The women in my fiction

I have never really tried to categorize the women in my novels and short stories. Last week, Alain Padilla, who is collating and editing my next essay collection, suggested that I should.

It was my mother who influenced me most – how strong she was in raising her three children without resources other than her industry. I’ve written about her in my forthcoming autobiography, Prom Di. Then, there is my wife; through more than 70 years of marriage, she provided me with precious insights into character and fidelity.

Almost all the women in my fiction are creatures of the imagination. If ever one is based on a real person, I made sure dissimilarities exist. My fictional women came from various places and from all walks of life: Tondo and Forbes Park, the mountains and the small towns and bucolic villages. I researched on their backgrounds. A teacher is not just a teacher – I give her character, her history, education, her relationships. She appears in the story as a complete person.

My greatest challenge as a writer was when I wrote Ermita. The novel’s main character is a beautiful call girl with a murky past and ancestry. I read the Western classics on prostitution – Nana by Emile Zola, The Woman of Rome by Alberto Moravia and that English exposition on the world’s oldest profession, Sitting on a Fortune.

I read, too, the literature on deviant sex by Filipino sociologists and conducted many interviews with the girls in M. H. del Pilar and in massage parlors until I knew their thinking, their aspirations and their wistful redemption. Whatever their station, I eventually realized they were almost all victims – in fact, in a much broader sense – of poverty in this corrupted and unhappy country where we are all victims.

For most Filipinos, Rizal’s Maria Clara stands out as the exemplary Filipina – loving, obedient and frail. But is Maria Clara really that weak? Look at her again – to the very end, she is faithful and true. Her tragic ending may be interpreted as frailty – but reconsider this conclusion – it is an expression of ultimate loyalty and, therefore, of strength.

Sometime back, a reader commented that my women – Narita, Ermita and Malu in Three Filipino Women – are the same, but in different dress and circumstance. The observation is correct. All three are possessed with grit and passion as validated by the direction and conclusion of their lives. Ermi, in Three Filipino Women, is the same woman in Ermita – the novel is an expanded narration of her life, now told not from the point of view of a man who loved her and saw in her his damnation. Ermita could be subtitled: a journey, the education of a woman or the shaping of destiny. Some readers have complained that the novel is not conclusive enough; I intended it that way. What I showed was a woman transformed by love – her love for Mac whose childhood she shared, that she would wait for his return.

I have recognized this faithfulness and courage of Filipino women since the beginning of my career as a writer, particularly in the novels that comprise the Rosales Saga. Dalin – the wife of Istak in Po-on – hardworking persevering and supportive and, of course, Tia Nena, the mother who disappears in My Brother, My Executioner and resurfaces in Mass. In Mass, there is Lily, a young activist who also disappears. And in the much longer work, Sherds, here is a story of a woman who suffers, who gives up everything for a cause she believes in.

My fictional women, particularly those who belong to the wrong side of conventional morality, are endowed with nobility, circumscribed as they are by despair. Marina, the provincial clerk in Progress, and Lily, Tondo girl and masseuse in Mass, are striving, reaching out for life from the quagmire wherein they are submerged.

Mass, the last of the five-novel Rosales Saga, is the most translated Filipino book as noted in a recently released listing of internationally translated books. I wrote it in Paris in 1976 – the year I was finally allowed to travel. I had very little money; fortunately, Nena Saguil, the expat painter in Paris, found me a $7 a day room near her own apartment close to the Boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Pepe Samson, the illegitimate son of Tony Samson in The Pretenders, is the central character. Pepe’s girlfriend, Betsy from Forbes Park, remains loyal to Pepe to the very end when Pepe is killed in Balik-Bayan, my two-act play that concludes the Rosales Saga. It was translated into Tagalog by Rody Vera and staged at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), as directed by Chris Millado.

I hope that the CCP will stage it again. Tia Nena – the old woman who is first seen in My Brother, My Executioner and in Mass, appears in the play, symbolizing Filipinas.

I’ve attempted to make my fictional women as real so that my readers will be convinced of their authenticity, although they are obviously symbols. As such, they should not appear as artificial constructs. Organic symbolism gives a work of art, a novel, a deeper meaning, illustrating the precious ambiguity of art. Its discovery is one of the ineffable pleasures of reading. More than this, the reader is unconsciously, yet profoundly, bonded with his past, and the national experience as recorded in the fictional imagination.

I have been so fortunate that I had very good teachers like Miss Soledad Oriel, who introduced me to Rizal when I was in Grade Five. Rizal, come to think of it, is the greatest influence in my life as a writer.

Then in college, the poet-author-editor, Paz Latorena, taught me how to write. I have read the English, American and translated foreign writers who were concerned with justice – Dickens, Steinbeck, Camus, Gorki, and I have learned from them how important – and human – it is to be humane. I found Hemingway boring, but not his best novel – For Whom the Bell Tolls – and Maria, his luminous heroine in it, is memorable. Truly, the bell tolls for all of us.