Riverrun

by Danton Remoto

  “I only have admiration for the prose of Danton Remoto. The vessel of form and the fluid of content are shaped in one organic whole in his works.”

  –N.V.M. Gonzalez

  National Artist for Literature

  “I like the passion and the attitude in the writings of Danton Remoto. And most importantly, he writes with heart—which is the only way to write.”

  –Bienvenido N. Santos

  “The Ateneo de Manila University has produced some of the finest Filipino writers in the last three decades. One of them is Danton Remoto.”

  –Alfred Yuson

  Manila Chronicle

  “Danton Remoto’s prose is, quite simply, marvelous, or full of marvel. Deep insights spring out at the reader from harmless-looking paragraph corners, keen observations startle the reader into looking at everyday reality with more alert eyes, and unexpected words make the prose exciting … If you don’t want to remain childish forever in your beliefs (particularly on gender and sexuality), you may want to pick up your own copy. You don’t have to be gay to enjoy Danton Remoto’s writing.”

  –Isagani R. Cruz,

  Philippine STAR

  “Danton Remoto is a gifted writer. His works have a contemporary flavor, dealing with topics that slice delicately but thoroughly the Filipino heart.”

  –Philippine Daily Inquirer

  OTHER BOOKS BY DANTON REMOTO

  As individual author:

  Black Silk Pajamas: Poems

  Bright, Catholic—and Gay: Essays

  Buhay Bading: Mga Sanaysay

  Gaydar: Essays

  Pulotgata: The Love Poems

  Rampa: Mga Sanaysay

  Seduction and Solitude: Essays

  Skin Voices Faces: Poems

  X-Factor: Essays

  Happy Na, Gay Pa

  As editor:

  Afraid: The Best Philippine Ghost Stories

  Ladlad: An Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing, with J. Neil C.

  Garcia

  Ladlad 2, with J. Neil C. Garcia

  Ladlad 3, with J. Neil C. Garcia

  New Philippine Writing, special issue of Philippine Studies,

  with Emmanuel Torres

  The Best of Ladlad, with J. Neil C. Garcia

  Truth or Consequence: Poems for the Removal of Gloria

  Macapagal Arroyo, with Joi Barrios, et al.

  As translator:

  Ang Higanteng Maramot at Iba Pang Mga Kuwento, stories by

  Oscar Wilde, with Jonathan Chua and D.M. Reyes

  The Fault in Our Stars, novel by John Green

  The Mango Bride, novel by Marivi Soliven

  Forthcoming:

  Landscapes of Feeling: Essays

  Si Nanay si Tatay, Di ko Babayaan: Writings on Bikol

  The Runes of Memory: New and Selected Poems

  Kuwaderno: Mga Bago at Piling Tula

  Green Roses: Selected Stories

  Riverrun

  A Novel

  Danton Remoto

  Copyright to this digital edition © 2015 by

  Danton Remoto

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents

  are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any

  resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is

  entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or

  by any means without the written permission of the copyright owner and

  the publisher.

  Published and exclusively distributed by

  ANVIL PUBLISHING, INC.

  7/F Quad Alpha Centrum

  125 Pioneer Street

  Mandaluyong City

  1550 Philippines

  Trunk Lines: (+632) 4774752, 4774755 to 57

  Sales and Marketing: Loc 801 to 808

  marketing@anvilpublishing.com

  Fax: (+632) 7471622

  www.anvilpublishing.com

  Book design by Jasper Espejo (cover) and Joshene Bersales (interior)

  ISBN 9789712732553 (e-book)

  Version 1.0.1

  For my father, Francisco Onrubia Remoto

  (4 June 1933 – 19 October 2009)

  and

  my mother, Lilia Relato Remoto

  (10 March 1932 – 19 November 2009)

  Acknowledgments

  EXCERPTS FROM this novel in their earlier versions have been published in the following magazines and journals: Ani, Heights, Manila Chronicle, Metro Magazine Fiction issue, National Midweek, Philippines Free Press, Philippine Graphic, Philippine STAR, Sunday Inquirer Magazine Summer Reading Issue, The Blithe House Quarterly (U.S.A.), www.abs-cbnnews.com, and www.dantonremoto2010.blogspot.com.

  I would like to thank the following editors for publishing these excerpts: Noel Alumit, Gregorio C. Brillantes, Isagani De Castro, Nick Joaquin, Jose F. Lacaba, Millet M. Mananquil, Malou Mangahas, and Thelma S. San Juan.

  “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” was anthologized in Golden Harvest: Essays in Honor of Fr. Joseph Galdon, S.J., edited by Edna Zapanta Manlapaz, Susan Evangelista, et al. Quezon City: Office of Research and Publications, Ateneo de Manila University, 2000.

  “Ice Drop” was anthologized in My Fair Maladies, edited by Cristina Pantoja Hildago. Quezon City: Milflores Publishing, 2005.

  “The Freak Show” was anthologized in Very Short Stories for Harried Readers, edited by Vicente Garcia Groyon. Quezon City: Milflores Publishing, Inc., 2007.

  “Yes, the Miss Universe!” was published in Happy Na, Gay Pa by Danton Remoto. Mandaluyong City: Anvil Publishing, 2015.

  In their earlier versions, “The Kite” won Honorable Mention at the Philippine Board on Books for Young People Short Story Contest, “The Heart of Summer” won Second Prize at the Philippines Free Press Literary Awards, and “Wings of Desire” won Third Prize at the Philippine Graphic Literary Awards.

  The recipe for Kinunut came from The Coconut Cookery of Bicol written by Honesto C. General and published by Bookmark in 1994. Dios mabalos, manoy, sa pagtabang saku.

  I would also like to thank the British Council, the University of Stirling, the International Writers’ Fellowship at Hawthornden Castle, Fulbright Foundation, and the English Department of Rutgers University for the clean, well-lighted places that allowed me to write this book. I would also like to acknowledge the support by the James and Mary Mulvey Fellowship Grant and the University Research Council of Ateneo de Manila University in the revision of the manuscript.

  Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Carol Smith of Rutgers University, RayVi Sunico, Joy Uy-Tioco, and Lourdes H. Vidal for reading the drafts of the novel and giving suggestions for revision.

  The Imaginary Iceberg

  Elizabeth Bishop

  This iceberg cuts its facets from within.

  Like jewelry from a grave

  it saves itself, perpetually, and adorns

  only itself, perhaps the snows

  which so surprise us lying on the sea.

  Good-bye, we say, good-bye, as the ship steers off

  where waves give in to one another’s waves

  and clouds run in a warmer sky.

  Icebergs behoove the soul

  (both being self-made from elements least visible)

  to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible.

  *

  Too thick? Love is or ain’t.

  Thin love ain’t love at all.

  – Anonymous quote from the Internet

  PART 1

  Memory’s Clear, White Light

  Words

  WORDS. THEIR SHADOW and light.

  My mother taught me the alphabet even before I was enrolled in kindergarten class. She would sit beside me, guiding m
y hand to form the arcs, loops and crosses, the dips and turns of the letters: the alphabets in a dance. I would copy onto my lined paper the letters, and then the words formed by joining one letter to the next, unlocking meanings, pulling them away from each other’s loneliness.

  One word would join another, turning into a sentence, a whole train of them turning into paragraphs, into pages, into books!

  On rainy mornings when I could not leave the house to play in the backyard, I would plump my pillow and let it stand against the bed’s headboard. Then I would pull the string of the lampshade (light, warm like skin), and begin to read. When my book was new, I would open it slowly, slowly, in the middle, then I would bring the book closer to my nose. I would inhale the smell of paper and ink, thread and glue, imagine I was inhaling the very fragrances of words. Then I would read.

  A world of words, a universe of sorrows and joys! Open, sesame, and out tumbled the tales of Scheherazade told in a thousand and one nights (how deliciously frightening to have your life depend on a tale). Alice wandering into the labyrinths of wonder (how the jaw would drop at every turn of the slippery episodes, turning like the lobes of a seashell). And later, the stories of Bienvenido N. Santos (oh you lovely people, Filipinos in a foreign land, Asian-Hispanic-American, sassy, bright, and noisy, the inner melancholy). The poems of Pablo Neruda (my heartbeats run to you like the sea to the shore).

  A geography of feelings, then, from the hidden treasures of a cave to the sea shimmering like the roundest of pearls.

  The Hitchhiker

  “A FULL MOON with no scar shone on the night you were born,” my father—my dark-skinned father—said as he sat under the shade cast by the star-apple tree in the yard.

  I had been pulling out his white hairs using a tweezer. Five white hairs meant five centavos, and business was brisk. Fifteen white hairs meant a bottle of RC Cola. I asked him about the small, square thing wrapped in layers of old cotton, hung on a string and dangling from the ceiling just outside my window. “That is your umbilical cord. The doctor, who was my friend, wrapped it in cotton, then gave it for me to hang from our ceiling.”

  “Why, Papa?” I asked.

  “So that you will not wander far from home.”

  The cool wind rising seemed to move him to tell more stories.

  “It was the night you were born. We still did not have a jeep then, so I was taking the bicycle that night, on my way to the hospital. I was already in front of the huge balete tree, its roots like knotted arms, when I felt the bicycle had become heavier. It was not an uphill climb, but why the suddenly heavy load?”

  By this time, I had stopped probing my father’s head for my RC Cola.

  “Suddenly, I knew that somebody was sitting on the back of my bicycle. That she was a woman in white, with long black hair streaming in the night, and that she had no face. In my mind, I talked to her to please leave, my first child will be born tonight and my wife has been going through labor pains, on and off, in the last two days—”

  “And then what happened, Papa?” I asked.

  “She did let go, in the end, and when I reached the hospital, you were just being born, bald and red and sticky all over—and squealing madly at the world.”

  The Magic Box

  I WAS FOUR years old, sleeping soundly on my parents’ big bed. One morning, my mother—my tall and beautiful mother—woke me up, brought me to the bathroom where she washed my face, and made me rinse my mouth. When we returned to their room, she said, “This is the day I told you about. The man with the magic black box will come today.”

  And so she dressed me up. She pulled my new white, short-sleeved polo shirt from its plastic bag, and shook it in the morning air. Against my skin the shirt was crisp and clean. Mama made me wear my new khaki shorts. She buttoned up my shirt and then knotted a green tie under my stiff collar.

  “Now, you look so formal already,” she said. “When the man stands before his magic black box and disappears under the black cloth, you should give him your widest smile.” Still groggy from sleep, I just nodded lazily.

  Whiteness, there was whiteness everywhere! The walls and ceilings of our house with its French windows. The bark of the pine trees in the yard painted white, as Brigadier General Bautista, the commander of the military base, had ordered. And then, when we stepped out of the house, the whitest of sky, whiter than the paper Mama would give me, along with a big box of crayons. From this box, I would take out the crayons one by one, memorizing their colors.

  The man inside the van had hair stiff as a toothbrush. He was also as big as a cabinet. He asked me to sit down on a wicker chair in the middle of the van. Behind me, a curtain in pale green. Mama was just outside, I kept on telling myself. The man then lumbered over to where the magic black box stood. “Okay, son, ready?” he asked.

  I just nodded, noticing the cracks on his pair of brown shoes.

  Then his head disappeared under the black cloth. “Smile, son,” he said.

  I smiled as he began to count. Ready, one, two, three. But at the count of three, I stopped smiling. I just looked at him straight, behind that magic black box, then tilted my head slightly to the right, as if listening to a voice only I could hear.

  Now as I look at that first posed shot (thin hair, oblong head, the most piercing eyes), I still find myself listening to a voice coming as if from afar. But in vain I would wait, for it would never arrive, and then there would only be the sudden explosion of light.

  The Visit

  LIKE A SNEEZE it spread among my friends, the news that the President would visit our military base. But perhaps, drop by would have been the word. For on that day, with the September sky the color of lead, the presidential plane landed on the runway stretching from the hangar like a gray tongue. In the horizon loomed the Zambales mountain range, including a dormant volcano called Mount Pinatubo.

  It was a Saturday. Since we had no classes, my friend Luis and I jumped onto our bikes and sped in the direction of the runway. Of course we should not be seen, so we just crouched on a slope, beneath the coconut trees, and watched the presidential plane make a smooth, graceful landing. The stainless-steel door opened, and there was the President, in his crisp off-white barong Tagalog. The spun pineapple fibers sheathed the body still young and firm, the chest of the bemedalled war hero of the country. Youngest mayor, youngest governor, youngest congressman, youngest senator, and now, the youngest president of the country.

  His slit eyes seemed to crinkle in the heat as he walked down the plane. At the landing he stopped, acknowledged the salute of the generals arrayed before him like penguins. Swift and sharp was his salute, his thumb a small wing beneath the four fingers slanting to the sky. His hair was well-cut, his eyes staring straight ahead, lips pressed together—a face poised forward, to the future.

  “But he only farted,” Luis complained later, when we were already having soda and crackers bought from the commissary. Luis was right, for after the salute and handing personally a sheaf of papers to Brigadier General Bautista and exchanging brief words with him, the President turned around and climbed the stairs again. The last thing I saw was his pure, off-white, dazzling barong, before he was swallowed up by the darkness of the plane.

  The First Television

  BOY, WHO LIVED in front of our house, told me one day that they had just bought a television set from the Ocampo’s Appliance Store on M. Hizon Street in San Fernando. Now he could watch Casper, the Friendly Ghost, Josie and the Pussycats, Batman and Robin, Spider Man, and The Flintstones, yaba-daba-doo, every night.

  I took that news as an invitation, so one afternoon, after leaving my school bag in the room, I rushed out of the house, past my grandmother who was watering the lawn, onto the street beginning to turn gold from the sunset. I only stopped running when I reached the yard of Boy’s house.

  I was about to enter their door when I met his mother, who was stepping out of their house. Now, Boy’s mother was the type who had been immortalized in countless sitcoms, drama
shows, and even advertisements. In the morning her hair would be in rollers; in the afternoon her face would be greasy from all that cooking.

  “So,” she asked me, shapeless in her faded house dress, “where are you going?”

  “To watch TV. Boy said your new TV set was delivered yesterday.”

  “Yes, but we’re not inviting anybody to watch it,” she said, her thick lips twisting with her words, like the villain in Tagalog movies.

  I was young and stupid, so I just stared at her. She stepped backward, held the doorknob with her left hand, and slammed the door shut on my face. I stood there, my feelings in chaos. My ears burnt with flames I could not see, and a great terrible anger began rising within me. It was the kind of anger that would rarely rise from me, but when it came, it exploded with a fury.

  I walked down their cemented stairs, grabbed a pebble, no, a rock, and hurled it at their windowpane. I only ran away when I was sure the window had been smashed.

  The window looked like the teeth of a shark.

  I ran in the gathering dusk, past my grandmother merging with the shadows, into the living room floating with the smell of fried chicken for dinner. I ran right into my room. I locked the door and sat down in the dark.

  Then I heard our jeep nosing into the garage, my father’s voice, in his wake a series of voices, then a series of loud knocks on my door.

  I braced myself, and then opened the door. Papa was there, his face cold and impassive. Behind him, Mama’s stricken face. And behind her, my grandmother.

  Papa grabbed my hand, dragged me to the kitchen, asked me if it was true; I nodded, and clamped my lips together. He made me lie down, face flat against the hard wooden bench. I knew what was coming. Then his leather belt began lashing at my buttocks and the skin of my thighs. Once, twice, thrice. I was just silent, my teeth biting into my lips until they bled.