Angelo Lacuesta's 'Flames': Passing through customs
We suffered the unwieldiest of mnemonics and attempted to commit to their nonsense some semblance of logic,” goes a line in Angelo Lacuesta’s short story “An Untold Story.”
Collected in his latest book Flames (Anvil), it’s not the best line in the story, neither is it the most memorable one. But what it does is elucidate his fiction. The stories in this third collection feature characters that are recognizable (at least to Filipino readers) no matter how peculiar some of them seem to operate or think. Instead of conjuring up fantastical metaphors (i.e. landscapes, traits) for them, he attempts the extraordinary feat of empathizing with their situations, following their narratives and conveying them in lucid language. There’s plenty of story but no pat moralizing or cozy endings — rather we are treated to complete experiences that are a mess of real life. In Lacuesta’s stories they achieve a familiarity or understanding if not a total semblance of logic.
Like his previous two collections, Life Before X and White Elephants, the stories feature transients: people who are stranded between jobs, in airport departure lounges, provincial retreats, international conferences or just the next thing that’s supposed to happen — reports from the waiting rooms of modern life. In “Prize Fight” an overseas contract worker headed for Dubai is negotiating his travel papers and luggage as much as he is engrossed in the ongoing boxing match of one of the country’s most famous pugilists abroad. At the airport early in the morning, it’s on his mind as he jostles with “Chinese businessmen with heavy gold watches, big fat white guys sweating in their suits” all trying to fly out. Like everyone else back home, he’s made a bet for the Filipino to win as much as he’s made his own bet on his future working in a foreign land. Both are tenuous assumptions.
Call it faith, call it our spirit, but in Lacuesta’s stories they never condescend or promote this kind of thinking (as can be seen in the word game of the title story) but he accepts it and illustrates how it permeates our lives.
“‘Relations come by chance, friends by choice,’ it’s been easily said. There’s another witticism that’s just as easily debunked. Everyone knows what the real truth is: friendships are formed by seating arrangement,” writes Lacuesta. And again this game of musical chairs is understood for what it is: the stuff we sometimes refer to as fate. And it is never a despairing epiphany.
Lacuesta’s narratives are not moral parables nor are they existentialist tales (though they may invite those interpretations) as much as stories such as Gregorio C. Brillantes’s Faith, Time, Love and Dr. Lazaro can be considered as such. To consign them as one or the other is to lessen them. Unlike the Edward Hopper paintings referenced in another story, “Nighthawks,” these are not snapshots or renderings of just a moment in these characters’ lives but rather an important chapter in their lives that more or less gives us an insight into their histories, both past and future. Though circumstance may be left to chance, our natures prove less malleable, it seems to say. All that’s left is the written fiction — and its acknowledged truths and what we can infer from them.
Lacuesta is one the most elegant writers, with a prose style that’s free from conscious obfuscation or gimmickry. Just as the characters are recognizable, his writing is readable. His genuine feeling for his stories and its inhabitants are more than enough — just as his respect for his reader is proof of his growing confidence as a writer. “I must confess I believe that the reader is ultimately more intelligent than the writer. Now I find myself relying on — and thus, distrusting — not only your sharpness, but most especially, the kind of moral wisdom that every sharp reader is inexplicably endowed with when he reads — and, in the end, must rely on in return,” he writes. This frank admission by the author is no caveat but rather an enticement for us to probe into his tale beyond language and plot. He asks us to find ourselves in them.
Like his previous two short story collections, Flames is a chronicle of the 21st-century Filipino, standing at the precipice of a growing cultural change and the ever-shifting sands of his identity — ever mindful that the rug is not pulled out from underneath him. These are stories that manage to fix their gaze on our accelerated lives, clearing up the blurs to delineate and show us the contours that make up the shape of our shared experiences. With his latest book, he manages again to prove that being Filipino is not where you’re going but more about where you’re at.
