Ilustrado (30 page)

“Cartier. Anyways, after dinner, we were in the powder room—me, my mom, and Tita Baby—and Tita suddenly unbuttons her blouse and holds it open. And she’s like, ‘Girls! Don’t I look beautiful?’”

“What?”

“I didn’t want to look.”

“I don’t understand.”

“She’d gone to Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon!”

“You’re kidding. Grapes said she was super in debt.”

“Not anymore.”

“So did she look beautiful?”

“Oh yeah. She did. She really did.”

*

Sadie is like another person when she drops him off at his hotel. They drive wordlessly through the rain. Our stalwart protagonist doesn’t know what to say, so he doesn’t say anything. They listen to the radio. Suddenly, she switches it off. Asks him, very seriously, when he’ll be returning to New York.

“Soon,” he says. “Maybe.”

“Is it really like in
Sex and the City?”

“It’s better.”

Sadie begins to cry.

“What’s wrong?” he asks. Sadie shakes her head, bangs the steering wheel, looks away. They arrive outside his hotel. “Come on. What’s the matter?”

“I wish you didn’t have to see that, you know? Why do they do shit like that, if they really love us?”

“All families are alike,” he says. He takes her hand for the first time. She lets him. “Hey,” he says. She looks at him. “Later, if you, you know, end up talking to your mom, do you think you could press her about Dulcinea?”

Sadie wrests her hand from his. “Please leave,” she says. He gets out of the car and stands in the rain, waiting for her to ask him back in. Sadie rockets off, spraying water and splashing some of the GROs huddled in the doorways of the massage parlors. They curse like stevedores.

The boy enters the lobby and shakes the rain off. He knows he should call her cell phone, that he should have acted more sympathetically. But dinner with her family makes him wonder if even his own parents’ famous love would have soured. And if it was better to die as they did, before the decline. He thinks of Spooky Lolo surrounded by his family. And the vacancy of Crispin’s life lived solely by himself.

In the elevator, a couple is talking as if he isn’t there. The man says, “I’m telling you, it was a hoax. Those jellyfish were rubber. The background was staged.” The woman replies, “You think it’s related to the bombings?” The man says, “To drum up support for you-know-who. They’re backing PhilFirst, who is backing President Friendly-Ho Estregan.” The woman says, “I think everyone should lay off PhilFirst. They’re the country’s largest employer, and they drive our economy.” The man replies, “That’s because they put food on your table. Did you know that the Americans—” The woman says, “I wonder if you can eat them.” The man replies, peevishly, “The Americans?” The woman continues, “Feed the poor with them. Jellyfish, I mean.” The man looks at her. “I give up,” he says. “You’re useless!” Then the couple turns to our protagonist and looks at him angrily.

When he gets to bed, all he can do is toss and turn. Finally, he cannot feel his body.

He is washing his hands very carefully, enjoying the ritual. A woman in a headset comes and runs an adhesive roller over his black polo shirt and blue jeans. She leads him down a hall. He is on a Latin American talk show, sitting on an Eames lounge. The host is perfectly tanned and tells him he’s much cooler than Pablo Neruda. The boy demurs. The host turns to the crowd and says in Spanish, “Who knew Blanc Neige was so nice?” The crowd erupts in applause. The lights are bright and he can hardly see the audience. Except for Madison, who is in the front row, looking angry. The host stands and goes to an ironing board. He starts pressing a black polo shirt. “Blanc Neige is an international star!” the host says, while
turning the shirt over to iron the back. The crowd laughs cruelly. The host goes offstage and returns, dressed in a black polo and blue jeans. The crowd cheers. “Look, all you people,” the host says in funny English. “I’m Blanc Neige!” The crowd hoots. After the show, he searches for Madison. The woman with the headset says, “Oye, Blanc Neige, she went with the host into a Toyota LiteAce van.” Outside, it is raining hard. The van is in a forest clearing and it is rocking. He goes back into the studio and flirts with a Hong Kong Chinese girl with rabbitlike feet in strappy sandals. She gives him a blow job in a cave by the beach. He goes home to find Madison not there, though Crispin is at the typewriter. He says to Crispin, “Aren’t you busy being dead?” The author replies, “Can’t die yet. I’m busy writing your story.” He leaves Crispin and goes through the blue door into the restaurant he owns with Madison. There she is. She looks beautiful. He helps her clean the shed out back. They bring the summer plates into the restaurant, as well as sangria pitchers. He thinks of what to say to her but doesn’t know. He goes outside to smoke a cigarette. When he comes back in, Madison is hanging by her neck from her belt. It’s tied to the rack in the kitchen. She gently swings and hits the pans suspended beside her. They sound like church bells after a wedding. No, he says. No, Madison. No. He hugs her legs, buries his face in the space behind her knees. He has nothing left. He knows what’s next. His belt will compress the carotid arteries in his neck, cutting off blood to his brain. His brain will swell and plug the top of his spinal column, pinching the vagal nerve and arresting his heart. His eyes will bulge and his sphincter will release. He will suffer. But he will have to do it. He can hear Crispin upstairs. Outside, the metal slugs of type bang like bullets into the white sky, leaving black letters suspended. “Dear Sire/Madame,” they say. “First, I request your stricst confidence in this transaction. I am the granddaughter of the statesman and finance minister of the Philippine. I need help from you as a man of God. After the deth of my father, who perished in mysterious circumstance and was found in a flood, 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 repleneshing my father’s legacy and masticating his despicable murderers. More information TBA.” The typewriter continues its banging. “I am looking
for an overseas partner who will assist me in transferring $21,230,000, of which 20% will be given to you, the account owner. Please send your bank details . . .”

Our slumbering protagonist awakens. Someone is pounding on the door of his room. The glowing hands of the clock say it’s four in the morning. The knocking stops. He rushes, bleary-eyed, to answer it. Nobody is there. As soon as he lies down and shuts his eyes, he starts dreaming again.

*

It cannot be doubted that my father, the great Junior Salvador—may he rest in peace—always knew exactly what his purpose was, politically speaking. Thus, he could be slotted anywhere in any administration. Congressman, senator, cabinet minister, consigliere. His skill wasn’t making something out of nothing—others were paid to do that. My father’s skill was making nothing out of something. This was what he tried to teach me when, newly returned from Europe, my university studies complete, I took to his side in the sixties. And this is what turned me off on politics. His specialty, you see, was engineering consent, intuitively taking a page out of the book of Edward Bernays—as you know, Freud’s nephew and the father of PR—but twisting it, using localized threats and fear. Martial law, communism, violent social instability, loss of foreign investment, all were used to distract the public from its valid protestations, second thoughts, and objections. Concerns like empty larders, pillaged coffers, debauched leaders, all became third priority to bombs in the streets and guns in the hands of the godless commies or the godfueled Muslims. With the country watching, not knowing what they were and weren’t seeing, my father the political plastic surgeon made himself indispensable to each president. Not by covering things up, mind you, but by sleight of hand, which is always more of a distraction job than a disappearing act. His legacy is that these tactics are still very much employed today. And though he and I had our differences, as I grew to discover his traits developing in me, I both fought those characteristics and used them as a road map in attempting to understand who he was, and therefore who I am and could be if I wasn’t careful. For that alone, I owe him everything.

—Crispin Salvador, in a 1997 interview for
The Nation
magazine, on the occasion of his father’s passing

*

With the deepening recession, and with Erning saving for an engagement ring for Rocky, he and Cousin Bobby get jobs as security guards at Wal-Mart. Erning, having already learned a lot in life, tries to start a union. But when he finds out that the company would rather shut down a store than allow a union to form, he backs down. Being Filipino, he is eager to keep the status quo. Plus, his life in America has saddled him with debt on four credit cards and layaway payments at Costco. Besides, he enjoys the responsibility of protecting people and their property.

One day, while they are on duty, they hear their supervisor’s voice calling frantically over their walkie-talkies: “Guards, a bag snatcher is on the premises. Block all the exits!”

Later, Bobby and Erning sheepishly approach their supervisor.

Bobby (bashfully massaging his triceps): “Eh, sir, the thief escaped.”

Supervisor: “How could that have happened?”

Erning (bashfully scratching his head): “Eh, sir, he left via the entrance.”

*

“That’s a hard question,” Crispin said.

We were hiking along the Hudson’s edge in Riverside Park, in the heights of Manhattan, where the footpath is set away from the shore. We picked our way over the large stones, like crabs. I could imagine Crispin’s answer, and I expected him to go off scandalously about his Filipino peers. I held my breath.

Instead, he fell serious. He stopped on a boulder and took off his spectacles (perfectly round, black plastic frames, usually seen on purposefully hip doctors and Asian architects). Crispin wiped them meticulously. I waited. He replaced them, fished a pocket comb from his overcoat, and ran it through his brilliantined salt-and-pepper hair. Had I upset him? The last edge of the sun slid into New Jersey. The Hudson was slightly aflame, silhouetting his face in shadow. He continued over the rocks. As if the conversation hadn’t paused, he began to lecture.

“The beautiful poet Mutya Dimatahimik lay down in front of an advancing tank. She was five months pregnant. The tank led a
column of military vehicles going to blockade Malacañang Palace from a march of students, laborers, communists. It was January 1970 and we had our fists raised against Marcos. When you’re like that, you observe yourself from outside your body, enjoying the sight of you engaged in heroism among a crowd of fellow heroes. Mutya just went and lay down on the street. I wanted to stop her, but I was being pinned by a cop. The tank pushed toward her. The street shook. The tank didn’t slow. A few feet from her small body, it stopped. All of us watching nearly became Catholic again. Three soldiers got out. They dragged her, screaming, to the side. I should say, it was they who were screaming. Mutya didn’t say a word. They beat her. She lost her teeth, and nearly lost her child. It was then that we found out that the baby was a girl. In the hospital, I stood by Mutya’s side, crying, and asked her what had gotten into her head to do such a thing. She said she’d been thinking of the dedication José Rizal wrote for
Noli Me Tangere.
Imagine?! That part about sacrificing to the truth everything. Death was nothing if her country was dying.”

Crispin paused and looked very sad.

“Truly, romantic bullshit, in retrospect,” he said. “And yet . . .” He wagged his finger. “And yet, ‘No lyric has ever stopped a tank,’ so said Seamus Heaney. Auden said that ‘poetry makes nothing happen.’ Bullshit! I reject all that wholeheartedly! What do they know about the mechanics of tanks? How can anyone estimate the ballistic qualities of words? Invisible things happen in intangible moments. What should keep us writing is precisely that possibility of explosions. If not, what then? A century and a decade ago, Rizal’s prose kindled revolution. They didn’t have tanks during that time, see? But when he wrote both his great
Noli
and
El Filibusterismo
, he was more concerned about the present than the future, and far more concerned with both those than about the past. An important clue to writers like you. Rizal’s books were good, but their lyrics on the page were most certainly futile against the Guardia Civil, not to mention tanks. But their lyrics in the hot head and swelling heart of a young reader, well, Mr. Heaney, there by the grace of God goes your tank buster.

“Now, a hundred and ten years into the future, our present, it’s
as if nothing else has been written in our sunburned isles since. Oh sure, they broke the mold with Rizal, Mr. Malay Renaissance Man himself. Like China’s Sun Yat-sen. Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh. Rizal’s books are
the
literary and historical touchstone, so we still like to crow about our revolution, the first democratic republic in Asia. How it was stolen by American backstabbing and imperialism. We talk as if we were actually there! Aiming our Remingtons. Pow! Planting our machetes in Spanish cabezas. Shhlock! These are our greatest accomplishments and saddest tragedies. Since then, has nothing else happened?”

The sun had disappeared. The footpath’s lampposts were far away, remote, like moons fractured by the branches of the trees. Leaves and twigs brushed our faces. The city seemed but a rumor. His silence pressed me to take his question as more than rhetorical. “Well, what about—”

“Truly!” he said, wagging his finger again. “Don’t let’s forget Ferdinand Marcos! His iron butterfly, Imelda! Don’t omit her shoes. How many? One thousand? Three thousand? Six thousand? Does it matter? Fifteen years ago that story ended. Fifteen years! Truly, Miguel, as a nation we’re overly concerned with the past. Even engaged in the present we lean slightly backward as time forces us forward. We’re like a probinsyano learning English. You know? Before saying anything, we form in our heads the things we’re sure we’ve learned in class. Aaaapple, b-oy, ca-pi-tul-ism, duh-mock-racy. That’s the problem, we’ve written one book, and it’s been re-bound again and again. So many re-presentations of the war, the struggle of the haves and have-nots, People Power Revolutions on Edsa, whatever. All those Pinoy writers industriously criticizing. All those critics tirelessly writing. About unsuccessful 1970s rebellions, 1990s domestic dramas. Or the Filipino-Americans, eagerly roosting in pigeonholes, writing about the cultural losses that come with being raised in a foreign country, or being not only brown, but a woman, and a lesbian, or half-blind, or lower-middle-class, or whatever. Oh my, what a crime against humanity that the world doesn’t read Filipino writing! This is the tradition you will inherit. Simon Leys, writing about D. H. Lawrence, pointed out that ‘often our imagination cannot fully absorb the truth of a city or of a land unless a poet’—was
it a poet that he said, or a writer?—anyway, ‘unless a writer first invents it for us.’ So, we realize ourselves in someone else’s words. Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness. Then we wallow in the fact that we, as a people, are not yet whole. Nothing to be done, Pozzo.”