Danceable tadtarin& a hundred years of NJ

MANILA, Philippines — For someone widely considered to be the greatest Filipino writer of the 20th century, celebrations have been kind of muted during the centennial of National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin.

Not to blame the usual government agencies in charge of cultural observances, in fairness the Cultural Center last May held an elaborate program on the occasion of the writer’s 100th birthday, which also saw the launching of Joaquin’s “The Woman Who Had Two Navels” and “Tales of the Tropical Gothic” published by Penguin books. Only fellow National Artist Jose Garcia Villa and national hero Jose Rizal are the other Filipinos who have Penguin editions of their works, putting them alongside the world classics.

Sometime midyear, the Ayala Museum held an open-to-the-public retrospective exhibit of Joaquin, complete with sculptures, interactive gewgaws and a wide board showing the writer’s zeitgeist of words and phrases, the museum was as good a place as any to ‘go for lost.’

Then in September was the Nick Joaquin Literary Awards sponsored by the Philippines Graphic magazine that the writer once edited under the auspices of Col. Antonio Cabangon Chua. At a hotel in Quezon City, old friends and literary cohorts reminisced on the life and times of Joaquin, the anecdotes flowing like beer, and musical numbers featuring reworded chestnuts including Cole Porter’s “You’re the top/ you’re Virgie Moreno.”

Lately too we have been advised that Ballet Philippines will be staging this month a dance version of Joaquin’s short story “The Summer Solstice” based on the pagan ritual Tadtarin, with the headwinds of habagat turning into amihan or is it the other way around, so things may not be too subdued after all.  

After a rereading in the Penguin edition, “Summer Solstice” does lend itself to dance, what with its wild gyrations and interpretative pas a deux, the beating of the drums and howling of women during the Feast of San Juan. A period piece that had as its central motif a foot fetish that would have done Freud proud.

The director Tikoy Aguiluz of course did a movie of Tadtarin many moons ago, starring Edu Manzano and Amanda Page, the actress whose present whereabouts are a mystery, as mysterious as water bearers walking into the sunset of an east Manila suburb, feet reflecting the shifting colors of twilight.

The New York-based Filipina novelist Gina Apostol, writing the introduction to the Joaquin Penguin, remarked that she had studied his sentences – and indeed what marvels they are.

“May Day Eve” whose opening paragraph is a lyrical tour de force and maze, ending with the exclamation of the guardia civil calling out curfew like a sad refrain: ‘Guardia sereno-o-o! A las doce han dado-o-o!’

THEN AND NOW: The 1974 production featured Alice Reyes as Amada and Ester Rimpos as the Tadtarin (middle photo), while this month’s production (right photo) has Candice Adea (Amada) and Sarah Alejandro (Tadtarin). Women power in the midsummer ritual (left photo) with Alice Reyes (at left) and Tina Santos (center) as the Tadtarin (1970).

In his stories the old Intramuros comes alive, cobblestones shining under moonlight as in the story “The Mass of St. Sylvestre,” one of the shortest in the collection and reading partly like metafiction, here was a magic realism before the term was invented.

Much has been made of how Joaquin’s work is strongly rooted in the Catholic faith, if not religion, but his stories are as much lower case catholic as well. In “Portrait of the Artist as Filipino,” one of whose unforgettable staging was at a theater of ruins in Fort Santiago decades ago starring Lolita Rodriguez and Charito Solis as the spinster sisters, the character Bitoy says: “Art is not magic, it is not meant to enchant but to disenchant.”

Also in the collection is the rather lengthy “Candido’s Apocalypse,” an almost freewheeling tale of adolescent angst and epiphany, like a Filipino version of “Catcher in the Rye,” only – and Joaquin himself may smile at the term – groovier. The young protagonist deals with the gift or curse of being able to see through people, through flesh and bone down to their very chakra.

Candido was said to be based on a real life person, Pepito A – as per other young men at the time who also first got drunk under the National Artist’s auspices, and the Heredia household’s architectural design patterned after that of a Joaquin kumpadre’s house on Maginhawa Street, UP Village, since turned into a headquarters of an engineering consultancy firm: “This house was split level; and the banistered corridor, three steps up from the living room it overlooked, ran past three doors, two of which were open, revealing books and shoes on the beds, pillow and clothes on the floor…”

Not to forget either the must-read for all journalism students and other aspiring reporters, “Reportage on Crime,” written under the pen name Quijano de Manila, a collection of 13 noirs starting with “The House on Zapote Street” based on a real weird family tragedy in the early 1960s, and eventually made into film by Mike de Leon. All the lead characters in “Kisapmata” are also dead and gone, except for Charo Santos. The ghosts of that report still hover at the corner of JP Rizal and Zapote Street, Makati, mementos of once upon a grassland past.

That booming voice was unmistakable whenever he entered a room, Nick as ninong known to hand out crisp 20-peso bills at Christmastime, and treating the kids of his kumpadre to the original “Batman” starring Adam West at a movie house on Avenida while still a member of the board of censors.  

“A small thing but my own, as the oyster once said of its cancer” was a dedication he wrote on a copy of his Prose and Poems, now a collector’s item. Or “Read ‘em and weep,” for a compilation of verses published by Ateneo press.

He once said that he wouldn’t mind being wrapped in a mat and thrown into the Pasig River once his time was up, though part of his ashes lies in the heroes cemetery. He surely would not have minded the summer solstice being turned into dance, the winds blowing colder in October in Manila of “Guardia de Honor.”

What was the order of Melkizedek then? The legend of the dying wonton mami.