Sometimes I still drive by Remedios Street in Malate, near the circle underneath the sheltering sky, where the old Penguin Café and Gallery used to stand. Now it is just a shadow of its former self, the old two-story, occasionally leaking structure all torn down and disappeared, gone the way of the elements save for the silent gnarled tree with roots jutting out the sidewalk, a witness to the passing of Pinoy Bohemia. It seems that anyone who had something to do with the literary or art scene at the time once passed through those old Penguin doors, of late invisible, or else hibernating into another dimension, leaving these signs of a burgeoning Koreatown only to rise again on the other side of the tracks, down Zobel Roxas way on Kamagong Street Makati.
The meeting between the old Penguin and the new Penguin occurred in August, on Quezon Day, during the opening of the one-woman photo exhibit of Hedwig de Leon, titled “Fuego,” about the fire that burnS even in water. The show itself was serendipitous with current events, in the same month as the Rizal park carnage under pouring rain, and the razing of an entire barangay of houses on stilts in the Navotas fish pens.
Hedwig, whose tocayo is the owl in the Harry Potter series, making her by transference a kind of Pallas Athena, was no stranger to the old Penguin, having been a La Salle student where she might have majored in literature, certainly having taken a number of subjects in creative writing and eventually attending the Dumaguete writers workshop in the early part of this century, smoking her Winston Lights on the boulevard amid the noontime glare after lunch break
Who knows but the seed of her photographs might have began while staring out from the boulevard, Isla Siquijor in the distance and the moss-covered rocks emerging subliminally a distance from the breakwater, and blending with the tempura vendors lurked even in her imagination a stalker among the stacks with missing teeth, and Hedwig herself going, “I know this guy…”
Fuego might have felt easily at home at the old Penguin, with its abstract-like photos of weird light and based on titles of both popular and obscure contemporary songs, including one by the Rolling Stones titled “Sweet Black Angel” from the album “Exile on Main Street,” that manifested itself like a Rorschach test and made me rummage through the CD cabinet for the Stones album to be able to listen to it again, my sweet black angel.
Those who had not been able to view the photos because of the overflow crowd on opening night, or at least were unable to look at them like a dentist does down the throat of a patient, may opt to return on less- crowded nights, but be careful because you might drive past, it’s just a stone’s throw from the Petron station at the corner of Zobel Roxas and Kamagong where a one-armed, one-legged mechanic used to hang out, hopping like a sad evil bird of prey.
Or maybe catch her work on Flicker photo stream, where an easy favorite would be her snapshots of Sagada in the summer of 2007, the play of light on shadow breathtaking. It reminded me of the only time I visited the place almost 20 years ago, when the eco-tourist delegation played on a hilltop basketball court, and in the nearby chapel the late historian William Henry Scott did scales on the organ. There’s something about the quality of light in the mountain town that would bring out the photographer in anyone.
How much more Hedwig, who is to art and literature born. But she herself would be the first to protest, “But I haven’t done anything yet!”
Judging by the turn-away crowd, that’s precisely the point, they’re waiting for her to astound and do something if not exactly scandalous, then a pirouette of cigarette smoke or anything that burns even in water, that makes the mouth water even if it is burning with heat sores.
Then of course, credit Hedwig with bringing together the old Penguin and the new Penguin, as my kumpare Krip Yuson said, surreptitiously sipping neatly on his scotch, it was the first time for him to visit the Kamagong version of a displaced but unforgotten Bohemia. Ditto for most of the other old guard as well.
Yet for all the wild celebration and the thrumming and drumming of the world beat music presided by a balding Caucasian and the ethnic hip swaying of mountain maidens chanting unintelligible phrases of seduction and conduction moving in and out of the new Penguin overflowing with faces old and new, there was still something missing.
It might have been the ancient Penguin statue that used to hold forth at the bar in Remedios that reminded of the books read and maybe even shoplifted. And to think that even the dancing shaman Billy Bonnevie declined to give Pepito Bosch’s death mask shaped by Agnes Arellano to the new Penguin, preferring instead the old that was no more. No photo of the late Santi Bose staring from the swinging door leading to the comfort rooms or underneath the stairs. And because I couldn’t get to the bathroom I had no idea whether Jacqueline Kennedy as Mona Lisa and Woody Allen were still entrenched on the doors of the respective her and his toilets.
Keep your eyes peeled though for familiar waiters and waitresses, bringing in another order of pale pilsen or angels on horseback, not for any one-armed one-legged mechanic looking for a car inundated by flood.
Heard the guitarist Noli Aurillo plays in the new Penguin, as he did in the old, and on such nights even the photos of Hedwig would applaud, the owl flying off her shoulder and into the wild and wet dark searching for a familiar sign in Korean.