We often respond most strongly to old letters – here’s one from a friend and colleague who died in a plane crash, and here’s one from a young poet on his first encounter with America. They will mean little to anyone else – perhaps some scholar or biographer in a far future – but they will never mean quite the same thing; they will be faceless, voiceless, and disembodied; another reader will never see the church or museum or Benguet pine looming behind the person.
In the days before e-mail, writing committed you to paper, imprinted emotion even in the faintest ink, in the extravagant loops and the abrupt downturns of your penmanship. How the paper looked was almost as important as the message it bore: the folds and creases of repeated readings, the imperishable stains of wayward liquids, the yellow of creeping age. Papers keep well as artifacts. Despite my seasonal vow to sort mine out, I always end up adding more fodder to the unlit fire – a certificate here, a jotted note from a writer there, a thesis given to some deliciously obscure subject.
When classes ended last week, I felt that urge again, and began a half-hearted effort to excavate the pile from the bottommost layers. This time my eye was caught by a nondescript manila envelope, bulging slightly; when I opened it I saw sheaf of yellowing scraps, and when I took them out I saw that they were receipts all dating from 1978.
And immediately my mind swept back to that year, the year in which Annie Hall won the Best Picture Oscar, John Paul II became Pope, Hotel California and Evergreen swept the Grammys, Jim Jones’s cult followers committed mass suicide in Guyana – and also the year in which my parents, my brothers and sisters, and my small family and I moved to two adjacent subdivision houses on the hills of San Mateo; Demi turned four in October, and I was on something of a roll, having been assigned to work with the United Nations Development Program. It was a good year to be alive, to be 24, to be wondering grandly whether I would devote the rest of my life to the dismal science of economics or the sullen art of literature.
Receipts have a way of reducing those great sweeps to little transactions, the mincing minutes of just another day in progress. In this consumerist age, nothing quite defines us as the things we buy, and receipts are the paper trail of our vagabond preferences. They also hark back to anciently benign economies, where and when a cold beer could be had in Ermita’s yuppie-ish Shady Lane Café Salon for P2.50 (I/we had four on 3-15-78, for a total of P10 plus a sales tax of P0.70).
You got two Cokes from Hamburger Street for P3, a regular burger for P6, and a salametti pizza for P12.80; a special bibingka at A&L in front of New Frontier Theater in Cubao set you back P4.
There is, of course, more to life than food. In what had to have been a major purchase, I paid P129.75 at Silver Dollar Jeans for a pair of Levi’s, "New Mexico" style; it isn’t even the price that pains me now, but the waist size indicated – a demure 30 inches, 10 inches in the murky past. A few days later I bought three sandos at P8 each and three hankies at P5 each; Beng got a pair of ladies’ shoes at Ian’s for P24.90 and children’s shoes for P15.90. When my boatlike Ford Cortina needed a new battery, it cost me P212; when we had to bring Demi in for her regular checkup, her pediatrician Dr. Gilberto del Castillo charged us no more than P20 for the visit.
Today it’s easy to coo about how cheap everything was back then, forgetting how hard it was for a lot of folks to set aside P100 for a nice date out or an imported book like One Hundred Years of Solitude or even just a hospital bed. But time and relative prosperity have a way of warming up the past, although I doubt that too many of us would actually want to return to it, to a life without cellular phones (the first commercial model, incidentally, came out in 1978 – along with the Sony Walkman), without the Internet, without cable TV, without Google to dredge up the kind of factoids I’ve been serving you.
There’s a reason a baul has a heavy lid, and once this column’s done those receipts are going back in there, perhaps never to be minded again until my retirement day.
Let me give you a sampling of some of these writers’ works. As for the rest, well, pick up your copies at your nearest bookstore or newsstand.
"A thousand false days whirled before him – of how, together, they swam in the rivers and chased the water birds; how she rode on his back as they hunted the torpid fishes; how she told him that she loved him no matter what he looked like, no matter what he was, that she would be pretend to be a diuata enchanted beyond hope by his charming voice." (from "The Maiden and the Crocodile" by Dean Francis Alfar)
"Why aren’t the rails singing? We see them all the time – in ones and twos – on the forest floor, foraging. Concealment doesn’t seem to figure much in their plans. Conspicuous at first light, midmorning, dusk, even noontime. After dark, they show up through the night scope, bisecting the footpaths; nonchalant. Sometimes, they’d look right back at us – or more accurately, through us – with unsympathetic, dry eyes: a sort of avian rendition of that torture device, the silent treatment. I suppose the more desperate we get, the more this silence is stretched out, until we grow inexorably mad; otherwise, we surrender, apologize for what – idiocy? Bad judgment? Wrong timing? Misreading the signals? All amounts to the same thing, I guess: a failure to communicate. (from "The Sound Wranglers," by Mads Bajarias)
"We had our consuming feasts. We indulged, even when the daylight came intruding in, and Veronica would hurry to close the bedroom curtains, explaining in one word: ‘Neighbors.’" (from "The Painted Lady" by Ian Rosales Casocot)
"She slid into bed in a rush, half-afraid that a cold hand would grab her ankle if she stood beside her bed too long, but lay awake in the dark listening to the house creak as it cooled and thought about the ghost." (from "The Haunting of Martina Luzuriaga" by Vince Groyon)
"The socialite-of-the-moment, who looked like a pretty, middle-aged mestiza in the papers, was frightening in person. She was a gigantess who seemed to tower beyond six feet in her teetering heels and had an eyebrow that was perpetually cocked to one side. She approached Clara, her barbaric jewelry banging against her magnificent chest." (from "Girl on a Couch" by Rachelle Medina)
"The rest were pictures of more unguarded moments: she with clasped hands, eager for the next clean gas station; back from a dirty toilet, but grinning nonetheless; a stray chicken pecking on her toe while she heated canned beans; a raindrop on her cheek as she slept on the grass; two fireflies lighting her mouth at a moment of prolonged awe." (from "Quizas" by Jo Pilar)
"The congee was cooking on the stove. Lira placed Mattie back in the crib, half-expecting her to start hollering again, but fortunately she was a normal baby, easily distracted and easy to please. In a moment, she had turned over on her tummy only to bend her head back to peer up at imagined patterns on the ceiling, expressing her wonder with discourses of tah-tah-tah." (from "How to Pacify a Distraught Infant" by Anna Felicia Sanchez).
Most of these, happily, are new names, the next wave of Filipino fictionists in English coming in from the horizon. (Two of them – Mads Bajarias and Jo Pilar – I’m particularly pleased to find here, coming as they did from a fiction workshop conducted last year at the Alliance Française by my former student Migs Villanueva. So the writing moves on.)
A few months ago, when the first issue came out, I expressed my fear – founded on experience – that upscale magazines like this (sumptuously produced, extremely picky about its contents) would have Achillean lives, glorious but short. The economics of publishing may be one thing, but this issue reminds us that we will hardly ever be in short supply as far as quality fiction is concerned. I can only continue wishing it the best of fortunes.