A World Of Both Magic And Reality

CEBU, Philippines – Filpinos always love a good story of magic, fantasy and enchantment. Our literature, cinema, television programs and theaters draw upon a faithful audience, who return time and again to experience a journey through the romance and high adventure of the stories that have collectively been referred to as the “Speculative Fiction” genre. Perhaps born from and molded by the cultures of our ancestors, these stories have nonetheless maintained their deep impact on the modern Filipino.

Although world literature is filled with classic examples of the fantasy-romance genre, the Filipino novelist finds a niche on the global bookshelf by producing works that draw upon the rich history of the archipelago. This gives Filipino writers their unique identity among their international peers.

One of these unique Filipino novels is Dean Francis Alfar’s Salamanca, an enthralling and fantastic love story that casts a magical glow even from the title itself. The story is an engaging piece of literature that mixes simplicity with complexity, with its typically Filipino setting and characters being exquisitely described and composed.

Born in 1969, Alfar is a writer and novelist whose numerous works were published locally and abroad. He is a multi-awarded novelist with eight Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. Also a comic book creator, his work includes The Lost, ab ovo, and Siglo: Passion. Aside from being a writer and novelist, Alfar is also a business-oriented person who owns a pet store and an integrated marketing company. He is a family man residing in Manila with a wife and daughter.

Alfar’s characters in his magnificent novel Salamanca are radiant and appealing: like the lovely Jacinta Cordova, whose beauty is so stunning that it transforms the entire house into glass. The tale reaches further heights in the marriage of the real and supernatural in the character of Apolinaria Vergara, Jacinta’s aunt, who is motivated by an obsession with being enraptured by God; her fancy becomes reality when the glass house is taken to heaven by a great storm.

The story begins in a dinner party in Los Angeles. The main male character, Gaudencio Rivera, proclaims to his colleagues his plan to return to Tagbaoran, a town in Palawan, to be with his wife Jacinta Cordova. With a sudden chronological shift to the past, the story tells of how Gaudencio met Jacinta Cordova, through a rumor of her stunning, extraordinary, magical beauty that spurred Gaudencio’s curiousity, leading him to seek out Jacinta for himself. In his failure in applying as a school teacher, Gaudencio becomes a copra factory worker that eventually leads him to work in a distant place, making his way in finding the “glass house” where Jacinta lives. Seeing the ever glamorous and beautiful lady makes him almost frantically crazy and ecstatic, enabling him to write scores of poems on every paper he could find. With much inspiration and thrill, he covers the glass house with his own written poems that ultimately make Jacinta fall in love with him.

Determined by fate, Jacinta and Gaudencio meet in a great storm. It is also here that the story depicts the passion of Cesar Abalos, with intent to rescue Gaudencio from the flood and ends up getting into the glass house. He enters, in the unexpected circumstances, together with Mrs. Brown. The three go crazy, emotionally delighted and sensually provoked when they see Jacinta just as the storm grows violent, ultimately taking the four of them into the air. Gaudencio loses his grip on his beloved Jacinta and is separated from the others when he falls to the ground. The other three fall in another place, hitting the fugitive Alejandro who has escaped from prison, killing him instantly, serving justice in a deliberately deus ex machine fashion. As an aftermath of the incident, Mrs. Brown hates Jacinta for such a despicable experience. Jacinta later realizes that the glass house has disappeared, together with her aunt Apolinaria Vergara. After several days, Jacinta and Gaudencio are reunited and they eventually marry, but not for long—for only 11 days. With unexplainable mystical or perhaps developed emotional reasons, Gaudencio chooses to be with Cesar Abalos. Cesar lives with Gaudencio who eventually earns a name as a writer in Manila. With fiery anger, Jacinta feels so tricked and betrayed. As for her remedy, the Abalos family has taken her as their own.

The story then shifts when Bau Long Huynh enters into the scene, a Vietnamese refugee who accidentally arrives in Palawan, a character who saves Carlito from almost drowning and who later becomes Jacinta’s lover. After several years, Cesar and Gaudencio get into an argument that leads them to a separation. Gaudencio displaces his troubling emotions with Isabel Cortez, his fellow writer. Not content, he explores a life of sexuality with different people both men and women. Awakening from his crazy and twisted lifestyle, with the help of a friend Dr. Eleanor Temple, he comes to the decision of returning to Jacinta. Trouble and conflict once again arise when he arrives in Palawan knowing that Jacinta has another lover. Not only with Jacinta, but Gaudencio must also contend with the angry of the Abalos family. He requests to be with Jacinta even just for a year to have a baby. Shockingly, Jacinta grants his plea by abandoning Bau.

Gaudencio and Jacinta both live in Manila for several years and they have a son named Gaudencio Antonio Rivera who also later becomes a writer, attaining his father’s skills as a literary artist. After decades, the pitiful Bau calls, still waiting, but Jacinta only gives a sad response that makes Bau’s waiting entirely useless and in vain. Maria Elena Francisco, an adopted daughter of the Riveras who has moved out with Jacinta, marries Washington Yu, the godfather of Jacinta’s second son Emmanuel Crisanto Rivera—who is gifted with visual art skills but dies at a very young age of eleven.

As the years pass, Gaudencio and Jacinta grow old. Remembering the past, remembering everything that has happened, Jacinta arranges a dinner, wanting to meet the families of Antonio and Washington. During the gathering, Jacinta dies and the walls of the house turn magically into glass—a remembrance of her beauty. Days after her funeral, Antonio hands Gaudencio a piece of paper with Jacinta’s thoughts: “After everything, you must know that I love you.”

Alfar molded the Salamanca using a masterful command of the language. He used words that graphically enhance the image bringing the story to life for the reader. It is in this cinema-like fashion that Alfar allows the reader to experience the scene where Gaudencio meets Jacinta, in all her beauty, for the first time:

At the moment that their eyes met through the see-through walls of the inconceivable house, Gaudencio dropped the cigarette in his hand as he was devastated by Jacinta’s luminous beauty. He felt an almost unbearable torrent of worlds rise up through his body. Before finally causing his hair to writhe as a whole paragraphs, chapters, short stories, novella, and novels recoiled back to words, suffusing his entire being with terrible power of unspoken expression.

The story is given an easy and well-paced narrative, as the writer arranges the concepts in a way that it would not bore the reader by being redundant in its as magical tale. This was done by taking the fast moving tale between the mundane and extraordinary.

From a feminist standpoint, the story upholds equality among sexes, which essentially espouses that women should be provided rights and opportunities equal to men, Jacinta provides an image of a woman that demands reverence. In the novel, it was her beauty and perfection that captured the hearts of men, especially Gaudencio.

Equality is proven in the context that each character—even homosexual (in the person of Cesar Abalos)—are significantly related to each other without bias, offense or sense of discrimination. The tale even emphasizes the power of women—beauty—that persuades men to do some unusual things altering what is normal into something vibrant and supernatural.

Just reading the story and visualizing every scene in the reader’s mind, it cannot be avoided or denied that the story is truly magical. Like a dream that shifts from one scene to another in a mystical manner and a sort of trance, it clearly depicts fantasy blended with reality.

If a lesson could be drawn from the story, it is the lesson of decision-making: A certain decision that a man or woman makes can mean either a lifetime of agony and trouble or satisfaction and fulfillment. The story emphasizes that the characters’ lives are intertwined to each other, how one can cause someone to be miserable—like the poor Bau.

Salamanca, is a magical tale that can take one’s mind to explore realism and fantasy in a flavor that is uniquely Filipino. It is truly a magnificent piece of literary art done by Dean, a trophy for Philippine literature.