In the pantheon of Negros Oriental’s history, certain names flare like sudden brushfires in the dark, and then burn themselves into permanence. One such name is Salvador Sureta Abcede, whose 112th birth anniversary we celebrated last September 6. His nickname was Badong, and he was born in the quiet town of Indan [now Vinzons], Camarines Norte—but he was destined to carve his legacy in the mountains of Negros, among the ragtag men and women who dared to resist Japanese occupation.
Abcede was soldier, patriot, police chief, and—often forgotten in the catalogues of Philippine letters—novelist. To remember him is to remember how history’s brutality demands both a rifle and a pen, and how the story of our nation, particularly in wartime, is not only etched in blood but also written in words.
He began like many young men of his generation, full of zeal for uniform and flag. He entered the Philippine Constabulary Academy in 1935 and graduated just as the country teetered toward independence, yet shadowed by another colonizer’s ambition. When World War II came, he was in Dumaguete, commanding ROTC cadets at Silliman University. There, on the cusp of the Japanese invasion, he made a decision that would shape not only his life but the fate of the island: he would not surrender. When General Wainwright capitulated to the Japanese forces in 1942, Abcede chose instead to disappear into the folds of Negrense mountains, gathering farmers, students, and disbanded soldiers to form a guerrilla unit.
It is difficult to imagine now, from the vantage of a peacetime Negros where sugar and politics dominate the headlines, what it must have meant to live in those hills, hunted and starving, yet steadfast in defiance. For Abcede, resistance was not abstract—it was a daily calibration of courage and desperation. And when liberation came, his name was already legend, the commander who had held Negros together under the banner of a ragged sun.
His career after the war reads like the trajectory of a model soldier in a new republic. He went to Fort Leavenworth in the United States for advanced military training, returned to command Filipino troops in Korea during the Battle of Hill Eerie, and later became Chief of Police in Manila in the 1950s. He was, in other words, a man who had embodied the shifting faces of Philippine nationhood: colonial subject, guerilla rebel, soldier of a new state, custodian of law and order.
He died on 19 August 1982, and today his remains rest in the Libingan ng mga Bayani.
But if we remember Abcede only in terms of his campaigns and commands, we risk forgetting his most human endeavor: his turn to literature, his attempt to make sense of history not through strategy but through story. That endeavor is crystallized in his novel Nita—a work obscure in the annals of Philippine literature, and yet, for those who know it, a vital testament to the emotional cost of war.
Nita, published in 1985 by Express Commercial Printers Corporation, is not the military report of a commander; it is, instead, a narrative of intimacy written against the backdrop of conflict. Set in Negros during the Japanese occupation, the novel tells the story of a young woman—its titular character—who becomes entangled in the complicated web of love, loyalty, and survival in a land scarred by war. What makes the novel remarkable is how it refracts history through the lens of the personal. For while history tends to monumentalize battles and leaders, Abcede insists that the truer measure of war is in how it shatters ordinary lives, how it tests the boundaries of affection, how it remakes the texture of everyday longing.
There is an almost Tiempo-esque sensibility to Nita, which is perhaps unsurprising, given the novel’s affinity with Edilberto K. Tiempo’s Cry Slaughter!—another Negrense novel that dared to place love amid war. Both novels emerge from the same soil, both attempt to grapple with the peculiar violence that befell the island, and both are written by men whose lives were inextricably bound to those years of Japanese occupation. Yet Nita feels different because it bears the authority of someone who was not merely a witness, but an architect of that very history. Abcede was there, in the trenches and in the forests, and when he wrote, he wrote with the memory of gunfire still echoing in his ears.
What does it mean, then, that a soldier would write a love story? Perhaps it means that even in the most brutal of times, the human need to imagine tenderness persists. Or perhaps it means that the work of resistance is incomplete without also recording the quieter devastations—the disrupted courtships, the unspoken affections, the homes left empty by men who never returned. In this sense, Nita is not just a novel; it is Abcede’s attempt to humanize the statistics of war, to remind us that behind every casualty was someone’s beloved.
Today, Nita remains an under-read text, eclipsed by more widely anthologized works of Filipino wartime literature. Yet its significance lies in its rarity: there are not many novels about Negros during the Japanese occupation, and fewer still written by those who commanded its resistance. To engage with the novel is to bridge the gap between history and emotion, between the martial and the domestic. It is to see war not only through the glare of strategy, but through the eyes of a young woman navigating her own survival.
Salvador Abcede lived many lives—cadet, commander, general, chief. But in Nita, he allowed us to glimpse another facet: the man who understood that history must also be written in the language of longing. To read him today is to recover a voice that insists on the fullness of our wartime memory. His lone literary output insists that the stories of this island are not only about battles won and lost, but also about the fragile persistence of love amid ruins. And perhaps this is Abcede’s greatest gift to Philippine literature: that he reminds us the past is not just a ledger of victories and defeats, but also a novel waiting to be read.
There is always a sense of awe and satisfaction when we come across a very young writer who finishes their first book, a sense of defiance that says: I have done the impossible. Especially if the first book is a novel. For Dumaguete writer Stefan André Solon, who is all of 28, that seeming impossibility takes the shape of Tears of the Forgotten, a bruising, fast-paced novel that fuses elements of investigative journalism, political corruption, and the lore of the engkanto into a thriller both Filipino and universal.
When I ask him what the novel is about, he is disarmingly honest: “On a personal level, this book is about proving to myself that I could finish something this ambitious. I had carried the idea for a long time, and writing it was as much about self-discipline as it was about storytelling. It taught me that an idea can manifest in the real world if you commit to it. I also wanted something to call my own, something I could hold in my hands and say, ‘Yes, I made this. I am an author.’”
That last line is something every budding writer in Dumaguete has whispered into the salty night, walking the Rizal Boulevard with stories like ghosts perched on their shoulders. Here, in this small seaside city that birthed Bobby Flores Villasis and Elsa Martinez Coscolluela and Lakambini Sitoy, that nurtured Edith Tiempo and Edilberto Tiempo and Rowena Torrevillas, that continues to midwife the dreams of young scribblers like Michael Aaron Gomez and Lyde Sison Villanueva and F. Jordan Carnice, one does not simply become a writer. One is made by the city itself, with its campus workshops and smoky cafés, its long afternoons under acacia trees, its gossip and myths.
Stefan joins that literary lineage with Tears of the Forgotten, a book where a young campus journalist, Del, finds himself investigating the trafficking of engkantos whose tears are bottled and sold as elixirs for the rich. It is a wild conceit, but also a metaphor sharp as a blade: the powerful draining the vulnerable to feed their endless appetites. In one of the novel’s most chilling moments, buyers discuss these bottled tears with the same casualness they would apply to fine wines or diamonds. [Disclosure: this novel was developed under my fiction workshop for the creative writing program at Silliman University.]
But what makes the book remarkable is how deeply it is rooted in place. Stefan admits: “I wanted to create a world inspired by my home. The province of Lugo and the city of Azucapuerte are modeled after Negros Oriental [and Dumaguete City], and I drew on my own experiences of living here. I wanted to capture the idiosyncrasies, the stories passed through the grapevine, and the legends handed down by our forebearers, and weave them into a universe that feels alive.”
These words reminded me of the long tradition of Dumaguete writers who turn the local into the mythic, who see in the ordinary surfaces of the city—vendors selling fruit outside Hibbard University, boys guarding motorcycles in the parking lot—the beating heart of an epic. It is not hard to see Kiki, the orange seller of Stefan’s novel, as an echo of every girl we’ve passed on the Boulevard at dawn, selling fish or peanuts, invisible until we choose to look.
For Stefan, the act of writing the novel itself was not easy: “It was daunting at first. I had carried this story idea in my head for a long time, but the act of putting pen to paper felt overwhelming. I had never written anything this long before. But every great journey starts with a first step, so I took it. I just started writing. My mindset was simple: write it first, you can always make it better later.”
There is a lesson here for every young writer in Dumaguete—or anywhere—who is paralyzed by the enormity of their own ideas. Just start. [Or join a workshop.] The novel will find its way if you let it breathe. In Stefan’s case, it was through workshops, revisions, and multiple rounds of editing. He says: “Looking back at my earliest notes and summaries compared to the finished novel was almost cathartic. It was incredible to see how the story had grown, how simple ideas evolved into complex characters and themes, and how the world of Lugo gradually revealed itself on the page.”
In the end, Tears of the Forgotten is more than just a finished manuscript; it is a manifesto of intent. Stefan says: “With this novel, I wanted to contribute to that legacy of human creativity, to add my thread to the fabric of stories that connect us all.”
That he does so from Dumaguete is no accident. The city has always been a haven for creatives, especially writers. It allows a young writer like Stefan to dream of turning the rot of local corruption into narrative, to transmute engkanto tears into a metaphor for systemic exploitation, and to do so under the gaze of acacia trees and the steady presence of the sea.
Stefan dreams big. “In the long run, my dream is to build the world of Lugo into something larger than a single novel, a franchise that could take shape not only in books but also in films, games, and other forms of storytelling.” Ambitious? Yes. But ambition is precisely what Dumaguete has always demanded of its writers. It demanded it of the Tiempes when they built the Silliman University National Writers Workshop out of nothing but conviction. It demanded it of the countless young authors who came after, from Cesar Ruiz Aquino to Marjorie Evasco to younger generations still finding their voice.
Now it demands it of Stefan Solon, who with Tears of the Forgotten has written not just a novel, but a declaration: that the stories of Negros, of Dumaguete, of the Philippines, belong not only to myth or to the margins, but to the center of literature itself. And if Dumaguete is indeed a city of writers, and a city of stories, then this book is proof that it continues to do what it has always done best: take the trembling words of the young and, with the patience of the sea, teach them how to roar.
The poet and fictionist Cesar Ruiz Aquino—an eternal icon of both Dumagueteño and Zamboangueño writing—have been dazzling readers of Philippine literature for decades now, ever since he surged as a wordsmith of “robust eloquence” [from the words of Alfred Yuson, writing about the author for the Philippine Star] in the 1960s and the 1970s. As a member of a highly experimental group of writers that exploded with prominence in those decades—a generation that included Yuson, Ninotchka Rosca, Jose Lansang Jr., Erwin Castillo, Conrado de Quiros, and Wilfredo Pascua Sanchez—it took Sawi, as he is affectionately called by friends, quite a while to gather his writings together, but finally, in the early 1990s, he gave us the one-two punch showcase of the breadth of his writing prowess with his story collection Chronicles of Suspicion in 1990 and his poetry collection Word Without End in 1993. Both books instantly became classics of contemporary Philippine literature—albeit strangely out of print today—simply because there was no one else writing poetry the way Sawi was writing his poetry, and no one else writing fiction the way Sawi was writing his fiction—strange, musical, and—this has to be noted—highly autobiographical.
He became more prolific in his book publishing from the 2000s and after, coming out with an astonishing regularity with such poetry collections as In Samarkand (2008), Caesuras: 155 New Poems (2013), Like a Shadow That Only Fits a Figure of Which It is Not the Shadow (2014), Fire If It Were Ice, Ice If It Were Fire (2016), and Figures In A Long Ago Mirror (2019), as well as the personal anthology Checkmeta: The Cesar Ruiz Aquino Reader (2003). But aside from that brush with Chronicles of Suspicion, he has never published his fiction again in collected form—not that he was not writing fiction. He was still winning awards for the stories he did publish in various magazines—but only until the pandemic did we get new fictional work in a book from him, with Z for Short, the novel he has struggled to finish for what had seemed like forever. The novel is, of course, of the Sawi vein of fiction—still strange, still musical, and still autobiographical.
Here is an excerpt he is sharing:
Our window overlooked the rich orchard. From a branch of the tallest tree hung a dead bird, Fra Hernani and I discovered one day. How or why it died, there was no way for us to know. And the greater puzzle was how it managed to cling on to the tree branch, upside down, as if by sheer will and even beyond that as if it refused to let go of the tree's branch and plunged to the earth and turn to dust, become the earth. True enough it did not seem to deteriorate all the time I was in Manila. It did, of course, but its feathers continued to shield the bird—as if to hide from our sight, from the rest of the world, the fact of its annihilation.
What is the novel about? Here is an excerpt from it that explains itself: “I can’t write a novel is how I’ve come to decide autobiography is what it’s going to be, if failed nonfictionist as well. Autobiographer manqué. At any rate I will be the book. Or rather the book will aspire to be me. But of course, you will say, what book isn’t the author? I mean some reader, perhaps a French girl traveling in the Philippines, who knows English, will read it in bed on a winter’s night, fall asleep still holding the book, and wake up startled by the sensation of a man lying beside her and talking in his sleep, in a word, dreaming. Paris! Friends will recognize the slouch, the somnambular way of walking, the footsteps. The strange inconsistency in speech, by turns articulate and groping (now running over, now clamming up). The stranger inconsistency with the eyes: at times, from a natural inclination, riveted on—at other times, by habit, averted from—the face of the person he’s talking to. The palms. Which are what really rouse the young girl from Paris, though he’s caressing her only in a dream. His dream.”
The book, only recently published, is sold out and also now out of print.
Sweet Haven is set in the little city of Donostia, where bad news travels fast. So when 16-year-old Naia is found in an illicit pornography video, the tight-knit community is outraged. They want answers. The finger of blame soon points to Narita, Naia’s absentee mother, for putting career ahead of duty. Now Narita is back from Manila and must face her past and the memories of a life she fled. In search of the answers to her daughter’s scandal, she follows a trail of evidence to reveal a web of family secrets, corruption, prejudice and the barriers of social class. Sweet Haven is a story of a family buffeted by an ailing and intransigent nation, of the simple and bitter ways by which a family falls apart, and the brave leaps they can take to put themselves back together.*
The day that followed was designated for one of the ordeals of her life with Daniel: the Sunday service at the university church. Luth opened her eyes to gray dawn light. She turned over in the hope of getting more sleep and discovered her husband lying by her side. In discomfort she squirmed away. It was rare, nowadays, that they awakened in the same bed together. But last night he had crept in almost as soon as she had lain down. Perturbed from the meeting with the lawyer, she had immediately sought to lay a barrier between the two of them by means of a formal talk.
“How can you be serious?” she said in her normal voice now, picking up the conversation that had trailed off into nothingness the night before, when he had turned from her and lapsed into unconsciousness. “Why do you keep encouraging that man? Do you think I’m an imbecile, that I don’t know we’re being used?”
His eyes were wide open, too.
“You say you want to take her to the police station and then to court. Do you realize what that will do to all of us? The shame?”
She could not abide being next to him, the sweat-damp covers binding their limbs. Was he dead? she wondered suddenly. Had he had an attack of some sort, or was he asleep, like a frog, with eyes open? But she was afraid to drag herself up, lean over and verify, lest he, in this inappropriate moment, reach for her.
Her husband moved, stretched his than limbs. He seemed to have gained ten years in the night. Luth escaped to the kitchen. In the sink was a used plate. An empty can of tuna fish sat on the counter, besieged by ants. Naia had crept out of her room some hours before to eat, and left the clean-up to her.
Luth breakfasted furtively, chewing and swallowing long after the hunger had been sated. Daniel busied himself in the garage. He revved the car engine a couple of times, humming in an annoying, joyless way. Luth knew he was casting around for something to do so he wouldn’t have to talk to her. Why didn’t he just turn his computer on? In the last year or so he, a sixty-one-year-old PhD, had discovered video games. Atrocious military fantasies were his favorite.
The door to Naia’s room was closed, as always these days. Luth tried the knob anyway. The door opened without resistance this time. The girl was asleep, on her stomach, her breathing almost inaudible. The air-conditioner had shut down automatically hours before, but the atmosphere was chilly nonetheless. The drawn curtains kept out the harsh morning light.
She paused by the bed. Who was this creature? What was this horrible thing they had accused her of? When I was her age I was a good girl, thought Luth. Never went with boys, never read dirty books, never touched myself. There were bailes at the town plaza that the “ladies” could enter free of charge, but I never went to any of them. At fifteen I was a good girl—no, not a girl, a woman already. I had four siblings to take care of, and twice a month my father’s two bastards came to the back door to beg. We had no maid; I ran the house.
Naia had kicked the sheets to the foot of the bed; her legs were long and smooth, without the damaging insect bite scars that so many lesser creatures bore, those pale round flaws, edged in black, that in Luth’s childhood were called diet, after the ten-centavo coins. This perfect body, warm and breathing, submerged in the early morning light, had been host to God knows how many men, Luth grieved. The entire community had had her granddaughter. Lashed her and branded her with jets of hot seed. The Naia who lay there sleeping was irredeemably wealthy with experience.
Luth opened a drawer at random. It held the usual clutter a child cannot throw away: elementary school IDs, notebooks filled with messages from classmates, a grubby old Nokia phone. There was one photograph, of a baby. Luth squinted. Which one? It would have to be Naia, she thought; the photo was in color. The hand that supported the infant around the waist wore a white lace glove. Luth peered closer. It was not a glove. It was a bandage. The hand was Antonia’s, then. The old injury. She shook her head to dispel sad memories—the appalling violence, the damage in its wake. Where are you? she mouthed to her younger daughter, always her favorite. Why didyou leave? Weren’t you happy here? Antonia had been gone two years. If she had stayed to guide the child, none of this would have happened.
A movement caught Luth’s eye. It was the computer, still running, a screensaver—a woman with wild red hair—silently flipping through the same four images. Impatient with such modernity, she pulled the plug on the machine, banishing the hungry, knowing face.
Naia rolled over on her back, exhaled. She was no longer beautiful, thought Luth. She was used. What a waste, those long eyelashes, that lovely, tragic mouth with the droopy upper lip. A waste, a waste.
The lashes fluttered: the girl was awake.
“Lola.”
Her voice was thin, as though from disuse. She sat up, smoothing down her T-shirt to cover her navel, the simple movements pained. “Lola, what are you doing? Those are my things.” Her head snapped around, checking the room to see what else had been disturbed. “I was downloading music!”
“Waste of electricity,” Luth managed, her heart thudding in her chest. She could not meet the girl’s gaze. The dark brows, the crescent eyes that were no longer perfect, that were, damaged, diseased.
“Lola, this is my room!”
“You don’t own anything in this house. Get dressed. You should have talked to that man yesterday. He promised to save you from shame. But of course you’re the one who knows best. All the time. Now we go to church. This is a Sunday like any other.”
“Luth?” Daniel called from the next room. “Leave the child alone. Let her do as she wants.”
Now it was eight and the sky was cloudless, the heat unrelieved. Luth took a shower to cover her weeping. There was a great void within her. The warm water sluiced over the hull that was her flesh. Mercifully her husband left her alone as she dressed in the bedroom. Occasionally he liked to surprise her by easing himself through the door, watching her movements with the diffident smile she had once loved. She hated their mutual nakedness, hated the casualness with which, nowadays, she could shed her clothes and converse with him, impervious to the nut -brown shriveled organ nodding placidly at his groin. This was all it came to—the lust, the dreams, the dance.
The maid opened the gate for them, her gaze downcast, her movements self-conscious. Afraid of getting yelled at again. Daniel had washed the car. Wiped the windows with a squeegee, scraped off the layers of dirt flung up by the wheels. She knew he would be pleased with himself, and expect a few noises of approval from her. Luth could muster nothing. She got into the passenger’s seat. The backseat looked as always, a hodgepodge of books and student papers and, today, a crumpled supermarket bag. She gritted her teeth.
They chugged through the neighborhood, an enclave of fading wooden cottages sheltered by acacia trees. The Pastors had lived in a house rented from the university for nearly forty years, as did their neighbors, administrative staff and teachers like her and her husband. Luth had loved these unpaved lanes, their American names—Mercer, Dereham, Westbrook—the gardens bursting with bougainvillea and orchids and hibiscus, a riot of color all year round. Over time she had observed with chagrin the gradual decay of the houses. The university left maintenance to its tenants, but no one cared enough to spruce up their homes, not even with a fresh coat of paint now and then. It wasn’t part of the culture. But it was standard practice to gripe about how Sweethaven U worked its employees like slaves. On paper, their salaries had increased in proportion to their seniority, but those wages had failed to account for inflation or the devaluation of the peso that began in the 1980s.
Luth saw no one, but fancied eyes peering through the grimy screens at the windows of each cottage, the inhabitants gleefully tracking their progress. At last they reached Urbino Road, city territory, a route that connected their neighborhood of faculty homes to the university campus. Here they were just one vehicle among several traveling the two-lane stretch. The houses and store fronts had kept pace with the times—they passed a restaurant opened not two years before, a privately-run kindergarten in a residential bungalow, and a handful of Internet stations, their glass doors papered with video game posters. Money from a generation working overseas. Luth and Daniel entered the university through one of the side gates, the guard on duty peering at their faces beyond the access sticker on the windshield. Small brown discs of acacia leaves, shed for the summer, spun up from their wheels as they drove down the avenue to the church. Luth cast a helpless glance at the edifice as they parked. Its concrete walls gleamed with a fresh coat of white paint, as in those early years, when she was a newly minted Protestant matron. The chimes sounded about their ears, calling to all of Sweethaven. Pretending to be searching in the glove compartment of the car, they waited until most of the worshippers had come up the walk and through the portals and been seated. Students mostly, dormers by alumni from the neighboring islands: boys and girls in shockingly casual jeans and flimsy Made-in-China cotton dresses. The old guard of Sweethaven would have arrived long ago and found their usual pews.
“Showtime!” Daniel said in that cheery performance voice of his, and together they marched up the steps and through the iron-bound winglike wooden doors and found an empty space in the center of the nave, just as the recorded chimes, broadcast from a speaker on the roof, came to an echoing end.
Luth sweated in her size-forty-eight silk dress, a gift that Antonia had sent her from Europe. The fabric that sheathed her was all wrong for this climate. Electric fans that stood in the side aisles brought the smells of fresh-soaped skin and a hundred different perfumes to her nose, but did nothing to dispel the heat. Last year she had sworn to keep her pain to herself—the humiliations of her marriage, the shock of her husband’s betrayal—and show up at church by Daniel’s side. Staking her claim. That had been in August. She had kept her dignity, put on clothes too fine for the lives they led, styled her hair. Above all, she had kept her face frozen and turned to the front. No one would ever catch her scanning the crowd for some foolish young graduate student face. The worst period of her life, and it was not yet over.
The scripture reading ended, and the minister claimed the pulpit. Daniel grunted approvingly by her side. He was always attentive to what was going on, or managed to put up a passable show. Wretchedly she pumped her palm frond fan.
Today the sermon was about listening. The minister used the patronizing, engulfing “we.” Were we attuned to the voices of our children, could we discern God’s word in the jumble of our mundane concerns? One could be an intellectual giant and yet remain a spiritual pygmy. Reverend Manguerra gripped the Pulpit, glared at his congregation, looked directly at Luth and Daniel’s pew. Smug from a scholarship at—what was that American school now? Wesleyan. A scholarship to Wesleyan. What kind of school was that? Had he been there on a minority Program? In his day her husband had competed with the best of them, the best of those whites. In his day.
Now people were reaching for their wallets, and the soft strains of a guitar penetrated Luth’s thoughts. In the center aisle, a man stood before a microphone, one foot up on a stool to support the instrument. He smiled as he sang the offertory melody, inviting the congregation to share in a moment of folksy intimacy, and at the sight and sound of him, Luth’s heart thudded violently once more and she thought she might throw up right on her pointed leather shoe tips. It was Rinky Holland. In his mid-fifties but with a voice as sweet and seductive as a youth’s. He wore a sports shirt and khakis, as though to mock the perfumes and embroidered barongs of the old guard. Two girls in the pew in front of her plucked at each other in delight.
Then Reverend Manguerra was praying for wisdom and courage, that dads and moms and, yes, grandparents, too, might gently guide the beloved among them who had strayed. Only God could condemn, and only God could forgive. Heads swiveled in their direction: the dean of women and her chemistry teacher husband, the head nurse at the pediatric ward, the grade school principal. There they sat, poor things, Daniel Pastor and his wife, Luzviminda, such a comedown, but oh, how they deserved it. How wonderful the Lord’s justice was, in the end. Rejoice! How he managed after years of seeming indifference to I take the proud among them down.
A collective mumble and clatter and the peal of the organ in the choir loft marked the end of the service. Luth would have bolted, first out the door, but her husband was in the way. They stood trapped in the pew, while the congregation inched through the aisle before them, men beaming at one another, reaching out to clasp hands, women calling greetings to friends. Nobody addressed the Pastors, but their every breath was marked.
Rinky Holland made his way up the aisle, smiling to himself. His wife, Emily, followed. She was the high school principal; her signature was first on the letter that had informed them of Naia’s crime and punishment. They moved toward the rear of the church with a cat-clean confidence, the woman a beauty as she had been for as long as Luth had known her: pale, unlined skin; tiny, perfect figure; and dark, soulful Spanish-heiress eyes.
Emily stopped at their pew. “Dan, how are you? These must be terrible times.”
“How are you, Emily, and congratulations to Rinky. What a wonderful solo that was.”
Mrs. Holland frowned, took in his insane smile, then forged on.
“I know your present troubles are difficult to talk about. Our family has always been friends with yours. I would like to step in now and help you myself. Unfortunately it is not proper for a man to receive counseling from a woman. But your wife, Daniel, with all my heart I reach out to your wife.”
Luth’s eyes flickered warily from the upturned face. Emily had spoken as though she were not present. Her gaze fell on the young man who waited beyond his mother. His name was Brent; he was Naia’s age and was some kind of cadet officer at their high school. The almond eyes that met hers were unpleasant, watchful. Sweat trickled from Luth’s temples, down to her jawline and her throat. Her bosom heaved beneath the orchid-purple silk. She understood that he was laughing at her, laughing with his mouth in a perfect serious line, this dark, slender boy in trendy khaki trousers, fondling a late-model mobile phone, looking as if he came from a family of millionaire generals. Looking at her and laughing.
“Snake!” Luth spat.
The look of piety vanished from Emily’s face. “What did you say?”
“I said, ‘Snake.’ You’re vampires. Snakes. You feed off People’s misery.”
Emily’s eyes narrowed. “People are in misery, Mrs. Pastor, because they bring it on themselves, in their solitude and pride.”
Brent Holland nodded to a friend, smirked, and, pocketing his mobile, sauntered off toward a wing exit. Luth lunged after him, determined to grab him and shake the arrogance out of him as she might have done had he been a fourth-grader in her charge, but Daniel checked her, clamping a hand on her arm.
She surrendered to panic, turning this way and that to seek support from the other parishioners and seeing nothing but malicious glee in their faces. They could have been peasants gawking at a knife fight. Daniel was quietly leading her down the aisle. She tried to snap off the press of his fingers at her elbow.
Emily had quite recovered herself and pursued them a few token steps. “Luth, I know you are under duress,” she said. “I cannot even imagine what pain you must be going through. You really, really must open up now.”
“Tell that woman to shut up,” she panted.
Daniel steered her out onto the lawn and in the direction of the science complex parking lot. A woman behind them gasped, “What happened? Who was it?” Another declared, “Scandalosa.” She could still hear Emily Holland’s parting shot: “You are more than welcome to come to our home for a cup of tea.”
They walked rapidly away, heads down, two fugitives.
* The summary of the novel is slightly modified from the text in the Rocking Chair Books website.
Lakambini Sitoy is the author of two collections of short stories, Mens Rea and Jungle Planet. She received the David T.K. Wong fellowship from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom in 2003 and has an M.A. from Roskilde University, Denmark, in the fields of English Studies and Cultural Encounters, both under the Department of Culture and Identity. She has also received numerous prizes in the annual Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards in the Philippines, was a recipient of the Philippines Graphic Literary Awards and Philippines Free Press Literary Awards, and was a columnist and editor at the Manila Times. She lives in Denmark. Sweet Haven is her first novel.
In this excerpt from the Palanca-winning novel Bittersweetland, we witness the homecoming of the protagonist Aaron Guillermo, an exile who has just returned to Bacolod City from New York, readying to attend his father Bill’s mañanica. It is the early 1980s, and the sugar crisis is crippling the island of Negros and the death of Benigno Aquino Jr. has become a political specter, making this particular return home perilous. The novel explores Aaron’s fate as it is tied up to the fate of his country, and tied up as well to the peculiarities of his being a reluctant sugar heir, even as he also grapples with a failed marriage and his fruitless attempt to finish the novel he has been writing for years.
Bill Guillermo would have missed his mañanica had it not been for the roar of the plane taking off less than a kilometer away. He started up at past three and remembered that he was supposed to be in Montecielo. He had slipped out of bed without disturbing Baba and made his way to the Range Rover. I’ve become so damn careless, he scolded as he tip-toed to his bedroom and slipped into his pajamas. Fidela did not stir. He fell asleep the moment he hit the bed. I should get a separate bedroom.
Aaron had caught the first flight in time for the mañanica. He eased back into his seat, trying to remember the songs; he had been singing them, at least before his exile, for most of his life. Bill’s fiftieth was going to be Bacolod’s party of the decade, a day for keeping track of your proper rung in the social ladder. Only his father would be unimpressed by the ostentatious display. It has been so long, Aaron smiled as he dozed off, nodding off to the hum of the jet engine.
Three in the morning, Adrian’s room reeked of San Miguel as, guts boiling, head in a funk, he stumbled off to bed. The report went as planned, Fernandez praising his work, good job, Aaron. Always the mistake with the name. My name is not Aaron Guillermo, he had exploded at the surprised class, who had always seen him as taciturn and unaffected. I am Adrian Guillermo, battering the desk with his hands. And he had to tell that oddball what he could do with himself and his parents besides. Sometimes, if I try hard enough, I could be a prince, he now scolded himself, tilting his lava head, sensing danger as he listened to the clatter of his father’s arrival. It was his father’s birthday and had to get up early for the mañanica. Seriously.
Aaron woke up as the steward was announcing, in a sleepy native lilt native, the plane’s initial descent. How long has it been? Five years of exile, self-inflicted. He had threaded the earth as a belly-gazer, dreamt the world revolving around his pusod. Home, finally, he said aloud as Bacolod’s mist rose up to obscure his sidelong look, his eyes edging toward a blurry space, as if conjuring up a ghost. Outside his line of vision, dawn was a flux of city lights, oscillating in intensity, blossoming into a hazy field as the plane weaved and bobbed into its terse final approach. He glanced at the shoreline bordering the runway, just coming into sight, a myriad of boat-shapes and fish-pen enclosures shuddering upward to greet the plane’s screeching underbelly. Bill would get the surprise of his life, Aaron glowed. Fidela, not so her, had been insistent on the phone.
Thursday morning, he had been puttering around in his robe, recalling who he had lured to the pad the night before and what had become of her, when the jangle of the phone poked through his hang-over, a dull peeling knife.
“Aaron, how are you?” The voice, strangled by distance, rasped.
“Mom?”
“Blanche gave me your number.”
“Anything wrong?” He slumped into the rattan chair, his temple throbbing.
“No. Nothing’s wrong.”
“Why did you call?” Aaron gasped in horror as the blanket stirred. Mike’s secretary. He had not even asked her name.
“Aaron, is anything the matter?”
“No, no.” Fucking Buñuel dirty martinis! He filed away a mental note to stop clowning around with the vermouth.
“Aaron, its Bill’s, it’s your father’s fiftieth. Saturday.”
“I know. I sent a card.”
“It would be nice—”
“Mom, I have things to do.”
“It’s his fiftieth birthday.”
“Who’s there with you?” Aaron heard shuffling over the phone. “It’s Blanche, isn’t it? What’s she doing there? It’s only Thursday.”
“It’s some holiday.”
“It’s those rallies, isn’t it?” he asked, shaking his head.
“Do you want to talk to her?”
“I’ll call back in the afternoon.” He ran a hand through his hair. The bed creaked. A leg poked out of the thick blanket. Pretty toes which started all this anyway when he visited Mike’s law office.
“Robertito’s in Bacolod.” His favorite uncle, the Jesuit.
“I had lunch with him the other day.”
“Are you coming home?”
“Saturday.”
“Yes. And Bill’s not to know about this.”
“Ah. Surprise.”
“Catch the commercial flight.”
“Sigue.”
“How’s the book?” Fidela asked, relief in her voice. A name came to mind, but he was not sure if Mike said it was Mina or Mira. M something.
“Fine. I’ll be home—“
“Please make it in time for the mañanica.”
He replaced the receiver with a hasty goodbye and glared at the Amorsolo etching of women bathing, realizing this bucolic hallucination had greeted him every morning for almost a year. That long. Shit! He panicked as he picked up the phone. Before she could wake up, he called Mike to ask him his secretary’s name.
Aaron drove the car despite the protestations of Enteng, the gray-looking family driver. Both of them rolled down the windows, allowing the October morning to sweep into the car. The sharpened wind made Aaron shiver. He drove the Mercedes with his feet light on the accelerator, the diesel engine a soft whirr in the quiet near-dark. Traffic was non-existent. From Araneta, he turned left by the City Hall, down San Juan, so he could pass by the reclaimed area. There were no new buildings. A few nipa sprouts and a wooden complex—Enteng said this was the Manokan, famous for its roasted chicken—were scattered along the shoreline. He turned right by the gloomy-looking cathedral into Rizal and then, Lacson. He smiled, seeing how the skyline had remained the same. The tallest structure was the Philnabank Building, half a dozen stories poking the gathering light. The roads were better, small consolation.
Five years was long enough but even before his self-imposed flight, he had only come home during semestral breaks and Christmas vacation. He had not seen Bacolod in nine years. He chuckled and the driver stirred beside him.
“How are they?” he asked the driver.
“’to?” Enteng looked surprised. He mumbled assent, slouching back into his seat. The black Benz continued on through the lightening dawn, trackless, unmindful. He sighed, realizing he would see Montecielo in a minute.
“’nong, don’t you miss us?” He remembered Blanche asking him. It had started, all these questions, after he had arrived from New York and from failure.
“No, I don’t think so. You know how I feel about strong attachments.”
Blanche sighed, her eyes brimming.
“That may not sound right to you, but that’s how I feel,” Aaron said. “I’m sorry, Blanche.”
He had apologized then as he would apologize whenever Blanche changed tack to talk about “family.” She was the only one he saw regularly, always propping her girlfriends against him. She was always around, although he didn’t seem to miss her but for his regular shot-in-the-arm.
Aaron whistled as he steered the car left toward the seafront. The narrow concrete road was bordered on both sides by ipil-ipil. The last time he had visited Montecielo, his father had worried about these trees. Nearby squatters were cutting down the incipient branches for kindling. The trees had survived, he smiled, as he scoured the darkness ahead for the familiar stone wall hugging the contours of the hill. He looked at the car’s digital clock: half past five.
He spotted the low adobe wall before he saw the house, set on a small hill, and the pavilion, set on another. He followed with his eyes the wall climbing up a soft slope, broken by a white wrought-iron gate.
As he turned into the flagstone pathway leading to the house, Aaron nodded to the dozing guard. Fidela, just awake, stood on the veranda. Peering over her left shoulder, Blanche waited on tiptoes. Home! His hands trembling as he killed the engine. Patting the driver on the shoulder, he eased himself out of the car. His mother, hands behind her back, was smiling as she greeted him. Blanche waved vigorously.
Above the doorway, a large, yellow sheet of cartolina caught Aaron’s eyes. Blanche’s practiced schoolgirl scrawl greeted: WELCOME HOME, MANONG AARON. He looked at his younger sister, deciding she would never grow beyond her hair cut short, her pixie-like frame belying a strong, distinctive will, an acquiescence to love, yet acceding to the possibility of harm.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Aaron scolded her sister with a smile. He glanced at his mother, in a light cotton blouse and shorts. Borrowed from Blanche. A forty-five year-old woman couldn’t possibly look better than Fidela Guillermo. No worry lines creased her forehead despite her abjuring of surgery. She would never go under the knife; that would have been too painful. Aaron watched the slim figure flit into the living room, wondering where his mother threw away the dark secrets and lies. Where did these women keep the emotional reserve that allowed them to wear their hair short, fit into their daughters’ dresses, and look like their sons’ sisters?
Aaron followed Blanche and Fidela, his eyes growing accustomed to what was vaguely familiar in his mind. They were suffused with a warm glow, the large mahogany dining table, the light-bay colored sheen of the panels, the off-white rug stirring under his feet, the incandescent reflection of light against the French windows that swung open to the pool area. The years of exile did not erase those scraps of his past still extant in these objects.
A congenial sight, of children rehearsing for the mañanica, made him nod. By the pool area, a cleric in a Yankees baseball cap Aaron remembered as their ex-parish priest was encouraging the children. Blanche waited for Aaron, hanging on to his arms, and led him to the poolside. Bernadette, the elder Guillermo daughter, was sunk into a rattan chair, as dark, and as cross, as she had always been. Her plumpness was masked by the chair’s shadow, under which she bore the proceedings with a frown. Her mouth curved into an unaccustomed smile when she saw Aaron.
Aaron turned to a familiar, restive voice. Adrian, much taller than when Aaron last saw him, and no less angrier, was scolding a boy who insisted on dipping his foot into the water. Adrian saw Aaron and, holding the struggling child with his right hand, extended the other in firm, almost mano-a-mano, greeting. Adrian disported the awkward taste of his age, his untucked and outsized shirtsleeves and his skewed grin a slop of what, to youth, must seem most important. Aaron looked at his brother’s sockless feet and old Top-siders, remembering his own, as his uncle Tito called it, “age of misrule.”
“O, ‘nong. Glad to see you,” Adrian said. The boy broke loose and scrambled into the arms of an old dumpy woman smiling at Aaron.
Aaron smiled back at his old yaya. “Miss!” he called out, waving at the old maid who had served the Guillermo for twenty-five years, now their middle-aged mayordoma. She had been flat and stringy when she arrived and was now with a serious paunch. This had people gossiping that she was pregnant, which would have been a miracle as she had never been married.
“Crispin, that is your Manong Aaron,” she whispered to the boy, the dialect lilting even beyond its usual sonority.
“Crispin?” Aaron asked. Of course, Crispin. Blanche had told him …
“He’s not even supposed to be here,” Adrian muttered.
Aaron stared at the small, curly-haired boy who was his youngest brother, born in his exile. A five-year-old brother he had never seen. Somehow, that made him feel he had been gone forever. He is as old as Billy would have been, Aaron decided, even if there was no point bringing that up now.
The pool area began to fill. A few government officials and Bill’s business associates arrived, some with their wives and children, each one apologizing for their tardiness. The Guillermos streamed in. Mariano Guillermo and his wife Angela, Amanda (her mother’s namesake) and her husband, Junior Lacson. Aaron paid homage and his disinterest did not go unnoticed, Fidela sighing as she flew past him to wake up Bill. His cousins, he greeted with more relish. He exchanged banter with Junie Lacson and his wife Millette, greeted Andy Guillermo and his wife, Lisa, both his saving grace in New York. How things would have turned out if Andy had not hurried home after finishing his MBA. Aaron looked with wonder at his cousins’ children, Andy’s eldest, precocious CJ, named after his great-grandfather, the original Guillermo Guillermo and Junie’s Miguel Jr. and Carlos.
“Pads!” Aaron greeted his uncle Tito, at forty-four, the youngest Guillermo heir and the only one in soutane. His impeccable combed hair still jet-black, Tito looked too much like a banking executive to be mistaken for anything but a Jesuit. Even if they didn’t come closer than sixes and sevens over any subject, Aaron still looked up to his uncle, academician and sociologist, as his doppelganger. Tito shook his hands warmly and introduced him to Monsignor Golez, an old family friend, who always gave the invocation, and who Aaron had not seen since he officiated at his confirmation.
The din heightened as the other Guillermos came in, the older children shouting familiarly, the younger ones scrambling, screaming as harried yayas fussed over them. Aaron looked at his watch, his demeanor unruffled by the noisy going-on. It was already six o’clock.
Turning around, Aaron spotted his father. Both smiled as Fidela pointed out her son. Bill Guillermo, except for the hair peppered with gray, was Aaron older but not by much. He hasn’t changed, Aaron thought, as Bill kissed Fidela on the cheeks. He strode forward and grasped Aaron’s hands as the children wheezed out a sentimental Ilonggo song.
“Happy you’re home, Aaron. Damn glad!” Bill growled. He looks the same, Bill thought, after five years, more gaunt but still too serious. Aaron had his father’s wavy golden-brown hair, the high nose and dull-gray eyes. Bill could see how familiar Aaron’s waddle was, even after all the years. It was his own. They called Aaron “Ducky” in school but the past years had replaced Aaron’s flab with muscles.
Bill did not think Fidela could still surprise him after 25 years of marriage. She’s a good wife, a good woman and I wish I could be home more often, Bill thought as he led his wife and son to a table. They sat down, listening to the children as they swung into a Bill favorite. It was “The Days of Wine and Roses.” Bill smiled and sang along with the children, clapping his hands as they sang Berlin’s “Always.” Aaron peered at his watch again. Not much longer. The last series was sung, the voices soon straining with the impatience. “Hindi Kita Malimot” and then, Bill rasping it out on the microphone, “Moon River.”
Bill gave his salutations, Monsignor Golez led a prayer for peace, the hubbub continued as the strains of “Happy Birthday,” off-beat and loud, accompanied the exodus for the buffet tables. As the birthday song faded, a boy, his hair slicked back with cheap pomade, started singing the theme from Man of La Mancha, his thin breasts thrust forward as he scaled the higher keys (dis is mi kwes, to palo da star, no mater haw hoples), his fervor befitting the peculiar accent with which he sang the moment’s hit.
“Now that I’m fifty, they might take a pot shot at me,” Bill joked. Aaron, hearing rumors about his father’s political ambitions, laughed at the reference, not unusual as the seasonal storms approached and the country was passing through the eye of a political and social typhoon.
Less political talk, more appreciative mumbling around the board. You picked through a monolith of blue, pink, white and green puto stacked on silver plates and served with kesong puti, carabao curd, or you sipped hot chocolate, digging into services of Spanish omelet, wafer-thin slices of Chinese ham, Chorizo Bilbao and Chorizo hamonado, while the children continued singing, watching with wide eyes, waiting for their turn at the overcrowded table.
The chill was disappearing, the sun starting to weave shadows on the grassy knoll beside the pool house. Bill had his arms around Aaron, both waving away each offer of breakfast, Fidela standing behind them, small in their shadow. Aaron thought, how prescient it was that he was standing here in the season of rain, this October month, this too-early Sunday morning, in this perilous hour of homecoming.
Raymundo T. Pandan, Jr., who is known as Rayboy to friends and associates, hails from Bacolod and has practiced law for more than 30 years. He served as Dean of the College of Law at the University of St. La Salle from 1998 to 2010, and continues to teach in the law school. He was the research director of the Supreme Court’s JURIS Project on mediation from 2004 to 2008. He was fellow at the Silliman University National Writers Workshop in 1984. His poetry collection Illuminations and Sonorities (2006) and children’s poetry collection The Ocelot and Other Poems (2012) won the Palanca Awards, while his first book of poetry, Days of Grace: Selected Poems and New, 1984-2002, was a finalist for the National Book Awards. He won the Cirilo Bautista Prize for the Novel in 2015.
Buglas Writers Journal 