Because the writers workshop began in 1962 we somehow thought, wrongly, that the world of writers came to Silliman also at that time. I was in that workshop, a callow youth from Zamboanga who had come to Dumaguete for the first time, unaware that his grandfather, whom he never saw, was a Negrense.
Well, in time we learned that Dumaguete had been some sort of Southern writer’s Shambala forever. Ricaredo Demetillo was here in the 50s. He’s the poet who gave Sands & Coral its name. Like the Tiempos and Franz Arcellana, a graduate of the Iowa workshop. The book that we knew him for at that time was The Authentic Voice of Poetry, the first book-length attempt in the country at formal literary criticism of the Filipino poets then on the scene, pre-eminently Villa, Joaquin, and Lansang. Others who had been on the campus were Aida Rivera-Ford, Dolores Feria who was later to become my teacher in the European Novel at UP Dilliman, and Antonio Gabila. In fact Gabila was very much on the campus when we came, only people were not so aware of him because he had stopped writing.
In June after the workshop I returned to Silliman to enroll as a college sophomore. I only stayed for a semester and I’m afraid I don’t have enough literary memories to regale the interested reader with. Edith Tiempo was my teacher in Creative Writing. Not one of my classmates in the class turned out a writer, though Ephraim Bejar became a theater director and, in a not so defined, rather general fashion, some kind of supporter for what may be called the literature of national awareness. I lived at Woodward Hall and for a week or so had for one of my roommates Williamor Marquez, who wrote in imitation of the prose style and manner of Ernest Hemingway. He had a real writing talent but he stopped writing when he left Silliman. I was not to see him again until 16 years later in Manila when he had become a man of piety, having had a fundamentalist American pastor for a foster father whose boat, which I never had the good fortune to ride or even just see, he inherited.
Marquez kept company with Eph Bejar and a certain Bert Ferrer, campus editors both, who held the Tiempos in respect and affection, these being their literary mentors and of national fame. I remember Bejar walking into our Woodward Room carrying a paperback by Henry Miller— A Devil in Paradise. That was the first Henry Miller book I ever saw and, I think, browsed. Ferrer always wore dark glasses and when I saw his eyes for the first time I remember that they looked as disarming as his voice. He was an Ilonggo.
There was also Myrna Peña-Reyes who wrote exceedingly clipped, terse, imagist poems a la Emily Dickinson but, in person, was so unliterary and so unarty (though I think it was an effort) that I do not wonder why we never became friends. In Myrna’s choice of a model poet and Williamor’s of a model writer we see of course the influence of the Tiempos. But how to account for Bejar’s reading of Henry Miller? And Ferrer’s dark glasses? Not to mention Marquez’s somewhat droll habit of going to and coming from the Woodward bathrooms in the nude? Surely these were not the New Criticism.
2.
In the very early 60s the new thing in literature, the phenomenon, were the beatniks of America and the Angry Young Men of England. Actually they came in the 50s but the cultural time lag delayed their shock wave here and, anyway, I don’t think we really got to read them in depth. It seems the virus was transmitted to us through the movies—in, or by, Marlon Brando and James Dean. Two new names in Philippine letters represented this trend or quality. These were the gifted young poet praised by Demetillo in his book, Jose Lansang Jr., who lived on the UP Diliman campus and who had been to Greenwich in New York—and Wilfrido D. Nolledo who was writing very conspicuously, very self-consciously eccentric short-stories that amounted to a revolution in Philippine letters. Really the quality of Nolledo’s prose was so excitingly new, that the others who were writing at the time generally paled into immediate pedestrianism.
Nolledo and Lansang both came to the Silliman writers workshop as writing fellows. The other fellows included Greg Brillantes and Gilda Cordero-Fernando (the two great no-shows), Petronilo Daroy, Virgilio Samonte, and Socorro Federis-Tate. All the fellows had published short-stories in the national magazines. Moreover, Daroy had published a book criticism, The Politics of the Imagination. Looking back on these names now, one cannot help seeing that the Tiempos had sat down and carefully chosen the definitive list of the top young writers of the time. Too bad, Brillantes and Fernando were unable to come. They would have enforced the judgement that this workshop, the first ever, was also the best ever in the country. In the panel were Ed and Edith Tiempo, Nick Joaquin, and Franz Arcellana. The Jun Lansang then was the Jun Lansang who wrote 55 Poems, to this day still the book of lyric poems in this country. The Brillantes who failed to show up was the Brillantes who wrote The Distance To Andromeda, still one of the authentic Philippine short-story masterpieces, written when the author was in his early or middle twenties, and adjudged first-prize winner in the Free Press. The Nolledo who came and stayed for the entire three weeks was the Nolledo who wrote Rice Wine, Of Things Guadalupe, and Kayumanggi Mon Amor, stories that influenced, quickened, and sent a generation of future Filipino novelists crashing into the sky.
3.
Repeat, the fellows in 1962 were not, as workshop fellows go these days, campus writers. They were published writers and national prize-winners. By today’s standards, the fellows then should have been panelists—or at least the best of them.
And sure enough, there were auditors then who should have been writing fellows. These were not the Silliman English teachers who all attended—but the handful of youngsters whose stories and poems were actually taken up and two of whom enjoyed, since they were not from Dumaguete, free lodging at the Alumni Hall where the fellows stayed. These youngsters were Williamor Marquez, David Martinez, Wilfredo Pascua Sanchez, and myself. Marquez was Silliman’s bet, Martinez was from St. Paul’s College Dumaguete, Sanchez was from UP Diliman, and I was from Zamboanga City. We were all four of us teenagers and it seemed we stole the show from the fellows because we were so young and we were writing passable, publishable (all four of us in fact contributed stories that Joaquin, then also the literary editor of the Free Press), promising, really hooray stuff. I remember Marquez voicing his objection to Nolledo’s experimental writing after the panelists had discussed a Nolledo story in a uniformly appreciative note.
Nolledo was then thirty. It was as the 50s waned that he started publishing those strange, or strangely written, stories of his and zoomed to local stardom shoulder-to-shoulder with his contemporary Greg Brillantes. Nick Joaquin and Virgie Moreno and Franz Arcellana took turns saying how good and baroque and brilliant the young man was. Nolledo seemed to embody the new things then like the Sputnik, the first rocket successfully launched into space. Joaquin was saying something of the sort. How the young writers like Lansang and Nolledo were a different, new breed writing with the bomb in their subconscious and you could feel it in their rhythm and in fact, the Bomb, Joaquin said, was not only a subliminal fear and anxiety but had actually exploded in Lansang’s mind.
Nolledo subsequently, in the late 60s, went to Paul Engle’s Iowa workshop and stayed there for about ten years. He became a friend of the Chilean novelist Jose Donoso whose The Obscene Bird Of Night ranks with Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (Columbia) and Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers (Cuba) as the three great novels from Latin America in this century. But recently Nolledo’s novel, But For The Lovers, produced during his stay in Iowa, was published anew in an edition that bears a word of introduction from Robert Coover (or Robert Stone I can’t remember). The intro says that Nolledo’s novel is a neglected masterpiece. It also says that Nolledo was writing magic realism a good decade ahead of the Latin Americans.
In conversation at the 1962 workshop, Nolledo told Sanchez he liked Dylan Thomas. Indeed Dylan Thomas seems the literary artist likely to have influenced him. The title of his novel is a quote from a Dylan Thomas poem. I suspect that Nolledo’s heightened language, his extravagant prose, was done under the intoxicating influence of Dylan Thomas and Nick Joaquin, particularly the Nick Joaquin who wrote the prose of “May Day Eve” and “The Summer Solstice.”
4.
After the workshop, Dr. Edilberto K. Tiempo wrote a paper which he had occasion to read at some literary gathering in Manila later that year. That paper dealt with what was done in the workshop by three young writers. These were Nolledo, Sanchez, and myself. The late old man (not really that old, he was younger then than I am today) perfunctorily saying a good word or two for the new direction these young writers were taking, proceeded to build a critical stand against it. He particularly took to task Sanchez’s “Moon Under My Feet.” I still think that story, the work of a sixteen-year-old, an amazing masterpiece. And that Dr. Tiempo may have been right in his critique of “The Summer Solstice” but was wrong in his opinion of “Moon Under My Feet.” I’ve read the story through four decades and my admiration for it has grown with each reading.
How swiftly Sanchez came upon the heels of his namesake, the erstwhile daring young man of the Philippine literary trapeze, Nolledo. After Sanchez, the literary scene was never the same again. And not only because he revealed himself, at the 1962 Silliman summer writers workshop, as the new sensation in Philippine writing, taking the new fiction farther, much farther than Nolledo who now appeared to be merely a precursor, but because along with Sanchez came a whole new bright bunch of literary youngsters, Erwin Castillo and Ninotchka Rosca and Alfred Yuson, foremost. At the UP campus, Sanchez was idolized by an inner circle of coevals who were themselves gifted albeit more shyly so. Rosca was writing opaque (a description popularized by Teddy Locsin, editor of the Free Press when he applied it to Willy Sanchez), rather murky precious prose in imitation of Sanchez which she later consciously discarded in her activist, political years. Before this change from Frenchy bohemianism to the literature of commitment (you can say, from Genet to Malraux) she had written a story called “Diabolus of Sphere,” which won her the prestigious Free Press first prize. The story’s title could have come straight from Sanchez. Like Nolledo, she subsequently migrated to the U.S. In 1976, I saw her again at some party in Diliman where she noticed the book I was carrying under my arm, Count Julian by Juan Goytisolo, Spain’s celebrated expatriate writer, and sort of chided me for it, saying it was the same stuff we used to indulge in back in the 60s at the UP.
By the 90s, Ninotchka published three novels in the US. The first of these appears to be the best—State of War, wildly praised by our women writers and at least two men, Edgar Maranan—who confessed his admiration for Ninotchka as a writer from his formative years the early 70s—and Juaniyo Arcellana who is a practitioner of what might be called magic criticism. Nick Joaquin gave State of War a sober review in his column, the gist of which seems to be that Ninotchka succeeds not as a novelist of our history (she commits a historical howler or two, Joaquin showed) but as playful writer, imaginative fictionist, or poet.
5.
Now why do I write at some length about Ninotchka who was from UP Diliman? Well, first—as I said—she was one of those who belonged to a movement that Nolledo initiated. Second, she came to the 1964 Silliman summer writers workshop. Third, not many people know it but she had been briefly a ward of the Tiempos. And really it may be false to draw a dividing line between North and South even in a literary reminiscence that is more or less private. I think that’s one of the effects of the Silliman summer writers workshop—obliteration of such a boundary.
This holds true too in the case of Willy Sanchez. Sure, Willy was the literary wunderkind of Manila in the 60s and the 70s—but in Dumaguete? In Dumaguete, yes—it was in Dumaguete that he met Jun Lansang, Ding Nolledo, Nick Joaquin, Franz Arcellana, Pete Daroy, and of course, the Tiempos of Silliman. It was in Dumaguete that his story “Moon Under My Feet” was first read. And yes, by the way, he had a sister at Silliman who eventually married her boyfriend, a nephew of the Garcias of Amigo Subdivision. There’s also the fact that he attended the Silliman workshop three times—in 1962, in 1964, and in 1970.
The “blinding thing” as Erwin Castillo put it in our mature, reviewing years, Willy Sanchez too left for the U.S. in the golden (if false gold) years of the Marcos regime and there incredibly stopped writing altogether. Today, more than twenty years after, one still asks, is this really true? Is Willy Sanchez really not going to write again ever? I think he will just surprise us one of these days. And I wouldn’t be too surprised. After all Ninotchka came out with her novel well into the 90s. Before that they were all saying she was a 60s thing, to talk about whom was to mumble in a time-warp, wake up man. Well, who woke up?
Anyway it was Erwin Castillo who won the race in the 60s, at least in the considered opinion of the Free Press literary editor. While Willy wrote stories that grew more and more opaque and impenetrable, Erwin offered an alternative metafiction rendered less inaccessible by a neo-primitive, Hemingway quality. And how many times was Erwin Castillo in the Silliman writers workshop? He successively attended in 1963 and 1964. Then returned as a grizzled veteran in 1971. I was not in any of these workshops. But was in close contact, even actually worked in the same advertising office, with him in the later 70s when—like the rest of his generation, the generation most injured by the dictatorship, Sanchez, Rosca, Mojares, Madrid, Lacaba—he drifted into silence, into Remontadoism. He came again successively in 1992 and 1993 and I couldn’t believe the telegram that came that May of the presidential election. He came because he wanted to finish a novel he was writing at Dostoevskyan speed: The Firewalkers. He needed, one surmises, a breath of the workshop atmosphere of old to keep going. Even if that worksop atmosphere consisted solely of a drinking buddy’s company. But he did attend the sessions for a week—interacted with the fellows. The novel was serialized in the Graphic that same year. In book form, it had a blurb each from National Artists Nick Joaquin and Franz Arcellana.
6.
There were other bright young writers in the 60s. Not all were of the style or temper or manner set by Nolledo. Appropriately enough, Nolledo’s coeval who preceded him by a year or two, Gregorio Brillantes, was writing from an opposite pole. It can be said that to be a young writer then was to choose between two poles or two paths—to write like Nolledo or to write like Brillantes. Brillantes was winning the top prizes earlier than Nolledo. His writing tended towards sure, solid, balanced craft. What we call conventional or traditional as opposed to experimental or new wave or futurist. Edith Tiempo favors the art of Greg Brillantes over that of Nolledo. It is the style of Timothy Montes and Charlson Ong and Susan Lara. Carlos Cortes and Juaniyo Arcellana and Bimboy Peñaranda, on the other hand, are children of Nolledo. In the 60s, the young writers who were in the Brillantes mold were Resil Mojares and Renato Madrid, both based in Cebu, who were giving the Manila young writers decent competition. Unforgettable were the 1966 Free Press awards in which Castillo won first, Madrid second, and Mojares third. It was the coming of age of a generation.
While the Free Press helped to foster a forum or even scene for the writing then being done in the country, Silliman maintained a proudly independent enclave of sorts. The Tiempos conducted, besides the summer writers workshop, semestral classes in literary criticism and creative writing. Silliman naturally suffered from sheer numerical limitation, but there were very good times. I remember a 1967 class under Dr. Ed Tiempo where my classmates were Kerima Polotan, Antonio Enriquez, Darnay Demetillo, Vic Montes, the Ceniza couple, and Florence Baban. The next year, a poetry class under Edith Tiempo where some of the students were her daughter Rowena, Darnay Demetillo again, Voltaire de Leon, and myself. I remember a Georgia Jones from New York who introduced Exupery’s The Little Prince to me. There was Dale Law also taking up his MA, looking at the Zorba the Greek that I carried and telling me P.A. Bien, one of Kazantzakis’ translators, was his teacher. There were the British boys, Terence Ward of London and Roger Wade of the Isle of Man, like Law, non-writers but serving to enhance the English Department’s reputation though the British boys did not even belong to it. The English majors then also had the advantage of being in the neighborhood of a Speech and Theater department that had Amiel Leonardia put on plays like All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, Sleep of Prisoners, Six Characters in Search of An Author, Rashomon, Waiting for Godot, Romeo and Juliet, and Zoo Story. I remember first meeting the theatre people at the 1967 summer writers workshop poetry reading at Faurot’s studio (as it was called then, not yet the “End House” of a later day).
The 1967 writers workshop was my second workshop and I attended as a fellow. Again the Tiempos hosted and from Manila the guest panelists were Kerima Polotan and NVM Gonzales. The participants came from various places in the Philippines. Bobby Villasis of St. Paul College and Elsie Martinez of Silliman were the hometown fellows. There were Jun Cañizares, Ric Patalinghug, Eddie Yap, and Nelson la Rosa from Cebu. Two guys from Manila—Mar Arcega and Romy Virtusio—and two guys from Zamboanga, Tony Enriguez and myself. Two nuns—Sister Delia and Sister Imelda, the latter of a beauty that I fear far exceeded that of the works submitted to the workshop. A girl from Manila, Joy Dayrit. An observer who later became a poet herself and coordinator of the Silliman workshop: Merlie Alunan. Lately I came across an article by Merlie in which she writes that she was in the 1963 workshop where Bert Florentino, Andy Afable, Raymond Lorca, Roger Sicat, and Erwin Castillo attended. This puzzles me, unless it’s a lapse in memory on Merlie’s part or else she is experimenting with history as fiction—or is it fiction as history. There was also Edgar Libre-Griño, Sands & Coral editor and cousin to two other girls from Manila, the Osorio sisters.
Elsie Martinez outshone her elder brother Danny who appeared to have stopped writing after 1967, though he has recently made a comeback by winning top Palanca prizes in both the short-story and poetry categories. Elsie wrote poetry in the 60s and one short-story that won her the Palanca first prize—“All About Me.” She was a dear friend of Bobby Villasis and both turned playwrights in the 80s. This seems to some a desertion, the literature of theater being somewhat remote and inaccessible in our country. No matter that the greatest Philippine literary work in English so far is a play—A Portrait of The Artist As Filipino. I think myself that the Filipino writer must always write with his fellow Filipino writers in mind. If I am correct in this then the Filipino writer must sooner or later face the challenge of the novel. Rosca of my generation has made three bids. Krip Yuson has two. Resil has hinted he will write an alternative Leon Kilat novel. Erwin has published one, withheld another, and will soon blow our minds with Cape Engaño, his third, which I have read in parts and found better than many of these touted magic realists of Latin America. As for Willy—it’s as his name indicates, WILL HE? Will he write again?
Postcript
To say, as I did early in this essay, that the literary current in the air then (the early 60s or even late 50s) were the beatniks and the angry young men may be misleading. The actual stuff that were being read was not Osborne or Sillitoe or Wilson or Ginsberg or Kerouac. At Silliman it was Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Housman, Frost, Eliot,Joyce, Conrad, Thomas, Crane, James among other names in the modernist tradition and noticeably Anglo-Saxon. At the UP, the names to read and to drop were predominantly European: Federico Garcia Lorca, Rilke, Kafka, Mann, Proust, Camus, Sartre, etc. It was in the 60s, of course, that Barth and Pynchon and Barthelme and other postmoderns emerged in the U.S. but we did not get to read them until the 70s. The “avant garde” authors then were Jean Genet, Henry Miller, and Samuel Beckett, figures who came at the tail-end of modernism. The list can include Lawrence Durrell and Vladimir Nabokov, whose dazzling prose was so natural to take if you were already addicted to Nolledo.
[Reprinted from Sands & Coral Centennial Issue, 2001]
Cesar Ruiz Aquino was born in Zamboanga City, and has a Ph.D. in Literature from Silliman University. He writes both poetry and prose for which he has won virtually all the national awards in the Philippines and one international – the SEA Write Award from the royal family of Thailand in 2004. His books include the short story collection Chronicles of Suspicion, the poetry collections Word Without End, In Samarkand, Caesuras: 155 New Poems, Like a Shadow That Only Fits a Figure of Which It is Not the Shadow, and Fire If It Were Ice, Ice If It Were Fire, and the personal anthology Checkmeta: The Cesar Ruiz Aquino Reader. He lives in Dumaguete City.
Maybe we’re here only to say: house, bridge, well, gate, jug, olive tree, window— at most, pillar, tower…but to say them, remember, oh to say them in a way that the things themselves never dreamed of existing so intensely.
Albert Faurot, the music teacher, gave me a bilingual edition of Rilke’s Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. His dedication—“To another poet and friend“—gave me one of the high moments of my life in Silliman. His End House was a favorite haunt for Butch Macasantos, Armando, my younger brother, and me; yet when he passed away I was not even around to pay him my last respects.
When for the first time I came to Silliman, I was trying to escape from the limitations of my island home in the Sulu sea. I was in search of another island, disdaining a humdrum destiny that was mine at birth, the destiny my ancestors, even from their graves, seemed to have foisted on me. I had thought then that I was urged on, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, by hunger for new knowledge. Even before this hunger had been appeased, a deeper kind of hunger was growing inside of me. It masked itself as the hunger to move about, but in reality it was not wanderlust but, my enemies would think, the other kind of wandering and lusting. I must be kind and just to myself and think simply that this new kind of hunger grew out of the demise of an old love, unfortunately because of my immaturity. I wanted to make up for that loss, and I thought a new island would be the right place to start anew because in a manner of speaking, my old island home had been washed away by the waves of time and misfortune.
So it was then that in the summer of 1970 I found myself in Silliman.
I was like a shipwrecked sailor who had come upon an island, and I was learning the names of things which I thought did not exist.
Many things crowd into my memory when I look back to that time nearly 30 years ago. I remember the languor and rhythm of the afternoon, the horses’ hooves clip-clopping down the asphalt streets, the pleasant rattle the cochero made when he touched the spokes of the turning wheel of his tartanilla with the handle of his whip. In the noon heat the sea just off the Boulevard would be shimmering and blinding as if someone had thrown a million shards of mirrors on the water. It was just like in the old home with the sea breeze coming in from another island. The stead, white houses of the elite facing the sea reminded one of the relaxed atmosphere of the boulevard. Late afternoon it would be full of the happy sounds of children, their concerned parents or yayas watching over them. But there would also be wrinkled habitués promenading in the sunset, or into the sunset of their years. Meanwhile, the boats docked at the wharf, but soon to depart for other ports and to carry away someone else to another country, to strange seas and climes.
After sundown or early evening, as you walked down to the university cafeteria to eat supper, you would hear again the clip-clopping tartanilla pass by. And again late at night when you paused from whatever it was you were doing or reading. The ending of one Nick Joaquin’s stories would come to life except that here there was no resonance or suggestions of romance but simply the humdrum sound of tartanilla. But who knows what was taking place behind the cochero: maybe a pair of lovers, coming home from a movie downtown, were kissing behind the cochero, their hearts beating each to each.
Unbeknownst to a provinciano like me, living in this untroubled paradise, with only my yearning for love as a kind of unrelieved pain, deep trouble was already brewing in many parts of the land. There was profound discontent among the masses. The President, who proved to be a dictator, was stealing the people’s money and depositing it in banks outside the country, while his wife was buying shoes and more shoes and vats of perfumes and body lotion to keep her young and beautiful. The generals were jockeying for power while their wives were ingratiating themselves with the First Lady. Meanwhile, the lowly-paid, underfed, ordinary foot soldiers were dying daily in the hinterlands of Mindanao at the hands of the communist rebels, or in the jungles of Jolo, redolent with the smell of durian and rotting lanzones; they were being slaughtered by roving bands of bandits and zealous mujahedeens. Unbeknownst to many in the country the president was planning to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and later to declare martial law.
As a graduate student in English in 1970, I had to enroll in a creative writing class. In the summer, this class happened to be the famous National Summer Writers Workshop. Although I had no ambition to be a creative writer, I was excited to be in a writers workshop. Here was an opportunity to sharpen my skills in writing, even if I did not intend to be a writer. At that time I did not know what exactly I wanted to do with my life.
Some of the writing fellows in the 1970 summer writers workshop, mostly from Manila-based schools like UP, Ateneo, and De La Salle, have today become nationally famous, although not all of them turned out to be the poets that they first thought they would be. Many of course are hardly heard of these days, deciding perhaps to do something better. Some joined the underground movement in order to fight the coming dictatorship. In the aftermath of martial law some changed their occupations, becoming journalists instead, or copy editors in some lucrative advertising firms. And some went abroad, to the U.S.A., to do something else like taxi driving. Taxi driving might seem embarrassing, but it is not without precedence in literary history, a precedence that moved Albert Camus to remark that art is gratuitous because look what Rimbaud did in Abyssinia after he had left the writing of poetry.
The few who persevered have become well-known writers and are now harvesting the coveted awards that are given annually by the Manila-based weeklies and the Carlos Palanca Foundation. One name stands out today, Carlos Ojeda Aureus, the Bicolano writer whose book of short stories, Nagueños, is the Philippine counterpart of James Joyce’s Dubliners. The other famous name is Ricky Lee, a scriptwriter of Tagalog movies. And of course there is Conrado de Quiros, a well-known columnist with the big time Philippine Daily inquirer.
There were others in that batch like Willie Sanchez, Albert Casuga, and Celedonio Aguilar who, for one reason or another, have stopped writing. The members of the panel of critics in the 1970 workshop, aside from Dr. Edilberto K. Tiempo and Dr. Edith L. Tiempo, were Myrna Peña-Reyes, Raymond Llorca, Bien Lumbera, and Mig Enriquez.
In retrospect the writing fellows and the critics formed an august body of intelligent men, but at that time, because of my ignorance and naïveté, because of my lack of ambition to be a serious writer, I did not feel the awe that was due to this group of men and women. There is something about me that until now is not impressed by importance, literary or otherwise, but I take off my hat to kind, honest, intelligent men and women.
Since I was not a writing fellow but a graduate student enrolled for credit, I had the leisure to sit back and listen 99 percent of the time to the fellows and critics discuss the manuscripts submitted to the workshop. I remember that the only time I had the opportunity to speak was when Dr. Lumbera thought that it would be good to let the fellows and the students talk first. Uncharacteristic for a timid person like me, I immediately and boldly grabbed the opportunity, opened my big mouth, bared my fangs like a dog lately unleashed. Having honed my critical sword in the periodical section of the old Silliman library, on the whetstone of such periodicals as Modern Fiction Studies, I decided to wield it on short story that did not live up to the standards of good fiction, pointing out the failure of characterization and the consequent improbability of the story. Apparently Dr. Lumbera noticed what I did because at the end of the session he approached me and talked to me about something, maybe it was about work. I remember saying that I was looking for work because I had already resigned from a teaching job with the Notre Dame of Siasi. He suggested that I see the Tiempos, but I was too timid to follow his advice. I would meet Bien again six years later when I was a writing fellow at the UP Writers Workshop.
How Doc Ed got me into the English Department of Silliman is a long story itself. Looking back I could say it was one of those turning points in one’s life that did not seem, at the moment it was taking place, momentous at all.
After the workshop, after we had gone back home and had returned to campus, when classes for the first semester were about to begin, Caloy Aureus, who had become a friend, asked me to accompany him to the residence of the Tiempos because he had to arrange the schedule of his classes. The Tiempos had promised him a teaching job so that he could at the same time study for his master’s degree in Creative Writing. As a writing fellow, Caloy had submitted a short story which, in spite of its subject matter (a rape near a cathedral) impressed the panel of critics. Dad, as we later came to call him, was the Dean of the Graduate School, and Mom Edith was the head of the English Department.
I had no inkling that that very evening, that Friday evening, still warm and pleasant as if the long days of summer were not over yet, the tide of my fortune was going to change.
It was my first time to be at the residence of the Tiempos in Amigo Subdivision. I remember the warm glow of the lights in the sala and in the adjacent dining room. There was snack for Caloy and me, brewed coffee I think it was, and cookies. While Caloy and the Tiempos were busy with the schedule of Caloy’s classes—those that he was going to teach in the undergrad and those that he was going to attend as a student in the graduate school—I sat back, looked around the sala, at the books and a bric-a-brac on the shelves, the large, wooden stereo and the large records, hardly enjoying the brewed coffee because in two days I had to pack my things up and go back to that God-forsaken island in the Sulu Sea where I came from. The prospect of going back, of repeating history—that is, the family history of store-keeping—gave me that sinking feeling that there was no justice in the universe, the feeling of a sailor in a rickety boat driven into the teeth of a storm.
We were walking to the iron gate when some good angel bent over Doc Ed and whispered to him, urging him to ask me what I was going to do. As calmly as I could, although the tide of dejection was rising to my head, I explained to him my situation, the dreadful prospect of return, without giving him a hint of that dread, and the desire to stay on if possible. He said there were available scholarships in the Graduate School. Was I willing to work as a graduate fellow and also study for a master’s degree? Could I postpone my return trip that Sunday? Could I see him on Monday in his office and see what could be done?
Those words and my affirmative response cancelled out the order possibilities of my life, turned the possibilities to might-have-beens: like I could have been a rich but discontented store keeper in a loveless island, or a rebel with the MNLF.
In Dumaguete and Silliman I stayed on and stayed on for the next thirteen years.
Every year I looked forward to summer and the workshop. In 1972, I worked as the assistant of Mr. Joe Torres, the reliable typist of the workshop manuscripts. I mimeographed the stencils that he had cut in that small room on the ground floor of the old library, which was an extension office of the English Department because at one time or another Mr. Jess Chanco, Mr. Darnay Demetillo, Mr. Joe Teague, and Mr. Antonio Enriquez held office there.
The following year I qualified as a writing fellow. I submitted a few poems and a short story about Tausug vengeance. It had an epigraph from a William Butler Yeats’s poem about things falling apart because the center cannot hold. The story was hotly debated by the panelists and writing fellows. I was thrilled by the reactions of the participants, whether they were favorable or otherwise. It was then that I realized that anything about Tausug was interesting to many readers. Somewhere on the fringe of my subconscious, I began to entertain the idea of someday writing a novel about my God-forsaken island.
The late Mr. Rolando Tinio was a panelist that year, and he played the role of the devil’s advocate to the hilt. There was no story or poem that pleased him. I remember an incident one afternoon when a literature-teacher fellow showed his poem to Mr. Tinio. It was under the acacia tree in front of Larena Hall. A circle of benches surrounded the tree. It was where idle students would make tambay, where the laundry women on Saturday and Sunday afternoons would wait for the students to pick up the laundry. After a quick reading of the poem, Mr. Tinio dropped the piece of paper, bent down and covered it with a pile of sand, and remarked that the poem deserved the burial. The way he scooped the sand with both hands, wordlessly pouring the grains of sand on the paper, how he quickly stood up and delivered the punch line was a brilliant comic action. We were all entertained. We all laughed, including the mustachioed victim of this joke who, we learned later, he invited to teach with him at the Ateneo de Manila.
Except for the summer of 1976 when I was at the UP Writers Workshop in Diliman, I attended the Silliman workshop every year in various capacity: sometimes as a tour guide to the visiting writing-fellows from Manila and Cebu, the role being performed by Mickey and Victor today; sometimes as an unofficial, unpaid panelist; and later with Butch Macasantos, as jester who entertained the writing fellows with ethnic jokes. I remember those long, carefree evening hours, lying on the ball-field between the men’s dorms and the nurses’ home, exchanging jokes with the fellows while above us the moon sailed by in the cloudless summer sky.
The writ of habeas corpus was suspended in 1971. The rumor of martial law was in the air. The campus weekly was full of omens and portents of things to come, side by side with pictures of Fidel Castro and Che Guevarra as icons of rebellion and liberation. Although Mao was equally qualified to stand as icon, his picture was not often reprinted in the weekly because (and this is a wild guess because I did not know the editors of the paper) Mao had some ethnic resemblance to the aspiring dictator. Everywhere in the dormitory rooms, the walls were plastered with theses pictures. The excessive presence of Che’s bearded image moved one run-of-mill lawyer to complain that instead of Che the students ought to hang the picture of clean-shaven Richard Nixon, then president of the United States. With his lower lip protruding, he asked in earnest “Why not Nixon?”
We would get free copies of various Marxist writings. Mao’s little red book was easily available; the quotations were familiar. The Internationale, in English and Filipino, sounded inspiring. When sung in protest against beauty pageants on campus, or some irrelevant cultural shows, it could move you to righteous anger. Let me hasten to add though that the airwaves were still dominated by American pop songs, like ”MacArthur Park” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”
One day the late Senator Benigno Aquino came to campus, and everybody was at the gym to listen to him. A brilliant and charismatic speaker, he warned the country that Marcos was going to declare martial law, that the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus was merely a dry-run in order to gauge the reaction or opposition of the body politic. According to Aquino, Marcos had repeatedly denied he was going to declare martial law, but don’t you believe Marcos, he said, because Marcos, Goebbels-like, was a congenital liar. I had heard of incorrigible liar and inveterate liar, but it was my first time to hear of congenital liar. Imagine, to lie as soon as you are born. True enough, exactly a year after the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, martial law was declared.
The night before September 21, we were already burning our piles of the Weekly Sillimanian, returning Mao’s little red book to its rightful owner, removing from the walls and cabinets the pictures of bearded heroes and replacing them with glossy pages from some magazines whose heroines had longs legs but were not necessarily beardless. I learned early on that you can be a rebel but you don’t have to go to jail; that when your enemy is pushing you against the wall, a quick change of hair color or wave is absolutely necessary. Put the hair somewhere. It can save your life. So while some of my dormmates had to flee to the other provinces, I stayed on in the third floor of Woodward Hall, partly out of necessity because I didn’t have the money to go back to far Zamboanga.
There were three kinds of rebel-heroes then. The real ones lived in the mountains, shoeless and in rags, so that the suggestion that they were naked was not without basis; hence they were called hubad na bayani. The ones who believed they were rebels but who couldn’t let a day go without smoking imported cigarettes, and who devoured PX goods, were referred to a huwad na bayani. The last worst kind were those who sold their souls to the regime so that they could enjoy the luxuries their neighbors were enjoying. There were referred to as tuwad na bayani because in order to sell their souls they had to bare something physical.
It took Silliman a long time to open again, probably the last of the private schools to resume classes. The reason was that, according to military non-intelligence, Silliman was full of rebels. It had that impression because the campus paper printed Marxist writings, and hardly a week went by when some pictures of Fidel or Che did not grace the pages of its campus paper. But as a matter of fact, there were hardly a hundred students who were really that serious about rebellion. I had been a witness to one protest march against a cultural show held in the gym. There were only about thirty placard-carrying students who marched and shouted in front of the gym. They hardly made a dent on the show inside the gym until an agent provocateur advised them to get into the gym and do their shouting and marching there. Only then did they succeed in disrupting the show. But sheer number there was none. Out of a population of 5,000 students, you have only thirty. What percentage of the population is that? Is that enough to say that the campus was swarming with rebels?
When school resumed, some changes were in order. Before martial law, the physical setting of the campus was such that it was integrated into the larger Dumaguete community. Anyone could get in and out of the campus. After martial law, some wire fences had to be put up per instruction from the military. The freedom to move about was already restricted by the construction of gates near the dormitories. Curfew was imposed on the residents of the dorms. We had to climb the fence once the gates were already closed, or we had to cut away a few feet of wire to make a hole in the fence. The administration, trying to tow the line, had to impose the wearing of short hair. In protest, one of my professors had his head shaven.
It took sometime before the campus paper was given the license to operate again. When it came back there was none of the usual Marxist writings, absolutely none of the pre-martial law pictures. In its first year of resumption, I was the technical adviser, meaning my job was to see to it that no such thing happened in the paper. On the other hand, the paper did not sing praises to martial law, but went quietly to do its job as a campus paper and as a workshop for aspiring journalists of the School of Communication.
The presence of the wire fences and the uniformed security guards manning the gates made the campus look like one huge garrison. Under the seeming sense of normalcy there was a seething hatred for the dictator. The Silliman community as a whole consistently voted no in the referendums and plebiscites when the dictator asked for a yes, and yes when he asked for a no. An excellent example of how students thought about the so-called virtues of martial law was the English translation it as “One Day, One Eat.”
Slowly, imperceptibly, people got used to martial law except the occasional outpourings of hatred for the dictator and his dragon lady. We returned to the library to read again the complete works of such and such poet. It was Eliot, then Auden, then Yeats and Frost and Dylan Thomas. Later it was Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce and James. Then the critics. Then the journals put out by American universities. We were becoming Anglophiles. Even on Saturday nights, when most of the undergraduates were out with their friends, we were in the desolate library pouring over books or periodicals.
It took me sometime to finish my thesis so I did not graduate until 1975. Caloy had finished earlier, and as soon as he had his master’s degree, he left Silliman and went to UP. Lack of ambition, lackadaisical attitude, and the desire to just stay on in Silliman campus were the reasons why I did not finish in two years. But one day it occurred to me that I wanted to move up to Baguio City. To inspire me to get the degree I wrote on a piece of paper: “Next Destination: Baguio.” I pasted it on the mirror so that I would see it every morning. In one semester, I finished the thesis and defended it in time for graduation in March of 1975.
I went to Baguio with the intention of finally moving there, but when I saw the city I was disappointed. The UP Baguio campus was so small. The terrain of the city was so uneven. The houses were perched on hillsides and gave the impression that any rainy time they would fall on the houses just under them on the next tier. I felt like it was being on tenterhooks everyday of your life. I did not want that kind of precariousness. But I think the main reason was that it was too far from the sea. Having grown up on the seashore, I could not, for the life of me, live far from it.
So I went back to Dumaguete , back to old, cozy Silliman, in the security of the century-old acacia trees. And I stayed on until finally I thought I really needed a change of scene.
In 1983, I resigned from the English Department, quietly, without fanfare. When Dad learned about it, he did not talk to me. He could not accept that I was leaving, that I who had stayed the longest when everybody else had left for one reason or another, was also leaving. I couldn’t shake off that Et tu, Brute feeling. But I had to leave for the sake of my sanity. I am amused now when I remember that morning during the 1983 workshop. Krip Yuson, Cesar Aquino, and I were in Krip’s room at the Alumni Hall. Dad came in to see Krip who had just arrived from Manila. Although he talked to both Krip and Cesar, Dad completely ignored me. Oh, where is that angel that made him talk to me thirteen years ago? I tried to put myself in his shoes. How would a father feel when his son was going away from home?
Life indeed is a series of arrivals and departures, mostly departures, someone said. And when we bid good-bye in this life, we are just rehearsing for the final good-bye we all must bid someday. Right, Mr. Laurence Sterne?
Another thirteen years went by. In September 1996, I learned that Dad had passed away quietly. Like a dutiful son, I came to Dumaguete to pay my last respects. I crossed two bodies of water, traveled ten hours, just so I could be at his funeral. For the first time in my life, I became a pall-bearer and delivered a eulogy. But I envy what Mr. Ernesto Yee did when he learned that Dad had passed away: he went to the house to polish Dad’s pair of shoes. I wish I had done that myself, for Dad deserved that act of kindness. In spite of his detractors and enemies, he was a kind man whose heart was not only in the right place but was also, as Cesar Aquino put in a glowing tribute, as large as Africa.
[Reprinted from Sands & Coral Centennial Issue, 2001]
Anthony L. Tan was born in Siasi, Sulu. He earned his BA English from the Ateneo de Zamboanga in 1968 and went on to Silliman University in Dumaguete City for both his MA Creative Writing (1975) and PhD. in British Literature (1982). For more than a decade he taught at the English Department of Silliman University and was a regular member of the panel of critics at the Silliman University National Writers Workshop. In 1983, he joined the faculty of the English Department at MSU-Iligan Institute of Technology and became one of its chairpersons in 1984-85. Together with Jaime An Lim and Christine Godinez Ortega, he helped organize the first Iligan National Writers Workshop/Literature Teachers Conference in 1993. He retired from teaching in 2012. He has won a number of awards for his writings, among them the Focus Philippines award for poetry, the Palanca 1st prize for “Poems for Muddas” (1993) and another Palanca for the essay. His poems and stories have been published locally and abroad, more prominently in the prestigious Atlanta Review and Manoa, the literary journal at the University of Hawaii. He is the author of two books of poems titled The Badjao Cemeteryand Other Poems (1985) and Poems for Muddas (1996).
You step down from a George & Peter Lines boat still reeling from a two-day trip from the backwaters of Samar. Your first view of the school, college boy, is that of Guy Hall partly hidden by coconuts. You didn’t expect this: coconuts! Dumaguete was supposed to be a city—you had dreamed of riding escalators and watching movies in shopping malls. But now you are confronted by coconuts and dilapidated buildings and realize the place is as rustic as the hometown you left behind.
You are fifteen. Your bag feels heavy with a generation of memories, a family tradition, really—a grand uncle, uncles, brothers, and a sister who have studied in the old school. You read the rotting signboard: SILLIMAN UNIVERSITY Founded 1901. A school as old as that should smell musty, but it is the smell of the sea that overwhelms you. And just then a tartanilla passes by; your nose is assailed by horse dung. Your tired brain is prone to synesthesia: waves smashing on the wharf, the smell of asphalt streets, tocino stalls along the boulevard, the early-morning sounds of a university town—they get mixed up except for this eschatological revelation that wakes you up from your lethargy: horse shit. (Fifteen years later, you would have a deja vu while walking along the boulevard at midnight but something will be absent from this synesthetic memory that you associate with the Dumaguete of your youth. Then you will realize what’s wrong: there is no smell of horse dung anymore. The last tartanilla has passed by.) But on this first day of your college life you look up at the coconuts and hold your bag and realize with a certain sadness that if you can stand the place until your senior year you will be able to hurdle the loneliness of youth.
You arrive in Silliman at the tail-end of Martial Law. The school is still enclosed by a barbed wire fence, a remnant of its closure in 1972. But after more than ten years of martial rule, the school still echoes with radical political protest from the late 60s and early 70s. To be an intellectual is to be a political radical. Your teachers in religion advocate liberation theology and you are amused by how Old Testament lessons like Exodus are being interpreted in light of Marxist ideology.
You don’t know who Ninoy Aquino is until he gets assassinated. As a martial Law baby, you have grown up on Niño Muhlach movies and the songs of ABBA. Half-understanding the significance of his death, you go to the Student Government office to watch a video showing of Ninoy’s assassination. But the film is as blurred and shaky as your political convictions. When you hear one assassin shouting “Pusila! Pusila!” you wish Fernando Poe Jr. will appear.
College boy, why are you walking around campus at night? You are a biology scholar but instead of being amazed by Darwin’s evolutionary paradigm you are here walking around the soccer field at midnight, self-absorbed in a poetic feeling that would make your hair stand when, years later, you will read Frost’s “I have been one acquainted with the night.” For you are bored with your science classes. In your intellectual arrogance, you dismiss most of your teachers as mediocre and think Silliman education does not challenge you.
So you scan the university library for novels, reading voraciously as only a young man who grew up in a small town without a library would suddenly discover the joy of books. On your own you explore the library stacks and fall in love with F. Sionil Jose and Herman Wouk. Sometimes you spend a whole weekend at the library just scanning books, suffused with the thought that even if a lifetime is too short to read all the books, you would, at least, get to touch all of them.
The ache of young love is subconsciously associated with the smell of books in the library. Sometimes you look up from a book you are reading and imagine a beautiful face with long, flowing black hair. Your sexual awakening comes with the gluey smell of old, old books in the library. You roam the library floors like a gangly freak, overwhelmed by the sight of one beautiful girl after another. (The sense of beauty you experience when reading a good book is still that feeling of adolescent dizziness with the sight of pretty girls.)
Unfortunately, you have also arrived at the tail-end of Silliman’s literary golden age. The famous Tiempo-Deriada war is raging.
When you enroll in English 12, you read with a certain pride the bulletin board of the English Department announcing that Leoncio Deriada and Rowena Torrevillas have won the top Palanca awards. That year the school is featured in Asiaweek because two of the Tiempo students won the short story contest sponsored by the magazine. Silliman is touted as a center of excellence in literary writing in Asia.
Whiffs, glances, words—your memory of Silliman writers is colored by your awe of books.
One morning, on your way to biology class, you meet Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas on the second floor of Science Complex. You gaze at the goddess as she adjusts the strap of her high-heel shoes, straightens up without looking at the students walking past her, and walks on with that regal bearing, leaving a strong scent of perfume in her wake. (A few years later, when you first read Arguilla’s “How My Brother Leon Brought Home A Wife,” you will associate “the fragrance of her was like a morning when papayas are in bloom” with Rowena walking by. The nose, indeed, has its own memory.)
Edilberto Tiempo, Vice President for Academic Affairs, sleeps during convocations. As an impressionable young man, you think his narcolepsy is a sign of genius.
Leo Deriada, with a string of Palancas to his name, is chairman of the English Department. During the second sem enrollment, you accompany a friend to the English Department to inquire about your English 11 grades. The famous writer himself is behind the window dispensing grades. “I’m sorry, you flunked,” he casually says to your friend, who breaks down in tears. When your turn comes, you edge over to the window to get a better look at him: curly hair, furrows on the forehead. He calls out your name as he nonchalantly scans the grading sheets. Then, in exaggerated tones which sound almost sarcastic, he says “Congratulations! You got an A minus.” (Later, after years of teaching, you will often catch yourself sounding that way, too. Academic exhaustion, you realize. Not literary sarcasm.)
Edith Tiempo is Dean of the Graduate School. Everyday you see the famous red car waiting for her outside Katipunan Hall. One time your teacher in Philippine literature assigns you to write a critical interpretation of Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels. You go to the grad school library to plagiarize a thesis on your assigned topic—and Mrs. Tiempo, followed by her masteral students, enters the room and holds a class right there. You try to disappear into a corner, sinking into a chair while reading a critical analysis of Joaquin’s women characters, half-listening to Mrs. Tiempo talk about the history of the English language. You wonder how such a gentle-spoken old woman could be so revered by so many people. (Later, when she becomes your teacher in poetry, you will understand the Tiempo magic.)
Being a science student, you observe the school’s literary events from a more objective distance. Secretly, however, you write stories inspired by Maupassant; you write poems about each beautiful girl who inspires you into excreting verbal diarrhea.
But there comes a time when you develop a more systematic, discriminating way of reading in the library. You scan the books to look for the names of the borrowers, looking for the names of Rowena, Tony Tan, Cesar Aquino. You reckon that by reading the books they’ve read, some of their craft will rub off on you. Their signatures on borrowers cards will become familiar to you, as familiar as the books you will read with them. You will read The Isaac Bashevis Singer Reader with Rowena; you will write on the margins of Nabokov’s Lolita with Cesar Aquino. Reading the same books that the Silliman writers have read is like surfing in the wake of the Titanic. You re-create the grandeur of the ship before it sank.
For two weeks during your first year, the school is paralyzed by literary politics. The faculty goes on strike to express lack of confidence in the university president. (You join the nightly vigils in front of the president’s house to pressure him to resign. You think that abuse of administrative power in the school is somehow connected with the despotism of Marcos.)
The issues are murky. Edilberto Tiempo, the VPAA, has changed the teaching loads of literature teachers in the English department. Leo Deriada feels slighted by this VPAA action which bypassed his authority as chairman of the department. The university president stands by the decision of the VPAA and the faculty union rallies behind Deriada. The words during rallies become more scathing: the Tiempos are portrayed as dictators. Edilberto, however, says this is a dirty tactic by Deriada who flunked in his Ph. D. class.
Only in Silliman do you see classes disrupted by literary politics. The writers on the different sides of the fence articulately argue out issues. (You listen in amusement to the two sides and decide that this is an ego war.) Kerima Polotan writes about the school’s academic crisis in Focus magazine (and her friendship with the Tiempos will never be the same again.)
After two weeks of academic holiday, the students get bored. You join them in the march to the house of the chairman of the Board of Trustees to pressure him into convening the board to resolve the educational crisis.
In the end, it turns out to be a war with no victors. Edilberto resigns and retires. Rowena leaves the English department in tears and leaves for the U.S. (Except for Cesar Aquino, the other Tiempo babies like Marj Evasco, Tony Tan, and Christine Godinez-Ortega had left Dumaguete a few years before this.) Deriada himself, as if doubting the vindication of his cause, leaves for U.P. Iloilo in a year.
By the time you are a junior student ripe for literature courses, the literary scene is eerily quiet. It is a quietness conducive to your own creative exploration as you decide that despite your majoring in science your real education will be through books and movies.
The gods have crumbled and the landscape has lost a mythic quality.
The hand of memory sweeps over the mind; it ruffles the crowns of acacias, and the leaves, as if twirling to autumnal music, falls gracefully over the past.
Your soul dwells on those moments of grace when historic events are signaled by the leaf-falling season of trees in Silliman. You remember singing Bayan Ko under the rain with Cory Aquino, and the senescent leaves falling down on the crowd like the yellow ribbons Ninoy had dreamt of.
During your third year in college, one afternoon on your way to Physics class, the acacia leaves come raining down on you carried on the waves of pealing bells. The bells ring with urgency and the air is filled with portentous sound and sense. You think you can stay forever under the leaf-rain. When you get to your room, you find your classmates jumping and shouting. Marcos is gone! The dictator has left! You don’t know how to react to the news; you tell yourself you don’t care as you continue to bask in some kind of poetic loneliness, thinking the bells had been for you, for the falling of leaves. Everyone becomes quiet as the Physics teacher enters the room; without any reference to the fall of the dictator he discusses Newtonian mechanics. A car travels at 20 mph; another car travels at 50 mph. This, you realize, is the essence of it all. One car will overtake another car, the velocity of historical events are incongruent to emotional inertia. But you don’t really care because the leaves, the graceful leaves, will continue to fall in your mind.
Two weeks before graduation, after taking all your final exams, you walk around the campus prematurely saying goodbye to the ghosts you will leave behind. That’s how sentimental you are. To avoid hang-ups, you decide to tell all your crushes about your secret feelings for them. It is your mission before graduating to erase all your emotional uncertainties about girls in order to have enough room for honest-to-goodness uncertainties of the working world. (But your passion for books won’t go away with your adolescent hang-ups.)
So you walk around waiting for graduation, feeling empty while contemplating the bare crowns of the acacias. After four years in the school, you ask yourself, what have you learned? Nothing, comes the humble reply. A few interesting teachers, a few plays you’ve acted in, a few songs you’ve sung in the Men’s Glee Club—life leaves you only the soundtrack for the movie in your mind. The film itself has been reduced to an incoherent montage. The music remains even as the memories get blurred around the edges.
You remember climbing over the barbed wire fence at night so you can drink beer with your friends inside the campus to celebrate your winning the student government elections. You remember the plays you’ve acted in and how psychically draining they were. You remember wet kisses behind dark school buildings. You remember agnostic questions you asked yourself even as you continued to attend Silliman Church. You remember your biology professor (Prof. Gonzales, with the profile of Joseph Conrad) saying: “Man is just a society of cells.” ou remember your weekend hikes up Camp Lookout, field trips to Lake Balinsasayao (where you first got drunk), snorkeling in Apo Island (where you got sunburned).
Before graduation, you say goodbye to the old school, your mind melodramatically rushing up to meet another leaf-falling season. You have to have a sad tale to tell to go with the dreary music in your head even as the leaves come falling down your head. Adagio, the heart says, but the mind vehemently denies: no, no, you were not—never—lonely here. And still the leaves rain down on you like music fit to commit suicide in.
Six months after graduation, you are back in Silliman. After a few months of working for San Miguel Aquaculture Operations as a babysitter of prawns, you have decided to become a writer. You talk to Merlie Alunan about the possibility of your pursuing graduate studies in literature and she offers you a graduate fellowship in creative writing. The Tiempos have come back from the U.S. and have revived the Creative Writing Program.
And so in the late 80s and early 90s you find yourself joining the inner circle. Your classmates include the De Veyra brothers (Nino and Jojo), Dinah Roma, Vim Nadera, and Cynthia Lopez-Dee. The Tiempos, Merlie Alunan, and Cesar Aquino become your teachers; you end up teaching in the English department but steer away from the old politics. And through it all you dispassionately go through your studies as if some part of you has remained suspended in another time. During your graduate years, you overtake your writing dreams and get to meet those idols of your youth—Edilberto Tiempo assuring you at the beach that you can write; Edith telling you that writing is a way of life, not an act of pencil-pushing; Marj Evasco serving you tea in her bowered garden at Hagdang Bato; Tony Tan serving you beer in his Iligan apartment as he talks about his disillusionment with love; courting nursing students at Chapman dorm with Cesar Aquino; meeting Fanny Lllego during Albert Faurot’s wake; meeting Rowena in SU Church who says she’s impressed with your work; Carlos Ojeda Aureus showing you his Silliman memorabilia in his office at U.P. Faculty Center (a framed diploma, a sepia photograph)—as you get introduced to the Silliman literati of the 70s as a promising writer and the last Tiempo baby.
You realize you have overtaken the ripples you used to surf in. The achievements of 70s and the silence of the 80s fold into each other in your mind. But while the loop of memory-time twists to a seamless resolution, you tell yourself you don’t belong to that generation. These people could have been your teachers. Even when you laugh with them and talk with them about Silliman, you know deep inside that you are talking across an Einstenian divide. You tell yourself you are a creature of the 80s, that era of your life when you thought you arrived too late for Silliman’s literary bus, when your teachers held classes even while the People’s Power Revolution went on in EDSA, when you were too thin to be handsome and too sensitive to be likable. The 80s was the time when you read books like crazy and fell in love so passionately. Even as Tony, Marj, and Caloy talk about glorious Silliman days, you find yourself looking in from the outside, you see yourself as an outcast walking to that sad music in his head, back to the 80s when it was an inauspicious time to grow up dreaming of being a Sillimanian writer, when the landscape was empty and the leaves fell on one’s head.
And one day you wake up to realize you are already thirty and still stuck in Silliman. You fear you’ll end up a doddering professor teaching literature to the children of your classmates.
Fifteen years have passed since you gazed at those coconuts (they are still there!) but the same ambivalent feeling remains. But you also realize you have been partly wrong in your judgment of the school, that morning fifteen years ago. You were able to stand the place so long because you never got over the loneliness of your youth.
[Reprinted from Sands & Coral Centennial Issue, 2001]
Timothy R. Montes is from Borongan, Eastern Samar. He studied in the Creative Writing Program of Silliman University under the tutelage of Edilberto Tiempo and Edith Tiempo, and published his first story collection, The Black Men and Other Stories [Anvil] in 1994. He also co-edited, with Cesar Ruiz Aquino, Tribute: An Anthology of Contemporary Philippine Fiction, in memory of his mentor Edilberto K. Tiempo. He has been the recipient of various national awards, such as the Palanca, the Philippines Graphic Literary Prize, the Philippines Free Press Literary Prize, and the Writers Prize from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. He has taught at Silliman University, the University of the Philippines in Mindanao, and De La Salle University Taft.
It was a year after I graduated from college that I decided to enter Silliman. After months of working as a cub reporter for a daily and a brief stint with an ad agency in my hometown, I realized I wanted to write for a different audience.
I first heard of the National Writers Workshop back in high school. The Tiempos, to me, seemed to be icons. When my parents couldn’t afford to send me to Silliman for college, I told myself I’d let her wait; my opportune time would just arrive.
And so, May of 1993, I set foot on Silliman. I tried to “read” the place and the atmosphere it exuded. After a month, I went back, enrolled, and dared to risk the whole of me to the Creative Writing Program.
The first semester consisted of months of “serious” work—study, research, reports. I wasn’t very particular with joining a clique or creating one. I was determined to leave a good impression on my instructors, especially since this was the first semester. But it was during this semester that I saw the real scenario of the Creative Writing Program. There weren’t enough professors to teach me: the Tiempos had retired, Cesar Aquino had gone back to Manila, and the rest, to name a few—Merlie Alunan-Wenceslao, Jaime Am Lim, Anthony Tan—had long left. They left, I would suppose, to seek for greener (read: financially fulfilling) pastures. I think the English Department panicked when I came in. I was the first one to enroll for a Creative Writing degree again after Timothy Montes defended his master’s thesis. I never knew then that the program was in shambles, , and all those graduating hopefuls—Creative Writing majors who are one step away from having an M.A. degree (if only they’d finish their theses)— were turning helpless. For lack of professors to teach, the program was dead.
It would explain the kind of panic which struck the department. Who would teach this virtually unknown newcomer? They would have to take a close look again at the subjects I would have to enroll in. I could only look back at it now: I might have been the small spark which made the program alive again.
The semester that followed was one I would consider my writing stage. From my major subjects, I was exposed to writers and their techniques: Poe’s organic unity, Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness, Updike’s peripheral-tangential. But far better than this, I labored to understand the writers themselves and their angst: Faulkner’s “human heart in conflict,” Kafka’s “ontological crisis,” Durell’s “pain becoming literature.” I was not aware that I had dug deeper into Truth in literature. I wasn’t just writing for myself: fiction, I learned, possesses universal values.
The first National Writers Workshop I attended—in 1994—exposed me to a newer and more challenging dimension in writing: literary criticism. I actually was in front of the literary giants—criticizing, praising, underestimating, glorifying, poking fun at, or taking seriously, the manuscripts I submitted. Mom Edith remained sweet-looking even when she delivered her attacks, Ate Marj was always the “ever-charming” panelist even in the middle of her punches, Butch Dalisay was restrained and particular with the language used, Ricky de Ungria had that pretty smile on his face especially after workshop time but would give us a stiff look when everyone would be awaiting his verdict, Cesar Aquino was forgiving and had that memorable hand gesture which I liked best because that would mean he’s very interested in your work. And Doc Ed? To survive a workshop is to survive Doc Ed.
Friendships bloomed the remaining semesters. The English Department revived the Sands & Coral, and we, the bunch who would meet Saturdays, sorted through hundreds of manuscripts. Kuya Noel, Ton-Ton, Dinah, Bobby, Tim, Jared, Angeline, and the rest of the staff shared a common bond which we did not have to make obvious: a deep interest in the revival of literary talent on campus. Our efforts have been rewarded: issues have been appearing each year on the stands.
The following summer, I joined the 2nd Iligan National Writers Workshop. I survived that workshop, too, despite the “blasphemy” my story earned. I still remember telling Dr. Cirilo Bautista that I might not again write a story on how the world would end.
Those two long years proved to be arduous. But my last year was equally painstaking. I strove to write more stories and saw them published. I “devoured” books for a probable thesis. I tried to beat the past record I had when I was still reviewing for my comprehensive exams—an 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily ordeal in the library. Time was proving to be more cruel. Juggling my time in-between teaching and researching, I felt that everything seemed to be more difficult. I was at a crossroads.
I attended the summer workshops in Dumaguete after my first. Those times, I was a veteran. Fresh, young faces were there, experiencing what it takes to consider oneself a writer. I remember looking at all their flustered and/or happy faces. I was there once.
All my years in Silliman are present in who I am now—including that long stretch of academic learning. But greater still would be the moments undocumented by words: they are found in the Self I was finally re-introduced to.
[Reprinted from Sands & Coral Centennial Issue, 2001]
Anne-Marie Jennifer Eligio earned her M.A. in Creative Writing at Silliman University.
I met Tonton at Noel’s kitchen, during the summer of 1995, a couple of weeks after the workshop. Gray and long-haired, tattered pants and hand-painted shirt, hunger in his eyes. He was strumming the guitar and was jamming it up with some jolly old chap from ULB who kept on mumbling between guzzles of beer about bringing his family from stinking Manila to placid Dumaguete where they may live forever and ever. He finished each burst of tearful talk with an eloquently rendered “What a sorry state of affair, oh what a sorry state of affair!”
The night before, I had slept at a bus terminal one shabby bridge over a dead river away from the city’s thoroughfare. I had unceremoniously left my last hovel, after a nasty quarrel with my sister, bearing only my bag of a few shirts. It was a wild idea: boarding the boat bound for Dumaguete.
Angst was the in-word in Dumaguete when I got there. Angst, it seemed, was what poetry was all about. I can’t remember where and from whom I heard it first, but before long, I realized that every poet and quasi-poet in Dumaguete was supposed to know the word by heart. Perhaps it was Tonton who said it first to me, but perhaps not. He was mostly quiet the first few hours that we met that I immediately respected him, no matter what ailed him then. Or maybe it was Jenny who said the word, for she it was who loved peppering her speech with in-words and in-names. Jenny chugged in while we were sipping coffee at Noel’s kitchen. So all-adoring she was. In ten minutes I learned what she had been reading over the past few months, what nastiness Siliman teachers were capable of, what terrific things Doc Ed said over the last piece that he trashed during which workshop. Whatever her faults were, I thank Jenny. Jenny helped me see that there was indeed a wonderful class of poets in Siliman.
It required a robbery before I could get my bloody transcript of record from the last school I attended even awfully beautiful years ago and finally squeeze myself in in that long queue of Silliman enrollees, but to make the story short, by June of the year 1995, I was among the handful of students who were congratulating themselves or having been taken in for an adorable English major. Whatever remained of the past glory of the English department (it was once the prima donna of Silliman, Ma’am Andre said), we were the cocks who crowed on its dung, to quote Hemmingway.
And if I was a cock, Ester was my mother cock. Ester was in her forties who graduated as a Nursing student in Siliman twenty or twenty-five years back. She was there again because…oh, the dunghill that school’s all about, she’d been teaching English in a State University in Mindanao for many years now, and suddenly her administrator, like all administrators, decided that English teachers, no matter how well they’ve been doing in their job, should be holding an English degree first of all.
We were best friends, Ester and I: I was her friend-in-need. I pity you, she always told me. You’re so deprived. Financially and emotionally.
Our friendship was not always mercenary though. It was also intellectual. Or rather, quasi-intellectual. Together we dug the library’s archives trying to salvage what scraps and dregs of human intelligence were there to benefit from. We took Shakespeare to heart, chasing after Lysander in the forest and doubling over with laughter at Kate’s hysterics. We cursed Iago and Othello, felt sorry for Shylock, and wondered in Bassanio was worth all of Portia’s wealth. How we raged against the gods who made sport of King Lear.
Ma’am Andre was happy. We studied our Vernacular Literature seriously, going to the barrios on weekends to retrieve songs and verses that would have died with our grandmothers. We learned by heart the Manuvu epic, knew the Ulahingan heroes by name, and would have staged a play if not for our lack of talent (mine, particularly: I could not dance, to Archie’s disgust and triumph).
I never thought of Silliman without Doc Ed and Ma’am Edith being there. I was therefore surprised not to see them among the faculty when enrolled in 1995. I had believed that what made every Silliman Creative Writing student possible was the Tiempos. Getting there in June and finding they were no longer with the English Department was puzzling. More puzzling was the passing references to them used by people. “The old man,” “the old woman,” they were called, not always in fondness, and sometimes, in a tone of anger. It was a curious thing for a young aspiring fool with unchecked notions about writers and poets.
“Have you met Cesar Ruiz Aquino?” Noel, then editor of the just-revived Sands & Coral, asked me. If it is poetry you want, he is the poet, or words to that effect. Up to that time, the only poetry that had stuck with me—beside a good dose of Latin American novels—was those of Eman Lacaba’s, Jason Montana’s, Alan Jazmine’s and from back in Dabaw, Don Pagusara’s. curiously male, it was, but that was as far as my education went in my literate NGO days.
But my first true encounter with Silliman poetry did not come with Cesar’s. It was from Migen, Franklin’s sister, who came to the Dumaguete workshop in the late sixties or thereabouts. Franklin was a classmate, beside Ester, in his fifties, also writing, and sculpting, beside a gift of circumlocution.
I cannot think of Franklin now without feeling bird droppings on my skin, but that’s not what I want to say here. What I want to say is, Franklin got a sister who wrote poetry better than T.S. Eliot.
Ester and I would go to Franklin’s quarters. Our common academic pursuit, namely Shakespeare and anything literary, sort of united us. Franklin would serve us with coffee or juice and his favorite French bread while we searched for literature from his hoard: a tumble of books carried over to Dumaguete from his theatre arts and scriptwriting days in Manila. When I read Migen’s poems, my school of poetry crumbled behind me. Migen heard hushes and laughter; saw gnomes, goblins and ghosts.
But nobody thought much of Migen’s poetry in Silliman. To each his own god, and Tonton’s poet was Sylvia Plath. He was also dying over Fatima V. Lim’s poetry, tucking with him The Wandering Roots/To The Hothouse wherever he went, along with Lina Sagaral-Reyes’ Storya. One thing which Tonton said, which made him grow tall and big in my esteem: The most important thing will be written by women.
Besides the graces of Ester, I needed the graces of God. My money from robbery was running out and my landlady was threatening me with a new rate or I will have to share the room with another starveling. At seven hundred a month, the rent was a luxury. I had clung to the place because it was near the beach, where I kept on going early mornings and late evenings, just for the need of sea water. It was a good life, except that one day she thought of raising pigs and made a hogstead right across my window. On early mornings, I would be awakened by the grunting of pigs and their smell. My head began to spin. By then, I was already taking my meals at the tiangge, at a carinderia called Tiaga’s, owned by Franklin’s neighbor, or rather, Sawi’s. Franklin was lodging at Sawi’s backboards and shared his front yard and his bathroom. The hunger that stalked his front yard and his bathroom. The hunger that stalked the land on account of delayed allowances and the like: Sawi took Franklin to Nang Tiaga to allow him meals in her carinderia on credit, and Franklin accompanied me in turn to her stall at the tiangge for my regular meal, also on credit. That settled the food question, but again, there was the lodging to look after and Franklin thought of a brilliant idea: He would saw his room off into two. Or rather, partition it so as to accommodate me. We would divide the rent between us, he said, and with Sawi in the neighborhood, we could talk poetry day and night. Just don’t mention it yet to Sawi, I’ll take care of that. Dr. Law, who was trying to find interest in people’s whereabouts, seemed perplexed. Ester was amused, as she always was, with ideas that didn’t get to her skin.
Enough with economics.
Jenny got high every time she spoke of Sawi. She was sauntering in Sawi’s class of senior citizens—a herd of MAEd students serving their second life terms in the academe in pursuit of professional advancement-and was having the time of her life watching Sawi hipping it up with the old cows. “Have you ever known love without hope?” Sawi, in inimitable grandiloquence would work the question on the dazzled cowheads, and Jenny’s heart alone, I imagined, bloated under the magic of his words. On my way to class at Villareal Hall, I would find Jenny’s poet seated on his table, knees spread apart, his heart leaping out of him. Some afternoons, he would be under an acacia tree, engaged with a clump of girls, his face dazed, Love Without Hope becoming him. Ester, indulgent mother and sympathetic friend, would shake her head every time a teener classmate confessed about Sir Aquino’s advances.
Love was what ailed the poets of Silliman. When Jenny introduced me to Lorena, I understood why Tonton should be so disheveled. So sharp-edged she was, from limb to limb. She was more devastating when she was upon the stage. Whatever role she played—battered wife, union organizer, ugly snob—she gripped you. What little space she occupied with her thin frame, she solidified with her being there. Perhaps it was her untranquil face; perhaps it was her carelessly done hair. Or perhaps it was her bundle of bones. But whatever it was, she was about one stage actress who could make her character come so strong.
But when it came to Poetry, Sawi was the mentor in Silliman. You can hear Mikki raving his name, from table to table, in every watering hole round the city. Younger poets, like Tonton, Gracchus, and Viktor, would rather cut him as a comic figure instead of the eternal lover title which the Sands & Coral generously gave him. It doesn’t help him, they say, half-sincerely, half-bitterly. But far from wishing him dead, they gave praise to Cesar when praise was due. They would hover over his poems and hunt for women’s names in the lines. Tonton, in solidarity with John Keats and all blighted lovers, would carry in his pack Word Without End as though it were a secret weapon and wield Sawi’s poetry like crazy:
Ultimately she couples with the sun However axes retrace their way and heads Roll by the blade Of her eye
I mentioned Viktor. I first met Viktor in December of 1995. He was limping, or maybe it was the mumps on his face that gave me the impression that he was mobbed and sore all over and could hardly pull himself up. Anyway, Sawi dragged him to the Weekly Sillimanian office one late late evening while we were readying the Sand’s manuscript for the typeset (we were borrowing Weekly Sillimanian’s computer, thanks to Dinah, then Sands & Coral’s editor-in-chief, who was also editing the Weekly Sillimanian). With them were three other fellows, Gerard from Cebu, Mikki who loudly announced his entry through every door by his sheer bulk and grease, and Jared a faithful disciple of The Word. I didn’t mind them then, Viktor and Gerard. They both looked like a couple of catatonics straight from the urinal. All the time they just sat there, gaping and grinning at what went on before them.
While Dinah was rocking it up with Alanis:
I’m sad but I’m happy I’m brave but I’m chickenshit…
If we had an anthem, she said, this must be it.
Oh the joys of editing. Late into the December nights we type our lived away: Bitoy, Dinah and myself, to the accompaniment of Jagged Little Pill. Dinah was unbeatable in her race to beat the deadline, which she herself set. It was mid-December, she said, and we should have gone home from the Christmas break, like the rest of the students, and not stuck there in front of the computer. Gracchus, our Poetry Editor, never showed up, after submitting his first try at a post-modernist fiction, “Ana Andrea,” which on third prize in the Sands & Coral Literary Contest, and a modest controversy. So ungraciously laced with pubic hair it was. Sawi tried to be useful by taking the manuscript home, deleting or changing a word or line here and there. Now, doesn’t it have more taste, he asked, after encoding his rewordings. Bitoy, our Essay Editor and lay-out artist, chuckled behind his thick glasses.
At a little after eleven, our stomachs would be grumbling, and we would leave our clutter and walk to the Engineering building, clambering up the fence behind it (the gates were closed by then), and landing right across the Burger stand beside Opeña’s where we would get our refill. Once, on our way back to the workroom, we almost jumped right into the guard who was lying in wait for us beneath the fence, cocking his gun. I laughed. He looked so ridiculous, lying there on the ground, as though poised for a surprise attack, like some idiot living his fantastic imagined war. But Dinah was quick, profusely apologizing over our infraction and calling him “Sir” several times over, promising we wouldn’t be climbing fences again without his permission. He looked appeased and he let us loose.
Viktor came back to Silliman like a recidivist, a year and half later, and occupied one of the seats in our English classes. He was a minor event, being a young returning poet. He joined a workshop one or two summers back and was enrolled as a Creative Writing student before he conked out. What a sight he and Sawi made as they walked around the streets of Dumaguete. Like a picture straight from Darwin’s Evolution of the Species, I would tell Ester. He was renting one of Sawi’s backdoors, just opposite Franklin’s door, and complained about his neighbor, who would knock at his door early morning bringing a tray of food. Does he think I need looking after? He would ask.
When I started going out with bayots, Ester and I had a falling out. Ester felt traded in for a bunch of bayots—or so I imagined, for unlike the company that I chose, Ester was not given to slander. Douglas just came to Silliman then, straight from an extended drinking binge in Davao, and I liked the bayot. I liked who he liked. Except Jessica Zafra. Like Viktor, he was enrolled at Silliman before. We were classmates in Sir Tim’s Fiction Class, so with Ester, Franklin, and Bobby. Except for Ester and a handful of spectators from the Philosophy and Math departments, we were mostly bayots. Sir Tim was freshly returned from U.P. then, and was dazzling us with great fiction. A happy class we were: Bobby spoke good English, quoting verbatim his favorite line from Lisa Minot’s “Lust”; Archie tienes-tienesed; Dennis laughed and cupped his mouth; Franklin trembled with feminist ideas. I was inarticulate with anger, as ever.
Among the boys, Dennis was a celebrity. You could find his name scrawled on the walls of Katipunan Hall, thanking him for his services. At El Amigo, he and Archie made a double attraction. Archie had only to open his mouth and Dennis had only to flick his lashes and guys would move over to our table. He had the saddest pair of eyes—or so he’d like to project—that went with the sexiest pair of legs. Like Archie, he was mean, but unlike Archie (who was always warm with fat), he could turn into an ice queen any moment and punish us with his trademark cold look on days without end, if we made the mistake of laughing at his hurt. He had this habit of breaking into a song. Douglas and I would often find ourselves conversing with ourselves as Dennis had suddenly transformed into a music box.
I don’t expect my love affair to last For long…
Gay love oozed in the alleys of Silliman like God’s piss. Riding and walking around with Dennis he would point to me every room and ground where he made a good, or bad, lay. In my Religion class, right under the nose of our school pastor, my friends would show me pictures of Korean thighs.
Have you tried something like that? It looks like ice cream cone.
At the cafeteria, men marched in through the glass door like a festival of food. See that guy in Coca-Cola shirt, Shielfa? He had nothing inside him. Look to your left, Shielfa, he’s the rapist I was telling you about. To your right, Shielfa. Hmm! Delicious! For a time, watching men had become a dreary occupation. The whole lot of them, it seemed to me, had been reduced to dangling penises. Others, though, did not agree.
Ellen gyrated like a boa. No I’ve never seen a boa, much more watch it gyrate, and Ellen was more knowing than a man-eating boa. Ellen lived a healthy virgin’s life: She was like Eve, when Eve chose the serpent.
How Ellen laughed, at men’s jokes, especially if they talked about women. She and Pinky would come to my ragtag of a house at San Juan Road (a new improvement from the last pigsty) to look for erotic literature from my trunkful of books, sometimes bringing with them an imbecile who would dare lay his hand on my Isabel Allende books, and never return them.
I loved Pinky. She introduced me to a boyfriend who later trundled up to me while I was peacefully sitting at the boulevard. Where is Pinky, huh? Huh? He asked. I sat there, shocked, while his knuckles kept on knocking against my skull. He looked like he was about to kick me, too. Like I was the bitch.
Life is a cabaret, said Pamela at a workshop in Tacloban, and for many late nights in Dumaguete, Dennis and I walked the streets like tramps. He would wear his fuschia pink shorts while I let my bra strap alone. (It kept on falling off my shoulder.) If I were not a teacher, I would have been a whore, Dennis would say. And earning, too, I’d tell him. We’d laugh through the highway, smoking, flaunting, and staring men in the eye. They would look away and give us right-of-way. We felt free. Like we could screw the world and get away with it, too.
Claire thinned down to half her last size as bulimia became the rage of the day. It was annoying: Ellen counting her calorie intake as though she were Nanette Medved or some other deity; Dennis, praying over his bilbil, his bilbil, while gorging himself with tarts and chocolate; Mark and Earl refusing to take beer lest they’d lose their shapes. But shape or no shape, they were hefty with talent. When the sky was dark and Katipunan Hall was quiet, Mark would gather his cast of post-England witches and stage a grand performance for a special audience, namely, faggots only. Together with Archie and other budding virgins, he would sing his incantation with a voice that could summon the burnt heroines of Salem back to life.
There’s a house in Amigo you can move into, said Sir Tim, who somehow kept tabs of the poverty indices at the department. Something funny happened in my slimy San Juan neighborhood: My roommate a girl of nineteen uninitiated to the manners of men, happened to look into an eye one morning while she was scrubbing herself at our bathroom cum urinal. (My landlady’s husband and sons pissed there, when we were not looking). I stomped down the stair leading to the rooms downstairs, banged at the door occupied by the male lodgers whose faces I really never bothered to look at till then, and screamed obscenities. The landlady, subjected to more obscene beatings by his exhibitionist of a husband (he liked walking out of their room with only his briefs on just when we were going out to pee at night) just looked, unsure as to who to defend, her boys, or us female lodgers. The husband blabbered a little, then went about some carpentry work, mending holes and patching the floor. A couple of days after, my roommate packed up, fetched by friends and a relative. I received a notice of eviction, later. The room will be used by their relatives, my landlady said.
The house at Amigo was an artists’ den, with ropings and spider webs spun by human hands, and paintings of bats and creatures of the dark. At the latrine, a recognizable fellow squatted right before you, comfortably defecating. Rhoda, Sir Tim’s sister, was minding the house. She was a Creative Writing student and was back there to finish her thesis. It’s open-house for kindred spirits, she said. Vibes is all that is required for any would-be occupant.
Cleaning my would-be room upstairs, I struggled with a window that refused to open, feeling horrible at my incapacity to feel for the place. You’re not an artist. You’re a lunatic, I chided myself. When Ophie, Rhoda’s best friend and resident-hag of the house, wrote from Mindanao and said she’d be dropping by Dumaguete and would need the room I was to occupy, I found an excuse not to move in. Nahadlok ka, Shelf? Rhoda asked, smiling. The evening I was hauling my things out, Krevo, another resident-artist, just arrived from America and was distributing books. He brought us a vibrator, too, Ophie said to me. You want? Claire and Nino waltzed: Mikki, who happened by, talked and laughed; I was dazed. Later, when I told Nino I was afraid of their house’s spirits, he jeered. You should befriend them and not fear them.
Something did not happen in the summer of 1996. I was spending night at Andre’s house, over another idea after the stage play that never happened. One late afternoon Viktor came carrying with him his bundle of clothes. He and Sawi had a quarrel and Sawi threw him out of his house. Or rather, Viktor himself had sense enough to evacuate. Can I, he asked Andre, rather honestly, sleep in your sala? The sala was an open-air affair, nipa roofing above it, bamboo walls and flooring adjoined to the main house.
He came all the way from Cebu to sit in the workshop, staying at Sawi’s as was his tradition, but something happened midway through the workshop: Sawi’s heart was broken anew, I seemed. He fell for some girl from Manila, or this girl fell for him—whichever, it does not matter now—but in what looked like an inversion of Prufrock’s lament, he left her to a bottle of beer. The rest is history, said Viktor, and old Prufrock went home to his cottage. A couple of days later, Grace, an old friend, called. Sawi ordered Viktor to clear away, sat with Grace, then went to his room to catch on some sleep. When Viktor went out of his room to leave, he found Grace unattended (he knew her from his Silliman days), and so he sat down awhile to entertain her. When Sawi woke up, he found them talking.
A cute story it was, and Andre, a little humored, took Viktor in a couple of days later, the two gentlemen patched up, and Viktor went back to Sawi’s house at Purok Santan, leaving Andre a handful of books.
In a poetry reading later, during the fellows’ last night in Dumaguete, Sawi wore a barong and read a poem, in honor of women. The poem, he said, was written by an obscure poet, and he chose it because in that year’s workshop, the girls proved themselves better than boys. All I can recall of the poem is that it was about her who folds the sheets. So simple it was, and so quiet. And so was Sawi.
Nino and Andre thought of a Poetry Reading in celebration of Women’s Day, and of all venues, we chose the university chapel. The English and Literature family was all there, in full force. It as a gay affair, with almost everyone having a good piece to say. Tonton read his poem, about a rubber band that you gave, which ended with “You don’t even remember my name”; Ellen read Migen’s “April Wedding,” about wanting to be Cleopatra and putting sleep into God’s eyes, and ending with “And they unawares/Bore apes”; Pinky read Ellen’s “The Journey” about opening one’s thigh, and becoming the world.
Other women were there, too. Dennis read a poem that began with “You made love to me at a stockroom,” ending with “And laugh with your wife about the fag at work”; Bobby read a sexy piece about hot pizza and a boy he wanted to take home; Archie choreographed a dance, performed by his women at the Telun Theater, to the music of Elynia S. Mabanglo’s “Kung Ibig Mo Akong Makilala.” (Telun was Archie’s and Ma’am Andre’s reply to Siliman’s broadway culture).
Married women also chimed in: Hermie read Dinah’s poem about the laundry that stank o family; Chinky read a Tagalog translation of Padmapani Perez’s “Newborn,” a motherhood poem ending with “She is at once my life-saver/And my death,” which Mabanglo translated as “Siya ang aking tagapagligtas, at mamamatay ko”; while Ma’am Andre read a naughty piece from Lualhati Baustista, “Dyugdyugan,” about romance after marriage and motherhood.
Lorena’s piece was a n erotic poem, Jocelyn de Jesus’ “One-Way Samba,” which sounded more angry than erotic, Tonton said. Dr. Law read Emily Dickenson’s “I’m Nobody,” while Sir Tim read Adrienne Rich’s “A woman in the shape of a monster/ a monster in the shape of a woman/ the skies are full of them.” Ma’am Mel and Gina dramatized a dialogue between a middle-class Latin American woman and a working woman.
Noticeably absent was the resident-poet of Dumaguete, who was by then still lost in the woods of Dumaguete, looking for the Poetry Reading lights. Along with two other idiots, he went round and round Silliman, led by the Muse of the night, whom we realized later must have been a feminist. We learned that he, Franklin, and Voltaire ( a brother just came home from Canada), ended up reading their poems to the rocks at the Boulevard.
SUFA staged a strike in January of 1997. They couldn’t take it anymore, the sahod-sakada, to use Mr. Deriada’s words, and so they staged a strike. That was after months and months of roundabout negotiations with the SU administration. The front yard of the Guy Hall and the Admin Building blossomed with placards, pleading for Christian compassion and the like or demanding the resignation of this or that asshole, and the hogwire fencing the campus grounds on both sides of the Hibbard Avenue were draped with streamers screaming the hunger that plague the lovely country. The city of gentle people, as it was called, unaccustomed to labor unrest, stirred aghast at the sight of university professors waving placard and their fists in the air. Dr. Law was in his youthful best, manning the forefront, tirelessly running errands, sometimes with Ma’am Rose, who pedaled with him on their tandem bike.
The prudish and the ignorant were displeased. Isn’t it scandalous? they asked, University professors of Silliman? Behaving like laborers? When a member of the board came from Manila, the whole throng picketed at the airport, announcing to all those coming and going of their miserable plight. The tricycle drivers and porters laughed in wonder as they read the huge streamer that enumerated the teachers’ salaries. Mas dako pa diay among suweldo ninyo, Ma’am?
That was not the first scandal to hit the holy land though. In late 1995, the air waves were shocked when fishermen at the Silliman Beach demonstrated in front of the City Hall after the tents that they constructed at the beach were demolished. The demolition was enforced (by the INP and Silliman’s Security Forces) after Silliman’s Ethics Committee decided that the shacks were a disgrace to the University. Students made out there; for the rate that the fishing families were charging was attractively low: twenty or thirty pesos per night. A legal tussle ensued, and Silliman was made to pay. The fishing village was economically dislocated, or so a fisherman told me one afternoon, in one of my mad walks to the beach.
The beach was combed clean, and the city was peaceful again. But funny things happened. In the campus, the guards was altered anew to new tremors on the ground. Condoms would be found littering in likely corners: deserted classrooms, stock rooms, including the backyards of the chapel and other holy places. A happy thing that was, which, we surmised, must have fired Gracchus’ imagination to write “Ana Andrea.”
Viktor called me a peripatetic. He had this habit of pacing up and down the floor as he ruminated. It ran in the family, he said. His brother back in Cebu would span all the three floor levels of their house, from the living room, to his bedroom, and down to the kitchen. I sit on my ass when I think, I told him. But you are a peripatetic, he said. You keep on going round and round just looking for a place to live in, without really getting settled in one.
At the time, we were both squatting in Ma’am Andre’s place in Bantayan, and I had just moved in and out of at least two other houses: the first after the room with peeping holes, a boarding house owned by an aging couple who kept a store downstairs and a kitchen upstairs that served galunggong everyday of our lives. The old lady hoarded bottles of all sizes, lined up to the wall and every corner of the kitchen, all filled with water. So we won’t run out of water, just in case there is going to be another drought, she said. Every night without fail, she counted her money on the table. It was so bizarre, like watching one of Dickens’ cartoon characters materialize right before your very eyes. If she found my book and papers on the table, she would sweep them aside and replace them with placemats.
They padlocked the door from the outside, beside padlocking the gate from the inside. My housemates, who escaped the lahar in Pampanga, laughed when I said I cannot bear the disgrace of dying in fire with the couple as a company. The husband slept at the store downstairs and kept the keys around his waist while the old woman occupied the room next to mine. I moved out after the tiny window of my room was blocked by a new building that rose right beside the house, letting the canal down below breathe right into my room, and after the latrine clogged and the old lady insisted on using the rod rather than calling the man from the sewers bureau.
I landed in a bowl-of-dust of a house right across Hibbard Avenue, occupied by girls who liked stuffing their used napkins into the holes of the bathroom walls. The day I tried cleaning the whole shit, I got sick for days. That was April, I had just finished another term. I moved all my things into the room, and escaped to Jolo for a summer job. By June, I was groveling at Andre’s place in Bantayan.
Andre was on leave, taking up her doctoral degree, and Diutay, her roommate, was commuting between the house and work in Dumaguete and the children in Bacolod. I played the housesitter and life was quiet and full of clean air, until it was time to move out again.
People went in and out of the house in Bantayan, The summer I was there, Neil and his poet-friends came, and Diutay played the flute. Tonton, who was at the time already employed in Cebu and was also into climbing rocks and mountains, came and talked about Kafka and The Hunger Artist. Did you know that once I had to cut down our neighbor’s banana tree, without her permission, just so I could eat boiled banana? he asked. I sent him out of the house, but walked with him to Bantayan Road, shouting I am walking with Kafka, which he took as a compliment.
I didn’t know that I would be sharing kitchen with Henry Miller, too. When Viktor barged again into the house with another story (he jumped down of Sawi’s window and broke his neighbors pots of orchid plants or something like that), my cramped life became more cramped. Viktor lived his life the uro-genital way, and annoyed me with stories about dying minotaurs rejuvenated by a good screw. Like Miller, he slandered every woman he knew and counted his erections. There would be mornings I feared going out of my room, lest he was having one. He let me Black Spring, a glorious book about the glory of pissing.
Diutay whose interest lay more on the esoteric and the extraterrestrial experience, wasn’t so pleased with Viktor. Beside fetching pails and pails of water and gallons of drinking water Viktor wasn’t very useful. He was like a stump of wood that lay there eternally on the bamboo divan, with his books for his pillow. It was a sad affair: the three of us without money, keeping to ourselves our bitterness—and our spite—while trying to be kind to each other. The only thing that connected us was Bob Dylan. Every time Diutay played my Bob Dylan tapes, the three of us jelled like brothers. One thing I would always appreciate about Viktor: The night I went down to burn my bale of letters, he helped me with the fire.
Doc Ed died. The news hardly hit me: I didn’t know the man; his life did not touch me. And I didn’t hear him speak to me, although at one time, I had thought he would be a mentor. I only saw him once. In the last workshop that I sat in, in 1996, which no one knew would be the last workshop he’d be sitting in. I saw him as an angry old man despairing at the world that stood before him. Had he talked to me, I might have misbelieved his words, must have looked him down, must have left him. In his passing age.
Until I saw him in his coffin, I did not know him, did not know his pain, did not know his battles.
In the next workshop the following year, Ma’am Edith’s voice wasn’t as strong either. And we sank in our seats when, after a fit of coughing, she begged off not to be made to speak any further. “Go on. Please go ahead,” she said to the strong and the healthy.
And they did.
I had my times in Silliman. They crown the heart.
[Reprinted from Sands & Coral Centennial Issue, 2001]
Shielfa B. Alojamiento was a Creative Writing major at Silliman University and edited the 1997 edition of the Sands & Coral. She has worked for various nongovernment organizations. She won the Palanca for the Short Story in Cebuano in 2002.
Bombay Bazar, they spelled it. Without the second “a” that turned the word into a Thousand-and–One-Nights exotic. But an old store nevertheless. My brother called it Bombay Bizarre the sort of joint where you get the feeling you’ll never get out alive, snickered our friend Chee-bee. Where they played what Chee-bee’s brother Tito called “that curvaceous music”; blaring out into the hot noonday asphalt smell of Alfonso XIII Street, its plangent diatonic swoops sinuous as the S-curves of the carved deities on Khajuraho, the music sounded harsh.
It was rumored they sold “pawned goods’ at the Bombay Bazar. Chee-bee’s brother had once hocked their sister’s hair dryer there, to plug a craving for speed and marijuana, but we never found out if they got it back or not. The proprietor of the Bombay Bazar interjected a spurious “eh wot?’ into his conversations and sounded like a dubious proposition on all counts. It was the “Bombay,” meant to sound exotic, that placed a kind of generic stamp on the place and doomed it, I thought; no one would ever wander in there looking for bargains.
Filipinos pronounce it “boom-bye.” That’s how Filipinos designate all South Indians, whether they’re actually from Bombay or really from Delhi or Calcutta or Poona or Kashmir. A resonance redolent of the bulging sacks of traders’ goods, hefted by hairy forearms; mixed in with muddled racist images of “curly shoes” and ankle-length bloomers, and the turbans one later learned to associate more correctly with the Sikhs; boom-bye: red onions, dark streets, and drums.
The Bombay Bazaar was the newest in the trio of Indians stores that triangulated Locsin Street, a tacitly competitive corner of local merchandising, teeth gleaming hostilely at one another like concealed daggers from across the street. One assumed their respective owners to be scarcely cordial with one another—but who knows: that aspect of their relationship remains enigmatic. At least they were not in sinister consortium the way the Chinese monopoly worked, with their secretive Chinese Chamber of Commerce weekly meetings, carving up the local economy, from town to town, according to the expansionist fiefdoms of Hunan and Formosa imperialistically transplanted.
There was a sort of mercantile hierarchy among the three Bombay stores. The Bombay Bazar, although the most recent, already reeked of decrepitude. It was an old time bazaar in the most authentic sense, and probably might have been transported, whole, from one of souks along “the street called Straight, in Damascus,” judging from the haphazard variety of somewhat cheap merchandise piled into its one small showroom.
The owners apparently never figured out their demographic targets or their marketing focus—what it was that customers were supposed to go to their store to buy—since they sold a hodgepodge of goods: aluminum kettles dangled weirdly, strung on hemp ropes from the low ceiling; tinny gilt photograph frames shared counter space with plastic barrettes; and one might even spy the dirty-white fringe from a bit of rolled-up carpeting among the bales of thin garish clothing goods. It was all rather unattractively placed, but in actuality, the store arrangements were probably more authentically “Bombay” than the other two stores, when one came down to it, if it were atmosphere one was looking for. I’d would have only been in there once or twice and wandered out again, vaguely relieved, as Chee-bee would have said, to have merely come out again alive, to have escaped the silent speculative glance of the store owner and returned to the hot open-sewer stink of Santa Catalina Street, pursued only by the shrieking sitars.
The owner of the “new” Ramanujam’s Shop-O-Rams, farther uptown, inherited the shop from his father. I have vague recollection of the “old” Ramanujam’s store, fronting the wet market, with old Ramaujam himself rotundly presiding over the cash register, and the startling glare of Coleman lamps sizzling alongside the 200-watt fluorescent bulbs: an efflorescence of illumination, as though to discourage would-be shoplifters, in the-not-unlikely event that the town’s unreliable electric power “browned out” unexpectedly. I think the old store burned down. Perhaps one of the redundant Colemans exploded one night.
“New” Shop-O-Rama was always New, even twenty years later, when it had turned itself into “the shopping capital” of Negros Oriental. Thin salesgirls guarded the glass cabinets containing Charlie cologne and the shelves stacked high with Levi’s dungarees. Watched coldly by the owner’s rather dour wife, the clerks rustled adeptly around the store, gift-wrapping packages and creating pouf bows with skillful twist of the wrist.
The natty owner, “young” Satish, a judicious sprinkling of gray at his temples, rested his neat plump elbow on the glass counters, benignly offering discounts—as much as twenty percent off the net—for favored customers, his twinkling eyes, underneath their outrageously curly eyelashes, resting perhaps a shade too long on the shapely backsides of the coeds as they emerged from his store, their buttocks smartly outlined by the studs on the Levi’s bought from his store.
It seemed to me that Satish had been Ramanujam’s Shop-O-Rama all of its life, even as the store stayed forever “new.” There was a childishness about him that probably derived from the store’s avowal of its unchanging regeneration. But for the name of the store one would have forgotten there had once been an Old Ramanujam. But for that—and for the small alcove set into the wall beside the curtained changing-room on the ground floor—one’s eye might almost miss seeing the small brass jar of joss sticks, and sitting beside it on the alcove shelf, the black-and-white photograph of old Ramanujam himself, now thin-cheeked, his eyes already sinking back into the shadows that no cheerful glare of Coleman lamps could hold away.
Hand-lettered underneath the photograph, the reverential but matter-of-fact care with which the words were formed was almost like a cry of grief: “Father expired on 31 December 1967.” Expired, like a battery, or a license to sell merchandise, on the last day of the year.
Yet it’s not quiet right to say Satish never changed, though the turn-over on his merchandise was a veritable model of successful retailing-as-perpetual motion. He was inordinately proud of his store’s participation in the university social life, such as it was: he’d cultivated a town-and-gown relationship, literal and exemplary—as haberdasher to the studentry. More specifically, he gloried in his role as the beaming supplier of jeans that the flashier nursing students strutted and swiveled in during the Founder’s Day “Miss Silliman University” beauty contest and fashion show.
He recounted to me one day his excitement at the visit paid by a movie star who’d dropped into town for a couple of hours’ filming by the famous Dumaguete seaside. She was a pretty, pouty girl with dewy eyes, on the second or third tier in the current Philippine hierarchy, and Satish’s cheeks gleamed moistly as he told about how she’d dropped by and tried on a couple of pairs of jeans right there in the store. (Behind the picture of Expired Father, I thought somewhat cynically.)
He leaned forward over the glass counter, propelled by the naïve pleasure of the moment, and asked: “Your husband, he makes movies right? I have a good idea. I been thinking about it some time. Maybe he makes a movie, you know, just a simple movie. I get sponsors from, maybe, the Mount Kaladias Lions Club, you know? I provide the costumes, like, you know, a real movie. Simple story. About young life. About the campus.”
I was too startled—and unaccountably touched—to think of a reply, and took refuge in mere dissembling; hoping I did not sound increasingly bright or patronizing, I said a shade too fervently, “Oh, that would be nice. I’ll tell him about it right away.” At that point the some total of my husband’s movie making was a couple of documentaries for the University, and several short films he’d successfully placed in the national short-film festival. He was deep into his Herzog hero-worship phase—having just emerged blinking into Aguirre’s Amazon sunlight from the Nordic darkness of a short-lasting Bergman influence—so he gave a scoffing, brief chuckle when I repeated Satish’s moist suggestion, and the whole thing was forgotten.
Satish did not mentioned the movies again during the next couple of years, even on those occasions when I’d buy the Chaps cologne and the tall Levi’s that were obviously meant for my husband. Perhaps it was the long-term residence in the town of another movie outfit that resurrected Satish’s “simple idea.” This time my husband was a unit manager of the film, and we and some of our friends and neighbors actually appeared briefly in it. After our very short moment in the sun as Christopher de Leon’s family (trailing along after him down various forest path and dry riverbeds, dressed in authentic pre-Hispanic garb), we attained to an uncomfortable fifteen seconds of local celebrity. Satish approached me again, over the counter, while his wife rang up my purchases behind him, a serious little pucker furrowing the friendly brow.
“I’m thinking about that movie,” he said, while my heart quailed cravenly at the prospect of fielding yet another movie proposition for my indifferent spouse. Now I’d have to accept Satish’s over-generous thirty percent net discount while pretending I’d forgotten all about that earlier business three years ago. “I think,” he said earnestly, his consciousness having apparently evolved, in the intervening years, into a weltanschauung far beyond the simple pleasures of garbing coeds in Levi’s for a movie about young life, “I think we make a movie about, you know, serious. World hunger. About Eenjah.”
Each year, three times a year, my Dad gives my mother a bottle of perfume: at Christmas, on her birthday in April, and the following month for their wedding anniversary.
He goes to the store of a particular Indian merchant for these gifts—usually on the day before the event, an hour before closing time.
Unlike the Bombay Bazaar with its mournful violence of plangent sitars, and the upbeat rock music that Shop-O-Rama’s favored to set the mood for the buying of jeans, Ranjit’s Department Store considered it déclassé to play music. Ranjit’s was the Macy’s of Dumaguete City. Stodgy and reliable, it was there that one went to buy wedding presents for people, a store one’s parents turned to for anniversary gift. In our town we had no department-store bridal registries (among my wedding gifts were three identical cake-server sets), but whenever a big wedding was coming up, someone at Ranjit’s could be counted on to whisper discreetly into one’s ears if a particular item had already been purchased, thus steering the giver away from redundancies.
The owner, a soft-voiced genial man who was in Rotary with Dad, had numerous daughters, and his fortunes—and the prices in his store—fluctuated according to the stages of negotiation leading to the ever-proliferating family nuptials. Dowries were the store’s raison d’etre. They had two sons, on whom his wife was pinning their fiscal deliverance, though Jayanta Misra was too seemly, or maybe already just too Filipinized, to make much of their marketable potential.
Their younger son, Harresh, had a thin face and wary measuring eyes—not tragic mellifluent liquidity floating over an excess of whiteness that were the eyes of his favored older brother, after whom the store was named.
Ranjit, more outgoing and seemingly less bright, was easy to be around with, but had a tendency to burble that made me vaguely uneasy. I had Harresh (he signed himself “Harry” then) in one of my Introduction to Literature classes when he was a sophomore or junior in college, and I was fresh out of school myself. His work had brilliant brevity, and his papers were submitted in tiny, scrupulous handwriting, with exclamation point judiciously placed.
I thought it was his being younger son that had probably given him the twist at the corner of his mouth, a mark of incipient bitterness that deepened upward into mirth when once or twice I’d tried a joke that sailed over the heads of the rest of the class. He had narrow fastidious nostrils that quivered in the sardonic stillness of his face, appreciating the knowledge that there were nuances he alone could catch, not bothering to nudge his seatmate on the elbow, or even to chuckle: just the twist of his mouth and the faint wing to the nostril.
There was something of the same reserve in his father’s eyes, a sharp absence that was like a judgment withheld, underneath the smooth mercantile jocundity. Sometimes I imagined it was almost the loneliness of an intellect gone undeveloped, that should have gone into theology and not retailing. Perhaps that was why he liked Dad so much—they could trade jokes, no matter how superficially, and that beyond the ritualized exchange of buying and selling, there was the novelist-professor on one side of the counter and, on the other, the heir to the Rig-Vedas and the Bhagavad-Gita. It was always tacit, a coinage never exchanged—an appreciation for the other—held in mutual reserve, as it were: a fiduciary note of intellectual respect.
Or perhaps I was just imaging it all. He was certainly the quintessence of the smarmy trader (his manner had an excessiveness that seemed almost ironic) whenever he’d spot Dad and me standing at the entrance to his shop three-quarters of an hour before closing time on Christmas Eve. In our town, the storefront entrances run the whole length of the shop, stopping at the pair of plate-glass displays that flank each establishment. These entrances open directly onto the street or sidewalk, and are laboriously closed each night with stout wooden panels and a metal grille that is pulled across the paneling and latched. Except in shopping malls, stores in the America do not exude this kind of daytime, wide-open informality, and recalling them now—and their dichotomous shuttling between trust and mistrust—is like stepping back into the third world again, with all its knife-edged vividness.
Jayanta strides amiably towards us from the back of the store, beaming with warmth that is meant to convey more than a merely professional pleasure. He has an unfortunate tendency to rub his hands together as he approaches favored customers, and observing this mannerism, time and again, gives my mother and me a kind of cynical enjoyment.
Hair crisply anointed with Brylcreme and his Countess Mara polo shirt reeking of Aramis, he stops smartly before us, rocking a little on the balls of his feet, his hand clasped together and the smile fixed relentlessly in place. “Ed, Ed, good to see you. And something for Edith today?” he says. His ebullience never varies, despite the prices of merchandise that go up wildly after each calamitous dowry-giving.
After all these years he knows that it’s perfume that we’re after, but is too mannerly to make that assumption in front of us. Or maybe it’s simply that he and Dad relish every station in his ritual, so he waits until Dad has explained our errand before turning to the business of selecting the merchandise.
“Maria,” he says, turning to one of the dozen or so slowly aging counter clerks, all but snapping his finger at her to have her unlock the glass case where the perfume is kept.
For some reason all the clerks seem to be named Maria. Or maybe he just calls them all Maria. They all speak excellent English, and in their dealing customers or the owners, they emanate the soft-spoken familiarity of household help who have been with the family for many years.
Examining the selection in the glass cases is usually just a formality, because the choice selections are all kept in the back room. When he’s had time to size up the occasion and the seriousness of Dad’s spending, Jayanta gives order to the Maria currently in attendance to bring out some of the stock from the back room.
There are no sample bottles of scent in third-world merchandising. The gilt or pastel boxes containing Anaïs Anaïs and Nina Ricci, of Ysatis and Madame Rochas and Givenchy III, are painstakingly opened, and a cautious nostril is reverently applied to the atomizer head. “It is the spray you want, not the plain?” Jayanta ask. “Of course, it’s to be the spray; these women, Ed, these women.”
When we have made the selection between us—Dad opting for the deeper woodsier scent, and I holding out for the flowery-citrus—we enter the delicate phase of transacting the price. Polite skirmishing ensues between Dad and Jayanta (the attendant privileges and obligations of their Rotarianship hovering in the background of their negotiation like the gaudy muses of merchandise retailing).
Sometimes the transaction is interrupted by another of the Marias, who approaches Jayanta tentatively, bearing a message from his wife who is working the cash register. Mrs. M., too, waves a heavily ringed hand in greeting whenever we enter the store, but prefers to keep her position of power behind the register. I have sometimes uncharitably suspected the message to contain a certain cautionary element that goes into effect when she senses, from afar, that Jayanta is about to cave in and give up a soft sale to us. At any rate, the Maria might say, “Mister, Mrs. says that the key to the stockroom, we cannot find.”
And Jayanta, interrupted at this delicate stage of the negotiations, throws up his hand in exasperation and says, “Oh, heavenly day!” and moves fussily toward his wife where they hold a brief consultation in Hindi.
Dad politely averts his eyes and pretend to examine the merchandise in the glass counter in front of us, but I’m less inhibited by the imperative for good manners and pass this brief interregnum wondering how Mrs. M keeps the sari from unwrapping and speculating on whether she ever gets gas pains from not covering up her tummy, and watching the pocket of exposed, hanging-over midriff heaving emphatically once or twice as she expostulates with her husband.
He returns grinning grimly and he and Dad move into Phase Two of the haggling. Both of them are trying not to think of those daughters. Or rather, Jayanta is thinking, Now Ed’s thinking about how many daughters I still have to marry off, and he is determined that Dad should not feel sorry for him.
“Now, Ed, Ed, this is for a special occasion, right? This is for Edith, right? And for the wife, why, one must give only the best.” And Dad makes some joshing remark about Jayanta’s obvious prosperity, and the town’s reliance on his store, stocked as it is with his discriminating good taste, and they move with mutual accord into the third phase, settling the price.
For his part, Dad, having transacted a price satisfactory to them both (and in order, too, to give some grace to the awkwardness implicit in all this), finally brings out the same jolly assurance he always gives Jayanta at the end of the haggling session: “I have a marriageable son, a good-looking boy; he can pass for an Indian, you know.”
Jayanta bares his teeth in a pained smile and sedately completes the charade: ”Well, well. Let’s talk about it sometime, shall we, Ed.”
I was witness to many of these transactions and at first they mortified me, until (out of a sense self-preservation, perhaps) I began to recognize a certain underlying esthetic.
I’d only seen Jayanta slip out from his well-Brylcremed punctilio once, and that was when Dad had made some casual remark referring to his being Indian, not Filipino. A glaze of hurt came over the bright, measuring eyes; and he said plaintively, “I am a Filipino, Ed. My father died, like yours, fighting the Japanese during the war, here.”
Years later, after our family had moved to the States, we learned that his son Ranjit—the young eminently marriageable doctor who never wed, and for whom the store was named—had died and died a hero. He went with a critically ill patient who was being airlifted to the next island, flying the child over to the Cebu General Hospital in a light aircraft owned by the son of one of the sugar plantation owners. They ran into a storm on the way back, crossing the Tañon Strait that separates Negros from Cebu. It is said that on a clear day, standing at dawn on the beaches of Dumaguete, facing Cebu, one can hear the cocks crowing across the strip of sea, in Santander. The wreckage of the plane was found but the bodies were never recovered. Jayanta, who used to sit in a back pew at the Silliman Church on Sunday mornings, the light from the windows picking up the silver streaks in his shiny hair, was a broken man, and within a year store was closed. At some time over the years, unobtrusively and not wanting to make a big deal out of it—still ruled by habitual courtesy, as it were—he’d turned Christian, it seemed, as his son Ranjit had, earlier; and perhaps, who knows, that finicking silence behind the merchant’s spiel did not, in the end, play him false—and he found the store was no longer enough to fulfill that unspoken esthetic, recovered from the wreckage.
Maybe it was that same ancient ontology (made durable and comfortable by the ritual of buy-and-sell), a sense of otherness persisting beyond the souks and the Khajuraho music transplanted to the far shore, that caused Satish to lean over the counter, to make his shy and clumsy offer of subsidizing a movie, as he thought, that might appeal to this customer’s discriminating taste—and to fill some hunger of his own: “About Eenjah,” he said, “something about Eenjah.”
Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas was born in Dumaguete City in 1951, the daughter of writers Edilberto Tiempo and Edith Tiempo. She received a BA in 1971, and an MA 1978, both in creative writing, from Silliman University, and went on to earn her Ph.D. in English Literature, also from Silliman. She worked for the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa as associate program coordinator, and for the university's English department as adjunct faculty. member. She has won several Palanca Awards for her fiction and poetry, and was the recipient of the Distinguished Author Award from the Writers Union of the Philippines, as well as the National Book Award. Her books include Upon the Willows and Other Stories [1980], The World Comes to Iowa: Iowa International Anthology [1987, co-edited with Paul Engle and Hualing Nieh Engle], Mountain Sacraments [1991], Flying Over Kansas: Personal Views [1999], and The Sea Gypsies Stay [1999]. She was former director-in-residence of the Silliman University National Writer's Workshop.
1. Go there at an impressionable age—say, fifteen or sixteen. Go to college there and convince yourself you have come, not just for a degree, but also for a heightening of sensations. Enroll in Silliman University (the Vatican in Rome), in some benign program you can coast through without sacrificing the wave you want to surf: the living of a full life.
2. Say you hate it, the place and the people—give yourself six months to one year to wallow in your youthful angst. Hate the pedicabs and the tartanillas and the eternal sunshiny smile of the conformist inhabitants. The lazy, laid-back atmosphere of it—the smugness of people who have to go to church on Sundays, the brown Americans who have inherited the New Englandish traditions of the colonial missionaries. The Protestant predictability of it all.
3. But relish the Cebuano language you have to learn. If you feel frustrated or bored, bury yourself in books. Or watch every movie at Park and Ever theaters, the alternative secular cathedrals of a traditionally religious city. Gloat over the mediocrity of your teachers and classmates, tell yourself you are too good for the school and for the place. Glance sideways at the beautiful girls, practice the eyes of a short story writer to exercise “the art of the glimpse.”
4. After the last full show at Ever or Park, walk the streets. Note the desolate silence of the town after ten o’clock: only the tocino stands catering to drunkards remain open. Walk: it is the 1980s and there is no nightlife in the city to speak of.
5. Let a year of solitude pass by before breaking out of your shell. Then join plays at the Woodward Little Theater, audition at the Luce Auditorium. Run for the Student Government. Meet the geeks who will be your life-long friends and who will teach you to drink beer and experiment with marijuana as you talk of poetry and love and anything that makes you giddy with being alive. Hang out at Manang Siony’s tocinohan until the wee hours of the morning but drag yourself out of bed for your seven o’clock chemistry exam.
6. Top the exam. Push yourself to the limit, stretch those wings: read the most difficult books in the library, audition for the Men’s Glee Club, court the most beautiful girl on campus. Succeed. Fly.
Take note of the pink sky at sunset at Silliman Beach in March. That shade of color will come only once in your life, like the strange feeling you have as you hold her hands there at the end of the airport. Dumaguete sky pink when you’re in love at nineteen. Hold her tight. Violins.
7. Graduate with honors but maintain the arrogance of someone who knows he does not deserve it. Preserve a sentimental contempt for your diploma, tell yourself you got nothing from four years of studies there except memories of being drunk, of acting in plays, of singing in the glee club, of mustering the courage to page a name in the girl’s dorm. Never admit that you, in your self-deflating assessment, have fallen in love with the place. As the bus departs for your first job after graduation, as you leave the city behind, catch the lump in your throat. You are mourning for love, for a girl you’re leaving behind. The place has nothing to do with it.
8. Come back after six months for graduate studies.
“Hey, you’re back. Where did you go?”
“Couldn’t hack it in the real world, eh?”
As if Dumaguete is the Neverland for the Peter Pans of the Visayas.
Come back to school, be the perpetual student! Enroll in creative writing class, join the dreamers club! Spend the next ten years of your life in arrested development, reading fiction and poetry books while your contemporaries buy houses and cars, go abroad to get rich. Become a bicycle-riding college instructor in the school you used to hate.
9. Teach: it’s the best way to earn your bread while flattering your ego. Take midnight walks after hours of grappling with thick novels: disregard the string of nightspots emerging along Rizal Boulevard. You are still encased in the texture of the novel you haven’t finished reading.
10. Fall in love and break your heart again and again. Pedal to projects fringes the city, past Banica River, to the new grids of suburban housing projects where you may bring your girlfriends on long walks. On weekends climb up Camp Lookout in the mountains of Valencia for the satisfaction of looking down at the seaside city you have left behind: there, obscured by coconut crowns, the city of our dreams, your Paris, your New York. Climb down to the disenchanted.
11. Fail. Make crazy forays into law school in a bid become rich and famous, or respectable and useful to society. Fail but remain a believer. Write to your girlfriend: “But I believe in the power of words in the same way that I have faith in my love for you.” Aside from her, you have to convince yourself about this.
12. Wake up to realize you got your latest girlfriend pregnant. You’re thirty years old, you will need to feed a family—buy a house, get a car, join the rat race. Wake up, there’s life beyond college.
13. Leave the place a second time, this time without the urge to look back. You might turn into a pillar of salt.
14. Live in big, noisy ugly cities where, in the midst of the asphalt jungle, you can relish the memory of that city you left behind: the tang of sea air, the shade of acacia trees, waves breaking on the boulevard. The city of my youth! My Paris! My New York! Toil under the burden of this romantic hangover.
15. Let twenty years slide by. Bungle your marriage, bungle your writing. Adopt a cynic’s posturing. Disavow poetry, stop believing in love. That place, that time, was too good to be true. What’s real is the noise and traffic and grime of the big city where the self is crushed into ordinary dimensions. Dumaguete was a dream, a whiff of brine in the air, an echo from a passage of a Chopin nocturne. Don’t confront the fragments of your present life—the inane pop song blaring from a jeepney is the true test of taste and toleration. Don’t mind the beggar children tapping on the car window.
16. Meet the disillusioned writer friends who have gone through the same wringer: fell in love in Dumaguete, fell out when they left it. They wax poetic about something in the past: “Oh, yes, I was happiest when I was there…” and later they trail off into the vocabulary of the damned: “I don’t believe in love anymore…” Hogwash, opiate of the hopeless romantics. As if the place and the emotion attached to it have hardened into an embarrassing synesthesia. It had its place in our lives, but we have outgrown it.
Nod in drunken assent.
17. Revisit the place once in a while, nevertheless. Business, pleasure, whatever. An antireligious pilgrimage, you tell yourself. To brace yourself against the encrustations of romanticism. There is only one city and you have become a stranger to it. Think of it as the heart of the country, the hub of an airline map where all the colored strings converged. But you have settled for a tourist’s deal—a hotel room and hotel meals. The old school has shrunk in your vision and the dorms where you used to stay too seedy. Walk the same old streets in search of the old you. New sounds, new lights. There is now a twenty-four-hour heart beating in the place, thumping to the disco sounds of tourist hangouts along the boulevard. In the quiet bystreets, listen to the echo of your footsteps. Don’t be afraid of the shadow you drag along. Laugh when you remember the joke about a prostitute’s transaction. You have to leave as fast as you come.
18. Believe in miracles when you meet her again after two decades, she who made you feel giddy as a teenager while you held hands at Silliman Beach a long, long time ago. From the debris of both your marriages, walk past the gauntlet of cars at the Manila airport. Hold her hand, wait for the violins to swell again. Inside her car, stare at her and try to see what middle-age pain and suffering has cast on her beauty. It’s not the disjunction of what is remembered and what is perceived that bothers you. It’s the fact that you meet her again in another city, another time. You realize that all your life you have been in transit, and that city of your youth was not the hub of all your journeys but a mere stopover. And so you embrace her again after two decades, feeling like a child cheated out of his chance to say goodbye before the parents met a fatal accident. But it had to be in Paris, this reconciliation, if not in Dumaguete. You cry together as you tell each other’s stories, tracing the trajectory of your separate lives from some point of origin that is more time than place. Dumaguete was where you last saw each other almost two decades ago.
19. Go back, go back there with her. Try to reclaim what was lost. Walk the streets of the city again with her—two middle-aged lovers navigating the traffic of a modern city. The cell phone–toting youngsters don’t know it; the laptop-flaunting students in the old school overlook it. There, the simplicity of it, the clarity of it, the brightness of it. Yes, it’s there. But not in the slick Robinson’s Mall, not in Jollibee, for they were not there twenty years ago. Ask a security guard to do it for you, hoping he will catch it. Stand in the bright sunshine, a little bit to the right of the acacia shade. Smile. Post it later on Facebook.
It’s not a quotation you can post on your Facebook wall. You have to wait for an opportune moment to be able to say it. Maybe a cynical tipsy friend complaining about his wife has to ask a jokey question over bottles of beer and give you a chance at philosophical revisionism. “Love—does it exist?”
Let a second pass before saying it.
20. Write it down.
Yes. But only in Dumaguete, a place you carry in your heart.
Wherever you go.
Timothy R. Montes is from Borongan, Eastern Samar. He studied in the Creative Writing Program of Silliman University under the tutelage of Edilberto Tiempo and Edith Tiempo, and published his first story collection, The Black Men and Other Stories [Anvil] in 1994. He also co-edited, with Cesar Ruiz Aquino, Tribute: An Anthology of Contemporary Philippine Fiction, in memory of his mentor Edilberto K. Tiempo. He has been the recipient of various national awards, such as the Palanca, the Philippines Graphic Literary Prize, the Philippines Free Press Literary Prize, and the Writers Prize from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. He has taught at Silliman University, the University of the Philippines in Mindanao, and De La Salle University Taft.
I never understood what happened to my father that night. Nor did my brothers and I talk about it. We remembered how our aunts, a few months later, would go ballistic whenever we went near the clothesline or that abandoned house where electrical wires played possum. Susmaryosep! You kids get away from there! Then, we’d be reminded of how our Father looked that terrible night.
My father was not really superstitious, but he had a reverence for his faith, a reverence so profound one might even call it superstition. He found it blasphemous to use God’s name when one cursed or made Bible jokes. At best, we’d get a severe reprimand from him; at worst, he’d give us a whip of his belt. My older brother got the latter when he proudly asked us why Jesus, on the cross, asked God the Father to forgive them for they know not what they do. Why? we asked. When he revealed the answer, father overhearing us went livid. Blasphemous child! Busongon gyud ka! He was outraged at the punchline that it was Joseph of Arimathea who, having offered to carry the cross for awhile, ended up getting crucified instead of Christ.
My brother suffered ten blows from Father’s belt. After that, when we exchanged Bible jokes, it was in secret and always filled with fear.
We understood that if we did something sacrilegious, something bad would happen to us. So we took care not to blaspheme—if we could help it—and to revere our faith and everything it stood for as something essentially connected to our lives.
When his kids were not yet in college and life was easier, Father indulged in the luxury of a post graduate course, enrolling at a university in the city. On Saturdays before going to his class, Father would wake us up at five thirty, always frighteningly on the dot, for morning devotion. He would never force us to get up though; he had less conspicuous ways of making us join family devotions. He and Mother would sing church hymns for a full thirty minutes. By then, we would have been woken by their throaty rendition of “Morning Has Broken.”
On some days, I would pretend to sleep, waiting until there was only a few minutes left for the clock to strike six before getting up. “Turn to Jesus, turn to Jesus. He waits …” Most days, however, I would get up as soon as I heard my father’s voice, low and guttural, prodded by my guilt and my childhood fear of being stricken because of my irreverent pretense and for making God wait.
After breakfast, Father would be gone for the entire day, and we would be left to our own devices. TV wasn’t attractive; our own TV, a fourteen-inch Panasonic squat box with two antenna rods, offered only two channels. When the soap opera about a miserable young girl facing frightening adult tribulations got too depressing and the other channel showed only cockfights, we turned to the fields.
We were fascinated with catching dragonflies. My brothers said they looked like helicopters. I disagreed, but my eldest brother said that an eight-year-olds’ knowledge of dragonflies was limited. I was willing to accept this as a fact, especially since when dragonflies were rare, I knew we would play with something more fascinating. We fashioned guns from small bamboo stalks, about one foot in length. The trigger was a small bamboo stick attached to a handle, thin enough to slide through the hole in the stalk. Those days, we’d keep our test papers, so we could wet them, squeeze out the water and pinch a small piece to fit into the bamboo gun. Soon enough, we’d be shooting each other with moist paper bullets.
Sometimes these games threatened our childhood happiness. One Saturday afternoon when Father came home, Mother felt playful. She grabbed one of our bamboo guns and shot at him. I don’t think she had intended to shoot him right in the face, but the paper bullet landed on father’s wide forehead, dirty water trickling down his nose. We saw how his eyes turned a darker shade. Without saying a word, he went to our rooms and snatched all our bamboo guns and headed to the kitchen. On his way, he stopped mid-track and, with sacerdotal sternness, extended his hand to Mother. Meekly, she placed the offending gun in his hand. The following day, we saw it with the others, in pieces, in the garbage.
At night, Father would make us read Psalm 23. Then he would find out who among us had read the fastest. I always won.
“Read.”
“I am reading.”
“No, you’re eating the words. That is good, but you have to chew them before you swallow.” Like others, Father believed that men did not live by bread alone. When we read the Bible or recited verses, the premise was that we were consuming the word of God. But we also had to fully understand it—chew, then swallow.
Later, he would find out who had memorized the most Bible verses. When the prize was enticing—like a promised ten-peso addition to my allowance every day for five days—I’d make sure to memorize two verses every night, albeit very short ones. And at times, when read in isolation, they turned out to be very cryptic, like John 11:35—Jesus wept. Was it John or Matthew? I wouldn’t find out why Jesus wept until I was in college.
Father never explained the verses that we recited in front of him and Mother. He just presumed that we’d find the meaning in our hearts. Nobody had the audacity to confront him about such a presumption, and we never asked for an explanation; we just wanted to go back to watching Ninja Turtles.
I was in grade one when I first understood the concept of God as a shepherd. I hadn’t known what a shepherd was until our Sunday School teacher showed us a picture of David tending sheep and lambs. “David was a shepherd boy who fought the giant Goliath,” said middle-aged, bespectacled Miss Luz who had the sweetest voice and who turned the violent story into something heroically romantic. (I often wondered why she never got married; she could have easily crooned her husband into submitting to everything she wanted.) Shepherd, Miss Luz would point at the picture with a polished fingernail. The closest association I had with a shepherd was a goatherd on a field my brothers and I often frequented in our games. But the goatherds I saw were so unlike the shepherds pictured in our Biblical storybooks. Storybook shepherds looked young yet strangely wise, with their turbans, long white robes and shawl-like coats.
Nonetheless, I knew that a shepherd, like a goatherd, was someone who looked after sheep. By deduction, I likened myself and my family to lambs, knowing that God looked after his lambs, or even goats for that matter. It was in this syntax that I sublimated God and the Bible into my little world. It worked quite well, and like the child that I was, I was content with the knowledge that I’d harnessed. The Lord is my shepherd started to make sense.
Around the time his course was about to end, Father came home one Saturday and told Mother about a joke his professor had told them. It punned on a very familiar phrase in the Bible, “only begotten son,” by syllabicating the second word into two syllables, the first of which was to be pronounced as “big.” Of course, the remaining syllable, “otten,” pronounced with characteristically Cebuano vowel enunciation, punned with the native word for the male organ. My father was smiling, but his eyes weren’t.
“Goodness! Irreverent brute!” Mother looked amused. Then she added, “What did you do?”
“What do you mean? What did you expect me to do?” Father asked, his voice getting louder. I did not understand the rest of what he said, but by the time he was finished, he was furious.
“I mean, how did the class react?” Mother asked calmly.
For a moment, Father was speechless. He looked embarrassed by his outburst and my mother’s placidity.
“They laughed.” Then he added, almost in a whisper, “I laughed with them.”
His face went white when he saw me. For a moment, he looked like he was going to get sick. “Tita wants to trim my hair. Scissors, I’m looking for them.”
“But you just had a trim last week, Lana.” Mother knowingly gave my pixie cut a cursory glance.
“I want another one,” I said, hurriedly thinking of an explanation for my presence and unintended eavesdropping. “Now.”
When I left, I thought of the word Father had said. It was an ugly word, one of those that was forbidden in the house. Grown-ups said it was vulgar and lewd. To use it on God was unimaginably offensive! And Father hadn’t done anything. Instead he’d laughed with the offender thus he’d offended too, making the devil happy. Divine justice was swift and exacting; this I’d gathered from Sunday school. I was scared for my father.
That afternoon, while we were forced to take a nap, Father got electrocuted on a “dead wire” my aunts used as a clothesline for the laundry. Nobody had minded where the wire came from; nobody had bothered to ask if it was live. It had been there when we arrived, and we had just presumed it was “dead” because it came from the abandoned house adjacent our own. But that afternoon, we found out we were wrong. He was adjusting the clothesline, cutting and knotting it, when all of a sudden, we heard his bellow, like cow in a field.
From my window upstairs, I saw how Father shook with intensity. His bare chest and shoulders heaved furiously, as he struggled to free himself. In my eyes, he was no longer formidable; he was as helpless as a child. Mother rushed downstairs calling for him repeatedly, my brothers tagging behind. I wanted to follow, but I couldn’t peel my eyes away from the scene. Father’s eyes dilated and went almost entirely white. His head limped to the side. I tried to call to him, but my lips seemed to be sealed.
Later, I was told that it was my aunt who, pulling my father’s hair at the crown, saved him. The doctor, who happened to be my grandfather’s close friend, said in between sighs that “it’s a good thing you’re robust or else …” He left the rest of the thought unspoken.
“It’s a good thing as well that Lanie and the kids were not at the deep well,” Father added weakly. On Saturday mornings, Mother would help my aunts do the laundry at the deep well a few meters from our house, while we joined in, playing with the suds or simply getting everyone else wet. The clothesline hung only a few feet from where we did the laundry.
We did not have Bible readings and recitations after the accident, at least for quite a while. Psalm 23 was dormant, and I had forgotten some lines from the verses I’d memorized. Out of habit, at night, I would say Psalm 23 while lying in bed looking at the sky. From the bamboo slatted window, the sky looked like a field of little diamonds, sometimes glittering here and there. Often, the sky was dark, and I would forget which came first: leads me beside the still waters or makes me lie down in green pastures. Somehow, I’d always manage to say the first few verses, even if not in sequence, but I’d stop when I got to the fourth. I would feel the hair on my arms standing on end—Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. I always felt an awful gloom and anticipation in that line; its cadence strangely hypnotic. Then I would sleep, disturbed. The following day, I’d wake up regretful for not having said the next line: I will fear no evil for thou art with me.
It had been almost a month since the accident, and Father remained unwell. He was unable to spend time with us in the evening, and Mother had to teach during the day and take care of all us, Father included. Our aunts cooked, did the laundry and kept house. They’d prepare us food before we ran off to school, and Father would be left at home. Our neighbors often wondered if he would ever go back to work. But I knew Father was still sick. I would hear him at night groaning and shaking, delirious—but never uttering a word.
One night, I heard Father speak. I don’t know. Maybe. I knew it wasn’t Mother he was talking to for I did not hear her answer. Then I heard him say Papang, the same term he’d used to address my grandfather who had passed away several years earlier. When one is young, it is difficult to make sense of things, because of ignorance or sheer innocence or mere forgetting.
The excitement of summer vacation soon made me forget what I’d heard. My brothers and I laid out our itinerary for the long break. First, we would hunt for good spiders, and then we’d build rooms in matchboxes for their houses. My brothers suggested we look for spiders at night in the fields where the weeds grew tallest. We’d bring flashlights or little torches, knowing spiders from the tall weeds were usually the bravest of the lot.
Then we’d make big colorful kites like the ones we’d seen two summers ago on the school grounds during the competition organized by that milk company with a smiling bear logo. At night, our eldest brother would draw his envisioned kite on a piece of paper, and my younger brother and I would study it in fascination. Then we’d throw in a few ideas about how big it would be or what colors would go well together—both to conceal our excitement and to mark the kite as our own.
It was during one of these nights, when Mother was out, that Father came running to us from the kitchen. He was in a frenzy, talking in a voice higher than the one he used when cross with us. At first, we thought he was angry at one of our aunts. But the terror in his eyes belied what was really happening. I looked in the direction he was looking. Nobody was there. Then he ran back to the kitchen as if to stop somebody from getting to us. His arms were spread wide, then entangled, as if wrestling with an invisible being. He was shouting the whole time. “Panulay! You demon! Be gone!” His face contorted hideously. We could see how saliva swished from his mouth as he bared his teeth. His eyes looked different, like the eyes of a beast we had imagined claiming us when we’d done something evil.
Then he was down on one knee, struggling to get up. It seemed that there was a force bearing down on him, and for a moment, it looked as if he was about to face defeat. My brothers and I squeezed next to each other, terrorized by what we were witnessing. We were scared even to breathe. Father growled, and with all his might, pushed the invisible enemy away until he regained his footing. I remember seeing his lower lip trembling uncontrollably. But I also remember seeing him press his lips together and curl his fists.
“Get away from my children,” Father said quietly but with a firmness that surprised me. He gathered us slowly and hugged all three of us. I felt tremors running through his body and then course through our own. Then he started humming one of the songs he used to sing early in the morning. Sometimes his voice faltered; other times, nothing came out but air. Gently, he swayed with the tune—forwards and backwards—and we swayed, too. When I looked at my father, there was a quietness in his eyes, the same look he had when highlighting Bible passages with our used crayons. He looked peaceful all of a sudden. We stayed like that for awhile—Father hugging us and afraid to let go; my brothers growing squeamish but still dazed by what had just happened; me finding myself wanting to cry but unable to.
Later that night, when Mother came home, we did not talk about what had happened. We were afraid to say anything, and even if we had mustered the courage to say something, we could not have explained what had occurred. We just wanted to forget.
Mother read us to sleep that night. The last time I remembered being read to sleep was when I was in kindergarten. Stories of a little orphan girl becoming a queen or of a feast created from five loaves of bread and two fishes had made me imagine I was an orphan myself and would become powerful and special. Or I would imagine that if I prayed enough, big fried chicken slices and sundaes would suddenly appear. Perhaps we were now a little old for such stories because mother read us Psalm 23 instead. Years of reading to seven-year-old pupils had made her a good storyteller. I liked the way she let the soft round vowels flow. He restores my soul. The rhythm evoked ease, the peace of green fields, and suddenly I felt sleepy though I had pretended to fall asleep much earlier. Mother kissed my forehead.
That night in bed, I cried so hard. I thought of what I had seen and tried to understand what it was. I got nothing but a sense of foreboding and the hairs on my arms standing on end. Then I became angry—that evil clothesline and that ugly word Father had learnt from his teacher! I was angry at the teacher and how he had made Father laugh at his joke and made God angry. I thought of how the electrocution had changed him and how he now looked. He was no longer my father. What if God would summon him to heaven to explain, and he would never return to us? What if it was God’s angel that Father had wrestled but he hadn’t recognized it because he had laughed at that joke!? What if God would find him guilty and give him to the devil?! I started to panic and a felt a terrible despair come over me. I thought that no matter how many Bible verses I recited, Father would never be the same again. But I was also so tired that my mind simply obeyed my body and made me sleep soundly and dream of shepherds looking after their sheep on green fields.
Early the next morning, I heard my father singing for the first time since the accident. It was a peaceful song. I did not open my eyes; I simply floated with the melody. I listened for a little while, then I drifted back to sleep loving the sound of the song on my father’s quivering voice. The clothesline was forgotten, the ugly word buried. I knew then that my father had come back to us. God had forgiven him.
Alana Leilani Teves Cabrera-Narciso graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree, major in English, from Silliman University in 2003. She took up Law studies but left in 2008, and applied into the Graduate Teaching Fellowship program of Silliman, eventually completing her MA in Literary Studies while teaching English and literature classes. She was eventually invited to join the faculty of the Department of English and Literature, and became its Chair in 2016-2018. She recently completed her Ph.D. at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
I. The Night Lives on the Boulevard and Escaño, Circa 2010
It is not difficult to map the geography of Dumaguete’s night life.
The simple answer is: there’s nothing.
Nothing resembling the sophisticated rough and tumble of metropolises, anyway—say, Manila’s Embassy and Greenbelt and The Fort, or Cebu’s Vudu and Doce, or Baguio’s Vocas and Rumours, or the whole sandy stretch of Boracay. There are no sightings of night creatures in the city bedecked in the signature wardrobe of painting the town red as they descend on the enviable hot spots of the moment, to party all night to the latest musical concoctions of the deejay du jour, and to emerge only in the near morning light smelling of sweet smoke and an amalgam of alcohol, cigarette, sweat, recreational mind-warpers, and perhaps somebody’s saliva.
Dumaguete is never a city that “never sleeps.”
It’s too small, some people say, and knows no variety. Everybody goes to the same places all the time, and everybody dances to the same music again and again. A “night life” is worth its reputation only in the way it provides escape from boredom of the every day. You can’t have that when tedium becomes the escape itself.
But there’s also this indefinable something—or perhaps a clustery kaleidoscope of everything: a scattered constellation of bright (and not-so-bright) nocturnal buzzing that follows a strict schedule lasting more than half a week, creating a social swirl that is governed, by and large, by a strange Negrense sense of social class.
One always starts with coffee and dinner and light talk at Gabby’s Bistro, in the enclaves of Bantayan, where the bright lights and the cheerful colors always seem to beautifully kick in the start of a good evening. Some choose to spend nighttime in the old tagay tradition, not on anonymous sidewalks outside residences, but in places like Garahe along Noblefranca, or Qyosko along Santa Rosa, or Sted’s near that. (But this is not an essay on beer circles.)
Everything really begins on Wednesdays, when the B and C crowd—mostly college students but also a generous smattering of young professionals—all ache to get over the hump day, looking forward to the looming weekend ahead. They flock to the Pinoy/Jamaican sounds of Hayahay’s Reggae Wednesday, where Sande Fuentes, often with Mickey Ybañez and the rest of the Hayahay regulars in tow, hold court. The beer in their hands will be ice-cold.
Hayahay attracts a loyal customer base—has always been since it opened in 2000. Its charms are rustic and simple: just a hodge-podge of mini-bars and tables, mostly in the open air, in an arrangement of managed chaos gelled together by a bohemian spirit. This is true Dumaguete night life at its purest form.
Its two observation decks will be in full capacity, and so will be Chez Andre’s pizza corner to the left-most side of the entire compound, where three large round tables accommodate a plethora of barkadas, with a vantage sight of the amused observer staring down the rest of the lion’s den. The band for the night—a mix of Boyan’s Law, Stand Out, Souljah, Front Page, or Silent Vibe—will start playing around nine, perhaps even earlier, and by the time midnight comes along, a throng—bodies rubbing and hopping to the quirky reggae sound—can be found on the tiny dance floor in front of the band.
Everywhere, everybody is uniformed in careless shirts over shorts pants, feet clad in sandals and espadrilles. Wednesday is when you let your hair down but still party. Wednesdays are sweaty. Wednesdays are dread locks nights.
On Thursdays, a taste of the weekend finally begins, but nothing too ostentatious—Hayahay still mostly closes by midnight, and its neighbor El Camino Blanco may blare out dance music but the place is often near empty.
Nobody goes to Camino on Thursdays. That is taken as an unspoken breach of night-life logic.
And so the only recourse, perfectly acceptable to many, is to park one’s car or van along the beachfront stretch of Escaño Boulevard, then take out the plastic shopping bags containing junk food and assorted pulutan, Tanduay rhum, and endless beer—and then party till the wee hours with the music blaring from the car’s stereo.
The spot that tops the T-shape of the stretch is ground zero for grill parties. It’s the choice spot to be in Escaño, which has since replaced San Moritz (along Agan-an) as the nighttime beach side hangout of Dumaguete. There is a certain headiness to being Escaño—perhaps the effect of the collision of the orange tungsten lights running smack against the black horizon of the sea, the twinkling lights of Cebu towns in the distance.
On Thursdays, the scene is small—only a few cars and a scattering of motorcycles dot the Escaño landscape—but already, the oldish couple manning the small stall at the corner of Piapi Beach and E.J. Blanco Drive is making good business selling packs of cigarettes, soft drinks, bottles of Tanduay (with a choice of long neck or flats), and packs and packs of ice. Business for them (and for the peanut vendors that now ply the long “runway” walk of Escaño, which ends at a sari-sari store/beer garden rightly named Tambayan sa Escaño) will pick up some more intensity in the next two days.
On Fridays, Payag sa Likod, nestled in the bowels of unassuming bodegas fronting the provincial hospital, unleashes what it calls Reggae Friday, and students (mostly from nearby Silliman University) descend on cheap beer, wallowing in the strange bamboo-hut-intimacy of Payag’s open door ambience. Here, the charming Christine Torres reigns, ready to pour you a swig of Payag Sling, its pinkish concoction subtle but ravishingly deadly. Admittedly, there is a roughness and an earthy aroma to the place that may confuse the uninitiated—but this is where the kids hang out, a cocoonish respite from the vastness of sea sky of Piapi Beach. And the beer is cheap. And the place is the only spot in town where the maddening crowds—all distinguished by the pecking order of schools around town—are allowed, somewhat, to mingle. The NORSU crowd are here hobnobbing with the Sillimanians, the Foundation people with the Paulinians who are careful to keep a low profile lest the nuns know.
In Gimmick, things are not the same: the Sillimanians with their airs have left the scene, and the NORSUnians have taken over. In Maychen, right across the road from Gimmick, a kind of social black hole—awashed in Beer na Beer—exists amidst the heaps of trash, the slaking rivers of urine across the dirt floor, and the monobloc tables and chairs jammed against jagged cement edges of what used to be a house. It is a different kind of party in Maychen.
But the main party still remains in Escaño, which, on Friday nights, is now beginning to pick up steam. The stretch—which starts right in front of Hayahay and goes all the way to the dark beyond, would now be filled to capacity, crammed with all manners of cars and motorcycles creating a drunken patchwork of parking. Nobody cares.
In one corner, near Barefoot Bistro, the policemen keep watch. Many moons ago, this was dangerous ground—I have friends who have been stabbed or mauled here—but the atmosphere has arguably since changed. It has become the place where the kids can “safely” party. There is a kind of harmony in the orchestrated chaos—everybody knows everybody—and people dance, flirt, drink, and make speeches to the moon and the stars.
Still, only the desperate goes to Camino on Friday nights, and most will probably end up in Hayahay, to binge on sisig and sinuglaw, and rhum and vodka.
On Saturday nights, the party in Escaño comes to full blast—and the well-heeled crowd now finally descends on Camino, with full intentions to gyrate to house and R&B. The ladies are in their best small black dresses, hair and makeup perfectly done—but with full expectations to be fully undone by the time the night comes to a close. These days, it is local designer Josip Tumapa who comes in with his posse to start the night right. (In olden days, that role would have been Al de las Armas’s.) And the deejay plays his selection of dance tunes—mostly R&B, because the Dumaguete crowd simply does not get house or trance music—but nobody dances until Mitz Meliton dances. It always begins with Paper Kisses doing contemporary covers. On some (bad) nights, a deejay’s sidekick would bark into the microphone, shouting, “Aw! Aw! Aw!” or “Seleman! Seleman! Jump! Jump, jump, jump your hands!” Some would, of course, jump. Some would curse back, telling him to go shut himself. DJ Joeren is the local deejay for the days—but sometimes, a Manila-based one, such as DJ Ace from Embassy, would be flown in, ready to give Dumaguete a taste of edgier stuff.
In Music Box, the dance hall of the entertainment and dining compound generally known as Why Not?—an alternate universe exists—where the garishly made-up and the truly crazy hobnob with the white trash to the sound of 90s dance music, creating the grand spectacle unique to the place: people dancing, not with each other, but to their reflection on the mirrored panels surrounding the squarish dance floor as everybody looks on in strange fascination. It is a different kind of fun, something to subscribe to when you’re already too drunk to care.
The Rizal Boulevard—previously the center of Dumaguete’s night life universe—is a ghost of its former self, crippled by pious but misplaced city regulations, and done to death by the spectacle of Japayuki-style entertainment on a makeshift stage outside CocoAmigos. “Nobody I know has been to CocoAmigos in months,” says a friend. “Too many boorish foreigners and their brown women.”
“That’s a bad thing to say,” I told him.
“But isn’t that how it goes? The moment they come, the locals disappear.”
And then the party stops at three o’clock on a Sunday morning—and slowly, the crowd dissipates for an after-midnight chow at Connie’s or Qyosko or Chowking. They will look tired and happy, like the very picture of merry stupor and delirium.
II. Walking the Ramp
“We do too many fashion shows in Dumaguete.”
—Patrick Boglosa, event organizer
Sometimes, the city night life is all about shows. The big event. This is the story of one of them.
It was already 6 o’clock in the late Saturday afternoon of August 29—and Dumaguete was at the start of the difficult process of winding down after the weeklong founding celebration of Silliman University.
It was the last day for a partying month—and the night to come was to be the last call for letting down one’s hair. “It was party to the limits, or bust,” recalled Gerard Anthony Adiong.
The entire month was already a veritable beehive of activity, but the seven days before this day had been particularly crackling with the excitement of a mob let loose: Silliman’s collegiate throng—and this is the only crowd that actually makes the city alive—saw no classes, and there was suddenly the excuse, the daily invention to party.
Mostly, they descended on Hibalag, the booth area near the Silliman gym—a bastion of tradition, and in the old days even bigger than the city fiesta, that had lasted decades. The year’s edition of Hibalag, even if small, was still surprisingly particularly zesty, its sense of fun miraculously infectious after seven years of morass that had its size and ambition contract year by year. This year’s Hibalag, needless to say, still mostly paled in comparison to the booths of more than a decade ago, when the soccer field became a virtual bustling city of nipa and amakan and kawayan, filling the entire span from Larena Hall to the Silliman Library, from the gymnasium to the Divinity School. There were a maze of byways and little streets that it was easy to get lost in the storm of organizations ready to spring on you both pranks and innovative commerce.
But even then, all throughout the week, there had been food fairs, and class reunions, and private parties, and exhibitions, and concerts, and horror chambers, and beauty pageants, and fashion shows, and tattoo artists plying their trade. August 29 was the last day of all that—and people seemed bent on giving the month that one last fling before they settled to the ides of September.
On that date, at six o’clock, Jaysun Penales, an event organizer and a clinical instructor at the College of Nursing, was still at Barefoot Bistro doing last minute preparations for the event he would be hoisting on the city late that night. It was the third edition of an annual “fashion fling” he called D’Ramp—and all pressure was on him. Already this one was the fourth—and the last—fashion show to hit Dumaguete in a week. Only that Wednesday, and in the same venue, Toto Marquez and his crew had already unleashed their Sneak Foam Party that featured a revealing ramp show of models wearing nothing but the skimpiest of beach wear. (The foam party part, however, was a bust—there was no foam, and nobody partied.) The following night, annexing Barefoot Bistro and El Camino Blanco this time around, Tyrone Tejam amped the ante with his X International Fashion Party that brought in a Manila deejay and a batch of international models, purportedly Eastern European and Brazilian.
Was Dumaguete already in a fashion fatigue? The tickets for the previous shows had already been priced quite high, one at P200 and the other at P500—enormous sums for the notoriously cheap Dumaguete crowd. The lingering question remained: was there a paying crowd left for D’Ramp 3, even at P150 per ticket? Better yet: would anyone be left to care for what passed for a fashion show in the city?
Fashion shows in Dumaguete are relatively a new phenomenon—although Dumaguete society had long since done their share from the 1960s on with private fashion shows exclusive to their well-heeled ilk. The city had never really been fashionable, given everybody’s predilection for tropical uniform: a white shirt, a pair of “city shorts,” and sandals. The idea of couture is largely lost in this small town pretending to be a city, but in the late 1990s and finally in the 2000s, “fashion shows” became almost an epidemic—and it came out in all sorts of disguises, from low-brow bikini opens celebrating the carnal, to wedding shows at the boulevard at the height of May.
Some call the phenomenon a travesty.
“Sometimes,” says local fashion designer Josip Estolloso Tumapa, “I do agree that we do a lot of fashion shows in Dumaguete. But it is quite an insult to attach the word ‘fashion’ in relations to many of these shows. Because some are done with intentions other than serving fashion. They’re more like Monterey ‘walking-meat’ shows. They’re partnered mostly RTW boutiques that make everything look … commercial. If I were to pay P150 to see clothes that I see anytime I want just by walking the streets of this city, then hell I would rather sweat it by walking rather than paying. It’s getting kapoy. And it’s getting generic. That is why I do filtering on the events I am invited to—to only work with established or semi-established and competent, well-experienced people in the field of production whom also I can learn from. And to check the production plans and see that everything won’t be half-baked. Lisud naman gud especially from my side. Here I am working and enslaving myself making clothes and—ugh, utter disappointment. But I think it comes in stages. Hopefully Dumaguete will get there sooner than later if we do serve the growing Dumaguete ‘fashion crowd’ with something deserving and worth the money. Nothing run-of-the-mill.”
Mr. Penales, in the meantime, hung on to what he thought would make his show a little different—this was going to be a bigger show, featuring almost fifty models culled from the various social sets around Dumaguete and Cebu. And he was also launching Faces magazine, a project he was editing for Negros Chronicle, which for its first issue would showcase what he called “the fifteen hottest bachelors of the city.” Most of those bachelors—which included the ragtag bunch of Gabby del Prado, Ian Lizares, Marco Ongsingco, Dudly Mark Realuyo Rios, Farzad E. Pakdamanian, Jonathan Keane Camat, Jacob Carl Jumawan, Ian Rosales Casocot, Saturnino Pacencia Jr., Bernard Piñero, Kyle Janruss Delfino, and Ralph Percidenes—would open the show and walk the ramp. He believed people would come. It was the last night of the Founders Week, after all. People would come.
And then it started to rain hard.
Dressed only in a plain orange shirt and shorts and a pair of slippers, Mr. Penales had been doing last minute preparations, checking that everything was set—the lights, the sounds, the stage that had been hurriedly set up only that morning, the makeshift dressing area, the sponsors’ various tarpaulin, the arrangement of the models’ clothes. It would have been a logistics nightmare, but his production assistant Bogy Lim, a quiet young man whose unassuming air belies a sharp fascination for dealing with details, was busy zeroing in on the essentials. Somewhere in the chaos, Angel Gonzales, another production assistant, counted out the clothes, and the choreographer Janjaran was busy plotting out the intricate finalities of the models’ movements on the long runway, a not-so-sturdy plank made of lawanit that was now beginning to get soaked in by the pouring rain. The models, meanwhile, were billeted in three hotels around town—in Hotel Carmila, in Hotel Nicanor, and in Ildesefa. Call time was six o’clock, and all were busy getting their makeup. They were all getting hungry, but no one dared eat—it wouldn’t be good to look puffy and stuffed in front of a crowd. And some of them would be wearing lingerie and stylish briefs in a few segments. In Room 303 of Hotel Nicanor, event organizer Kathleen Hynson Patacsil was helping put on the makeup for the boys while the newly made-up Aesha Amigo Villanueva gingerly brushed away the hotel’s curtains and looked out the window to see the rain pouring down like mad on San Jose Street. “Do you think it’s still going to rain at 10 o’clock?” she asked no one in particular. “Will we even have a show?”
The show, of course, was still a distant four hours away, but the rain was not helping anybody—including those who planned to see the show—feel at ease. In her house somewhere in Valencia, Arlene Delloso-Uypitching was a little worried about the tickets she was promised, and also the possibility of getting wet. In Hotel Carmila, Miss Dumaguete Maria Luz Catan was not happy with her make-up, and swore to hop to another hotel and another make-up artist, her boyfriend and fellow model Ian Lizares in tow. Back in Barefoot Bistro, sitting quietly at the bar, Mr. Penales was already thinking in terms of contingencies—what he would do if the rain persisted, or if a blackout would occur? But he was also thinking: what would I wear? It had to be something that would make him look good on stage. He wanted to go home, take a shower. He felt sticky and sweaty despite the cold air.
Earlier that Saturday morning, things were the very picture of preparations going well. The day was fine and bright, the skies blue. It had been rainless all of August, and no one would foresee the drench of rains ahead. That morning, El Camino Blanco and Barefoot Bistro—the twin venues for things nocturnal in Dumaguete—looked quite different in the daylight that at nighttime, at the height of weekend parties where the darkness hide the empty beer mugs, the ashtrays filled with discarded cigarette butts, the curious flirtations between friends and strangers alike. In the daylight, the remnants of Friday night were all too clear and topsy-turvy—it looked like the aftermath of a battle. The tables and chairs were haphazard, some in a dance of tumbled madness. Everywhere, the carpenters and electricians were busy putting in the effects for the duo events for the night—D’Ramp 3 and the Philip Morris Party. The ramp in the bistro was being built—a plywood runway held together by a flimsy wood frames. The speakers were being put in place, the tents unfurled. Inside Camino, new lights—better, more dramatic ones—were being installed, and a new deejay’s booth being placed on stage. The models were in clusters were everywhere, all trying to get last minute instructions for how to move that night. Still, this was going to be my first time to walk the ramp—I have never “modeled” before, if that was the word for it, as I was always in the background of things as these events go. But I took to the experience as an observer of new things—and came to this conclusion once said to me by a friend, a socialite: “I like fashion shows. They’re shallow fun, and vanity is the perfect excuse for being in the center of things.” But considering the rain later, I asked ruefully, would the “debut” even happen?
But by nine o’clock, the rain was slowing down—but it would not readily vanish away. It slowed down in spurts. It was still cold, but at least nobody was going to get wet, except by stray showers. By ten o’clock, the two red billowing tents that graced the catwalk and the rows of chairs that surrounded it were filling to the brim, and by the time the fifteen bachelors walked the ramp to open the show to the tune of Pitbull’s “I Know You Want Me,” the crowd was screaming. At nearby El Camino Blanco, the now legendary Philip Morris Party was also starting.
The night of August 29 was going to be a night everybody would remember.
Later on, Mr. Penales would tell me it was not glamorous at all, the staging of fashion shows—it was all of grit and tons of headache. But it was fun.
“Why do you do it then?” I asked.
“Passion,” he replied.
III. A Brief History of Dancing and Commotion
“College life is really not about pseudo teachers and their boring classes. It’s zigzagging from Escaño to Barefoot to take a leak.”
—Marianne Tapales, former student
Our nights become because of the city we have.
Let me start by saying that the city always seems to stand on the brink of clashing peculiarities that often make it difficult to describe. Dumaguete is—so the tired cliché goes—a city that really is a small town at heart—but not exactly. It is a place so far away from the center of things that it is permeated with a semi-rough probinsyano air—but not really. It’s conservative to the bone—but not really; it can be quite liberal—but not reallyeither. It is a beautiful, romantic place you can easily fall in love with—until you see pockets of it that make your heart bleed.
It is this and that, a place of constant flux in the guise of a slow tartanilla.
These things make it the capital of infuriating constancy as well as head-turning reinvention. But see how that goes? Our contradictions become us. “It’s the capital of schizoids then,” a friend once casually observed. I nodded and shook my head at roughly the same time.
Dumaguete is place where not too many people from the rest of the regions know very well—and there are people who are even more familiar with Silliman University than the place where it is located. (“Is Dumaguete in Silliman?” so the question goes. But perhaps this is in the same vein of how we think of Princeton but not New Haven.) Mention that it is in Negros (omitting the Spanish terms of direction that divide the island), and they think it’s a town near Bacolod. And yet it is a celebrated city in spite of itself: it is a place of cultural ferment, and a place of breathtaking romantic beauty that more often than not finds itself splashed, like a surprised virgin, on the pages of Island Magazine (“one of 20 best islands in the world to live in!”), the New York Times (“I grew attached to the small harbor town,” writes travel writer Daisann McLane), or the Lonely Planet travel guide (“If you were beginning to develop an aversion to regional centers, you’re in for a pleasant surprise with Dumaguete. It’s a nice place. Seriously. Everyone raves about the Rizal Boulevard promenade, and it’s true there’s something genuinely charming about this harbor-front ‘quarter mile’: the faux-antique gas lamps; the grassy median strip. But there are other things to like about Dumaguete: it’s big but it feels small, and it’s less congested, less polluted and—being a university town—far more hip and urbane than your average provincial capital”).
To the eyes of the world, it is our merry contradictions that make us.
Still, Dumagueteños love to shroud themselves in the promise of calm, slowness, and silence. We call it a “city of gentle people,” after all—a gentility bred by Spanish sugar nobility, I suppose, which does not really say much—or perhaps it is a throwaway description of how passive things can be here?
Historically, the silence has always been part of the old Dumaguete charm, and the first complaint now from any returning Dumagueteño long gone from the scene is to express dismay over the traffic and the surprising flood of people. Writer Krip Yuson, adopted son of the city, speaks of the old silence with such nostalgia in his book The Word on Paradise: “I remember it as clearly as yesterday, that first rite on a slow-moving tartanilla, May of 1968. How I marveled at the manner of entry, at the fresh air of provincia, rustic indolence, aged acacias lining an avenue I instantly knew would lead to a long-imagined, long-elusive fountainhead…”
I also remember an anecdote Jacqueline Veloso-Antonio once told me about how the sound of someone’s car from not too far away—the screeching of tires on asphalt or gravel road, the sound of brakes—can immediately be registered sight unseen. “That’s So-and-so’s car, we would say,” Jacqueline laughed, remembering the old days. “Nipauli na sya.”
And then there is also the “university town” label, a moniker that promises an abundance of youth culture that always must be on the cutting edge of things and sensibilities—inherently defiant, gloriously rough, astoundingly creative, aggressively hip. How does one reconcile that image with a Dumaguete that is also a bucolic capital smack in the middle of countryside?
Everybody knows everybody else, and conservative fronts—nurtured both by Roman Catholic piety and American Protestant missionary zeal—still remain the standard order of things. But there’s also an ironic awareness among most Dumagueteños that there are not-so-subtle waves of transgressions that run like undiscovered waters beneath this general impression of “nothing happening.”
When Peyton Place came out—first as a scandalous 1956 novel by Grace Metalious and then a 1957 hit movie directed by Mark Robson and starring Lana Turner—it wasn’t such a great surprise that many locals saw too many parallels between Dumaguete and that archetypal American small town of sweet hypocrisy, where a pristine white picket fence mentality also bristles with delicious scarlet secrets that threaten to explode like a vat of raw sugar.
Such places on the quiet edge of things beget nocturnal lives that are the stuff of scandalous dreams. Dumaguete is so small and so quiet, that to vent—in one way (drinking) or another (dancing)—becomes the thing to do. Which brings us to a truism that Moses Joshua Atega, a Dumaguete transplant from Davao, always tells every new visitor to Dumaguete, in a kind of wicked reassurance: “Nothing bad will happen to you in Dumaguete. But, if something bad happens, you will like it.”
It is into that tradition of billowing quiet and vapid slowness that Music Box—before it was known as Why Not?—came in, and radically altered the nighttime landscape.
There had been other disco places and clubs in town before Music Box arrived, of course, and there were social events of various stripes where the young of Dumaguete raged against the overwhelming quiet of the everyday.
Moses Atega told me that before there were “official” party places like El Camino and Hayahay, Dumagueteños were already hosting strings of private parties in casa blancas everywhere in town, including the posh ones hosted in American missionary homes in Silliman campus. Even older than that, there were the bayles during sipong among the sugar cane workers.
“When I was in high school in the 1970s,” local TV host Glenda Fabillar told me, “we had jam sessions held in friends’ houses with only katol as light.” She said this laughing at the memory. “Then, in college, we partied in Silliman’s Catacombs, and there were more—but I can only remember the places we went to, but not their names. There were a lot.”
“In the 1970s,” Professor Cecilia Genove told me, “it was Town and Country Bakeshop, or TCB, which had a disco. That’s located near the Gallardo Building where Mr. D is now. I remember we would climb the fence near the SU Church to cross to Town and Country, to buy hot pan de sal. There was also North Pole, which is now Why Not, where you can have dinner and a nightcap. No disco there, however. I remember the spaghetti of Maricar’s [which is now the boarded up place fronting Taster’s Delight]. Their pastries were our favorites. There was also Dainty, an ice cream parlor. Life was truly laidback then.”
Understandably, Dumagueteños ate out more than partied then. For Rural Bank’s Toby Dichoso, to go out in the 1970s was to visit Speed Meals, where Body and Sole is now. “They had really good food in a jiffy,” he said. “And when merienda time came, who could forget those ice cream sundaes of North Pole, which was located in the Boulevard then. They served the best sundaes and banana splits. Remember, these were the time when we had to take two flights to Dumaguete from Manila. We took flights from Manila to Cebu with BAC 1-11, and upon reaching Cebu we changed to a plane with a turbo propeller bound for Dumaguete. And we used to go to Cruztelco just to make long distance calls. All phones were analogue then—only four numbers—and we went through an operator and we would ask her to dial the number for us while we waited in the lobby. As soon as the operator would connect us, she would direct us to a booth with a number, and there we would converse.”
U.S.-based Al de las Armas remembered that time as an opportunity to be creative: “When we ran out of allowance, we shared, we treated, we donated, we pahulam to our fellow Sillimanians. I’d walk from the campus to Ricky’s and bum for piso-piso, and I’d got lots of money after the social walk… Then, of course, we spent it all having a good time… Nowhere else can you do that!”
Local Globe manager Jacqueline Antonio remembered her parents mentioning Red Pepper in the 1970s, where Monterey of La Residencia is now. “There was Rainbow Pub in Piapi, a bar with billiards—but I was too young then. Not sure if it had a disco. There was also Windmills in Banilad and North Pole—both in the Boulevard and then in Bantayan—in the late 1970s and 1980s,” she said. “There was Tavern’s soft bar in the late 1980s—‘80s music was the best!”
“Definitely Tavern in the 1980s,” says businesswoman and writer Sonia Sygaco. “It had a disco, a resto bar with a band. And billiards. Tavern, I think, was the only elegant place to go because Dumaguete at that time only restaurants with no additional forms of entertainment.”
“In the early 1980s,” court clerk Angel Quiamco remembered, “there was Blue Wave in Escaño. And pwede pa pa-inoman sa Boulevard then, after which mag-bayle sa SU gym, or Hibbard Hall’s second floor, or Silliman Hall’s first floor. This was during Fridays, with events sponsored by different campus organizations. Then there was inoman sa Silliman Beach, or mga bayle sa mga barangay during fiesta.”
But Music Box was the hinge that changed the course of things. The year was 1992, the world was still fresh from the wounds of the Gulf War, and a young Swiss named Marcus Kalberer took over what used to be North Pole, a beloved watering hole for locals, and put into place what was then the most ambitious party club in Dumaguete. The city until then knew no such things. To cap that plan, he installed a jazzed up jukebox on the roof of the old Veloso sugar house, with dazzlingly colorful neon signs blaring out the words: “Music Box.”
For the young in the early 1990s, it was an electric current into the common placidity and the brutal ugliness of the boring. It was also the new excuse for the hip to return to Rizal Boulevard, which had become, by the late 1980s, a mecca for drunkards and prostitutes who plied their alcohol smell and their skin trade in a virtual city of tambay vendors and barbecue stalls. The whole boulevard nightlife until then was defined by sleaze, its headquarters being Rainbow Lodge (later The Office), which is now the Sol y Mar Building where the Globe office is located. It used to be part motel, and part bar.
To go to the Boulevard then was reason enough to be mocked by friends. “You’re going to the Boulevard of Broken Dreams?” they would say. But the strip was slowly undergoing a cosmetic make-over then, spearheaded by the dynamic new mayor Agustin Perdices, who came in after the chaos of the Quial years. The grassy lawns were being manicured, the seaside promenade cemented and prettified, the garish fluorescent lights nailed to haphazard wooden posts replaced by the Spanish-style posts now emitting a more romantic yellow light. The sugar houses along the stretch suddenly took on a different shine. Some opened their doors to new business. There was now Sans Rival in the old Sagarbarria house, for example, and the old Villegas house was now Hotel Al Mar (later La Residencia). But there were unforeseen changes, too, that shocked: North Pole—the old Medina house, which was leased by the Wuttriches for 25 years—suddenly became Music Box.
And the young flocked to it like it was the answer to their dreams.
In the long-gone layout of the Music Box of old, you made your grand entrance after a cursory inspection by a bouncer—a new thing in Dumaguete then—and once you’ve passed through the heavy, padded doors and straight into the inside, you were introduced into a dark, very glamorous interior that was leveled in many places, red sofas dotting surfaces everywhere. The dance floor was right on the far-side. The walls were covered by screens that played the latest videos from MTV, when MTV was still new in the country and it still had currency as the symbol of cool. There were glittery things that hung from the ceiling. And the bar, right in the center of things, was party central. People dressed up to go to Music Box. The coolest cats and the most ravishing girls in town partied in Music Box.
Music Box was the place to be seen. “MB,” its patrons lovingly called it. And for the next five or so years, Music Box reigned as Dumaguete’s center of the social universe, where the young and the rich (and the social climbers) went and partied. To arrive by car was de riguer. Motorcycles were frowned upon, but tolerated. But if you arrived by tricycle, it was a common—although unspoken—rule that you had to alight by the corner near Chin Loong, and walk the rest of the way to the entrance.
And for what it is worth, Music Box opened the floodgates for more contemporary sensibilities that shook the old silences and the geriatric drool of the old Dumaguete.
It barged into the scene at the same time as DYGB, which blasted into the air as Power 95. It was the new FM station in town, with the swanky new chrome-and-white cement headquarters right in the heart of town—so swanky it even had a popular video store in the ground floor called Midtown, which rented out the latest in laser discs! DYGB threatened the longtime ascendancy of DYEM and its easy-listening vibe. (Remember “Album Covers”?) Barely a month into operation, the Dejarescos had taken it to court, to have it dial down to a frequency that was not to near its own. Power 95 soon became Power 91. But it was a hip new FM station with an alien sound, with fast-talking American-sounding deejays, playing scandalous songs like Salt N’ Pepa’s “Let’s Talk About Sex.”
Dumaguete’s head spun.
I still remember those days. I was still in high school—a sophomore in Silliman High—and one day, DJ Alan felt compelled to explain the nature of the next song in his playlist. “We don’t mean to hurt the sensibilities of the people in the community,” he said, “but we are here to play for Dumaguete the latest hit sounds. I hope nobody gets offended by our next song…”
And then the music played:
Let’s talk about sex, baby
Let’s talk about you and me,
Let’s talk about all the good things, all the bad things that may be.
Let’s talk about sex…
Let’s talk about sex.
Dumaguete’s head spun some more.
Later on, in early 1993, our first section of high school seniors from Silliman, led by our gangleader for merrymaking Gerard Anthony Adiong, trooped to our favorite party place in town, and painted the night away in hues of red and blue. Someone saw us partying like mad, and duly reported us to the authorities. The principal admonished us. “And to think you belong to the first section!” she said.
And thus began Dumaguete’s 10 P.M. curfew—with matching sirens blaring out like a mad sound from the heart of City Hall.
Blame us. That’s our fault.
IV. The Long Party Closes
“We were gods and goddesses of dance and light. Everywhere we went, we glittered.”
—Eric Samuel Joven, on Dumaguete of the mid-1990s
All what ifs, given the right nurturing and a little kick of imagination, are excuses to party.
Like all good ideas that become infectious and are soon carried through by the sheer push of will and word-of-mouth, the one I am about to tell you started out as a broad stroke of such kind of speculation.
But let us begin by noting that What Ifs was the game to play—bordering sometimes on the wicked and the suggestive—in the boredom-infested, pre-cellphone, pre-Facebook days of the mid-1990s. This was when, for a brief moment, a kind of affluent flowering enveloped a suddenly burgeoning Dumaguete, turning the city into a frenetic beehive.
It was a brilliant bubble of a time, coming right before the Asian financial crisis (which shook our lives, and from which we have yet to recover). President Fidel Ramos was in power, and the Philippines—just coming out of the dark ages early in the decade that saw the country crippled by endless blackouts that ravaged the economy—was suddenly enjoying a belated (and, alas, short-lived) reputation of having become the new economic miracle of the region, Asia’s “new tiger.”
Those were the days when Dumaguete began stirring from the slumbering pace, when old and new began to clash and to accommodate each other. Its narrow streets were no longer so quiet. By 1998, Felipe Antonio Remollo was the new and dynamic mayor. Everybody suddenly seemed flushed with extra cash. The air was drunk with unbridled optimism (there was talk of a Metro Dumaguete, of urban master plans that would change the way Dumagueteños lived and interacted…). Every day felt like a promise of bigger things. And every night was a party.
There was no such thing as a slow night at the Rizal Boulevard, for example. In the heady days of the 1990s, it was Party Central every night of the week—even Sundays. Newly rehabilitated from its bleak 1980s reputation as a red light district, the seaside promenade was suddenly a slick stretch of simple but handsome design, thanks to outgoing mayor Agustin Perdices. The place practically leaped away from its previous incarnation as a concrete monstrosity with bad lighting. Suddenly, it became postcard perfect. There was now a set of faux-antique lampposts lining the walkway, as well as a meticulously cultivated landscape of carabao grass with brick (and later, brown slate) borders. Families could picnic in the new Boulevard in the daytime, and nocturnal creatures could cruise a thriving scene after hours, drinks permitted.
The famed Sugar Houses along the Boulevard stretch, long “abandoned” by their hacendero owners to the ravages of time and fortune and the red blinking lights of streetwalkers, were suddenly being spruced up. Tocino Country—the collective name of the mass of barbecue stands that dotted the Boulevard—was transferred to the vacant lot fronting West City Elementary School, where it thrived for years. (Now it is situated on the lot beside the City Engineer’s Office in Lo-oc.) New restaurants were opening along the stretch, and new hotels, too. Bethel Guest House, the Cang family’s idea of a “Christian” hotel, was a swanky addition to the Boulevard cityscape—and Honeycomb followed suit, settling in the old Medina mansion, which was refurbished to suit its new function. The Lees, too, took over the old house where the legendary local mystic Father Tropa used to house his exotic pets, and made it into a slick bar called Lighthouse. This became the nightly hub of the young social set. (This is now Shakey’s.)
Over at the other end of the stretch, near Silliman University, some things strained to get on with the bandwagon—like Ocean’s Eleven across old Silliman Hall. (This is now Blue Monkey Grill). The restaurant didn’t quite catch on, and for years, the place was reduced to a rubble of an empty lot. But, near it, Hotel Al Mar suddenly became a more posh La Residencia; across the street, the honky-tonkish building housing a pub called The Office became a private condominium where Globelines now is; and the barely-used lot beside The Office became an outdoor grill and beer garden called Ang Boulevard. Much later, that beer garden became a popular bar done up in a ‘50s diner-style and was called, appropriately, Happy Days. (This soon became the short-lived Grin Life, and is now CocoAmigos.)
Happy Days… This was where Tina Alcuaz, the proprietress of exceeding proportions (a cheerful demeanor included), reigned over the black and white chessboard-tiled floor, flanked by screaming red walls with framed posters of Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and the whole pantheon of classic Hollywood icons… This was where her friend Zaldy would tether his horse outside, after a gallop at the Boulevard. (Yes, a horse…) This was where the A and B Crowd descended regularly for their fix of Budweiser, then the beer of choice. In the island bar that dominated the middle, a kind of social Mount Olympus existed. On one end, Vincent Joey Alar—the 1990s poster boy for partying—trafficked the crowd, introducing everybody to everybody else. “Gideon of Caballes Printing Press,” he would say, for example, “this is Star of Wuthering Heights. Say hi to each other.” The placed buzzed with beso-besos everywhere… Every night was dance night. This was where Wednesdays happened, before there was ever a Reggae Wednesday in Hayahay… This was where we held plenty of erotic poetry readings—courtesy of the shenanigans of the posse of the resident intellectuals Eva Repollo, Jean Claire Dy, Bombee Dionaldo, Jesselle Baylon, Tintin Ongpin, and Aivy Nicolas—complete with smoke machines, a ceiling full of condom balloons, and throaty deliveries and a lot of moaning… This was where Tuesday Nights were Girls Nights, Thursday Nights were (unofficially) Gay Nights, and the rest of the weekend a merry mix of Everybody Else.
Those days, indeed, were happy.
It suddenly seemed that Dumaguete was becoming truer to its cityhood. It was starting to feel like one; it was no longer so much an overgrown town, although much of its charm was still derived from a lingering sense of smallness as well.
It became a kind of secret destination, a Filipino city that was like no other. Soon, celebrities—film and TV actors and singers of all stripes—were constantly flying in from Manila, not to perform, but to bask in the Dumaguete sunlight as adopted locals. Here, they could not be harassed as they would be in Manila’s public places. They could walk the main stretch of Alfonso Trese (which was renamed Perdices Street), and not be gawked or rushed at by hysterical fans.
Then again, it was an old Dumaguete (now gone) that didn’t care much about local celebrities, nor fawned over them. It was a city that was not capable of being star-struck. (The teleseryes of ABS-CBN and GMA had yet to come in with such popularity to make a bakya masa of all of us.)
It was a city where actors like Mark Gil could come in to set up shop. In the old Perdices mansion along the Boulevard, where Mamia’s is now, the actor opened Limelight—a grand forerunner of El Camino Blanco, only better—which was a fine dining restaurant by day (and all throughout dinnertime) and a VIP club by night. This was where the best parties happened—its kidney-shape bar overflowing with the partying days of Daniel Fernandez, who was Dumaguete’s Party King and Ultimate Ringleader.
And the city, of course, felt like partying with him. It partied for the rest of that decade, to the soundtrack of Paul Van Dyk, Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill and Madonna’s Ray of Light.
“In 1996,” now Manila-based Dr. Gideon Caballes recalled, “the place to hang out in was El Amigo, our version of Minimik. It had great food, cheap too, but it was generally a nice place to chat over beer. And I remember Orient Garden, fronting what is now Gold Label Bakeshop. It was around from 1987 until probably 1990. It had a band famous for overplaying ‘The Name Game’ song. I remember hanging out at St. Moritz in Agan-an a lot. It was a nice seaside place to have a cheap date. This was the place to go to before Escaño became popular. Then there was Colors Disco in front of West City Elementary School. Then there was Music Box and that disco on the second floor of Gemini Building around 1991 or 1992. In 1996, there was Gimmick. Remember when Warren Cimafranca first broached the idea of opening an outdoors bar in the family property in the middle of all those residences in Claytown? We all told him the idea won’t work. That it would flop. We ate crow later on, didn’t we? We had no idea it would become so successful. Is it still the place to be seen in right now?”
The long party would go on until a little beyond the worldwide welcome for the new millennium (which unleashed the biggest Boulevard party in local history—complete with fireworks and spontaneous dancing in the streets).
The party would go on into the frenetic months of the Silliman Centennial, culminating in August 2001 when—for an entire month—Dumaguete did not sleep. That August was the peak of Dumaguete’s partying: it was filled with hundreds of random 24-hour parties everywhere, lasting all of its 31 days. How busy was it? Imagine the ultimate in traffic gridlock—at four o’clock in the morning, every day.
Then September 11 happened. When we all lost our innocence that day, our world shattered and shaken, the party ground down to a halt. For the next five years or so, all we had were shadows and memories.
Every generation in Dumaguete’s social set always has a muse who sets the tone for the party scene of the moment—a list that would include Jacqueline Veloso, Lua Khanum Padilla, and Christine Torres.
Flashback to 1996. Campus beauty Cherokee Dawn Esguerra—known more affectionately as C.D.—decided that she wanted to remember her twenty-first birthday the best way possible and in a manner that staid Dumaguete had never seen before. She was then the reigning Miss Silliman, and she would have none of the usual birthday buffets. None of the usual inuman at St. Moritz either. And none of the usual beach parties in the Bais sandbar, or Dauin. The speculation she hatched that soon raced through town like wildfire and had every one clamoring for the “exclusive” invitation to the shindig was—what if she invited the Who’s Who of the young Dumaguete set and ask them to dress up in 70s vintage costume, would they come?
A costume party. In the bell-bottomed, tie-dyed, sideburned, miniskirted gloriousness of the Bee Gees and their 1970s ilk.
The idea worked, for the most part, because of the promise of exclusivity. You were either invited, or you were not. For days before the party, those who still did not get the purple envelope with instructions to descend in full vintage regalia on the Joshua Room of Bethel Guest House—then the newest hotel in town—were feverish from anticipation and worry. It became, so to speak, a question of sociable existentialism: if you did not get the invitation, were you in fact a nobody?
In retrospect, the theme of the party was perched on an idea of risky novelty, given the notorious tendency of many Dumaguteños to spoil the fun in the name of “keeping a low and humble profile.” This is often the excuse for dressing down and going around in typical pambalay wear—a plain shirt (several sizes loose), a pair of “city shorts,” and sandals or espadrilles. Even for parties. And yet, perhaps for the first time ever, people heeded the sartorial challenge and began digging into their parents’ kabans. I went in as Elvis Presley in his Las Vegas years, minus the drugs and the paunch and the air of eventual doom. My pair of bell-bottoms was hot purple, my shirt a blazing LSD rainbow in brilliant Technicolor. My hair was too short, however, to be coifed into the standard Presley style—but I promptly made do by sporting fake sideburns. Everybody else—save for a staggering few who came in dressed as typical Dumaguete killjoys—dressed to the nines, and came in droves to the Boulevard, down to Bethel. They became a spectacle the likes of which this small city has never seen before. Everybody danced to the merry hits of the Village People and the Bee Gees and Gloria Gaynor until the wee hours, and soon everybody spread out around the city to satellite social hubs—the neighboring Lighthouse Bar was the next best thing—to prolong the party.
And for the longest time, that 1970s shindig was billed as the ultimate Dumaguete party to beat. It took five more years—with the month-long centennial celebration of Silliman last 2001—and another eight years—with the Philip Morris party last August—before the sheer audacity of C.D.’s party could be eclipsed. Great parties in Dumaguete, we soon learned, always came far between.
But in the final analysis, the 1990s would forever be marked as the decade where the city flowered and changed. Variety bloomed, for one thing. “In my time,” artist Sharon Dadang-Rafols said, “it was Silliman beach and Wuthering Heights, and it was always ‘action’ with friends, inom, tsika, poetry readings…”
“The places we went to,” recalled Silliman University’s students activity head Jojo Antonio, “were Lighthouse and Gimmick. In Lighthouse, new bands played every two to three weeks, and they were all from Manila and Cebu. The music ranged from the usual latest pop hits to retro. Everybody knew everybody then, and one didn’t worry over getting stabbed and shot after the late night fun. We could even leave our rhum or tequila bottles in the bar with our names scribbled on them, ready for consumption for the next day’s hangout.”
“Limelight was the ultimate!” remembered medical representative Jesselle Baylon. “It was great because of its cool house music. Great service, too. And in Lighthouse, we got different bands from all over the country, every month. And for your last stop if you felt like partying at 2 AM onwards, there was Detour. I loved that placed. It was hard to get another drink, and you just stand the entire time because there were no chairs—but people danced like crazy and you couldn’t help but bust your own moves… Dumaguete party places back then were better—but the number of people who knew how to party was even less than we have now. Now you have cross-generations of partygoers from their teens, their 20s and 30s. I wonder why they don’t open any more bars or clubs…”
Ian Rosales Casocot teaches literature, creative writing, and film at Silliman University in Dumaguete City, Philippines where he was Founding Coordinator of the Edilberto and Edith Tiempo Creative Writing Center. He is the author of several books, including the fiction collections Don’t Tell Anyone, Bamboo Girls, Heartbreak & Magic, and Beautiful Accidents. In 2008, his novel Sugar Land was longlisted in the Man Asian Literary Prize. He was Writer-in-Residence for the International Writers Program of the University of Iowa in 2010.
Buglas Writers Journal 