By TIMOTHY R. MONTES

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.