Ilustrado (10 page)

—from the biography in progress,
Crispin Salvador:
Eight Lives Lived
, by Miguel Syjuco

*

Dominador’s face is fierce. His teeth, filed into points, make him look like a wolf. Antonio points and tells him: “Ay, punyeta! Look behind you!” Dominador just laughs. “The oldest trick in the book,” he says. Antonio replies: “Not in this book,” then jumps off the overpass and into the water. When Antonio surfaces, he sees eight policemen chasing Dominador. His nemesis, however, is surprisingly quick for a man of his bulk. “I’ll get him in a following chapter,” Antonio mutters before diving, lest the fuzz spot him.

—from
Manila Noir
(page 58), by Crispin Salvador

*

I guess what I miss most about Madison is our unique breed of passion.

We shared the daily papers religiously. Debated politics. Recycled. Always bought a little something—a Gray’s Papaya hot dog, a hot cup of joe—for the bums panhandling on the cold sidewalks. We even boycotted China. We were among the first of everyone we knew to do so. After much debate, we’d reached the consensus not to shop at 99-cent stores; morality, Madison had said, comes at a price. We weren’t going to watch the Beijing Olympics, either—a plan she’d hatched for an event still years in the future. Not even the opening or closing ceremonies, which was something that really bothered me; won’t it be enough to hurt the sponsors by turning off the TV during the ads? What about the deserving athletes? I complained, on several occasions, about friends and colleagues who did business in China; Madison, quiet, let me speak, exploding only once, in the host’s guest bathroom, and accusing me of referring to her ex-boyfriend, a rich Chinese-American real-estate developer now based in Shanghai. Together, however, Madison and I moaned about how CNN had stopped calling it Communist China, except during negative news stories about lost American jobs or consumer safety violations. At parties I’d hear Madison ask people: What about
Tiananmen? Falun Gong? Censorship? Endangered species decimated for quack medicine? I’d be on the other side of the room, saying: Tibet really should be freed, the IOC should use their leverage while they still can. The Panchen Lama is a tragic figure. Don’t get me started on their backing the junta in Burma.

China: one of the many, perhaps arbitrary, causes that incited communal indignation in the two of us. Part of a list that included SUV drivers, unchecked capitalism, fur wearers, people who spit in public, and the plight of Palestinians. Obsessions that fused us together in our private spiral of frustrated, but very noble, negativity.

*

At the airport, two ladies in line wait to check in their golf bags:

“Oh my Lord, I heard he’s so handsome,” says the short woman with the big hair.

“I don’t believe!” says the tall one wearing fake Gucci from head to foot.

“Oh yes, like a matinee idol. Like a young Fernando V. Estregan, but with great pecs. Why can’t I have security guards who look like him?”

“They say he’s like a modern-day Limahong. But more of a Robin Hood! They say he made some money as an overseas worker in Saudi, came home, and invested it, but was a victim of another one of those pyramid schemes. They say he might be the one behind all the bombings. But I don’t believe. He just wants to get back at the Changco couple.”

“I know! Imagine? Out of love! His love made him totally loko!”

The Gucci girl retrieves from her bag one of those glitzy local celebrity magazines. She holds it up reverently. On the cover is a hazy headshot of a dark and handsome man in a blue security guard’s uniform. Something in his bearing is exceedingly dignified. Something in his epaulettes and shotgun slung over his shoulder. In his badge polished to a proud shine. In his unruly brush of black hair uncowed by the caps security guards are forced to wear. He looks authoritative. His eyes stare out as if he’s been expecting all his life a chance at something larger than what he has.

“Oh my Lord,” says Gucci girl. “Yum.”

“And what a noble name! Wigberto Lakandula!”

*

Our curious protagonist—eyes closed as the plane takes flight for Bacolod, the thrum of the engines a gruff sedative—bows his head to the persistence of jet lag. In his dream he is typing a passage. Or maybe someone else is typing it. He can’t be sure. It’s only hands that he sees. The letters collect. “You must make a choice. It will be difficult. You have to take sides. You cannot sit on the sidelines. If you do, you are a deserter. No man is an island, isthmus, atoll, continent, or hemisphere. Everything to the west is yours, everything to the east is theirs. Whatever they may say, your story is truly your own. You have a responsibility to it, the way a father has to a child. Damn your detractors, your hurt-faced family. They can’t take it away from you, just because they feature in it. They lay no rightful claim. They’ve already laid claim to their lives. Too late! It’s been done. What’s yours is yours, theirs is theirs. Nothing to be done, Pozzo. You can’t wait for them to die, because the dead must be respected. Truly, what epiphany will force you to a decision? Riches and fame? Fireworks? A great flood? A riot? A river aflame? Yet another death? A choice must be made. Independence or duty. Love or freedom. Poor little rich boy. A father must take credit for his child, but never a child for his father.”

*

Cristo was not alone. His father the Capitan, a devout Catholic, had sired a child outside the marriage in the early 1860s. Though no documentation exists, family mythology shamefully insists that the story is fact. The Capitan’s illegitimate son—Cristo’s half brother—became a Recollect friar, Fray Augustino Salvador, who, it was said, in turn impregnated, in the confessional, the fourteen-year-old Sita Reyes, daughter of Bacolod’s roaming knife sharpener, Joselito, famous for his baritone voice that sang out beautifully as he lugged his whetstone wheel from street to street. Sita was disowned and gave birth in a hospice. When the nuns took the baby from her arms to raise him, out of sin, in Iloilo’s Orphanage of San Lazaro, Sita’s faculties twisted irreversibly. She was damned to wandering the streets of Bacolod, searching for her child and threatening to take any un-watched baby as her own, as if a character from the books of Rizal.
Under the tutelage of the nuns, Sita’s son grew to become Respeto Reyes, the powerful Ilonggo politician who would challenge the Capitan’s own grandchild, Junior, at every turn of his career. The legend is generously helped along by Reyes himself, who successfully manufactured a cult of personality as a true Visayan patriot: an orphan, of the people, against the Spanish-descended hegemony, beyond the reach of Americans. Among the Salvadors, however, the story was always avoided and, when mentioned, met with wry and condescending smiles. Junior, however, was more vehement: whenever faced with the gossip, he liked to declare, “The Salvador family would never breed a bastard.”

—from the biography in progress,
Crispin Salvador:
Eight Lives Lived
, by Miguel Syjuco

*

Overheard in the airplane:

“. . . and of course, due to that, they’re in real trouble,” one man says behind me. “You can cover up your environmental sins locally. But as soon as the world media gets involved, the government gets egg on its face.”

“Tell it to the marines!” says the other man. “Nothing will come of it, believe you me. Remember when they blew up their asbestos plant? Acquittal! The judge even ordered the insurance company to pay.”

“But how can there be no consequences
now
? There was a front-page story in the Asian edition of
Time
magazine. And those World Warden environmentalists are stirring trouble.”

“Nothing will come of it. Remember ’91? PhilFirst Timber’s illegal logging and the landslide in Ormoc? More than two thousand dead. What happened then? Scot-free! Changco even
made
money. As he said at the last Elite Club meeting—”

“I wasn’t there. I had business in Hong Kong. You should have seen her. Almost six feet tall, Russian blondie. Pink nipples, Jake! Pink. No bigger than a peso coin—”

“At the Elite Club, Dingdong tells the audience: the Chinese character for crisis is the same one for opportunity.”

“I don’t read Chinese.”

“Well, it’s true. I told him after, ‘D.D., that may be so, but in Filipino there’s only one word for success: cashmoney.’ We had a good laugh at that one. I mean, come on: two thousand–plus washed into the sea. What happened to D.D.? PhilFirst Funerals made a killing—”

“Haha!”

“PhilFirst Construction developed those pastel houses. PhilFirst Homes sold them. PhilFirst Holdings posted record profits that quarter. Now there’s a PhilFirst SuperMall, where the bodies were piled.”

“You know the company slogan. ‘There’s no stopping progress.’”

“Go ahead. Sell your stock. To me! D.D. has Estregan’s ear.”

“More like his balls. But what about when Bansamoro has Estregan’s head? I’ll bet PhilFirst will slump.”

“Game! A weekend at Tagaytay Highlands. We’ll stay in my chalet and play two rounds. Then have a Kobe steak dinner. We’ll even open the Petrus.”

“And if you win?”

“We take your chopper to your beach house. You bring the girls. But not that one with the bleached hair. I prefer the charming student from AMA. We’ll help pay her tuition.”

*

I had lunch at La Perle d’Bacolod City. Spent time at a lonely Internet cafe. Still no response from [email protected]. I even went through my spam in box, but found only the typical crap. Then I went and sat under a tree in the Public Plaza while studying my
Lonely Planet
guidebook.

I didn’t have to look hard to recognize the city of Crispin’s early stories: the groves of ancient acacias with wide branches, the grand old bishop’s palace and San Sebastian Cathedral, the stone gazebo with spires and beveled dedications to Mozart, Beethoven, and Haydn—crumbling landmarks standing valiantly among belching vehicles, spitting pedestrians in Fubu sleeveless shirts, signs hawking cell-phone credits, saccharine radio hits remixed to techno beats, the flashy lights of Lupas Landcorp’s Bacolod Plaza Mall. The neoclassical Provincial Capitol building—now the Sugar Museum—was
where Crispin used to play on the steps while waiting for his father, under the watchful eyes of Gorio, the equestrian-booted and capped chauffeur. It now houses an array of sugar plantation artifacts and a bequeathed toy collection.

Awaiting the hour of my appointment with Lena, I walked among the exhibits, endeared and saddened the way one is sometimes by the museums of our country: the typewritten display notes often misspelled and fastened with by-now brittle and peeling cellophane tape; old photographs and paintings succumbing to the slow but constant assault of moisture; dioramas and taxidermy specimens well on their way to manginess; the Plexiglas donation box thinly lined with the lowest denomination of coins and plastic straws and Juicy Fruit wrappers. I overheard the ancient curator giving a tour to a pair of odorous blond backpackers; his English was proper and colonial, with such a fresh earnestness it was as if he were presenting memories entirely his own. The backpackers seemed to be having a hard time following him.

Now, on the way to Swanee, the Salvadors’ estate, the long roads leading to the haciendas, lined claustrophobically with tall green cane, offer glimpses of the distant sea. When passing a crossroads I turn my head and follow, briefly, until it swings away as we move on, the long green corridor ending in two swatches of different blues.

*

Cristo arrived at the New Year’s party unexpectedly, inciting among his old friends quite a commotion, with several of them abandoning the dancing to come shake his hand. It had been several years—five, to be precise—though he was surprised that his peers had changed only incrementally. Only the styles of their mustaches, beards, and attire altered, keeping with the latest European vogue. After the fanfare of his welcome subsided, his friends returned to their circles, and Cristo stepped outside onto the porch.

The moon has already risen. Every night for forty nights he watched it waning then waxing over the deck of his ship, and now it is becoming whole again. Bigger, fuller, than it had ever been in Madrid. The air here is much cooler than it had been in Manila, as if the walls and streets of the capital retained the warmth of days, or imbibed the heat of the rumors of revolution he’d heard spoken in private places. Here, at home in Bacolod, the evening
seems to breathe more freely. Or perhaps, he considers with a smile, I am just succumbing to the nostalgia of arriving. He lights his pipe.

Only after he has stoked it and it burns well does he realize he is not alone on the porch. In the darkness of the far corner, beside a large potted plant, he sees three figures huddled, whispering emphatically. He considers returning inside before they notice him, but the shadows abruptly adjourn their furtive congress and face him. One, then two, then all three of them call out his name, joyfully. The conspirators emerge from the gloom, large smiles on their faces, and grab and shake his arms and slap him across the back, welcoming him home and wishing him a prosperous 1895. They are his old, dear friends, Aniceto Lacson, Juan Araneta, and Martin Claparols, the three laughing out loud, the way one does when embarrassed suddenly, as if hiding something ignominious.

—from
The Enlightened
(page 122), by Crispin Salvador

*

In any of the predestinations of Fate there exists complex, unexplored dramas. Each of us is born into trouble . . . even freedom resulting from material security creates a vacuum, a Fourth Hunger, that must be filled, by either opportunities taken or ennui, or any combination of distraction, faith, success, neuroses, or social/familial dysfunction. Pity not the elite, but do not condemn them all. It is not in the interest of any progressive-minded citizen . . . Vilification, by its definition, creates an antagonistic struggle, an us-versus-them mentality, that throws us all into a senseless battle-royale. The slaves of today will become the tyrants of tomorrow—the proletariat overthrows the hegemon to become the hegemon itself, only to be eventually overthrown by a proto-hegemon that will in turn lose its position. It is this dizzying cycle that keeps humanity chasing the tail it lost millennia ago . . . The Alienation of the Elite is the unpolitical effect of the political. It concerns the pluto cracy’s own legitimate, and sympathetically human, frustration with this downward-spiraling human condition, and not just the malaise of having.