Under a Negros sky

A wing of madness casts its lurid shadow over the first novel of young Bacolod writer Vicente Garcia Groyon, whose The Sky over Dimas (DLSU Press 2002) is a fictionalized history of an upper middle class Filipino family’s lunacy.

Winner of the grand prize for novel in the Palanca Awards last year (almost like the Olympics, the novel category is open only every three years), The Sky over Dimas is a faithful retelling of the sad and crazy life and times of one George Torrecarion, Bacolod native, and his equally batty wife, Marge Jarabas, and their offspring and respective forebears, though we are always reminded that this is a work of fiction, and any similarity to persons, living or dead or somewhere in the limbo between, is purely coincidental.

"The fact is: George Torrecarion went crazy," goes the first line of this novel, and instantly we are taken on a wing and a prayer to that nether region of dark family secrets, where even the closest of kin fear to tread.

George meeting Margie seems more than a simple twist of fate, rather one of those little tricks of the gods to, as the saying goes, further winnow the chaff from the grain in the advancement of the species – in the Torrecarion’s evolutionary ladder, to something slightly less unhinged.

Groyon writes that the Torrecarions have two sons, Rodel and Rafael, the older one not really George’s but by Marge’s former lover, her father’s Man Friday in the hacienda. Though this could be the stuff of telenovelas, or the novelist’s own tribute to sentimientos de Ilonggo, the reader should bear in mind that these things happen, truth always being stranger than fiction. What Groyon does, in tracing the family history’s fight to keep on the better side of sane, is turn the tables on an abject, quite disjointed truth, which cannot be any stranger than the fiction he lays on the perhaps now upturned table.

The excellent opening scene, wherein George reaches the apex of his madness by brandishing a sword in a respectable restaurant and coming across as some kind of vigilante, is a veritable tableau of the art of losing one’s marbles.

Or is it really the apex, seeing that we might well have encountered such stuff before, the classic breakdown broken down into bits and pieces of a shattered man, the very soul reduced to smithereens.

And so the saying, "Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad" acquires new meaning in The Sky over Dimas, which shifting points of view, between father (George) and son (Rafael) to third person omniscient (the sober narrator), reveal a sordid family history that helps explain the tragic consequences that befell the Torrecarions and Jarabases and their progeny.

The novelist being well-grounded in the formalist, structuralist school of literature cannot but move the narrative along, if a bit ploddingly in spots as observed by one reader who appreciates Groyon’s short fiction more.

It reaches the point where we know there can scarcely be a form of deliverance for the main character, mainly George, and that the madman’s only hope is his son and alter ego Rafael, who now must cope with his solitude in the concrete jungle of Manila, far removed from his dark Bacolod past.

Is it a considerable denouement, therefore, if George effectively burns to death, and Margie many years afterwards reaches her end due to a neglected diabetes that leads to her small accident and coma, from which she never recovers?

And are we supposed to search for possible soirees of escape and insight, the relevance of which could be peeking from between the covers of this book? There is a line or two in this novel we wish we could have written. Near the bottom of page 26, it reads:

"He smelled something burning in the distance – the wind brought a whiff of smoke – dead leaves maybe, with some moist rot. On Negros something always seemed to be burning."

Having spent some time ourselves on that central Visayan island, we know this to be true: Not only is there the sensation of constant nearness of the sea (or as Cesar Aquino had once written, it always felt as if coconut trees are nearby even if in fact there aren’t), but the air especially in the summer feels like the breath of a dragon, and people in the villages are either burning leaves in a pile or hawking firewood on the roadside, while in the distance the clouds over Cuernos de Negros resemble wisps of blue gray smoke.

We cannot be sure what Groyon is trying to tell us, The Sky over Dimas coming across like the gargoyle of Philippine literature in the new millennium. That it is about family should not be a surprise, because what else can one write about in extended households seething with literary possibilities?

To be staring at one’s navel is good only to a certain extent, but Aquino, who is Negros Oriental’s bet as the island’s complement to these confessional letters of doom and deliverance, put it wisely when he said, "It’s impossible to relate everything that’s happened in your life in fiction. There are things you must leave out, some things expand and play out."

Or something like that, and leave the reader to reach a plateau somewhere between a rock and a sexy whore.

In the meantime, cheers to Groyon and to Negros, the horns of Negros of our childhood and young manhood.