Syjuco  * “You’re the most handsome of all my grandchildren,” Grapes would often tell me. I never knew how to reply, so I smiled the smile of a shy child basking in attention. I of course didn’t believe him. I was afraid to. “You are the most handsome because you’re the one who looks most like me,” he’d say. Then: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” “The sergeant of the army.” Grapes laughed, amused to no end. “Not the president of the Philippines?” “Whichever is higher.” “I’ll be president,” he’d say, “and you can be the sergeant of the army.” He would pick me up with an exaggerated grunt and carry me to my own bed. He smelled of Old Spice and pipe tobacco, which, I realize now, are more of those comforting clichés. But that’s really what he smelled like. “All right, Sarge,” he would say, tucking me in. It became his pet name for me. We all had them, his private names that made us each his unique grandchild. Jesu was “Groovy.” Claire was “Reina.” Mario was “Smiley.” Charlotte was “Princessa.” Jerald was “The Plum.” I was Sarge. Maybe it’s not “was” but “is.” I don’t know. A lifetime later, Madison would call me “Beauty.” She’d look at me in bed, touch my face with her fingertips, as if afraid of breaking it, and she’d tell me: “You are a beautiful man.” I of course believed her. I was afraid not to. Every night, under the covers, her foot would be pressed against mine. We always wanted to spoon but, because of my troublesome cervical curve and my orthopedic pillow, I had to lie on my back if I didn’t want neck pain the next day. We touched feet through the night, a gesture of reassurance that we’d stand together through the darkest. “I love you,” I’d say. “I love you, too.” “Do you love me more than I love you?” “Yeah.” “Good,” I’d say, sliding into the edge of sleep. “See you in a minute.” “G’night,” she’d say. “In our dreams then.” I never told her that I don’t have dreams or can’t remember whether I do. * From Marcel Avellaneda’s blog, “The Burley Raconteur,” February 14, 2002: Happy Valentine’s all! But let’s get to the point: The nerve of that Salvador, no?! The biggest sin a Pinoy can commit is arrogance. Yes, dear readers, you may have already heard the latest literary scuttlebutt about our former comrade and compatriot Crispin’s most recent visit to our shores. Last Friday’s awards ceremony at the Cultural Center of the Philippines was marred when his acceptance speech turned into a tirade against our literature and a threat to publish something that would “lop your heads off.” How we’d hoped he’d mellowed. How I’d hoped my old friend would return humbled by failures. Autoplagiarist? (He should have ripped off from someone else.) There is a time and place for everything, my dear old Crisp. Haven’t you learned that by now ? For those interested, literary blogger Plaridel3000 has posted a clip of Salvador’s speech on his weblog here. Some posts from the message boards below: —Wat a twatface that Salvador is! Lets c wat his so-called The Bridges Ablaze has 2 say. I herd it hits at the Lupases, Changcos, Arroyos, Syjucos, Estregans, among others. ([email protected]) —It’s sooo sad a man like Salvador has lost himself to hubris. Shouldn’t literature do more than just criticize? Goes to show he doesn’t have the answers. ([email protected]) —LOL! More power to you, Marcel! Lop the head off that commie. IMHO, he’s in with the Muslims for sure. ([email protected]) —Hey, kts@ateneo, I think you are correct. But in fairness, do any of us have answers? ([email protected]) —Love dat clip of his speech. Hilarious. Check out the yellow armpit stains in his barong! ([email protected]) —How do you get rid of pit stains like that anyway? My bf has stains like that. ([email protected]) —Dilute a T-spoon vinegar in cup of water, den apply carefuly w/ basting brush. Should work gr8. Ur wlcm! ([email protected]) —Halabira, I hab d answr to r cuntry’s probs: just kill d rich & reboot d systm. ([email protected]) —Gundamlover, that’s been tried before. See: en.wikipedia.org/Khmer_Rouge. ([email protected]) * Out of the corner of my eye, I look at my seatmate again. His head is nodding, slumping away from me. My little bottle of alcogel peeks from his breast pocket. My hand hovers to fish it out. I decide against it. Instead, I try to sleep. I try not to think of Madison. In the month before Crispin died, it got to a point that being with Madison was like walking naked around a cactus with your eyes closed. She even began questioning my long hours spent at Crispin’s apartment. She liked to alternate her homoerotic suspicions with accusations of literary mercenariness. “Why don’t you like hanging out with people your age, Miguel?” she asked, in the implying, opinionated manner of beautiful women not blessed with big breasts. When I recounted to her my interest in his work, and, later, after he died, my eventual dream of writing his biography, she accused me of sounding like a young naive version of Bellow’s Charlie Citrine. That was one of the lovers’ things Madison and I did, our own affectation of Atlantic academia: we referenced fictional characters as if they were people to learn from. As if real-life people were too nebulous, too private and unreal for us to understand. We liked to believe there is an alternate world, a better world, populated entirely by characters created by the yearnings of humanity—governing and inspiring themselves with all the lucidity with which we rendered them. We posited such a world to be an afterlife for the monumentally great and flawed men and women of history, because Julius Caesar is as real to us as Holden Caulfield, Pol Pot is as alive as Judas Iscariot. Madison had just finished Humboldt’s Gift. Like Citrine, Madison said, I ceaselessly rationalized my relationship with my dead writer friend, before finally admitting that “the dead owe us a living.” I don’t remember what happened in Bellow’s book, but in Crispin’s case I believe it is the living who owe the dead. The debt inside ourselves, as we Filipinos say. My biography of Crispin will be an indictment of my country, of time, of our forgetful, self-centered humanity. I can hear Madison now: “Oh, how wonderfully romantic of you. Romantics are really only in love with themselves.” * Christened Crispin, after the patron saint of cobblers, the eight-pound two-ounce baby was brought from the hospital three days later to the family estate at Swanee, to much fanfare. Hand-painted canvas banners had been strung up at the gate. Dozens of farmworkers lined the gravel drive, straw hats pressed solemnly against their chests as they craned their necks to glimpse the child through the windows of the silver Packard. Some of them had undone their neckerchiefs and waved them like makeshift flags. As the vehicle passed, a whistle blew and on cue the workers tossed up cheers and hats that flew in the family’s wake. The car pulled up to the two-story manor, and the household staff in their cream uniforms, lined up in order of importance from the mayordoma down to the stable boy, erupted in applause. Leonora stepped out from the car, reached in to take Salvador from Ursie, and proudly showed him off. Pink cheeks were touched, the bridge of his nose pinched again and again, and his already thick head of fine blond hair caressed admiringly. They marveled at his hazel eyes. Until he reached the age of four, two years after his hair darkened to brown and into the first months of the war, Salvador’s nickname among the staff would still be “Golden.” When those who’d called him that had fled to their own families or had became casualties of the fighting, the name was forgotten and Salvador himself would not know of it until he was finally an adult. —from the biography in progress, Crispin Salvador: Eight Lives Lived, by Miguel Syjuco * Here’s a memento I took, out of the only frame on Crispin’s desk. An old four-by-five in sepia: in front of the Salvador ancestral home outside Bacolod. From left to right (all squinting in the sun): Ursie, short and stout; reedlike Lena in her school uniform; tousled Narcisito holding his toy glider; Crispin, almost too big for his perambulator; the punctiliously attired Mortimer J. Gladstone, their Bostonian tutor; in the background, walking beside the rosebushes, his face hidden in the shade of his straw hat, Yataro, the Japanese gardener. * “You sure you’ll remember everything we’ve said? Cristobal, are you listening?” He doesn’t reply. He picks up his watch from the desk and looks at it. “The train to Barcelona leaves in three- quarters of an hour,” he says. He winds his watch until it can’t wind anymore. He tries to attach the chain but has a hard time. After a few moments he gets it right and slips the watch into the pocket of his waistcoat. Yciar gets up from the bed. She picks up the silk robe off the floor and pulls it around her. Cristo watches her silhouetted against the thin, bright lines of sunlight coming through the shutters. They look like gashes on her, on everything. She walks barefoot across the room and stands on his feet. She holds him around his waist. They waltz a few steps. “I’m sure,” he says. “Think of me when you’re on the boat.”  “I’ll have my letters sent here when we berth at Port Said. Then when I transfer at Hong Kong. And of course the minute I land at Manila.” “You belong here. Not there.” “I know,” he says. She studies his face and seems guilty. She looks down. When she looks up again she is smiling. She straightens his cravat. “No. I know. You must rush home, to that hospital to care for your mother and sister. It’s your duty now.” She stretches up to kiss the bottom of his chin. “You’ll arrive in time to usher in 1895. Promise not to forget me. Being remembered is all anyone can ask from a lost love. I’ll remember you, Don Cristobal Narciso Patricio Salvador.” She laughs at the length of his name. “Cristo,” she says. “You look nothing like a patriarch.” She pinches his nose. “Even a new one.” “I’ll come back,” he says. “Before you go,” she says, reaching up on tiptoes to whisper in his ear. Her voice is so gentle he can barely hear her. “Before you go, I have to tell you a secret.” —from The Enlightened (page 52), by Crispin Salvador * My seatmate finally asks to borrow my copy of The Philippine Gazette. He’d been eyeing it for hours. I take it from the seat pocket in front of me. He opens it and begins to leaf. Tsk-tsk, he says, shaking his head. He nudges my elbow off the armrest and points at a particular article. Two more suicide bombings, just this morning. This time down south, in Mindanao. Six dead, twelve injured by the first blast, at a Lotto outlet in front of the city hall in General Santos City. Most were municipal employees wagering just-cashed salaries. The second blast was at a children’s birthday party in a McDonald’s in the Lupas Landcorp’s Cotabato Plaza Mall, leaving nine primary-school students dead, six others wounded. No one has asserted responsibility. The Estregan administration suspects various groups: the Abu Sayyaf of Mindanao, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the Indonesia-based Jemma Islamiah, the Middle East’s Al Qaeda. The bombings are assumed to be retaliation for the coalition-led invasion of Afghanistan, of which President Fernando Valdez Estregan has made us a part. I look at my seatmate and shake my head at the article. Then I pretend to go to sleep. A minute later, I hear him chuckling. I peek with one eye. He’s reading the article about the “trial of the century.” I recall seeing that case online. Even I was shocked by the not-guilty verdict received by the Filipino-Chinese couple, who killed their maid by forcing her to drink Clorox Spring Flowers bleach. The maid was minding their son when he drowned in the bathtub. She had been busy text- messaging. It wasn’t the sensationalism of the trial that got my attention. I hate lowbrow tabloid junk. I only clicked on the link that once, because the family involved was named Changco. I thought they might have been related to Dingdong Changco, Jr., who was supposed to figure prominently in TBA. It turned out the family in the trial was of no relation. If they had been, they wouldn’t be in this mess. In fact, the trial of the century kept getting bigger until the media was calling it “the trial of the millennium.” In the weeks following, articles teased out the fact that the couple offered a large sum to the presiding judge. The couple claimed he took it; the judge denied acceptance. The Changcos threatened to sue. Investigators confirmed a withdrawal of two million pesos had been made by the couple, though not a centavo surfaced in the accounts of the judge. Blogs poked fun at how Mr. Changco said at a press-con: “Now we are out two million pesos.” The myopic-looking Mrs. Changco quickly followed with: “And our youngest son is dead.” But then the case turned into something almost mythical. Following the trial, the boyfriend of the murdered maid, a security guard named Wigberto Lakandula, also formerly employed by the family, vowed “violent vengeance.” A day later, Mr. and Mrs. Changco returned home to find their three prizewinning Chihuahuas beheaded in the living room of their gated home. In the past couple of weeks, the love- and-retribution story has turned Lakandula into an unwitting celebrity—as soon as the media learned that he had wooed his now dead beloved by writing songs for her and playing them on his guitar, he became a national heartthrob. Photographs of him were bought by tabloids and pop magazines at exorbitant prices. My seatmate is looking at a photo of Lakandula as a construction worker in Saudi Arabia, shirtless and muscled, leaning against a front-end loader. His smile is bright, his hard hat askew on his thick shock of black hair. Lakandula is, the caption says, currently in hiding, “a fugitive from the long arm of the law.” * Unable to sleep, I return to my notes. Among them are slips of paper filled with jokes, some in my handwriting. Crispin was obsessed with our oral traditions and doubly infatuated with translating Filipino humor into English. He called jokes “our true shared history,” “our sweetly bitter commentary.”  “Jokes are the hardest things to translate,” he said. “There is a danger in not getting it right. For example, capturing how the deprecation is in actuality self- deprecation.” “You really think so?” I countered. “I think we’re just mean.” “No. It’s not divisive. The act of hearing a familiar punch line, the ensuing moan of corniness, that’s all unifying. Jokes are as palliative as a proverb,” he said. “Without them, we wouldn’t understand ourselves.” And so it became a habit for Crispin and me to trade these well-worn classics, particularly the ones about our distinguished alma mater, writing them on slips of paper to pass like shibboleths when next we’d meet. “Three male students loiter around Shoe Mart Megamall,” one note said. “One is from the exclusive Ateneo de Manila University. One from the rival De La Salle University. The third, named Erning Isip, is from the populist AMA Computer College. The three students spot a very pretty light-skinned girl. Each of the boys takes a turn at trying to woo her. The Atenenista says: ‘Why, hello there. Perhaps I should text my driver to bring my BMW around to chauffeur us to the Polo Club so we can get some gindara?’ The Lasallista says: ‘Wow, you’re so talagang pretty, as in totally ganda gorgeous. Are you hungry at all? Let’s ride my CRV and I’ll make libre fried chicken skin and Cuba libres at Dencio’s bar and grill.’ Erning Isip, the AMA Computer College student, timidly approaches the girl. Scratching the back of his head, he says: ‘Miss, please miss, give me autograph?’” * From the window you can now see Manila. Rain streaks sideways across the glass. Suddenly the plane dips. Our stomachs squeeze into our throats. Passengers squeal, straighten, clasp armrests tightly. Many double-check their seat belts, more than a few pull out rosaries and begin moving their fingers in time with their lips. Fuck. I hope it’s not a water landing. The pilot announces: “Cabin crew, take your seats.” The plane steadies. Its interior lights dim. Muzak standards are played from the PA system: a tinkling piano version of the theme from The Godfather. The only person unfazed is my seatmate, who pulls out my bottle of alcohol disinfectant, takes off his socks, and starts slathering his feet, holding the plastic bottle between his teeth as he gets between his toes with all the fingers of both hands. He slurps to keep his saliva in. So much for my bottle of alcogel. The plane shakes violently again.  I close my eyes. The Godfather tune makes me picture silk-socked mobsters skating lithely on mirrored ballroom floors. Liberace at his piano on a dais, watching expectantly for the imminent crash that would break everything into a million little pieces. I’m pleased by the idea of not having to make small talk with the men Granma always sent to whisk me past customs, to tug my suitcases from the carousel, to drive me home. I’m overjoyed I won’t have to greet my grandfather. I love the new freedom of life without Madison, not having to call to tell her I’ve arrived safely, my reassurances met with inordinate tears that made me feel both wanted and burdened. Independence is bliss. It really is. I remember, though, when Madison and I decided to get our own place in Brooklyn—my first real taste of independence. It had gotten to a point where my conscience bothered me, hiding her there in my grandparents’ apartment at Trump Tower without Grapes’s permission. I remember when I called him in Manila to let him and Granma know my decision. “Just make sure,” Grapes said, “that you scrub the floor well so we can rent it out quickly.” Part of me was flabbergasted that he was so unconcerned, that he didn’t just tell me to stay. But part of me was relieved that I had pulled it off so easily. Madison and I moved our stuff into our shitty little wonderful new place, and returning the U-Haul truck felt like I was navigating my new yacht to one of those all-inclusive island resorts with vacationing Pilates instructors in G-strings and a pool with a bar in the middle of it. The next month, however, my grandparents arrived suddenly. After a couple of days of enjoying accompanying them to Broadway shows I’d have dismissed otherwise, and going to dinners with them where Madison and I ate well for a change, Madison was fairly convinced I had exaggerated all my complaints about them. Even I began to doubt myself. I thought, perhaps, my independence had earned their respect. Then they asked to see me alone on their last night in New York; they were leaving for Tel Aviv the next day to see a man about some especially fertile chickens. Grapes stood by the table in their room at the Holiday Inn. The place made me sad, disgusted even. Ever since I was little, he liked to remind me that his wealth came from knowing how to save. My grandfather’s thick silver hair was uncombed, and he was in his boxer shorts and undershirt. The shirt was inside out. When he turned around to get something from his suitcase, I saw that the maids had written “Sir” on the shirt tag with a felt pen. The same hand, the same pen, had written “Migs” on all mine. Grapes turned around and sat down at the table. He placed his seven-day pillbox in front of him, opened it to Tuesday, and began taking out tablets and capsules and arranging them on the tabletop. They looked like candies. He hadn’t even glanced at me since I walked in. Granma sat in the corner, looking at her hands. Grapes sighed. It was a brutal, crushing sigh. Like Aeolus, the windwarden from Greek mythology, blowing down all too easily every wall I’d constructed within myself to contain my confidence and pride in the new life I’d just begun. “Why don’t you tell us why you have been lying to us?” He sighed again. “I know you are doing it for that girl.” Sigh. “Wasting your life.” Sigh. “I sent you to an Ivy League school.” Sigh. “What are you doing working for that magazine? You went to Columbia! They should make you editor in chief. Do you want me to go with you to talk to them?” Sigh, sigh, sigh. “I’ve got a good position, Grapes.” “Do you? I looked at the masthead. Are you editor? Let’s see here. Brigid Hughes, managing editor. Is your name Brigid Hughes? Ben Ryder Howe, senior editor. Is your name Ben Ryder Howe?” “Grapes, I’m an editorial assistant. If I work hard enough, I’ll make editor one day.” “Hmm, let’s look at the other names. Oliver Broudy, senior editor. Is your name Oliver Broudy? George Plimpton, editor. Is your name George Plimpton? Where’s your name, little Miguelito?” “I’m still new,” I said feebly. “They haven’t updated the masthead.” “There you go, lying again. Always the same, huh?” “I’m telling the truth.” “Your version of the truth. Are you the janitor?” I looked at Granma. She sat quietly in the corner of the room, looking at her fists. My attempts to make eye contact with her, I still don’t know whether they were for her or me. My own hands started to hurt and I realized I was clenching them so tightly that my nails almost broke the skin. When I spoke up, I could feel myself shaking. “Grapes,” I said, “you don’t understand.” How childish that sounded. I steeled my voice. “This is about my short story. Right? I knew I shouldn’t have shown you the magazine. It’s always this way. Why do you think the father figure is always you?” “I’ve never understood why you can’t just write nice stories. Stories your grandmother would like and can show off to her friends.” “Granma, is that what this is all about?” Granma spoke up. Her voice was surprisingly angry. “Why can’t you write nice things?” Her voice softened. “Why would anyone read your story and want to visit our country?” “A writer has to talk about the things that go untalked about.” Grapes banged his pillbox on the table. “Don’t argue literary aesthetics with your grandmother,” he said. “She’s right. You are always trying to shock. You have all this horrible stuff in your work. Not very Christian things. Not very patriotic. And you say things that are not yours to say.” “If you have to hide something, then you shouldn’t have done it in the first place. Right, Grapes? If you had some integrity—” “Don’t you dare speak to me like that! You’re one to talk! What do you know about owning responsibility? We helped you play mommy-daddy with that girl in university. What happened there? But of course we helped you. We’ll always help you. Because we love you. But how do you repay us?” “Love isn’t based on gratitude. Respect isn’t based on debt. I’m not your constituent.” “Oh, how dramatic! Listen to yourself. In what book did you read that baloney? We’ve all always known that you were the selfish one. Out of all of you six.” “None of us kids have stood up to you before. Well here I am. Finally. One of us six. I’m telling you who I really am.” He looked like he was going to say something, but he didn’t. Good. I continued: “You hate that I’m independent. That you can’t control me. That I didn’t go into politics, like you, like my father...” “Those were suggestions,” Grapes said quietly. “I paid for your writing education.” “You’d tell me, ‘When you’re done playing Hemingway, when are you going to come home and take your role in politics?’ It’s all you ever talked about. But look at where it got you.” “Yes,” Grapes said. “Look at where it got me!” I held back. I wanted to hurt him, but not that way. A man’s life is all he has. When you’re old, it’s all you’ll ever have. I said instead: “Look at where it got my dad. A hero’s death. Don’t think I don’t know what really happened.” “I just want you,” Grapes said quietly, “to reach farther than I did. Than your father did.” Granma piped up. “We love you.” “If I became a politician, either I’d be corrupted by the compromises I’d be forced to make, or I’d be shot for my ideals. Don’t you see?” Grapes wasn’t even looking at me anymore. “You always have to have the last word,” he said finally. “Don’t you?”  I thought of what to say, but realized I’d only be having the last word. We stewed in the silence of a stalemate neither of us expected. In a small voice, Granma told me: “I think you better leave now.” I couldn’t believe it. I looked at my grandfather for what I knew would be the last time. He looked old. I went out into the hall. Granma followed. She started pulling wadded hundred-dollar bills from her pockets and pushing them into my hands. I kept my fists closed. “No, Granma. I don’t want to take any more of his money.” “Please,” she said, starting to cry. “Take it. It’s mine. Please. For me.” She stuffed them into the pockets of my jeans. I let her. I hugged her. “Why don’t you come home with us?” she said. “Just leave her. You don’t have to be responsible for her.” “What will I do in Manila?” “I don’t know,” she said weakly. “Enter politics?” Her voice was so quiet. “I’ll help you,” she said. “I’ll take the weight for you.” I hugged her and told her I loved her. Then I walked to the elevator. I pressed the call button purposefully. We stood there. Granma brought out a Kleenex packet and tried to open it. I pressed the button again. Granma hid her face in a tissue. I pressed the button again. Granma began to blow her nose. The elevator finally came. I was grateful that it was empty. I turned to look through the closing doors, but my grandmother was gone. The elevator went down and down and down until it stopped. The doors opened and I was faced with a group of guys who looked like Midwesterners in town for a wrestling competition. “Hey,” one of them whispered, “that dude’s crying.” The plane steadies, banks, straightens, and makes its final approach. “I’m sorry for the delay, ladies and gentlemen,” the captain says over the PA. “There was a, uh, problem on the ground.” My neighbor finally asks me, in English, “You visiting?” I nod. “Me,” he says, smiling, “I come home. For good.” He fishes out a thick wad of U.S. dollars from his belt bag, opens it like a booklet, and flaps it proudly. “My savings. In past times, I work very hard. I remit money for a long time. I will now change everything.” I nod. The money in the middle slips out of the stack and bills shower into our laps. He laughs as we pick them up. I hand over what I collected. The bills smell like sweaty hands and baking bread. I feel unspeakably happy for him. And guilty for having resented him. And sad that I’ve come home with less definitive intentions. “I work so far away,” he says, as if I didn’t understand him. “In past times. Now, for the future of my children, I come home.” I can picture his family at Arrivals, a bright stain of joy on a tapestry of disorder. The Ninoy Aquino International Airport is your apt introduction to my country. You’ll be struck by the ubiquity of armed guards, enticed by the glossy luxury shops selling duty-free liquor, cigarettes, last- minute presents; you’ll tumble out into a warlike fug—an overcrowded arrival area with desiccated, air-conditioned air, worn linoleum, and creaking baggage carousels; a quintet of blind musicians greets travelers with faves like “La Cucaracha” and “Let It Be”; a larger-than-life, smirking President Fernando V. Estregan welcomes you from a poster taking up the entire wall; a sign declares, “Welcome to the Philippines, the most Christian country in Asia”; beneath it, another, “Beware of pickpockets.” Grasping your possessions tightly, you pass through the gauntlet of taciturn but thorough customs officials before an exit orphans you to the insidious ninety-five-degree heat and humidity and the swarming masses of other people’s family members, all of them periscoping necks to stare collectively at you. Your armpits drip sweat like a tap, though the sky is almost always white, the sun almost always hidden. On the street, taxis done up like carnivals will honk straight at you, their drivers accosting your bags as if intending to hold them ransom for a twenty-cent tip. In their cabs—perfumed with three different fruit-scented air fresheners, pork cracklings, and spicy vinegar—they hospitably turn the air-con to arctic freezing and crank up the volume on their stereo just for you, so that the Bee Gees fly high-pitched and crystalline from the speakers by your ears. Soot-caked cops do their best to direct the beast that is our traffic, their ineffectual whistles exacerbating the chaos that is our order. It takes you two hours to get anywhere; and when you arrive, it’s almost time to go. Let me welcome you to my first country, my Third World. * The country has changed so much, my childhood years before the war seem improbable. I’m not sure if I remember the events as actual or if they were stories later told to me, Salvador folklore in which I reportedly took part. Most wonderful in my mind are the caged animals on Tito Odyseo’s farm. At dusk, when no other humans were afoot, Lena, Narcisito, and I would creep slowly between the cages. There was the jaguar, with his immense paws. The pair of aardvarks, named for Saints Peter and Paul. The Palawan bearcat. The ring-tailed lemurs. The buff-faced gibbons. The Philippine monkey-eating eagle named Bonifacio. And the baby giraffe, who died before he grew to his full height. I’d run with my brother and sister, around the slow-footed cassowaries that were permitted to roam freely. On those Sundays when his family would host all the others (or at least those in good grace), Tito Odyseo would sometimes release the gazelles, a fleet trio that ran without knowing the estate was a larger, inescapable cage, or ran because a dozen children gave chase, or ran for the opportunity and sheer love of running. I remember how we took after them, for those very same reasons. If only someone had taken a picture of that last picnic, with the animals in the background and the family all present. That was the last time we were together, the last time our ancestral land was still ours, the last time the spirits were still present there in the shadows beneath the trees. When the war came, the animals were quickly stolen, one by one, by hungry farmworkers. Tito Odyseo was severely beaten one night when he fell asleep guarding the cages. —from Autoplagiarist (page 188), by Crispin Salvador * From the window he can see Manila. Rain streaks sideways across the glass. Suddenly the plane dips again, and his thoughts take on the tinge of desolation, as they do in such moments. He closes his eyes and tries not to pray. * The airplane comes down low. From above, the city is still beautiful. We pass over brown water off the coast, fish pens laid out in geometrical patterns, like a Mondrian viewed by someone color-blind. Over the bay, the sunset is starting, the famous sunset, like none anywhere else. Skeptics attribute its colors to pollution. Over there’s the land, the great gray sprawl of eleven million people living on top of each other on barely more than 240 square miles— fourteen cities and three municipalities, skyscrapers and shanties, tumbling beyond Kilometer Zero and the heart of every Filipino, the city that gave the metro its name: Manila. The megalopolis’s components, when named, sound like mountain music, all drums and cymbals and gongs: Parañaque, Mandaluyong, Makati, Pasay, Navotas, San Juan, Cubao, Quezon City, Caloocan, Taguig, Malabon, Pasig, Las Piñas, Marikina, Muntinlupa. Connecting them, the grid and the superavenues—Edsa, Roxas, Aurora, Taft —countless overpasses built like Band-Aids, innumerable billboards, restaurants for every nationality and budget, huge shopping malls with Bulgari, Shoe Mart, Starbucks, Nike, you name it. You want it, you can get it in Manila, in shops and tabloids, alleyways and boardrooms. There, by the shadow of our airplane, near Rizal Park, where the statue of our hero stands as centennial testament to a stolen revolution, we’re now flying low enough to see tangled lines of jeepneys and buses bringing people home from work; that crowd there, with the banners, is a small part of a million worshippers en route to the weekly, desperate, El Ohim prayer rally, where Christ is the answer to unanswerable Boolean questions. If you look closely, there’s Reverend Martin onstage, in his metallic double- breasted suit and happy-colored tie: a man of God and man of the people whose faith earned him financial security and a mansion in a gated subdivision. Modern Manila. She who once was the Pearl of the Orient is now a worn dowager, complete with the hump, the bunions, the memories of the Charleston stepped to the imported and flawlessly imitated melodies of King Oliver, the caked-on makeup and the lipstick smeared in thick stripes beyond the thin, pursed lips. She, the trusting daughter of East and West, lay down and was de stroyed, her beauty carpet-bombed by her liberators, cautious of their own casualties, her ravishment making her kindred to Hiroshima, Stalingrad, Warsaw. And yet, from the air you think her peaceful and unflustered. On the ground is a place tangled with good intentions and a tyrannical will to live. Life works with the Lord’s benevolence and a generous application of duct tape and Filipino ingenuity. Five hundred years ago Spanish conquistadors sailed their wooden ships into the world’s most perfect harbor to begin their mission of, as historians say, God, gold, and guns; their walled fortress is still there, as is their religion and blood, but the gold they, and others, took with them, or apportioned among their few native deputies. Manila has changed much since. It’s changed so little. If you know where to look, this is the most exciting city in the world. The airplane’s wheels touch down. The passengers clap. * The spectators watch the action eagerly. At the intersection, stranded cars block Antonio’s way. Our hero slows. Eagle-eyes search for Dominador. There he is! He’s abandoned his Jet Ski and is running up the stairs of the pedestrian overpass. “Santa Banana,” Antonio mutters. “If he gets through, he’ll make it into the shopping arcade, and I’ll never find him in that crowd.” Antonio revs his Jet Ski ferociously. It speeds across the water, between buses, between taxis, their occupants blinking at what they’re witnessing. Antonio builds velocity, his black leather jacket flapping like a cape. He jerks his vehicle to the right, heading straight for a half-submerged car. The Jet Ski slides over its hood, up its windshield, and flies through the air, Antonio hunched over the handlebars. Man and machine arc higher and higher, the engine screaming like a banshee in heat. He lands on the pedestrian overpass, the Jet Ski’s underside trailing sparks as it slides over the cement. The fleeing Dominador looks behind him, wide- eyed and stupid-looking. The Jet Ski closes in. Antonio leaps over his handlebars, like a gazelle through the air, and tackles Dominador. They tumble together. Antonio whispers in his ear, “If you don’t mind, I really prefer being on top.” —from Manila Noir (page 57), by Crispin Salvador * A woman cries out from the rear of the plane, silencing the applause. Seat belts click, click, click. Passengers rush to the windows on the right. Over someone’s head I can see, beyond the gleaming new terminal, rain clouds, dark and heavy. Two pillars of evil black smoke, clambering up in the distance, seem to hold the heavens up. At their feet, fire.  2 These are the broad themes: enigmas, dreams, mythologies, the tyranny of absence, the shortcomings of language, deciduous memories, endings as beginnings. —from Autoplagiarist (page 188), by Crispin Salvador * That part about my seatmate in the plane and his wad of falling money didn’t happen exactly as I recounted. That last bit about his coming home for his children, that wasn’t accurate, either. If I had spoken to him, I reckon that’s what he’d have said. In a way, I wrote that part for him. He became more than the guy beside me with annoying manners. What I said that he said to me, I could see that in him. But no, I didn’t talk to him. When he tried to strike up a conversation, I closed my eyes and pretended to be dreaming. From this point on, I should promise to tell the truth. * During Crispin’s last months we became closer than I expected. I even reached the point of being able to cuss in his company. The friendship started with me doing a profile on him for my class with Lis Harris. Crispin and I would sit stiffly formal, a tape recorder like a string of barbed wire between us, always at some coffee shop or restaurant. Usually Tom’s Restaurant on Broadway, the one they always used in Seinfeld. I finished the semester and turned in the profile. I had a feeling Crispin wanted to see it, though he didn’t ask and I didn’t offer. A couple of weeks after our last interview I was finally invited into his office for a cup of Lapsang souchong and some madeleines. He was visibly more at ease now that he was no longer under scrutiny. His smile, I noticed, was unexpectedly shy. We sat and nibbled and talked about stuff. I don’t remember what. Books, probably. Writing. Crumbs clung to the front of his argyle sweater. When I saw him the next day they were still there. I don’t know if it