A visit with BenCab
It’s always a pleasure to be back up in Baguio for our annual UP National Writers Workshop, and that’s where we are and what we’re up to again as I peck away at this piece on my laptop. We’ve traditionally gone up on Easter Sunday, but with Holy Week falling late in April this year, we decided to move up the workshop a couple of weeks earlier.
And it was a good thing we did, because we got up just in time to celebrate the birthday of National Artist Benedicto “BenCab” Cabrera with the artist himself in his sprawling hillside museum. A visit and merienda with BenCab has become a workshop tradition over the past few years we’ve seen that museum literally rise out of a hillside and while our métier is writing and BenCab’s is painting, it’s always good for the workshop fellows to see how an artist can work and succeed with perseverance, vision, and, of course, abounding talent and energy.
Every time we’ve returned to that museum, something new has been added to the place not just more galleries and more objects, but more terraced gardens, more walks, and now a café andfor private use a large meditation room with a glass window framing a ribbon of water running down the rockface. Leading to and away from this room were shrubs of coffee and beds of strawberry.
I wasn’t surprised to hear from Ben’s gracious wife Annie Sarthou that hundreds of visitors many of them schoolchildren come to visit the museum every day. The museum works outside as well as inside as a showcase of both modern and indigenous art and of architecture that rises above the landscape but also blends seamlessly into it.
When we went there, it was the sunniest it had ever been in all our years of pilgrimage to the place; by the time we departed, approaching six, the fog had rolled into the valley, muting the brightness and sharpness of the colors and lines of the museum. The workshop fellows left with a sense of the purposefulness of art, of its public, welcoming aspect. That’s what a visit with BenCab always does for us, and again, on behalf of the workshop, I’d like to thank him and Annie for the privilege.
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The workshop itself got off to a rousing start with a discussion of among others two pieces by two young women writers in English, both of whom happened to be students of mine in UP many years ago. I should add here that we’ve reoriented the UP workshop for some time now to focus on what we call mid-career writers who’ve already published at least one book, given that many other workshops now address the needs of absolute beginners. It’s in mid-career that the writer long out of the university and working by his or her lonesome needs reaffirmation, some form of assurance that one’s travails have been and will be worth it, despite the absence or the shortage of recognition and remuneration for one’s creative labors.
The first writer whose work we took up was Jennifer Ortuoste, a mother of two who came with a very interesting background in journalism (she’s now doing a PhD in Journalism in UP) and horseracing. Yes, horseracing she used to ride horses as an apprentice jockey and was married to a professional jockey, and has had a long and distinguished career as a horseracing announcer, columnist, and historian. Last year, she attended Dr. Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo’s class in Creative Nonfiction, and blew the class away with a piece on Sta. Ana Park, juxtaposing the racetrack’s history with snippets from her personal life.
In Baguio, Jenny presented a longer work, something approaching autobiography a memoir of growing up in troubled circumstances, and of keeping herself whole and well in an adulthood steeped in heartache. It’s a narrative worthy of a telenovela, but what I appreciated most was the acuity of the storyteller’s eye. For example:
“This ceramic pig was a family heirloom. No one remembers where it was bought or where it came from to begin with. But it was meant to be used as a coin bank there was a slit on its top. It was about as large as a real pig, made from white ceramic, and encrusted all over with faux pearls, rhinestones, and other glittery bijoux. Its mouth was open in a smile; its tongue was of soft red felt and its teeth were pearl beads. I would wiggle my fingers into its mouth to touch the tongue, which was the only soft part of the pig, and run my hands all over its encrustations. I didn’t give that pig a name; somehow it seemed beyond that, for I knew it was older than I was. It first belonged to Lola Bennett’s mother, my great-grandmother, who always wrote her name in her books thus: Dña Marciana Ledesma vda. de Lacson and naming her pig would have been presumptuous on my part. That pig looms large in the family mythos. One creased color photograph from 1968 shows me, less than a year old, pink and chubby all on fours on a blue chenille bedspread beside that pig, wearing only a toothy grin. People who see that picture comment on the resemblance.”
Yvette Tan, whose session I moderated, is a writer of horror fiction, a genre that we Pinoys with all that’s happening around us should be naturals at writing and reading, but which has been surprisingly under-represented in our literature. Yvette submitted three stories, asking that the last one, “Stars,” be taken up because it seemed to be the one that needed the most help and indeed it was. Dealing with a sea monster that turns out to be divine, the story was, as yet, unrealized, and Yvette received some helpful suggestions for reworking the material.
What most impressed us, however, was her other story titled “Seek Ye Whore,” a pun on “Siquijor,” involving two white American men who order brides from the Philippines by mail. We’ve encountered that deplorable situation before, but Yvette Tan brings a new twist to the practice: the women come in boxed pieces, literally, from siquijorbrides.com: first the right leg, then the left, and so on, and without waiting for their bodies to be completed, the women make love to the men, to the point that the men start complaining (“I’m not in the mood!” one says, one of many ironic reversals. Also, the more sex they have, the weaker the men become, to the point of bodily corruption and disintegration:
“Foster stared at the person in the wheelchair. Donovan smiled back at him. Or at least one side of his face did. The other side sagged, drool pooling at the side of is mouth. He had gained an enormous amount of weight over the weeks, so that his once-fit frame was now bloated, his flesh sagging over the wire that kept him in place, parts of it cutting deep groves into the fat. He was dressed in boxer shorts, a wifebeater, and socks. He had wet himself recently, the stain on his crotch still wet, the stink still new. His skin was covered in sores, some of them ripe, some of them oozing a thick, greenish liquid. His limbs were thin from lack of use. His left leg looked gangrenous, as if it was being eaten alive from the inside. And yet Donovan’s smile, despite being half paralyzed, was genuine, and sane.”
It’s bizarre, it’s horrifying as a good horror story should be.
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Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.
