by Nick Joaquin
“Yes, brat, you were a pain in the neck.”
“My young tears on your neck, silly. But you were a darling to baby me when you were a perfect baby yourself. When you went away it was like Father had died again.”
“I’m sorry I ditched you.”
“Whatever became of your writing?”
“Also ditched. Whatever became of your writing?”
“Rite of passage, brod. Like sharing that awful apartment in Cubao with this girl from the U.P. We called it Cockroach Farm.”
“The same girl you opened a bookshop with?”
“I don’t know what impelled us to. Yes, I do, too. This young writers’ crowd we were with, terrible, we couldn’t always be having them at the apartment, you know. The neighbors were square na square naman. Oh, perfect creeps. Always kicking about this and that. And in the middle of the night, too. Lacson her name was, my partner, Pomona Lacson, but we called her Lucky. So, the bookshop was called The Lucky Steve. Everybody called me Steve in that crowd. Short for Estiva. What do you know, we hadn’t been in business a week yet when here were those stupid cops raiding us. And in broad daylight. Pornography, they said. And Lucky and me only eighteen. I said to this officer, hey, first time I heard of minors corrupting a big grown man like you. Because he said he was so shocked. Lucky was wonderful, she has connections. Had the whole thing hushed up and we reopened. Though we had to junk half the stock. I think, do you know, that did it in, my Steve phase. No, it had been building up already. Like the time we attended this writers’ workshop and got kicked out when all we did, our crowd, we slept on the beach. Kicked out. The whole crowd. Just for sleeping. Imagine! And things like that. Well, anyway, the writing wasn’t going at all. Not mine nor my crowd’s. We’d all been published—a poem apiece, a story apiece. Rimbaud cum Joyce cum Kerouac and Angry Young. But I felt myself more and more on the outside looking in. At them. The Group. Young Writers. Which was dingy of me considering the crap I was guilty of, myself. But I felt they were just monkeying with words, and helling around, but pretending all the time this was being creative. I said to myself, I said, if I was going to hell around I might as well do it with people who didn’t have to pretend it was art for art’s sake, my ass. Now don’t be having ideas, Siddie. I was taking care of myself. Still intact virgin and all that. Though there was a time or two, like when the bookshop was flopping and we rented the upstairs to roomers, when I almost gave. Because they were beginning to think I must be lesbian or something and there was this Pakistani painter renting an upstairs room, not bad-looking but very secretive about the stuff he did. So I went up there one day prepared to give myself to him. I knocked, he opened, I swayed in—’naks, real sexy—but one look at his paintings on the walls and, bo-rother, I knew if I was going to be deflowered it wasn’t going to be by anyone that corny.”
“So what followed?”
“The nagwawala babies, going for lost. The Young Barbarians, Kamikaze, target society. Not the Group now but the Barkada. You know: scooters and motors, drag races, combos, stomping in movie houses at rock-’n’-roll films and squealing in chorus at the Coliseum at pop singers, jam sessions with gin and dog on the side, sometimes nude swimming in somebody’s pool if their olds were away, oftener a gang rumble—the whole teenage routine.”
“And no longer intact.”
“Still most wonderfully intact, though it took some work. I was Ginny to my barkada, Stowaway Ginny, because I lived out. Took a pad with this coed I didn’t even know was a call girl, bless my innocence. The Ginny phase didn’t last very long, you know.”
“Too old for that sort of thing?”
“I was still eighteen, what are you, but, yes, something like that. They looked like babies. And another thing: I find I tend to be zany among squares, square among zanies. Now why is that? In school I was the Compleat Kalog. But afterward, in New York, where everybody tries to be so kooky, you said I was a square, remember? The rebound was to the lit’ry bohemians—but I still couldn’t let myself go. Not all the way. They said it was the convent school in me. Nerts. They couldn’t turn me on. But I wanted so to let go it shot me right into the teen-age jungle. Now that was better really. Basic. Down to basic things. Food, drink, sex, action. The primitive. And you begin to see everything else, especially laws and churches and reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic, as just the red tape that’s messing up life and making people so sick. Excess baggage. Often, in rumbles, I’d get a feeling all this teen-age violence would finally set off one global explosion hurling out all that trash. The world would be flat afterward but what was left of it could start clean. Now that was a good cool feeling. Made you feel dedicated. Like the feeling you get when the barkada says let’s go there and you go, or says let’s do this and you do. You’ve no will of your own, you’re just part of something on the move. Don’t you some times want to be that, Sid?”
“Then why didn’t you stay with it?”
“Because it was bogus, too, like the lit’ry life as a sleeping around. This barkada of mine, they were basic, they were primitive, they could afford not to be bothered about anything except eating and drinking, sex and action, but only because they had allowances. And whenever they got into trouble they fell back on mommy and daddy. They said they wanted to be free, hah—their freedom was just freeloading. And how can you stage a strike that’s subsidized by the company? That’s when I asked Adela to stop my allowance. I had begun to feel like a crook. So, goodbye to Ginny, Stowaway Ginny. I got this job with an ad agency, moved in with some media girls, got to know the executive-shirt boys.”
“If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em.”
“But I did show I could do okay copy for the rat race: style-wise, market-wise, offbeat approach-wise.”
“And got rechristened once again?”
“Gigi this time. You should have seen Gigi’s layout. Pink-rimmed eyeglasses, a pouf, linen suits, a rolled umbrella, an attaché case. Cocktails now, instead of gin and dog. Night- club-hopping instead of motorcycling in a pack up to Baguio on the spur of the moment in the middle of the night. But it was good to be able to talk again. This new crowd I was with was with it, whichever it was in: hot jazz, new-wave films, Salinger, the young ones. I felt queer, though, talking about teen-agers instead of being one. Talking. That was a talking crowd. Compulsive punners to a man, to a corporate man.”
“But Madison Avenue still wasn’t Damascus.”
“Know what, Sid—I never did figure it out. There I was so anxious to be sincere, ready to wrench my soul if need be to Believe in the Product. But nobody did. Not even in what they said about it. If you praised someone for a catchy slogan he’d say: ‘Yes, it’s so bad it’s good.’ And all the time all this murderous jostling for position but pretending all the time all they really wanted was to write the Great Filipino Novel. My God, there must have been 359 books in progress in this agency I was with, everything from epic poems to exposés of the Filipino soul. They were the least of the status symbols there but they were supposed to keep the package honest. This guy I was going around with, a soft-sell poet wanting to become a high-pressure executive, he said the copy he did was really a blow against the Establishment. He said the crap he produced helped swell the crap being rammed down the public’s throat that at last would have to come out, in one big violent throw-up. A revolutionary, what do you know. But all the time wanting oh most pitifully to make it to account executive—and a house in San Lorenzo with an Impala in the garage.”
“Any chance of him getting there?”
“All he has got so far is an ulcer.”
“And what did you get?”
“I got confused, very. You have to be schizoid to last in there, I think. Even the punning’s their urge to split up meaning. I worked mine off by beginning to march with the nationalists, because they were at least trying to integrate meaning. Before I knew it I was a card-holding member of the KKKs: Kami’y Kilusang Kaba
taan.”
“This isn’t Gigi anymore.”
“No, Gigi had become a split personality and I let her lie where she dropped. For the nationalists I was Guiang: hair in a knot, native fabrics, much poring over Rizal and Recto, demonstrations in front of Congress and the U.S. embassy, the protest marches to American bases, Go Home Yankee, and Come Home Filipino. The pre-Hispanic thing.”
“Guiang sounds close.”
“But not close enough. Still not radical enough for me. I wanted to go back, not just look back in anger, like Guiang and her crowd. College professors, parlor pinks, magazine writers, proletarian poets, rich boys with a conscience and shrewd fathers. Back to native roots, they said, and was I rarin’ to go. But every time we started off, where we always ended up was at the American embassy or the American bases or some American firm. I got to thinking the way back to native roots must be through Washington, D.C. And some of them, poor finks, they marched Yankee-ward so often they finally stopped there. Like this poet who was almost my b.f.—always T-shirted and denim’d, unwashed and unbarbered, and in a fury—whom I started a fund for so he could write his angry proletarian poems. Next thing we knew, he was with this American firm. Last time I saw him, he was in a white, white suit, would you believe it, and a silk tie yet, a crewcut yet, but still doing the Angry Young Man bit as he passed cigarettes around in a gold-plated case. Oh, that was sad. I felt it was the PRO world all over again. You could stay honest doing crap as long as you were the first one to admit it was crap and you were really meaning it against the Establishment. Oh, too sad. And afterward—that boy did break my heart, Siddie—Guiang with her Marikina shoes and Tondo-boy slang was just window dressing. She had to be swept away, too.”
“Steve, Ginny, Gigi, Guiang. Down the hatch. And now Sister Guia.”
“Yes.”
“On the real road to Damascus.”
“Yes indeed.”
“But what got you on that track?”
“Magic.”
“The Prophet Melkizedek?”
She sat up and passed palms along the sides of her head.
“Here we are,” she said, “at Salem House.”
• • •
The door, one step up from the street, opened into a narrow hall, dark save for a flame floating in oil in a coconut shell, flickering before the figure that had shocked Santiago: an Igorot-style wooden carving of the Virgin pregnant, asquat on her haunches, halo of stars round her head. The rude face stared from the dusk of a niche in the side wall.
Sid paused just beyond the door, waiting for the girls to switch on a light, but they glanced back at him in wonder.
“Haven’t you got electricity?”
“Oh, we do, Mr. Estiva, but we prefer candle and oil, for atmosphere.”
“Siddie, you’re not afraid of the dark!”
He advanced to the middle of the stone-flagged room. It was mostly bare but in the winking twilight he could make out a gallenera bench, a couple of round inlaid tables with clusters of high-backed chairs, and what looked like part of an old retablo now turned into a bookshelf.
“This was the nuns’ chapel,” explained Sister Juana. “We have made it our common room. That wall where the altar stood separated the sacristy and the chaplain’s quarters from the nunnery proper, which was behind this side wall. When this was a bodega, after the war, they tore up what used to be the nuns’ choir to make a passage into the interior.”
Sid followed the girls through the short passage and emerged into a small square courtyard surrounded on all four sides by the restored edifice, of two stories, the upper story ajutting over the lower one to form a roof for the walk. From each of the four posts at the corners burned a torch leaning from a strap.
“This was the cloister,” said Sister Juana. “The arches were completely destroyed during the war but we have been able to rehabilitate the cells.”
She waved at the doors that lined the square.
“Come and see my cell,” said Guia.
She opened a door and Sid peered in over her shoulder. An oil lamp on a cheap wooden chest revealed a bamboo papag, a stool, a small high window without bars.
“How many of you stay here?”
“Oh, usually not more than half a dozen at a time; we’re usually on the road. We’re growing fast, I think, but we’re still not a movement of hundreds.”
“And what’s beyond the cloister?”
“Come, I’ll show you.”
One door opened into a narrow hallway with another door at the end. Sister Juana unbolted the door and they stepped out into an angle of open space, where a cluster of ruins jagged the moonlight. Beyond darkened a high wall.
“This is how the nunnery must have looked after the war,” said Sister Juana. “The nuns’ compound was in the shape of a triangle, with the longest side parallel to the city walls. This is the upper angle. The original complex must have extended up to here and you can see that whatever building stood here must have enclosed a small circular courtyard.”
“Look what curious ruins the war left,” said Guia.
Nothing remained of whatever building had stood here save parts of its wall round the courtyard. Six or seven fragments of this wall, unequal in height but still massive though long moldering and pillaged by weed and shrub, stood in a ring, indicating the shape of the courtyard. Sid walked up to the ring of ruins and stood in a gap between two boulders, gazing into the moonlit circle. Guia and Sister Juana appeared in other gaps in the ring.
“We think,” said Sister Juana, “the nuns did their washing here. There must have been a well or pool in the center of this courtyard.”
“What’s that in the middle now—a barbecue pit?”
“No, you silly,” giggled Guia. “Those are adobe blocks we found lying about and didn’t have the heart to throw away. They must be centuries old. So we piled them up into a kind of table there.”
Sid walked up to the pile. Four longish slabs had been set side by side and another layer of four slabs had been laid crosswise upon them.
“The altar stone?” he called out.
“Well, why not?” laughed Sister Juana. “If we ever get permission to hold the sacrifice of the Mass here.”
Standing before the adobe pile, Sid looked up and saw a small light in the boulder directly across. As he approached it he noticed that this remnant of wall had been cleaned of weed and shrub. There had obviously been a tall window in this part of the wall but the hollow was now enclosed by a rounded metal door, silvery in the moonlight. A flame deep in a tall glass burned before the shut door and on the ledge were scattered flowers, a sheaf of grain.
Sid glanced around, skyward, and found Guia and Sister Juana standing behind him.
“It faces east,” he said.
“A Philippine superstition,” said Sister Juana. “Doors and stairs must face east.”
“What is this a door to?”
“Our great devotion. Corpus Christi.”
“The Sacrament?”
“No, just an image, Mr. Estiva.”
“But it’s shut up like a tabernacle.”
“Not everybody is ready to understand.”
“Oh, primitive statuary.”
“And you don’t find that shocking.”
“Can you open it up for me?”
“No, I don’t have the keys.”
“Your great devotion.”
“Mr. Estiva, shall we go in now?”
“What do you call it?”
“We try not to call anything by name, Mr. Estiva. The basic terms have been so corrupted.”
“Then when do you celebrate it?”
Sister Juana merely shrugged but Guia spoke up.
“New Year’s Day, you donkey. Now shut up and let’s go.”
“Why New Year’s Day? That’s not liturgical. Oh yes,
it is. Feast of the Circumcision.”
“And you’re cordially invited to our patronal festivities, donkey. Now let’s go in. I’m cold.”
Sid turned to follow the girls but stopped, seeing something standing in shadow in a gap in the ruins. As he stared at it the shadow moved, emerged, crossed the ring of stone—walking with an almost imperceptible limp—and stood before him: a tall man with long hair in a black suit. Sister Juana had hurried back.
“Father Melchor, Mr. Estiva.”
Sid glanced at the man’s throat: he was wearing an ordinary tie, not a Roman collar.
“Are you a priest, Father?”
The man smiled and bowed.
“But not a practicing one, Mr. Estiva.”
“Oh, you’re the—”
“—defrocked priest your brother-in-law mentioned?”
“Father Melchor,” said Guia, drawing nearer, “was never defrocked, as we tried to explain to Santiago, who’s another hopeless donkey.”
Not wanting to, Sid found himself meeting the man’s eyes. He looked between forty and fifty, very brown, with competitive shoulders and a face deep in ambush in the coarse locks that, hardly graying, dangled to his shoulders. But no Beatles bangs curtained the forehead to hide the birthmark there: a slight swell of skin like a welt, darkly purple, the shape rather like a tree aslant. His voice, pitched low, seemed to be muffling thunder.
“It’s a long story, Mr. Estiva. I was ordained in China. I had gone there as a lay brother of this order I had joined, but my superiors thought it fit, despite certain physical defects of mine, to elevate me to the priesthood. I was originally in Fookien province but had been sent to Tibet on a mission and there I found myself stranded during the revolt and the change in regime. Unable to join my colleagues, I stayed where I was, serving in the local parish, until I was permitted to leave the county two years ago. When I arrived in Hong Kong I heard that I was under a cloud for having served with the Church in China after it broke with Rome, and that my order had dropped me. I therefore thought it wise when I came back to the Philippines not to raise the question of my status but to return as a simple layman.”