Ilustrado (9 page)

Now, having come home, we see him, our patriotic protagonist, sitting in bed, wondering, Where are the trumpets?

*

When Cristo isn’t in his quarters, writing on the special lap desk he designed and built with springs and pads to allow him to work on any mode of transport, he sits and stares at the sea, pushing away the thoughts of his murdered father, his mutilated mother, and his abused sister. This ocean is said to pacify the deserving—he thinks, trying for the bravery of a smile—and I am hopeful.

If he looks hard enough, he can see land on the horizon. But when he blinks, it disappears. He’s never as close as he hopes.

—from
The Enlightened
(page 92), by Crispin Salvador

*

Apparently I had been Crispin’s only friend. Lena rang me very late one night, to my surprise. It was hours after I fought with Madison, who had stormed out dramatically. When I picked up the phone, I was expecting my girlfriend’s voice, grated by tears, and I answered sternly. I startled Lena. She kept repeating herself. Her sentences were tinged with a British-school accent long blended into the blocky lilt of a life spent in Bacolod. She asked me to go through Crispin’s things—sending home what was significant, taking from what was left anything that interested me, and donating or discarding the rest. What could I have said?

The task proved daunting. There was a lot of stuff. Yet I came to enjoy the work, hoping to understand his life from the artifacts left behind. I was now free to pick leisurely through his possessions, to recline and relax on his chairs, to make tea without asking permis
sion, to open windows. There were no longer secrets hidden by drawers, darkened corners, closed books, doors. The resulting oddity left me curious and angry and exceedingly depressed. It reminded me of stretching like a starfish in the very middle of the bed those nights Madison stayed out late to spite me. But at least the morning would bring her back.

There were hundreds of books in Crispin’s apartment. Shelves covered every wall. He used to call his library his
akashic
—Sanskrit, he’d said, for an unending library containing the totality of information. Included, on their own shelf, were scores of his notebooks in the orange suede covers he’d ordered specially from a workshop in an alleyway off the Arno. On the bottom shelf in the living room was his sizable record collection. I leafed through and put on Chuck Berry, to disperse the limitless silence. He sang about going down to the Club Nitty Gritty.

I walked through Crispin’s study as if I were in a museum. Atop his desk: a typewriter, the letters worn off its keys; a Bohemiancrystal decanter, filled with water; a matching glass beside it, fruit flies floating dead on its surface; an ashtray holding his forlorn pipe—meerschaum, stinking of Cherry Cavendish.

That was when I searched the place for
The Bridges Ablaze.
I found nothing. I did, however, discover a receipt for a large package he had sent to a post office box near the Hundred Islands, in the Philippines. It was dated the morning before he died.

On a table in a corner was Crispin’s chess set, our game still on it. I made my move: rook to king-four. Check.

*

The boy watches the scene slide past. The homes are all ruined, charred a black so deep it is as if it were always inevitable. Men and women and children sift through the wet rubble, hopelessly, their legs and arms sapped of color. Our angry protagonist wants to go out and help, but what can he do but get in their way? In traffic ahead, the long-haired soldiers lounging on the back of the armored personnel carrier pay no mind. Their rifles are propped between their legs. Those men already know all they need to know.

*

I forgot to mention what happened last night behind the pension where I stayed.

I was tired and lugged my suitcase, hand-carry, laptop bag, and orthopedic pillow through the rain, only to find the front door locked. I went around back to a desolate parking area. In the darkness, I heard, then saw, a young police officer in uniform, shoving two small street children against each other. The kids were in a daze. One clutched the telltale stuff: a bit of cardboard, Rugby adhesive blobbed on it, wrapped in a National Bookstore plastic bag. Both children had sampaguita leis around their necks, the evening’s unsold wares. The policeman was knocking the two kids together repeatedly, like two hands clapping. When they fell, he grabbed them by the waists of their shorts and pulled them up roughly. He was growing increasingly agitated. He rifled through their pockets, looking for their day’s earnings.

I put down my luggage and my pillow, already formulating what I would say. I was going to mention my surname, tell him who my grandparents are. He would stop, slack-jawed, quietly fuming, but stop nonetheless. I was going to demand his name and precinct and threaten to report him to Senator Bansamoro.

But what would have been the point? Sometimes you can’t help but wonder, in the grand scheme of things, if kids like those are better off never having been born. And any cop who’d steal from street urchins is liable to shoot me in a second.

I carefully picked up my pillow and luggage, and quietly went through the back entrance of the pension. Inside, the electric fans mounted on the walls squawked.

I forgot to mention it.

*

INTERVIEWER:

What then was meant when you wrote: “Translation kills so that an other may live. Manila is untranslatable.” Were you able to address this, and how?

CS:

I meant you can’t bring an unwritten place to life without losing something substantial. Manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. The
Mecca, the Cathedral, the bordello. The shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque. I’m hardly speaking in metaphor. It’s the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that? If one writes about its tropical logic, its familial loyalties, its bitter aftertaste of Spanish colonialism, readers wonder: Is this a Magical Realist? So one writes of the gilded oligarchs and the reporters with open hands and the underpaid officers in military fatigues, the authority of money and press badges and rifles distinguishing them as neither good nor bad, only unsatiated and dangerous. And readers wonder: Is this Africa? How do we fly from someone else’s pigeonhole? We haven’t. We must. And to do that, we have to figure out how to properly translate ourselves. Let me tell you how I think we can do it.

—from a 1988 interview in
The Paris Review

*

The morning flight to Bacolod leaves in fifty-five minutes and I’m still stuck in traffic. The taxi driver keeps looking back at the wreckage and going on about the fire. He says that before the bodies were collected, the place smelled like roast suckling pig, a scent so delicious that he vomited until he thought he would faint. The traffic light seems frozen on red. In the open back of an armored personnel carrier in front of us, a dozen soldiers sit. Dressed in combat fatigues, all but one wear their hair long around their shoulders. They slouch lackadaisically, dark ropy arms thrown back idly, elbows propped up behind them on the truck’s railings. Automatic rifles held between their knees look like penis sheath gourds of New Guinean warriors.

These are different from the surreptitious-faced troops regularly transported from bases around Metro Manila. These are special-ops, distinguished by their ways and miens, fully armed and battle ready. Strangely obtrusive. Patient. They smoke cigarettes and wrap T-shirts around their necks for protection from the sun. Their sergeant reads today’s paper. The tabloid headline asks, over two lines: “Philippines First Corp: Hero or Villain?” The photograph below is of the company’s fireworks and munitions factory on the Pasig River, taken from the opposite bank. Large pipes above the waterline spew viscous gray sludge lacquered in a spectrum of colors.

A soldier spots me staring. He nudges his seatmates. They all stare back. The sergeant lowers his newspaper and looks at me. I turn my eyes to the embroidered
Playboy
symbol on the back of the taxi driver’s headrest. The men laugh.

*

Erning Isip, in hand a newly minted degree from AMA Computer College, visits his cousin Bobby in Daly City, California. Silicon Valley, Erning knows, is only a bus ride away. Bobby is a male nurse at one of the hospitals and has to go to work every day. At first he leaves Erning at home with a box of cornflakes and the TV on, so that Erning has something to eat and can improve his poor English. After a week of staying home, Erning tells his cousin: “Pinsan, sawang sawa na’ko sa cornplayks” (Cousin, I’m tired of cornflakes). So Bobby shows him the local diner and instructs him to tell the waitress that he’ll have an “apple pie and coffee.” Erning repeats it as best he can: “Affle fie end copee.” He practices it all morning: “Affle fie end copee. Affle fie end copee.”

That afternoon, Erning bravely ventures to the diner. The waitress approaches his table. “Whaddya want?” she asks. Shocked and nearly lost for words, Erning stammers: “Affle fie end copee.” The waitress leaves, much to his consternation and relief. A minute or so later, she brings him a slice of apple pie and a cup of coffee. Erning is flushed with accomplishment.

After a week of going to the diner, having the waitress accost him with “Whaddya want?” and eating apple pie and drinking coffee, Erning is feeling quite cosmopolitan. Before Cousin Bobby leaves for the hospital, Erning tells him: “Pinsan, sawang sawa na’ko sa affle fie end copee” (Cousin, I’m tired of apple pie and coffee). So Bobby tells him to order a “Cheeseburger, medium rare, with a large Coke, no ice.” He’s very specific about ordering no ice, to get more refreshing beverage for his money. Erning gamely practices his new English phrase in front of the mirror. “Chisborger, midyum rayr, end large Cok, no iys.” He practices all morning: “Chisborger, midyum rayr, end large Cok, no iys.” When lunchtime comes around, he makes his way to the diner. Under his breath, he turns
the phrase into a jolly song. “Chisborger, midyum rayr, end large Cok, no iys.”

Erning sees the waitress come toward his table. He holds his breath. “Hello again, honey,” the waitress tells him, unexpectedly. “What can I get you?”

Erning blurts out: “Affle fie copee! Affle fie copee!”

*

Beside the chess set in Crispin’s study stood a large metal filing cabinet. Forcing it open, nearly cutting myself in the process, I found: a photo album, cameras, binders filled with negatives and contact prints, boxes of assorted black-and-whites and oversaturated coloreds (artful nudes, scenes of markets and nightlife, traditional wood-and-stone Visayan manors, old friends from the Cinco Bravos debating and drinking in smoky bars, a series of stark duotones of the annual flagellants and crucifixions in Pampanga).

*

Nation, we must consider deeply: Isn’t the President justified in his attempt to extend his tenure? He is, after all, forgoing a comfortable retirement for the good of the country. In 1998, when the Supreme Court upheld his bid to run an extra term (validating his argument that the shift from V.P. to President was thrust upon him—we can recall him as “reluctant but ready”), the public protestations were legally repudiated. And what followed were years of stability. Now is little different. And still the opposition wrap themselves in the banner of democracy. Salvos of accusations are omnipresent in any presidency (people die, policies falter, thieves will steal until they are caught) and a parliament of the streets undermines the fabric of our constitutional republic. As his motto goes: Don’t change horses in midstream! Full speed ahead, often, is the bravest option, even if not the perfect one. For in democratic politics, there can be no perfection.

—from an editorial in
The Philippine Sun
, December 2, 2002

*

Salvador’s father’s father was the son of Capitan Cristobal Salvador de Veracruz, a Spanish garrison officer who emigrated to the Philippines from Alburquerque in the province of Badajoz, in the region of Extremadura—an area from which came many great Spanish
explorers, including Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, Pedro de Alvarado, and Pedro de Valdivia. (The Capitan’s own father was the famous Extremaduran matador El Narciso Splendido, mortally gored in Ronda in 1846.) A near-fatal bout with pneumonia on the journey to Las Islas Filipinas in 1860 left the twenty-five-year-old Capitan with a phobia of extended sea voyages. He would never return to his homeland.

After a brief posting at Fort Santiago in Intramuros, the walled city of Manila, the Capitan was transferred to duties on Negros Island, a position almost certainly more desirable to a soldier with agricultural roots. In 1865, after being discharged from active service following a crushed testicle inflicted during a riding mishap, the Capitan quickly married a local mestiza beauty named Severina “Stevie” Moreno, whose American mother had emigrated to the Visayas from Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1849, after marrying the globetrotting Catalan-born Visayan shipping magnate Patricio Moreno i Monzó.

The Capitan and his young bride settled easily into the privileged life of the new Spanish gentry. In 1868, they had a son, whom they named, after their respective fathers, Cristobal Narciso Patricio Salvador. They nicknamed him Cristo. In the succeeding years they also had a daughter, Paz Isabel. The frugal Capitan invested his savings and officer’s pension in a textile factory and a farm for cattle, and they both yielded a modest fortune. In the 1870s, when fabric imported from Manchester flooded the market and killed the thriving Iloilo textile industry, the Capitan stubbornly held on, giving up his looms in 1874, rather too belatedly. He then devoted himself wholly to his small holdings of land across the Guimaras Strait, breeding, for stud, bulls of the highest quality.

Some years after young Cristo left for Madrid to join his peers in receiving an education, the Capitan faded into a historical footnote, hacked to death by his own drovers during an uprising in 1894; his wife and daughter succumbed to wounds and infection some weeks after. The three were buried in the nearby San Sebastian Cathedral (the coral-stone church their contributions helped build). Cristo did not arrive from Europe in time for their funeral. Their passing bequeathed him land and respect. He was then all alone in
a new life, except for a dark family secret, of which everyone in good society knew.