Writers

By Cesar Ruiz Aquino

In the later 1960s Proc Montecino was the editor of a Zamboanga monthly news magazine that he himself published and hoped, for a while, to circulate not just in our town but in other parts of Mindanao like Davao and Cotabato. The dream did not materialize and eventually his magazine even folded up. But there was a time in 1966–1967 when I frequented his office on the second floor of the Manuel Wee Sit Building. I was exceedingly welcome. I was the college kid who, in 1962, published two short-stories in quick succession, first in Graphic and then in the Free Press. When he wasn’t too busy, he would treat me to coffee — sometimes, when he really had time, to beer — downstairs on the groundfloor. In time I knew his secret: he had a collection of rejection slips from national magazines for short-story attempts that died, so to speak, with their boots on. [1] The coffee and beer sessions, where he went literary to his heart’s content, were a substitute for the elusive acceptance slip. But that’s not fair to Proc. Anyway, let me just shift to the present tense.

In one such session he gets me to promise writing a story for his magazine. [2]

In another, a name crops up: T.E.

“He’s a friend of yours?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe we should get together sometime.”

“Exactly. He was here yesterday and we talked about you.”

There are five or six people in Zamboanga apart from me who have published a short-story or two in national magazines, all of whom I haven’t read, including T.E. who is the latest and rather impressive: he has produced about half a dozen in two years.

Somehow I have a feeling that Proc is playing me off against the guy. I have not done anything since the two stories in 1962.

“What’s he like?”

“He drinks like a black stallion.”

Proc puffs at his cigaret, apparently relishing his queer imagery as much as he does his association with T. E. [3]

I’ve seen the guy once, late at night, walking down Guardia Nacional with some friends, drunk and laughing raucously. [4] He is thirtyish, rather short [5], the sleekly dressed sort, down to the gloss of his shoes. I have a hazy understanding that he is a news correspondent for some national newspaper or other, and that he lives with his parents who are well-to-do. Faint traces of the Spanish in his looks [6] Prominent stomach, eyeglasses, a slight waggle when he walks. [7]

It was my last year as a boy in Zamboanga.

The sequence was something like this:

I study at Silliman for one semester in 1962. The next semester I quit school and go to Manila for the first time, to attend a seminar under Leonard Casper, the American literary critic, at the Ateneo Graduate School on Padre Faura. [8] When the next school-year opens I am back in Zamboanga. I finish my A.B. at the Zamboanga AE College. Then I go back to Manila, go to the U.P. at Diliman for graduate work in Comparative Literature. I am twenty-one. I see James Dean for the first time at the Lyric Theater in Escolta. The movie is East of Eden and when the movie is over I want to bawl like a child inside the moviehouse’s comfort room.

I come home during the semesteral break and beg to be allowed to quit school for a while and stay home. My mother will hear nothing of it. I do not have the courage to tell her I am a delinquent, more exactly a truant, in school and I know the second semester will go absolutely the same way. So she wins, I go back to U.P. and after a year she loses, though I can hardly say I’ve won — I leave university with no units earned except in one subject under Mrs. Dolores Feria.

Now nothing can make me go back to school. My mother yields helplessly, as though I were ill. I am in fact completely bewildered, sort of knocked out on my feet. But I am back to my old habits in no time. I visit the public library in the mornings. From our house on Unreal Street, it is one short perpendicular street away — a small building from the American years. Its door faces north; one enters turning left, away from a now visible sea beyond the Fort and the acacia trees. In the afternoons I take to the streets. I browse in the two bookstores, Apostol & Sons and Golden Bell, very small but in the former I miraculously find a book each by Capote, Bellow, and Nabokov. One after another I buy all three. I run into old friends, chiefly Willy Arsena.

This goes on for months. In July, I join a radio station as casual announcer. I disc-jockey in the evenings. People wonder who the young man behind the voice is. At parties they are surprised to meet me. Naturally I am extremely good-looking on the radio, not to mention tall and dark. I become shyer and shyer and more and more conceited at the same time. They can’t make anything out of me in person. I am the ultimate in uncommunicativeness. But quite swaggering on the radio, and on the phone when the girls call up, who all flip over the voice. One can’t wait to meet me and comes to the station right after she calls. When she arrives, I put on a long-playing album and take her outside the booth, away from the view of the technician, and proceed to at least partially fulfill her fantasies before they completely deserted. In March of the following year, I transfer to another station where, in December, I get into a fight with a senior announcer, let go with a hail of blind blows one of which lands hard, sealing the end of our boxing match with a black-eye.

Also the end of 1966, the end of my job, the end of my adolescence.

The end of my life in Zamboanga.

I have all the while kept my real, secret self [9] alive by retaining my melancholy habits and corresponding a little with Willy Sanchez in Manila. Writing has been torture. My vain opinion of myself contributes to my block, poisons whatever real ability I may have. I don’t even know that it’s a writer’s block — what I know is that, though I think of writing all the time, I shirk the actual job of sitting down to work. [10] The truant continues on his way. I dissipate myself on dreams. On the dream. I don’t even really read. I buy or borrow a book and keep it in my room like a miser, reading it a little here and there, but never get to read through. I never get to finish the three books — Saul Bellow’s Herzog, Capote’s In Cold Blood, and Nabokov’s The Gift. Yet I feel somehow I must be someone like Herzog (whatever he is), and I am killing the gift in cold blood. I am hungry for life, but life as it is in books. And I don’t want to just read it. I want to live it. Zamboanga will never read like a book. I will have to be a magician. Willie Arsena says we shall die talking in Chinese. It is 1967 and Manila is luring me again. It is back of my mind all the time — Manila, the Henry Miller Paris of my dreams, the book of my life which I dream of living and writing. I make up my mind to leave. Look for a job. Begin. Big city, I’m coming. I spiral, zigzag, fly, plummet, sink, resurface, float, loiter at Proc’s, meet T. E. One Sunday afternoon a little after lunch-time I get a phone call. It is T. E. drinking beer at the beer garden on the groundfloor of the Manuel Wee Sit Building — the downstairs place from Proc Montecino’s office — and he is asking if I care to join him.

I am a half-hour late. T. E. has two companions. Piled neatly to one corner of the table are the beer bottles they have emptied. There are four unopened bottles in front of the vacant chair — my “fine”, he says, as I sit down. Meaning I have to drink all four and catch up.

T. E. then tells me he has been granted a fellowship to the Silliman writers workshop in Dumaguete, scheduled in May, but he doesn’t feel like going all by himself so he is chucking it. Anyway, he’s heard I studied at Silliman for a while, was in the 1962 workshop — the very first — so can I tell him what Dumaguete is like and the workshop? [11]

I tell him he should go. I tell him Nick Joaquin and Franz Arcellana were in the 1962, the first, workshop. Ed and Edith Tiempo were the hosts. Among the fellows was Wilfrido D. Nolledo. [12]

Before I know what’s happening I tell him we can go together. Soon we are talking like there is no doubt we are going to Dumaguete together. We split at about five o’clock. Back home, I tell my mother about it. She gladly gives her consent. I do not tell her of my plan to proceed, after the workshop, to Manila. [13]

I visit T. E. in his house four days later. I meet his mother, who is as excited as we are about the trip.

Two weeks later, we take the boat. T. E. sees to it that we have a case of beer under our cots. It is the middle of April and the middle of sundown.

After fourteen or sixteen hours, we are in Dumaguete. It is around eight in the evening. We take a room at Al Mar, on the boulevard a little past Silliman going south. Then more beer in the dining hall which is empty.

T. E. calls Dr. Tiempo up. And after the formal greeting and self-introduction it is, naturally:

“By the way, Cesar Ruiz Aquino is here. He’s right beside me.”

And so I hear the man’s voice again after almost five years.

When I hang up, I am, in the blink of an eye, a fellow in the Silliman writers workshop.

Beer and laughter — that is, the workshop has begun.

At past ten we decide to go out.

We flag a tricycle, amused by the red rose on the driver’s buri hat before he has stopped. Interesting too is the design of the tricycle: T. E. says it is a rocket ship.

The driver says there’s a place near the airport.

The rocket ship roars along the highway.

We meet another tricycle. The two drivers recognize each other, slow down and stop. We u-turn. The second tricycle, less gaudily painted and designed, is a submarine — I tell T. E.

The drivers talk, unfazed by all the laughing. There are two girls in the submarine — one a mermaid, the other a luna moth. T. E. gets down and trades places with the luna moth.

We head back for town. I see T. E. turn around laughing to look at us. The happy look on his face is so funny I can almost forget that the drivers are racing. I try to kill the paranoia by thinking everything is moving. The planet itself is moving, and along with it the stars. But the thing gets worse. The whole universe could turn turtle.

There is only one room. This does not deter us.

And the light from the hall outside comes in through the gaps above the wall. We ask the attending boy if they can turn it off. Boy replies they can’t.

This does not stop us either.

I can’t help taking a look at T. E. and companion. I suppress a laugh. Like a stallion is right. Beneath the pot belly and the slight waggle, he is a horse. [14]

They lie still.

I keep recurring, trying my best to even things off somewhat. I fall asleep with a joke: I’ve outrun Proc Montecino’s black stallion, three Sundays to one.

In my sleep I dream I am riding a horse in my grandfather’s land in the mountains and the horse is flying. The flight is slow. After a while, the horse is a giant butterfly. It becomes harder and harder to fly. We draw nearer and nearer to the ground. When we land, there is a small nipa hat on the spot. A woman is giving birth inside. From the foot of the stairs, I see the midwife come out of the room and talk to my mother. She is one of our tenants. I go up and tell her my butterfly has sprained its wing, can she heal it. But that’s an airplane she says and runs for cover under the trees. I fly deftly between the branches and soar, then swoop down in circles till I spot my target. I hit the umbilical cord, splitting the child from its mother.

A third woman, of bewitching beauty, wipes my perspiring face with a handkerchief that has a red rose painted, together with the baby’s smile, upon it. Then it is not a red rose but a red sun.

T.E. makes fast friends with the writers who are mostly from Cebu: Nelson la Rosa, Eddy Yap, Ric Patalinjug, Jun Canizares, and Thelma Enage. The writing fellows from Manila are Romeo Virtusio, Mar Arcega, and Joy Dayrit. There are two nuns: Sister Delia and Sister Imelda.

Who bears some resemblance to the third woman in my dream! [15]

My roommate is Eddie Yap, who is most of the time high on Benzedrine. He wakes screaming one morning, sitting up terrified as he looks upon his missing arms.

Nightmare. His arms are very much there. [16]

The piece that is taken up on the last day of the workshop — in the very last session in the afternoon — is a short-story with Zamboanga for its setting. Glances, as the session begins, coming naturally in my direction and T.E.’s. Author can only be one of us.

At the Silliman writers workshop, the identity of the author is not revealed until discussion of the work is finished.

The story centers around a monster, a rich Spanish mestizo in his fifties who owns coconut plantations both in Zamboanga and Basilan. Estranged from his wife and family, he has lived alone, for decades, in a house in Pasonanca with his cook who is also his gardener.

The man is Bluebeard, Zamboanga edition. Buried in this fiend’s backyard are young women he ravished and then killed. He has no problem seducing them. He has wealth, good looks, a way with the ladies. The last being chiefly his diving prowess, amazing for a man past fifty, displayed on weekends at the Pasonanca Park swimming pool.

And he has no problem with the town’s knowledge of his deeds. He is able to silence everyone — victims’ relatives, judges, the press and radio. How? Through glitter. The glitter of money and the glitter of terror.

This hush-up, sustained incredibly for decades, may have spawned exaggerations. It is whispered that he watched his little daughter drown at a beach and collected a fortune in insurance. [17]

He vacations once every two or three years in Spain with the secret purpose of surgically cutting his tail, which regrows.

The story’s point of view, first-person singular, almost makes it a double story (the narrator is the author). The narrative is so constructed as to make either of the following observations equally correct. (1) The monster’s crimes are etched against the day-to-day affairs of the narrator who leads an uneventful existence. (2) The day-to-day affairs of the narrator whose life is uneventful are etched against the monster’s crimes.

Anyway, the comeuppance: The man is driving his car across Cawacawa Boulevard, south to north. He is headed for Pilar College, Zamboanga’s exclusive school for girls. Comes down. It is high noon. Suddenly — out of nowhere — a boy, very young, sixteen or seventeen, is facing him. “When the gun cracked it was as if the sun, blazing out of Africa, had struck and he saw everything spiral into a still point amid the blackness of his heart.”

On the next day the gardener is found hanging from a tree. The same tree under which he once raped a girl in front of the devil who had told him to do so. The story instantly spreads that the devoted gardener, again, was only carrying out his master’s order, this time his “last will and testament.”

Dr. Tiempo qualifies his admiration for the story by pointing out the rather sensational material and the author’s apparent tendency to indulge in it.

Sister Delia says she does not know which is the real horror — “the Spaniard demon” (she keeps saying this till the fellows smile) or the fact that the townspeople have been willing to live with his deeds for decades.

Jun Canizares says as monstrous as “the demon Spaniard” (laughter from the fellows) is the fact that the author obviously enjoyed writing the story (more laughter).

I venture the remark that perhaps it would be interesting if the man’s having a tail, surgical removal of which he takes periodic trips to Spain for, were not just folk tale but actual.

T.E. immediately answers that the author “couldn’t possibly fictionalize everything.” The piece, he says, is based on an actual story in Zamboanga.

There is a general look of surprise on everyone’s face. Both T. E. and I have joined the discussion as if neither of us is in fact the author.

“Did you see this man?”

T. E. again: “I saw him dive at the Pasonanca swimming pool, the sound of the water as he cleaved it followed by the onlookers’ applause still in my ears as I say this.”

“How come we’ve never read it in the papers?”

I answer this: “That’s how weirdly far-reaching his sinister power was. Some people say he was practicing the occult — that he was in fact doing ritual murders. If this were the U.S.A. you can be sure a Truman Capote would be writing the book.”

T.E. adds: “The story says he bribed and made death threats.”

“What’s Africa doing in this story?”

“Allusion — blackness of his heart echoes Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Someone criticizes the story for what appears to be blatant editorializing. This is the passage:

The enormity of it all, if the stories are true, was so unspeakable it’s a wonder that for so long we were able to live with it, were in fact ready to live with it for the rest of our placid lives.

These were tales of darkness that register intensity ten on the metaphysical Richter. So dark as to be nightmare interpretations of what the city’s name, based on two syllables, means. “Boang,” mad.

If the immediate news reports are true, the assassin assumes the status of an avenging angel, plummeting like Kleistian lightning from heaven when men fail to settle horrendous issues of justice among them. How significant that the gunman is a youngster — sixteen to seventeen years of age — what more fitting visitor and emissary can we have from a future disconsolate with ours? Young boy with a 45 caliber pistol for flaming sword razing the judged man to the ground.

“Well,” I smile, “that’s really from the editorial of one of the city’s papers.”

A panelist looks stumped. “Is it? I don’t remember seeing that. Besides I thought radio and press in the town played hear no evil, see no evil, talk no evil with regards to the whole matter.”

“You’re right. Read the story again. The editor wrote an editorial that he didn’t publish.”

Panelist: “Yes, but it’s nowhere indicated that the passage in question is that unpublished editorial.”

“It’s sufficiently hinted.”

“Was the gunman really a boy?”

This is Sister Imelda. [18]

“He was,” T. E. answers her.

“I can’t help wondering who he could have been. It seems to be the final touch to a story that’s — well — stranger than fiction.”

There is a momentary silence in which everyone seems to be sorting through Sister Imelda’s remark mentally. Look who’s talking, I say inside me as I note once more this beautiful young nun’s uncanny resemblance to the woman in my dream.

“Does the author intend to publish this?”

When the workshop comes to a close, T.E. and I are each offered a graduate assistantship in the English department by the Tiempos. Manila bursts like a bubble.

T. E. and I — and my brother Voltaire — share a cottage inside the campus for one semester. It does not take long for us to see that our personal differences rule out a close friendship. I even begin to dislike him sometimes. His beery (even when he hasn’t had a beer) quality arouses my distaste. Above all he is not sympathetic — is the exact opposite of sympathetic — to my dreamy moods, does not seem to have any interest in women. Unable to hold myself, I tell him he can’t possibly go on doing the way he does forever; a man ought to have a wife. I don’t know if this hurts him. He does not seem to be the sort who gets wounded visibly, never gets into a mood. But something between us is soured. We drift apart. He finds other friends. So do I. Even here we are irreconcilable. We don’t take to the same people.

Then fate plays a little joke: T.E. gets married. [19]

At the start of the semester we get to know a group of young ladies in a neighboring cottage. T.E. meets a music teacher.

We visit the cottage together at first. After a while, he visits the place alone. I know it is the music teacher.

The first time he visits the cottage alone, he comes home near midnight. He comes in quietly but briskly, all potbelly as he takes his shirt off. Before he can sit down, I ask him how the visit was, framing the question very ribaldly. His eyes laugh, but to my surprise, he says he can’t answer my question — what if the lady becomes his wife.

A week later, he comes home one night with her framed picture. I look at him in disbelief. Aware of my gaze, he does not meet my eyes at first. Then the happy smile comes on his face and we burst into laughter together.

And so our paths diverge and the years burst like bubbles — whole balloons of memory that do not include T. E. Dumaguete swallows and digests us separately. He becomes just one of the faces that I see on the campus from time to time. He and his wife move from the campus to Banilad, to the southern limit of the city. Their baby, a girl, is born. Space wheels, time drops like a crescent moon. All of a sudden I run into T. E. one Sunday evening. The night is young. It is October in 1972 and there are no memories.

We are both teaching in Silliman.

T.E.’s wife is in Spain. She is taking further studies and will be away for a year. I do not know if their child is with her or with T.E.’s parents in Zamboanga.

T. E. is on his way to Looc, near the wharf. He asks me if I want to come along.

The place is quiet when we arrive. It’s a small place with painted walls. The light is dim because of the colored bulbs.

There are three girls.

The girl who serves us beer drops a few coins into the jukebox and after pressing her selections sits with us and talks to T. E.

T. E. introduces us to each other and tells the girl to sit beside me. After a while, she asks me if I care to dance. I shake my head and offer her a beer instead. She gets up for it and when she comes back I rest my hand lightly on her lap.

She keeps pushing my hand off her lap gently.

There’s a cluster of empty beer bottles on the table when the girl we are waiting for shows up. She is fair-skinned and hefty. She stands beside T. E. and slings her forearm on his shoulder, their hands meeting in a clasp. He tells her to get some more beer but she answers that she wants to go home. T. E. introduces me to her. She smiles at me. I reach out for a handshake and Ernie’s eyes laugh when I kiss her hand.

The four of us leave the place and walk through an unlighted neighborhood. The house is not far. It has two storeys. The girl with me occupies the downstairs portion. She tends to the kitchen straightaway while the two sit down on a single upholstered seat, their hands still locked. I’m sitting on the bench at the table wondering what the time is.

She takes out some eggs and a can of corned beef.

We buy some more beer after dinner. After a while, I ask what the time is. No one has a watch. She says it must be very near twelve. Twelve means we have to stay in or risk getting apprehended if we go home.

I’m sure it’s only around ten-thirty.

I drink my beer quietly, still trying to decide whether to go home or not. I can feel my body aching to get some sleep.

T. E. and friend slip out to go upstairs.

When they are gone, she tidies the bed up. There’s a smaller bed in the kitchen, folded up against the wall to which it is attached.

I sit on the bed, take my shoes off. She comes out of the kitchen with a blanket and makes for the door. I ask her where she is going. She says she will sleep upstairs. I get up, overtake her and close the door. Smiling, I tell her I’m dead tired and I won’t disturb her. I add that if she sleeps upstairs it will look like I’m driving her out of her own place and I won’t feel good about it.

She yields.

When the light is out, I lie trying not to moan. The nights of staying up very late are telling on my body. I bury my face in the pillow as if my whole head is a wound and the pillow is a cool stream or a balm.

An hour passes. Another. All at once I know I will pass the whole night sleepless if I don’t get up and go to her.

In the dark, I make her form out. She is lying on her side, facing the wall. I shake her gently. She stirs and half pushes against my arm, as if awakened from a doze she was just about to sink into. I tell her I want to know where the water is, I’m thirsty. She mumbles where it is. I grope for a glass on the table. I drink the water soundlessly but can’t avoid sighing after emptying the glass.

I go back to her bed, sit on the edge for a while. My eyes now adjusted to the dark, I watch her, relishing the sight of her breathing deeply, tense with waiting.

The bed is too small and it squeaks. She asks to transfer to my bed. We get up. She turns the light on. I feel funny standing, in more than one meaning of the word, as I wait for her to get onto bed. She strips the gown off.

In the light I discover that she is pregnant.

Afterwards I strike the slightly swollen belly gently. My touch is hesitant at first, as if her belly were some strange animal that might bite.

I ask her if she knows who the father is. She answers that she is not what I think she is.

There’s a little girl washing clothes in the kitchen when I wake up. The little girl looks up at me quickly and shyly.

I ask her who the little girl is. She says the girl is from the neighborhood who comes every morning to her place to wash.

She tells me T. E. left early in the morning. I ask her what the time is. She says it’s past ten. I ask her in a whisper if the girl stays in the place all morning. She says the girl will be off in a little while.

I make some coffee and smoke as we sit at the table saying nothing.

The little girl leaves, saying nothing and glancing at me again.

I get up and lock the door. I pull her to bed.

Afterwards I stroke the belly again.

I have a strange urge to squeeze the rest of her body hard till it hurt. My hand stops and rests on her womb.

I tell her to name the child Rima, if it’s a girl. Or Risa. Rima and Risa if it’s going to be twins. She laughs. Rhyme and laughter, I told her.

If it’s a boy, I continue, Andre is a good name.

She laughs again, saying the name as if the name were a puzzle, but adds that she doesn’t like Andres. I tell her it’s Andre not Andres. She asks if it’s English. I tell her the English is Andrew. Andre is French and it sounds better, special.

I begin to be aware that I am a hair’s breadth away from play-acting to make her feel good but actually I have no intention of coming back. I suddenly regret that I have no money I can spare. I think of the food last night.

Weeks pass before I get to see T. E. again.

When I see him, he tells me the girl keeps asking about me. I say nothing and merely laugh with him.

Whenever we chance to sit at coffee together, the girl crops up in our talk inevitably. It becomes some kind of ritual.

After a while we get over it. I see him more and more rarely.

A year later I see the girl again.

I am strolling on the boulevard with Butch Macansantos. Butch Macansantos is twittering, firing away at Nietzche or is it Dostoevsky.

Someone pokes me from behind.

She gets past us in a half-run and not turning to look at me. I recognize her.

I stand motionless for a moment, then run after her.

I ask her where she’s going. She says she’s going home. I ask her if I can go with her to her place. She says an uncle is at her place. She is walking fast, as if the night is propelling her feet.

I ask her about the child.

She says she had it aborted.

I walk back to Butch Macansantos. He asks me who the girl is.

Butch Macansantos is a young poet from Zamboanga whom I recommended to the Tiempos for a fellowship at the 1972 workshop held in May. Now he is taking up his M.A. in English under their tutelage.

I begin to tell him the story

I change my mind mid-sentence. But I have already mentioned T. E.’s name. I continue a little. Shift to Proc Montecino.

Who is in Dumaguete and still at it, publishing and editing a weekly, wanting I’m sure to see me. And still wanting, I’m sure, to write. Albeit secretly.

“Maybe we should get together sometime.”

It is 1974. Memories dart like shadows as I stalk, though I am in fact the quarry. I stand waiting for the day when they shall be all over me.

1 I mean there’s a certain heroism in anyone who persists in a literary or artistic bent even when he knows his limitations. Proc, who is no longer around — may he rest in peace — persisted for I do not know how long. Possibly to the end. Despite this personal frustration, which must have been painful to him, I won’t ever forget (he was about a decade my senior): “Journalism has limits, kid, believe me. Fiction has none. And I mean when it comes to presenting the truth, to reporting — yes. Believe me. The fictionist is Superman.” Let me put down here, to avoid giving a wrong impression, that I can’t say we were great friends. We were not really even friends — but Zamboanga was a small town as was Dumaguete where, by sheer coincidence, we were both to be transplanted.

2 A promise I was unable to keep. It was not until 1969 when I finally broke into print once more with a short-story — a silence of seven years. And after that nothing again for half a decade. Perhaps in 1976, when I was writing a series of autobiographical fragments for Ermita, the magazine, I finally realized that I was incapable of writing the traditional short-story. I was writing, at the rate of one every month, five pieces for that wonderful but short-lived outlet — pieces of the sort that are now called cross-over.

3 If this were a movie, creative use of the cigaret smoke can be made which will shift the scene to one in which T. E. is shown as he looked in 1966.

4 The physical details would come later — exactly when he “collected” or “settled” in my mind’s eye I do not know.

5 But taller than Proc who was short, though he could in fact, as I have written elsewhere, be tall in some other sense.

6 If you have seen the sketch of him done by the Zamboangueno painter, Ed Jumalon, and printed on the back cover of one of his recent books, you might object to the adjective ‘faint,’ — he looks quite Spanish, or at least Mexican.

7 That is, where did Proc Montecino’s metaphor or simile come from?

8 I had applied for a fellowship and was accepted. Leonard Casper, teaching at UP Diliman and married to the Filipina writer, Linda Ty-Casper, was then an active part of the local literary scene. Casper invited a good number of writers to talk in the seminar. I remember well Estrella Alfon, Greg Brillantes, Gilda Cordero-Fernando, Amador Daguio, Emanuel Torres, Jess Peralta, and — I think — Franz Arcellana. For the life of me, I don’t know why I am not sure.

9 The one with my real voice, not quite found yet, but which Willie Arsena, perhaps, virtually alone in Zamboanga, had heard.

10 Perhaps there was a real block somewhere deep inside me, too deep for one at my age to understand. And perhaps it would be more accurate to say, rather, “My inability to write has been torment.” I was still far from the day when I would see that what may hinder a literary youngster from writing is his own awareness of the masters, whom he aspires, alas, to write like. One prose writer I tried to write like for instance was Lawrence Durrell of The Alexandria Quartet. A foredoomed attempt, naturally.

I did manage to write a story, The Case of Bernardo Angelo. Very surrealistic, heavily influenced by Kafka, its final scene is a court trial in which the corpse of the murdered man is on exhibit. I mailed this to the Free Press and after months of getting no word from the literary editor I sent an angry telegram saying “You had no right to throw my story into the trash can.” A prompt reply came from the country’s premier literary figure that said, “I kept your story for so long because I didn’t know what to do with it.” It wasn’t a telegram; it was a note that came together with my returned manuscript. Handwritten by Nick Joaquin, the rejection made me, nonetheless, very happy.

This was the time when the young writers of the 60s were entering their heyday (unfortunately cut down in 1972 by Martial Law), winning prizes in successive years. Erwin E. Castillo’s Ireland, won the top Free Press prize for best short-story in 1965, with superlative kudos from Nick Joaquin and Franz Arcellana, two of the judges. In second and third places respectively were Greenwich Standard Time by Father Rudy Villanueva and Island by Resil Mojares, undoubtedly the best young writers then from the South. The following year, 1966, Ninotchka Rosca won the top prize with Diabolus of Sphere. And in 1969, Alfred A. Yuson with The Hill of Samuel.

11 This, not the beer, blew my mind right there and then (I had a hard time catching up — by three o’clock I was drunk and still a bottle behind). I was suddenly in a dream again. It had seemed so long ago, so far back.

12 T.E., then, knew only Nick Joaquin.

13 It would take me three decades to realize, because I have never thought about it until now, that T. E. had probably set me up. And three decades to notice that my mother had consented instantly — torealize that she did because she was relieved, happy to see the radio madness gone and her son headed, once again, for university.

14 Vindicating, somewhat, Proc Montecino’s metaphor!

15 It is more correct to say, perhaps, that the woman in my dream resembled her.

16 He liked the mad world of writers and living it, though he hardly said a syllable, both during and away from the workshop sessions, mild and quiet in fact as a little birthday card. When I met him again in Manila many years later, I could tell he was A-okay. He had a good job — with a drug company! Was married; had, by admission, stopped writing. Jun Canizares and Ric Patalinjug later became lawyers. Ric Patalinhug continues to write, but has shifted to Cebuano. Somehow he was always at loggerheads with Dr. Tiempo at the sessions. Though it was never in the open, since he wouldn’t argue after he had, say, expressed a discordant view, it was pretty evident. Maybe they just didn’t like each other. It was from Ric Patalinhug that I first heard the names of John Updike and Gunter Grass. He and Nelson la Rosa (who, not Eddie Yap, turned out to be the really mad one) liked quoting passages from the great prose writers. In particular, a whole paragraph from Hemingway’s autobiographical A Moveable Feast.

17 The story’s opening sentence is “John Fowles’ collector is nothing compared to this one.”

18 Banning memory’s smoke and mirrors, this is the only time I can recall Sister Imelda speaking up.

19 The joke was on me and has proved to be one for life — I have remained single. Incidentally Sister Imelda, too, later left the nunnery and married. Or so I heard.