The Dumaguete connection

Every writer who’s been where it’s at has marvelled at the matrix, its nurturing strength and continuing charm. Dumaguete has served as a way-station for a good number of good writers. And somehow the memories of one’s stay help maintain and polish the craft, let alone the sense of dedication, that attends fine writing.

The proud list of Dumaguete’s literary sons includes every single writers‚ workshop fellow and panelist who has sat with the late great Dr. Edilberto K. Tiempo and his wife, Dr. Edith L, Tiempo, declared National Artist for Literature in 1998, and who continues to direct the 40-year-old workshop. Some of these visitors stayed on or came back seasonally, so that the Dumaguete connection in Philippine literature has been credited with a steady source of literary and academic talent.

Among the distinguished names of writers who have profitted from long sojourns in Dumaguete have been the novelist Antonio E. Enriquez, who currently shuttles between Cagayan de Oro City and Zamboanga City; Palanca Hall-of-Famer Leoncio Deriada who teaches in Ilolilo; Merlie Alunan and Victor Sugbo who have long been with UP Tacloban; Anthony Tan, now based in Iligan; Timothy Montes, now with UP Mindanao in Davao City; Marjorie Evasco, Susan Lara, Danny Reyes, John Labella – now all in Manila; and Merlinda Bobis, currently on a U.S. book tour after establishing herself famously in Australia.

Other than "Mom" Edith, only three full-fledged writers currently remain in Dumaguete. The youngest in spirit, Cesar Ruiz Aquino, still busies himself wrestling with everyone else’s daemons and duendes while prodigiously writing simultaneous novels in his head. Then there are Atty. Ernesto Superal Yee and Bobby Flores-Villasis, twin scions of the Tiempos and Dr. Albert Faurot – authors who have both exalted sublime music by aspiring to it in their poetry and prose.

Several weeks back they had a twin launch in Dumaguete, and it must have been the year’s sleeper of a literary event. Wish we had been there.

Suite Bergamasque: The Boulevard Stories by Bobby Flores-Villasis, and About My Garden, a poetry collection by Ernesto Superal Yee, are both published by Mrs. Gloria Rodriguez’s Giraffe Books; both carry Introductions by Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas.

To say that the Intros alone are worth the price of these books would be honest and true, albeit fail to fairly represent their full value between covers.

Flores-Villasis is an accomplished playwright and fictionist who has won a Philippines Free Press magazine first prize for a short story. That story, "Menandro’s Boulevard," rightfully starts the collection. And it may be claimed to have already taken its place among our contemporary classics in fiction.

Remarkably peak form is bared in this introductory offering among a "suite" of stories revolving around one locale and a set of belle-epoque characters. It begins with unadorned dialogue between an old man and ayoung prostitute, setting off a contretemps of a relationship that recalls the thematic trademark in Wilfrido "Ding" Nolledo’s early fiction. The conversation takes place while the two characters claim the same bench on Dumaguete’s boulevard by the sea. The spoken lines establish, theater-like, the parameters of character and elliptical conflict.

This brief section is then followed by a long expository paragraph that advances the lilting, bittersweet concerns playing in Menandro’s eye and mind, merging past and present with the consummate ease of a narrator totally beholden to circumstance, spirit of place, and the continuum of fading romance that weaves together all of the "Boulevard Stories" in Suite Bergamasque. As expositions go, it is an excellent showcase of writing that can be held up for all aspiring young writers of fiction.

"Against two loops of the window grill Menandro jammed the binoculars to steady it, hooked his pinkies on the nearest curlicue so his hands wouldn’t shake, and peered at the boulevard. She wasn’t there. Eight nights in a row he had watched her, the new girl with the furry black shoulder bag and the hungry child’s face that glowed like a cold light when she laughed. He liked it better when she was alone and sad-looking, the bag hugged close to her small breasts. Then, though she had no way of knowing, he could inhabit her night until another man took her away in a car, on a motorcycle, on foot, and he could go to bed comforted that he had kept her company. This evening he had dragged the console closer to the window so he could sit with her. He really should have thought of that last week instead of punishing his feet. He stepped back from the window. Wings flapped in his stomach, a talon clawed its way up his solar plexus into his chest. Cold sweat erupted on his brows and palms. He leaned on the console, set the binoculars down on it. Damn acidity, he muttered. Must give up those lentils, and the scotch. The garlic vine outside the window rustled. Wind, dense with sea smells, rushed into the room. He took deep breaths. On his tongue gathered a faint taste of the city’s vile slop that roiled down sewers and culverts and ditches to the sea beyond the boulevard and hissed from it a dank steam that the wind blew over the promenade and into the houses facing it. When the city was younger, Menandro remembered, the boulevard smelled like a fresh bath."

Exquisite, isn’t it? Tone, cadence, diction, syntax, sentiment, and the effectively looping narrative spirit ratchet up the synergy of compleat presentation. We are offered, in full, a character already in place, and who seduces us to enter further into a world in the very throes of celebration.

Menandro’s wife has long deserted him. She is painted in his mind and in ours, in quick strokes of insight and commemoration. Again, character delineation in this story can prove an invaluable lesson in any creative writing workshop.

"Pilaroca anointed most things she owned. One pfft from her atomizer and the merest calendar became personal belonging."

This is the same lady who, two pages later, is uniquely memorialized through the husband’s tired, jaded eye: "She had brought into their home only silk flowers, and she had brought into their lives many precious things that were hollow, empty, and would not die."

The narrative alternates sectionally with more of the straight dialogue between Menandro and the girl Anna ("But I want to be called Mitzie. It tells you right away what I am.") whom the old man watches from his window as she plies her trade, or occasionally joins on the boulevard bench.

Verily, it is like dialogue from a play, shorn of qualifying authorial descriptions as to how the lines are uttered or arrived at. Each line of repartee settles epigrammatically on the heels of another, uncluttered by quotation marks, speaker identification, adverbs to modify the utterances, or any intercutting, parallel rationalization.

A sample (with quote marks supplied only to distinguish the passage):

"It’s late. I didn’t think you’d still be working.

I’ll just sit here for a while.

You want to be alone?

You want to go – just go. I’m used to people leaving me. I’ve seen more backs than fronts in my life, and me being what I am, I think that’s funny."

We might cavil that the young prostitute in the story isn’t credible as type, what with the apparently arch sophistication and wit in her pronouncements. But one tends to "forgive" this "hothoused" extension of character. It is necessary to establish Anna/Mitzie in some form of equal footing with the elegiac Menandro.

As well may the culminating scene be questioned initially, the physical communion between the characters and ages seemingly a letdown that is unexpected because it is to be expected only of an inferior narrator’s imagination, so climactic "type" it is. But toward the closing lines we realize that Menandro still inhabits his world of imminent decay that is struggling with his own imagination, as well the very vision of his demise that is only tardily parallel to that of his boulevard’s once-proud, now sad, universe.

The rest of the stories are equally fascinating. But we need to turn to Rowena T. Torrevillas’ Intro for further unveiling.

"In the manner of the volutes and arabesques ornamenting the villas built during the early part of the century just past, the seven stories in this collection reveal themselves in spirals. This ‘suite" written by Bobby Flores-Villasis is patterned like a dance of masques, a concentric narrative of intertwined histories, of lives that are circumscribed by the economic and moral ravages that all its characters share."

This is such a fine fiction collection, and Bobby Flores-Villasis is one heck of a terribly under-rated Flipino writer.

So is Ernie Yee, whose About My Garden is a fully realized suite that is totally superb in its efflorescence. The thirty-one poems are devotional pieces dedicated to various individuals, but as a cycle of celebration they essentially exult in the spiritual focus of this poet with the green thumb.

Here’s one of his exemplary poems, titled "Gladiolus and Her Kind (for Mom Edith)":

"Out in the green or in a jug full of water,/ Your sword-shaped leaves parry/ Midsummer air and your spikes disarm/ With ribands flame-red, gold, and the creamy/ White dove feathers.// Old as Africa, Europe and Asia,/ Your opulent corms/ Gifted by Grandmother’s/ Patient green thumb hoard her love/ For the brilliant and the quiet.// My gorgeous giver of gladness,/ You, too, receive my adoration:/ From the jug where you now stand Your land of silence offers/ The glow of colors,/ Your long, leafy stems tilt/ Over, each one miming a beloved’s waist Leaning to catch my murmur of thanks.// Beauty need not speak."

Wonderful. As Marjorie M. Evasco writes for the back-cover blurb, "Soon after his first book of poems was pubished, Ernesto S. Yee’s second collection burgeoned in a space he himself calls ‘an amazing period of fecundity.’ Hearkening to an old and unmitigated longing, the poems in this collection evoke the shapes and scents of that lost wilderness of origins, resound the music in images that lure the imagination into a sudden confrontation with chaos. It is the poem’s tenderness that sees us through and transforms mortal ‘...Desire, passion and need/ Into the accessible’/ Manageable, acceptable...."

Yes, indeed, how able as an eroticist of the first water is this poet Yee, whose fiction collection Ember Days & Other Tales & Stories, a National Book Awards finalist in 1999, I use seasonally as a beacon to seduce students in a Fiction class.

His garden is as effusive as it is introspective, and in this duality of growth and decay, of sprouting buds and wilting leaves, is his manhood asserted in Georgian splendor. Witness (hear ye!):

"Lover (for Jasper Adrian Pascual Cadilena)":

"In comfort, safety, gratuitousness of sleep/ curled body seeks a promised intimacy:// yearning thickens, ruptures seams and frees the wild/ need effervescing the length that probes and pushes/ and drives through a moist dark, emerging/ where the head can watch your loft rising,/ your heat to ride the insatiable/ hunger ensnared, in-cored/ slave now to your coming,/ leaving behind a shadow to spill/ glittering silver – wait,/ wait for the hot finger that empowers,/ that authorizes and bestirs all nerve ends –// Press yourself against my shuddering length!"

Hee-haw!

Suite for suite, Yee matches Flores-Villasis in upholding the undeniable cerebration of the lush gardens of erudition and passion that is Dumaguete. Cheers to both of these books and their authors.