by Nick Joaquin
The narrator then reframes this story as a kind of cautionary tale that parents used to tell their children during Mass to keep them from falling asleep during the ritual. He passes it on to us, his readers, as something that was once passed on from one generation to the next. But the experience of the story as a kind of gift that circulates and which no one owns had been brutally shattered. World War II rained bombs on the city, bringing with it a magic “more practical and effective” than any sorcerer could ever conjure. Reduced to ruins, the city ceased hosting the holy procession of a host of angels and saints marking the arrival of the New Year. It could no longer furnish a site for ritually subsuming the mechanical tyranny of clock and calendar within the promise of messianic time. However, as Joaquin shows, one thing continued to survive amid the devastation: the story of St. Sylvestre’s Mass and Maestro Mateo’s plot to witness it. He recounts telling the story to a group of American GIs and is surprised when one of his American listeners tells him that one of the soldiers had actually witnessed St. Sylvestre’s grand entrance into the city. Finding the soldier’s address in Brooklyn, the narrator writes him a letter, asking him to tell him the story of what he, the latter-day Mateo, saw. The narrator reproduces the reply from the American. He did see the procession, he writes, but was unaware of the Christian references and names of saints. What captivated him, though, was the music and the vision of the city fully restored as the ancient parade passed by. Rather than the eyes of the recently dead, the American reached for a mechanical eye, his camera, with which to record the scene. But as he tried to take a photograph, everything suddenly vanished. “There was no crowd and no bishops and no altar and no cathedral,” he wrote. “I was standing on a stack of ruins and there was nothing but ruins around. Just blocks and blocks of ruins stretching all around me in the silent moonlight . . .”
The time of the story shifts with each retelling. It begins in some unspecified moment of early Christianity when saints succeed pagan gods. It is then reset in the early period of Spanish conquest in the later sixteenth century. Finally it is recapitulated in the immediate postwar era. As a parable about the hubris of mortals seeking immortality by magical rather than liturgical means, the story does what stories are meant to do: provide counsel. At first glance, such counsel has to do with parents’ warning their children to stay awake during the Mass lest they be turned to stone. But in the wake of war’s catastrophe, there is a further twist. The storyteller retells the story by means of another source: a soldier’s letter. By then the moral, as it were, of the story is of an entirely different sort. It is no longer about the need to stay awake, but of the need to endure the sense of loss amid the ruins upon ruins that remain. Such ruins become the occasion for both remembering the story and recalling its demise. The storyteller thus leaves off not with his own voice but with that of an American other.
While the city may be lost, something else remains: not just the ruins but, more important, the indestructible force of time that animates the capacity to remember and pass on stories, to become hearers ready to assume the position of tellers again from whatever distant shores and alienated circumstances. The story as a gift that passes from one time to another thus evinces the way by which storytelling allows us the experience of lingering on the ever-shifting threshold that divides and joins the old world with the new, the empty time of clock and calendar with the ritual time of messianic expectation.
V.
Displaced and decayed, the past seemed formless and forgotten in the postwar era. Yet the forgetting of history only meant that it was absorbed into the rubble of memory. Joaquin sought to call attention to the productive powers of the material traces of the past in his other stories. In his play, A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino (1951), he dramatizes the plight of the Marasigan family living in a grand house in Intramuros, the colonial core of Manila, which was steadily collapsing under the weight of unpaid bills, sibling rivalry, and paternal weakness. Narrated from the future perspective of the war’s aftermath, when the house itself had already been leveled, the story relates the struggles of the family to rescue its legacy and cling to an older way of life even as the forces of modernity were busy tearing away its foundations. A central concern of the characters is the fate of an oil painting by the father that depicts him as a young man fleeing a burning city while carrying on his back an older version of himself—an allusion to Aeneas carrying his father Anchises as they fled Troy. Close to death, the weakened father imagines himself saving himself. The allegorical portrait is a gift that the father had given his two spinster daughters, Paula and Candida, in compensation for sacrificing their lives caring for him.
As part of the revolutionary generation, the father, like many other paternal figures in Joaquin’s stories, is enfeebled by colonial and capitalist forces he could neither comprehend nor control. In need of money, yet unwilling to sell the portrait for which there is great demand, the sisters find themselves trapped in the house, besieged by American popular culture and its Filipino purveyors, by politically compromised politicians, and by their own feckless nostalgia for rapidly vanishing conventions. But by telling this tale from the future perspective of the near-total destruction of the city, Joaquin recalls the inter- and intragenerational struggles around historical legacy, private property, and the politics of conduct that enlivened even as it endangered late colonial families like the Marasigans. Condemned to perish, they are nonetheless redeemed in memory.
Indeed, Joaquin was obsessed with the masculinized struggle between and within generations—the Oedipal search for truth that came at the price of the violent exposure and displacement of the father’s authority by sons and daughters immersed in, but guilt-ridden from, the desires of the flesh. His first story, “Three Generations” (1940), casts fathers and sons as if they were secret lovers as much as sworn enemies struggling to control their carnal desires amid their spiritual aspirations and worldly doubts. “Cándido’s Apocalypse” (1965), written some twenty-five years later, takes up a similar thread, this time set in the new suburban developments near Manila where the father is a company man and the teenage son, Bobby, is thoroughly alienated from his parents’ world. Seeking a way out of the hypocrisy of bourgeois life, he finds himself drawn to his alter ego named “Cándido,” a Christian martyr who is also his calendrical namesake. As in “Three Generations,” the son searches for a truth that would guide his conduct and allow him to live a “genuine” existence rather than, as Joaquin puts it in the teenage lingo of the 1960s, one who is constantly “over-acting.” Possessed by Cándido, Bobby begins to see uncontrollably through the clothing and eventually the flesh of all those he encounters, driving him into a frenzy of embarrassment. Wanting to see the truth, he instead sees too much and is thus blinded to the very humanity of those whose inhuman behavior he seeks to disavow.
The figure of the weakened father also appears in The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1949). Once a widely admired doctor and officer in the failed Revolution, the older Monson chooses to go into exile in Hong Kong in the wake of the American occupation, swearing never to come back to his country until it is free even as he fills his sons with elaborate expectations of returning to the ancestral home. When the country is finally granted independence at the end of the war, he returns only to be greeted by the sorry state of their Binondo house, utterly destroyed except for the staircase. Thoroughly shaken, he quietly returns to Hong Kong and sits ossified in his room as his two sons take care of him. His failure to deliver on his promise of returning his family to their home leaves him in a state of emotional destitution. He can barely speak and retreats to using opium as his sons look on helplessly, unable to come to terms with the historical curse that they’ve inherited. Similarly, the two women in the story, the mother Concha and the daughter Connie, play out a more dangerous and violent generational conflict in Manila and Hong Kong. They seek to overcome the betrayals of corrupt politician-fathers and the desires of and for the same emasculated lover-musi
cian who passes between them as they traverse two cities and two colonial eras—the late Spanish and the American, the two navels, as it were, of Filipino history.
The gendered and sexualized inflections of generational politics are similarly thematized in two of Joaquin’s best-known works, “The Summer Solstice” and “May Day Eve” (both 1947). In the former, set in the late nineteenth century, the patriarchal complacency of a wealthy Filipino home is shattered on the hottest day of the summer when one of the servants, Agueda, returns from an orgiastic fertility ritual with its roots in pre-Christian practices. Drawn to the erotic power suddenly palpable on the half-naked body of the servant, the properly feminine mistress, Doña Lupe, decides, with the encouragement of her much younger nephew newly returned from Europe and against the wishes of her older, more conservative husband, Don Paeng, to attend the ritual. Running off to join the frenzied dancing among women of all ages and classes, Lupe is transformed as she comes to absorb the repressed memory of pagan practices that elevated women’s power of fertility over men’s claims of ownership over that power. Back home, she triumphantly confronts her husband, forcing him to declare his adoration for her as her “dog,” and “slave.” In the unforgettable ending, he gets down on the ground like “a great agonized lizard,” and crawls toward her outstretched naked foot, “kiss[ing] it savagely . . . the step, the toe, the frail ankle—while she bit her lip and clutched in pain at the windowsill, her body distended and wracked by horrible shivers, her head flung back and her loose hair streaming out the window—streaming fluid and black in the white night where the huge moon glowed like a sun and the dry air flamed into lightning and the pure heat burned with the immense fever of noon.”
In “May Day Eve,” we hear a story that’s been passed down from one generation to the next: that holding a candle in a darkened room in front of a mirror will call forth the image of the one you will marry. But it might also cause the devil to appear. In Joaquin’s telling of the story, a girl takes to heart the promise of the myth, rushes down to look at a mirror, and encounters the man who would be her husband, but who would also be her oppressor. Many years later, she recounts this tale to her granddaughter but says that what she saw was not her grandfather but the devil himself. Joaquin then retells another version of the story, this time from the man’s perspective. Coming home from a political meeting, he is surprised to see his grandson looking at a mirror reminiscent of what his wife had done when they had first met. This unexpected encounter with the future generation reenacting the past triggers in the man a flood of memories about his wife, about the passionate love and miserable life they shared. Caught in the painful rush of images from the past, he looks out the window and hears the night watchman calling out the time as he had done at the beginning of the story, as if to synchronize the current telling and hearing of the tale with its earlier versions across three generations.
Intragenerational struggles figure prominently in Joaquin’s only attempt at a murder mystery, “The Order of Melkizedek” (1966). It is set once more in the suburbs of 1960s Manila, where Joaquin retraces a series of crises that confront a Filipino expatriate returning from his job in New York with the United Nations. His siblings had asked him to help save their youngest sister from the clutches of an insidious cult leader seeking to resurrect an ancient order of pagan worshippers while passing it off as a revolutionary revision of Christianity. Precolonial and pre-Christian ideas about power and worship brush up against what Joaquin portrays as the ecumenical pop theology and pseudo-revolutionary politics characteristic of the Filipino reception of the Vatican II reforms in mid-sixties Manila. The Marcoses had just assumed power, the Beatles had just been summarily kicked out by thugs of the First Lady, and the descendants of the newly rich whose wealth came from the corruptions of their fathers mingle in sunken living rooms wearing Western suits and kitsch ethnic-designed dresses. A defrocked priest passing himself off as a new prophet employs thugs and theological mumbo-jumbo to cajole a rich, aimless heiress into his cult, while her hapless expatriate brother tries but fails to rescue her.
VI.
Alongside the obsession with gendered generational politics was Joaquin’s concern with the temporality of the past—its longue durée that stretched into the future as it curved into the present. In “Guardia de Honor” (1949), a conversation between a mother and daughter about a missing emerald earring worn by the latter’s great grandmother takes place in the late 1940s but is overheard by that same great grandmother as she prepares to put on the set of earrings for a parade in honor of the Virgin Mary in the 1860s. As the point of connection across several generations, the lone earring is the remainder of a deadly accident borne out of passionate jealousy. The great grandmother’s story unfolds as the tale of choice crashing against contingency.
Joaquin stages a conversation between the past and the future whereby the latter tells the former what it must not do, yet what it cannot help but do. Is the past made up of a series of accidents that, in hindsight, could have been avoided, or is everything a matter of fate, whereby events necessarily happen for a reason? Is the tragedy that brings death also the miracle foretold that gives birth to love and new life? Can the past learn from the future, or is the future condemned to play out the missed opportunities, the misplaced anger, the deceits and the shamefulness of the past? What can stories tell us of these confounded possibilities and tangled relationships across generations? How can we continue telling and hearing stories if all endings have already been foretold? Or is the point not the end of stories, like the end of life, but the afterlife of their telling, the possibility of their living on, spoken by another source, delivered to another recipient, who in turn tells it to someone else? Is this the lesson that the future offers to the past: not just the need to bear the inevitable passage of time but also the necessity of being alert to the coexistence of many other times?
Such questions persist in many of Joaquin’s stories, inflected by and enfolded into the postcolonial dilemmas of memory making amid the social upheavals and surreal political violence and corruptions of his time. Just as the war reduced the city to its jagged, chaotic traces, so the inexorable but uneven process of reconstruction resulted in imposing upon the colonial past the architecture of anonymity and sameness. The result was a virtual lobotomy, wiping away awareness not only of the Revolution but also of the complexity of the Spanish legacy as well. Reaching back to the early period of conquest and conversion, Joaquin dredged up legends from the nineteenth century that referred to the sixteenth for a mid-twentieth-century readership. Such a project, ranging far and wide in time, lent to his stories an epic quality frequently played out on the level of the sentence. Joaquin often resorted to long sinuous sentences that meandered like the Pasig River—the major waterway that links and divides Manila—overflowing into the many esteros of popular forgetfulness. There is, for example, the opening sentence of “Doña Jerónima” (1965):17
In the days of the galleons, a certain Archbishop of Manila
was called to a council in Mexico but on the way there fell in
with pirates who seized his ship, looted the holds, slew the crew,
and were stringing up the Archbishop to a mast when a sudden
storm ripped up and wrecked both pirate craft and Philippine
galleon, drowning all that were on board, save only the
Archbishop, who, being bound to the cross of the mast, was
borne safely over the wrath of the waters and thus reached the
shores of a desert isle, a dry isle that was but a tip of reef in the
sea, where, for a burning year, he lived on fish and prayer, on
rain water and meditation, crouched day and night in deep
thought at the foot of the cross of the mast he had set up on the
shore, all alone in that waste of ocean, until a passing ship,
mystified by a reflection as of a giant cross shining in the
air,
tracked the mirage to the horizon and came upon the desert
isle, and upon the cross of mast planted on the shore, and upon
the bowed, mute, shriveled old man squatting motionless and
cross-legged there, stark naked and half-blind and burned black
as coal, all his hair turned white and his white beard trailing
down to his navel, and hardly able to stand or move or speak
or grasp, in which dismal condition he was carried back to his
city, arriving there some two years after he had left in glory,
having departed a fine blaze of a man, handsome and vigorous,
and bidden farewell by all the city to a tumult of bells, banners,
fireworks and music, and returning now in decay, terribly
altered, terribly aged, mere skin and bone and wild eye, but