Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, July 31, 2006


IF YOU hate name-dropping (normally, I do with a passion), you might want to think twice about reading this column. I’m going to drop names as shamelessly as our congressmen award themselves allowances and trips to Geneva. And for what noble purpose, to what lofty end am I about to parade a plethora of worthies?

To be absolutely honest, none. None, but the fleeting if dubious thrill of vicarious voyeurism, that odd but distinct sensation of somehow being enlarged by your proximity to someone famous—and never mind if he or she is across the room or on a stage a hundred yards away; the important thing is, you’re breathing the same air, sharing the same roof, and for that one moment subject to the same cosmic forces. (That could mean, in the worst case, that you could die in the best of company, a prospect that struck me once when I boarded a tiny plane in Marinduque only to find the illustrious writer James Hamilton Patterson (below) in one of the seats. “Durnit,” I thought, “if this plane crashes I won’t even get top billing!”)

Last week, I mentioned watching a Bulls-Bucks game ca. 1990, skipping my graduate class in Shakespeare to witness Michael Jordan gut the Bucks with a last-second three-pointer. It reminded me that one of the most popular threads in a techie forum I inhabit is devoted to “Famous people I’ve met (or kinda met”); it’s an off-topic thread, of course, a diversion from the usual rants and raves over core-duo processors and backlit keyboards. One particularly well-positioned member could list, among others, Colin Powell, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, Kalapana, Claire Marlowe, Jim Chapell, Kenny G., Janet Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Phil Collins, Jose Carreras, Yanni, Barry Manilow, Gloria Estefan & the Miami Sound Machine, Ricky Martin, 98 Degrees, The Corrs, Gene Hackman, Natalie Portman, and Jon Bon Jovi. Another member ran into Mike Tyson in the elevator; more pleasantly, yet another encountered Viva Hot Babe Jen Rosendahl in Boracay. And so on. You get the idea.

In this celebrity-infested world where nearly everything’s just a plane ticket away (of course you may have to sell the family farm for that ticket), it’s become almost impossible not to bump into some superstar or other. You could even be avoiding or ignoring them, and then they bump into you. My favorite story of a celebrity encounter—which I’ve told so often in this corner that there ought to be a plaque for it somewhere—has to do with my poet-friend Fidel Rillo who was collecting kanin-baboy as a nine-year-old at the Rizal Coliseum in 1964 when he strayed into a room and met one-fourth of a visiting foursome: John Lennon. (“The room stank,” Fidel remembers; I believe him; kanin-baboy guys should know.)

Having survived for more than half a century now, methinks I’ve earned the right to rattle off some names of people who, if they’d only looked in the right direction and were blessed with divinatory powers, could have told their grandchildren that they’d met the future Pinoy Penman, self-described in his blog as “a Filipino collector of old fountain pens, disused PowerBooks, '50s Bulovas, and desktop lint.”

For example, if Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte, and Herman’s Hermits had looked up to the bleachers of the Araneta Coliseum in the mid-1960s, they might’ve seen me; I certainly saw them—tiny moving dots on a distant stage, perhaps, given that general admission was all my folks could afford, but hey, I saw them.



“Seeing” famous people, especially for the richer and older among us, could just be another way of boasting about where we’ve been; in a sense, to see is to be, to matter in the great scheme of things. Celebrities matter, but only (we think) because we patronize them, and as patrons can feel entitled to meet the patronized. We hope to achieve some osmotic effect, a sudden sense of community or even oneness with the brilliant and the beautiful.

The easiest way of doing this is to buy a ticket to the show—and maybe, with enough clout, to go backstage. But it’s not as much fun as just stepping into Starbucks for a quick café mocha and falling in line behind Julia Roberts (as if she would).

My most memorable encounter of this casual sort happened not where the coffee’s made but, uhm, where it goes—in the men’s restroom of UP’s Faculty Center, arguably the last place on earth to meet the man who played the darkly dashing Mordred in Camelot and the hero or anti-hero of the ‘60s cult films Blow-Up and Barbarella. The daytime scene goes: I’m in my cubicle doing my thing, and in comes this big, fat, blond guy looking like he hasn’t slept for three days; he takes the other cubicle and does his thing. We don’t look (a big no-no). But when I step out after him, there’s a friend waiting outside, a theater director who whispers to me, “That’s David Hemmings!” Oh, I say, remembering the name instantly, but unable to match the tired and pudgy face with the screen idol (who, sadly, died three years ago at 62, on the set of a movie).





I work in media, politics, and entertainment, so I keep meeting famous people, feeling like Forrest Gump, trying to look composed and focused but actually a dizzy fan-boy half the time and a snickering cynic the other. Guess which one I was in this next episode. How many men can say they spent two uninterrupted hours with Ara Mina? Well, I did. Unfortunately, it was all talk and no action; I was interviewing her across a table for her life story, doing my professional best to keep my eyes at, well, eye-level. It was a great interview; I took notes; but I hardly remember anything.



I’ve met boatloads of politicians (and sometimes you just wish the boat would sink), but some encounters stick in my mind more than others: Ferdinand Marcos as our graduation guest in grade school; Imelda Marcos in front of a mountain of “nutribuns” in 1972, when I interviewed her as a rookie reporter for the Herald.

One of the best interviews I ever had was with “Globe Trekker” Ian Wright, not only because the STAR sent me to Singapore to get it, but because he proved as much a performer in private as he is in public. On another assignment, to Macworld in San Francisco, I got within ten feet of Steve Jobs—who walks around with a ten-foot cordon sanitaire, so that was that.

As a creative writer and teacher, I’ve had more than my fair share of meetings with the literate and famous. My fiction teacher in Michigan, Nick Delbanco, was the literary executor of John Gardner, and even better, the ex-boyfriend of Carly Simon; my other fiction teacher, Charles Baxter, went on to gain more fame than all of us put together. Thanks to the resources and the good sense of American universities—who invite writers and artists instead of politicians to speak to their students—I had a chance to meet and even talk to, among others, Raymond Carver (big guy with a Marine crewcut, but gentle and soft-spoken); Joyce Carol Oates (sharp and skinny like Olive Oyl); Joseph Heller (now where’s that copy of Catch-22 I had him sign?); Marge Piercy; Margaret Drabble; and Wallace Stegner (old, very old).

Because I was either too cheap or too broke to pay the price of admission, I missed out on listening to Kurt Vonnegut in Ann Arbor, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko in Milwaukee. I did meet one Nobel Prize winner in literature: the poet Derek Walcott (below), who seemed interested only in what goes with wine and song.



In England, I met Frank McCourt (funny and polite, making of Beng an instant fan), Kazuo Ishiguro (“It was a good year,” he said when I told him we were both born in 1954), Malcolm Bradbury, Alan Ayckbourn, and Hanif Kureishi (also born 1954, so maybe it truly was a good year), among others.

If we count what we’ll call the wave-by’s, then I’ll count Pope Paul VI (in a papal limousine around the Elliptical Road) and Bill Clinton (in shades, at the American Cemetery) among two of my most famous sightings. They were eclipsed, however, by Nelson Mandela, who spoke to a crowd I joined at the 2002 World Summit in Johannesburg, requesting only that no flash bulbs be used, to protect his eyes (and guess what: some flashbulbs popped above the audience, anyway).


The late NVM Gonzalez had a picture taken of him as a small young man with Ernest Hemingway. Greg Brillantes had a picture taken of him as a lanky young man with John Updike. I’ve had pictures taken of me as an oafish fan with Mr. Gonzalez and Mr. Brillantes. If osmosis works, then I’m headed for the big time.

Penman for Wednesday, July 26, 2006


AS EVERY wife, partner, and lover knows, men are notoriously difficult creatures to live with, presumably sentient animals who insist that they know what they’re doing even when they clear-as-a-baboon’s-big-behind don’t. We have very definite ideas about how life should be lived and about how certain things should be done, any deviation from which is a veritable threat not just to the marriage or the relationship but to the foundations of civilization itself.

Of course, it’s not just us. Women keep complaining about the toilet seat, the missing hangers, the dog poo, and such trifles as hardworking men of substance feel they shouldn’t be bothered with. Typically, you’d be hard at work on a Powerpoint presentation for your regional sales conference—the one you’re expecting major pogi points in the office from—when your wife (who should have better things to do, being the boss of her own company) will cruise along and say “How many times do I have to tell you to dump your socks in the hamper? Look, I picked this up in the kitchen, probably dragged there by Tiger, and God knows where the other one is!”

And then you make the usual noises about being too busy putting food on the table to mind such pedestrian chores; that nearly always succeeds in buying a momentary silence. But next she lays a guilt trip on you by quietly putting out all your laundered socks in pairs, on the table or on the bed within annoying range, and balling them up neatly, as if to imply “Say what you will, but whatever would you do without me?”

I’m convinced, however, that many such scuffles could be avoided if we men simply listed down (and maybe tacked on to the fridge door) those things we clearly hate, sparing our mates the trouble of having to interpret our pouts and smirks and murmurs, and the three hours of sulking that usually follow a silent outburst.

In that conciliatory spirit, let me enumerate some of my pet peeves. This list comes with the standard warning that different men might have different quirks (no, let’s call them preferences), although I’m fairly sure that I’ve got the most important flashpoints pretty well covered. If you’re a woman and don’t want a 200-pound gorilla growling in your living room, pay close attention to what I have to say:

1. Don’t make me change my routine. If I prefer going to Makati from Quezon City via EDSA instead of C-5 (or vice-versa), don’t tell me that this route will consume XXX less minutes or XXX less liters of gas. I don’t care. I’m doing the driving, and it comforts me to see familiar signboards and traffic lights where I expect them. If I’ve perfectly enjoyed barako coffee after dinner for 30 years, don’t imagine for a minute that I’m giving that up for some Himalayan tea or even some fruit-flavored coffee.

2. Don’t make me wait. Guys take it as an article of faith that their time is always ten times more valuable than women’s, even if they have nothing better to do than hurry. If I say I’m picking you up at 5 o’clock, that means you’ll be stepping into the car at 5:00, not anything else like putting on your make-up or choosing a dress or making a phone call or taking a shower. (And if I’m late, you’re supposed to accept whatever explanation I offer at face value, or assume it was an act of God; and my being late certainly doesn’t mean that you get a few minutes more to waste.)

3. Don’t tell me what to eat, or put strange food in my mouth. I don’t know if this goes back to some infantile trauma, but I tend to smack or bite down on any hand that insinuates anything green, goopy, or with a French name into my gullet. I like being able to choose what I ingest, thank you, and never mind if it’s the same old steak or crab or pancit I had yesterday. And the day before (See No. 1, above. In my case, familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, but good digestion.)

4. Don’t fix up my workspace. I know, I know, my desktop looks like a tornado went through it (followed by an incontinent farm animal), and you can’t imagine how I can possibly find things like a stapler (the one I’m always screaming about: “Where’s my stapler? Who took my stapler?”) in all that garbage. But I assure you, there’s method in my madness, and I actually know where everything is; unless you’ve invaded my territory and touched my things, I know that stapler’s in that pile—somewhere.

5. Don’t be late for the start of the show. Is it a woman thing for you to be all set for the crucial opening scene of something like CSI, popcorn in hand, and then to have your wife or mate go to the bathroom or take a phone call or choose that precise moment to feed the dog, only to step back into the room five minutes later to blithely ask, “So, what happened?” For God’s sake, shouldn’t you strap yourself into your seat at take-off time?

6. Don’t forget the toilet paper on your next grocery run. And the 40-watt light bulbs. And the triple-A batteries. And the razor blades. And all those little things we habitually run out of—the ones I have a kind of fetish for, the reassuring presence of which makes me feel like I’ve worked long and hard for something truly worthwhile: bulbs that light up; remote controls that work; razors that don’t scratch; bathrooms with six months’ supply of toilet paper. What’s that again? I’ll do the groceries? Did you say panty liners? Who needs panty liners?

7. Don’t tell me how stupid or silly I am. I hate being told what I already know, even if I’d sooner die than ‘fess up to the fact. Okay, so I backed the car over the dog, and left the fork in the microwave. These, my dear, are survivable events, blips in the ever-flowing continuum of space and time, after which life goes on with cosmic indifference. Just don’t tell that to the dog.

Penman for Monday, July 24, 2006


A FEW friends and readers who know me have been wondering about my recent conversion from couch potato to badminton addict, noting—correctly—that I’ve rarely been known to do anything more strenuous than reaching for a cold beer (and, of course, lifting the bottle all evening). But they can’t argue with some of the more obvious results; since I picked up a racket three months ago for the first time since high school, I’ve lost 20 pounds (okay, make that 15 on my surf-and-turf-bingeing days).

That still leaves me with 195 pounds of blubber to confront in my morning mirror, but it’s a start, and while I may never become as svelte or as sharp as Sharapova, what began as a crash weight-reduction program has turned into a serious, to-the-death effort to whack a small feather-skirted rubber ball over and across a five-foot net.

That’s what badminton (or just “bad” to its faithful followers called “badders” or “baddicts,” naturally) is—something like tennis, which I played with blood-curdling ineptitude half a lifetime ago, but actually faster (the shuttlecock can travel at almost 200 mph) and more sweat-inducing. That shuttlecock weighs next to nothing (as our trainer—about whom there’s more, below—keeps reminding us at the top of his voice, “The ball is light! Relax! The ball is light!”). But it’s no joke to put it exactly where and when you need to put it, which is usually somewhere behind your opponent, or just between his legs.

As I was saying, I was never much of a sportsman. (If you see me and my physique, you will hold that truth to be self-evident.) I played patintero, step-no, and agawan-base as a kid, won a Hershey bar for pushing a classmate off a balancing beam in some intramural, kicked a few footballs and maybe sank 5 percent of all my shots in basketball, but that was it. Later in life I realized that while the best I could be at billiards was what the regulars called a tama-bola, I could toss three pieces of pointed metal at a circular target with some ease and precision, and I played darts until I was good enough to win little trophies and beer-money bets. Then I decided that my true calling as a player lay in indoor sports—okay, games—as the bangka in pusoy, as the local advocate of an ancient and esoteric Japanese board game called go, as a patsy in poker, and as a onetime casino habitué that the blackjack dealers came to call “The Prof.”

I’ve done a bit better as a sports fan. As a grad student in the Midwest, I gladly gave up my weekends to baseball and American football, and once sneaked out of Shakespeare class to watch Michael Jordan break Milwaukee’s heart with a last-second three-point shot. I’ve never hit a golf ball in my life, but I enjoy watching guys in funny shoes nudge a tiny white ball with expensive sticks into holes in the grass. Sorry, Zinedine: I’d sooner watch paint dry than endure a soccer match and the spectacle of overpaid boys writhing on the ground pretending to have been disemboweled; but I appreciate TV billiards and boxing like any good Pinoy homeboy, and have lately taken to following the finer points of “Texas hold ‘em” poker (and practicing them, on Friday nights).

But, ah, now there’s badminton, which I don’t only get to watch but can actually play some semblance of, thanks to a roving band of “baddicts” (there’s also a local online group here) whose composition could, at one court or another, include fellow Mac users, former students, fellow artists, fraternity brothers, high school alums, family, and friends of any of the foregoing. (In truth, anyone with a smile and not too mean a smash will do.)

And it came as no great surprise, given my history of clinically addictive behavior, that I moved quickly from being a novice at the game to, well, still a novice at the game but an expert in accessories—the Nike Dri-Fit shirts, the Yonex shoes, the rubber elbow band, the ticket to the MVP Cup at the Araneta Coliseum—all manifestations of what, in my blog (where you’ll find a picture of my satiny red shoes), I define as “equipmentitis—the feverish notion that jumping around in the fanciest gear will give you a killer backhand where you had none.” If I couldn’t match my trainer’s shots, I said, I could at least match his shoes.

Which brings us to the one of the best investments I’ve ever made in someone else’s know-how. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the travails of teaching creative writing to a roomful of what we’ll kindly call innocent students. Today, let me tell you that it’s tougher to teach a 52-year-old slouch with a beer belly how to glide three steps backwards to get in front of a shuttlecock and smash it to kingdom come than to get a freshman to write flawless compound-complex sentences.

That job goes to my patient instructor, Melvin Llanes, our former No. 1 player and the Philippines’ first international badminton champion at age 15. I say “my” instructor as if I could call him whenever I feel like it, but Coach Melvin could actually be teaching a dozen students at any given time—not all together, but one at a time, the hallmark of his style of teaching. It doesn’t matter who or how old you are and what you think you know; Melvin will insist on individualized instruction at your real level of play, so he can weed out bad habits and teach you the right basics, ratcheting up the lessons as your skills improve. (In my case, it was simple: “I know nothing,” I said—“a very good place to start,” as Julie Andrews said.)

Melvin’s story captures the drama, the highlights, and the challenges of having both the gift and the grit to excel in your sport—in a country that idolizes champions but can’t or won’t provide the support they need to sustain their talent.

The youngest son of a Constabulary man who was also caretaker of the old PC badminton courts in Camp Crame, Melvin started at age seven as a scorer for players after school hours—taking up a racket and playing when he could between and after other people’s sets. He joined his first tournament at age eight, won at nine, and never looked back. In 1992, at 15, he won the Prince Asian Juniors Championship in Hong Kong; the year before, on his first international outing, he had reached the quarterfinals. He remembers how, at the finals, he had been awed by the size of the Queen Elizabeth Stadium in Wanchai—but also how encouraging it was to see so many countrymen in the bleachers, and how uplifting it felt to stand on the podium and hear the National Anthem.

Then followed the glory years of being the country’s youngest No. 1, of rubbing elbows at the PSA Awards with such better-known luminaries as Efren “Bata” Reyes, of thrashing the Commonwealth Games champion in Australia, of training scientifically in China in preparation for the 1997 Jakarta SEA Games, in which Llanes and his team won bronze. Then Melvin became assistant coach and physical trainer of the national men’s and women’s teams.

Today Melvin devotes his time to teaching private individuals (most of them, I should add, far more deserving of his time than me) as young as six and as old as 54. “It’s time for me to give something back,” he says, having won enough trophies to fill a warehouse but, ironically, still struggling to gain proper recognition and support for himself and his fellow world-class athletes. You have to medal in international competitions, he says, to get any kind of substantial support; but how can you even get there without the right training, the right equipment, travel expenses, and sustenance for your family?

He remembers the case of a friend who suffered a slipped disc and had to pay P50,000 for his medical bills; the government threw in P4,000. “It was an eye-opener for me,” Melvin sighs. He would have qualified again last year for the national team, but he declined the offer; team members were going to be given only P4,000 a month and no benefits. Llanes deplores sports politics and the bata-bata system as our most formidable obstacles in the way of more international championships.

To the legions of us who happily endure daily and punishing one-hour sessions with Coach Melvin in his favorite hangout at the Battledore and Shuttlecock courts (77 Scout Ojeda, Roxas District, Quezon City), Philippine badminton’s loss may be our personal gain. To give you an idea, a businessman-student of his named Arthur started from scratch in November and has since won seven trophies, shedding 40 pounds along the way. But knowing how awful my forehand is—my new Yonex SHB-99 Power Cushion shoes notwithstanding—it leaves me wondering why Coach Melvin isn’t training our next under-16 champion instead. (Or, well, there’s the 52-and-under crown to fight for.)

If I were a taipan, coach, I’d set you up for life—just teach me how to take three steps backward to hit an overhead shot instead of turning around and giving up like a cheap umbrella. And if you want Melvin Llanes to teach you—though he’s booked for the next few weeks—drop me a line. I’m not managing him, but I’m plugging this hopefully in exchange for a little leniency in our net-rushing exercises.


SPEAKING OF sports and plugs, let me put in another one for my old high school, the Philippine Science High School, which now has the unusual distinction of producing an AFP Chief of Staff in Lt. Gen. Hermogenes “Hermo” Esperon, Jr. (PSHS 1970, PMA 1974). And he’s not the only PSHS alumnus in uniform. From what I hear, there are now some 30 PSHS alumni-officers from the PMA, the US Naval Academy, and West Point organized into the PSHS Alumni Association-Uniformed Services Chapter, first headed by Cavite congressman Joseph “Jun” Abaya (PSHS ’83, USNA ‘88) and then by Commodore (now Rear Admiral) Rogelio “Rogie” Calunsag (PSHS ’70, PMA ’74).

To keep things going, Gen. Esperon (whose daughter Mae also went to the PSHS), called for monthly golf fellowships which were successfully held in Fort Bonifacio last April, May, and June.

And now a major golf tournament has been set for this Thursday, July 27, at the AFP Golf Course, Camp Aguinaldo, Quezon City. Interested parties (PSHS grads or otherwise) are invited to join the tournament which tees off at 6:30 am and 10:30 am. Tickets at P2,500 each (including breakfast or lunch) are available at the AFP Golf Course or from the PSHS Foundation, Inc., telephone 924-0655. PSHS alumni who haven’t been bitten by the golf bug may also get tickets for the Dinner Fellowship at the AFP Officers Club at 6:00 pm on the same day. The First Pisay Golf Tournament aims to raise P1 million for the benefit of the PSHS Foundation, Inc.


LAST WEEK'S piece on “Restoring the Spoliarium” brought in a lot of queries about the Spoliarium in particular and art restoration in general. For those interested in learning more about either of these topics, may I suggest that you get in touch directly with the Art Conservation and Restoration Specialists, Inc. (ACES) at acesinc@gmail.com.

Penman for Monday, July 17, 2006

CREATING A masterpiece is hard enough, but sometimes restoring or preserving one can be just as tough if not more difficult.

That rare breed of specialists we know as art restorers or conservators certainly know this. It took Michelangelo four years to paint the frescoes on the Sistine Chapel ceiling—now one of the hallmarks of Western civilization—but it took an international team of experts 12 years to restore the work to its nearly-original glory, paring away centuries of grime and soot. And the end of the restoration proved to be only the beginning of a continuing debate over whether it was right, in the first place, to mess with the dark, brooding magnificence of the aged frescoes. (For a quick look at the work in question—before, after, and during the restoration—check out this website.)

Here in the Philippines, we’ve been blessed by the proliferation of gifted and productive artists who’ve left us with a trove of valuable and irreplaceable art—valuable not only in the financial sense but more so in terms of their significance to our cultural and even political history. It’s a far cry from where we are now, but in the days of Jose Rizal (himself an artist of no mean talent), painters and poets were important people, their greatest works held with the same esteem we now reserve for Manny Pacquiao.

One such artist, of course—if not the greatest of them—was Juan Luna y Novicio (1857-1899), a young man whose obvious gift for painting took him to Europe in the 1880s as a government pensionado. In Rome, in March 1884 and after eight months of labor, Luna completed what would become his signature work: the Spoliarium, a massive (almost eight by five meters) oil on canvas painting depicting two dead gladiators being dragged to an ignominious disposal as men and women look on in helpless horror. The word spoliarium itself refers to that part of the Roman Colosseum complex where the corpses of vanquished gladiators were divested of their armor and weapons, for reuse by the survivors.

In May 1884, the painting was exhibited at the Nacional Exposicion de Bellas Artes in Madrid, and won the first of three gold medals, besting compatriot Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo, whose Virgenes Cristianas Expuestas al Populacho won a silver medal. The victory sealed Luna’s reputation as a painter of the highest order, and praise—as well as Filipino pride—abounded.

Almost immediately, Filipinos on the verge of a revolution saw the work as an allegory for colonial suffering. Critic Eric Torres reports that “Rizal interpreted the Spoliarium as a symbol of ‘our social, moral, and political life: humanity unredeemed, reason and aspiration in open fight with prejudice, fanaticism, and injustice.’ On another occasion, Lopez-Jaena likewise read political implications in the Spoliarium, as follows: ‘For me, if there is something grand, something sublime, in the Spoliarium, it is because behind the canvas, behind the painted figures… there floats the living image of the Filipino people sighing its misfortune. Because… the Philippines is nothing more than a real Spoliarium with all its horrors.’”

For Luna, it meant a welcome stream of commissions, and entry into some of Europe’s most exclusive circles. His life would take a tragic turn when, in 1892, he shot his wife and mother-in-law to death in a fit of jealous rage (just as outrageously, he was slapped on the wrist and released by a French court that saw the deed as a forgivable “crime of passion”). He died in Hong Kong in 1899 from a severe heart attack (some say he was poisoned), broken by the news of his brother Antonio’s murder back home.

Today we remember Juan Luna not just for the Spoliarium, but also other masterworks such as the Blood Compact (and one of my favorites, the enigmatic green-gowned woman of Despues del Baile). The more practical minded might note, with some cynicism, that Luna’s Parisian Life took a P43-million chunk out of GSIS pensionsers’ funds. But it remains the Spoliarium that we identify most with Luna, and, indeed, with the romantic notion of a Golden Age of Filipino painting, when we proved ourselves equal to the world’s best.

The Spoliarium itself would acquire an interesting if spotted history. After having been exhibited in Rome, Madrid, and Paris, it was bought (while still in Paris) by the provincial government of Barcelona in 1885 for 20,000 pesetas. In 1887, it was moved to the Museo del Arte Moderno in Barcelona, where it remained in storage until the museum was burned and looted in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. Damaged, the painting was sent by Gen. Franco to Madrid for restoration, and remained there for 18 years. In the 1950s, patriotic Filipinos and sympathetic Spaniards moved for its repatriation to Manila. (“Repatriation” is misleading, since it had never been here before.) Franco heard of these plans and ordered the work restored and donated to the Philippines; restorers worked on it in late 1957, and the painting was turned over to our Ambassador Nieto in January 1958.

And then a curious thing happened. Just before it was shipped to Manila, the Spoliarium was cut into three pieces, with each piece going into its own crate. These pieces were much later received by the Juan Luna Centennial Manila Commission in 1960; Antonio Dumlao performed relining and cleaning, while Carlos da Silva took charge of the mounting, framing, and architectural work. In December 1962, the restored Spoliarium was unveiled in the Hall of Flags of the Department of Foreign Affairs. (And this was where I first saw it, on a high-school field trip.)

It was hardly the best spot for the masterpiece, because, as a reporter would later observe, “Molds caused by the moisture from an air-conditioning unit have eaten away the paint in the lower right hand corner of the huge canvas, and a sizeable area immediately above. The painting's signature today has the appearance of a grayish patch from which the paint has been clumsily scraped away. Furthermore, the inexpert joining of the canvas has begun to show. The new coat of varnish applied to the seam fails to match the old coat so that a broad swath appears to separate a third of the painting from the rest.”

In 1982, the painting was cleaned by the late Suzanno “Jun” Gonzalez, and at some point, the Spoliarium was moved to its present location in the National Museum.

And here begins the vignette of its latest restoration, undertaken by a young but experienced and energetic company called the Art Restoration and Conservations Specialists, Inc. (ACES). Headed by painter June Poticar Dalisay (uhmm, yes, we’re related—and that’s how I got this story), the Spanish-trained members of ACES have worked on a score of important restoration projects since their formal incorporation in 2001, including the ceiling paintings of the 150-year-old St. John the Baptist Church in Jimenez, Misamis Oriental, and a steady stream of works by Botong Francisco, Vicente Manansala, Jose Joya, Anita Magsaysay-Ho, and J. Elizalde Navarro, among other Filipino masters.

No, Beng (that’s what I call June) and her team didn’t restore the whole painting—that will need vastly more time and resources—but they were brought in to address a relatively small but potentially critical problem that had developed. Sometime last year, the Spoliarium had to be moved in its entirety by three-and-a-half meters to make room for another painting, but even the best care—which we’d have to assume was taken—couldn’t prevent cracks from forming in the joints and on the canvas itself.

ACES prides itself on its scientific approach and its respect for the artwork and its creator—it won’t take on a job if all the owner wants is a coat of varnish and some dabs of pigment to make a painting “look new”—and it responds to every assignment as a team, usually comprising a painter, an art historian or scholar, a chemist, and an architect. The Spoliarium was their most challenging task to date because of its historical importance, but the job itself was easily broken down into predictable and manageable phases, from detailed photo documentation (before and after), grid-laying, data recording, and a thorough discussion of the problems and options, to the actual repair, which consisted of mechanical cleaning, testing the solubility of the damaged paint layer, consolidation, removal of the facing and excess glue, and retouching.

Working almost daily on wiry scaffoldings that brought them nose-to-nose with the painting, the ACES team finished the job in four months, and is now completing its report (from where much of the data here was taken). But even more interesting to me, as a distant kibitzer (I never even got past the door, so strict were the conditions), were Beng & Co.’s personal observations:

“My team of scientific conservators and I were in awe the first time we set foot inside the Great Hall of the Masters. We stood inches away from the painting, a magnificent work of art that takes one's breath away. Its size stupefied us while the drama and energy that emanate from the powerful images on canvas affected us profoundly and transported us to Luna's studio in Rome….

“Many questions came up as we studied the physical condition of the painting through our magnifying glass. We knew very little about it and we needed to know its story so we could better understand its present condition. How did it find its way to Madrid? Who took care of the painting? How and where was it hung or kept? What were the circumstances surrounding its journey to the Philippines? Was it restored before it was returned to the Philippine government? Who restored the painting? Who and how was it mounted and put up in its present site?

“Gathering information and data on the Spoliarium proved difficult. The National Museum tried its best to help but could not furnish us with any kind of documentation. Some individuals had stories to tell about the painting, but we needed hard data. Finally, Ricky Francisco, who was a member of the conservation team, found a report on the Spoliarium, while Roberto Balarbar, a conservator with the Chemical and Conservation Laboratory of the National Museum, also found a copy of a research paper among his files. These data proved very valuable and helpful for they answered many of our questions and filled in many gaps in the history of the painting.

“However, some questions remain unanswered at this point. One issue that continues to puzzle us is Madrid's decision to cut the painting into three parts. Did Madrid inform the Philippine government about this decision? Who decided this? Is there a document to prove that the Philippine government gave Madrid permission to do so? Did the size of Spoliarium make loading it into a ship truly impossible? Was there not any ship capable or willing to accommodate a painting of such length? What kind of ship was it loaded on? Did anyone from the Philippine government accompany the Spoliarium as it traveled from Madrid to Manila?

“We hope that in the future, an art historian will come along and accept the challenge to dig deeper into the history of the Spoliarium and uncover other stories that surrounded the painting while it was in Rome and Madrid.”

And let me add that if you or anyone you know has any of the answers to these questions—or corrections to make to the painting’s history as ACES knows it—do let me know and I’ll pass it on to them.

Much more work needs to be done on the rest of the Spoliarium, and credit has to be given to National Museum Director Cora Alvina for her tireless campaign to seek support not just for the Spoliarium but the many other priceless pieces of our heritage in her safekeeping.

Not incidentally, Beng and I recently attended a benefit concert at the National Museum sponsored by the Museum Foundation of the Philippines, featuring the opera “Spoliarium,” with music by Ryan Cayabyab and libretto by Fides Cuyugan-Asencio. It was a marvelous musical treat, worthy of its subject, and proof positive that, as in Juan Luna’s time, we have what it takes to compete with the world’s best. Ryan’s score convinced me that I had heard the work of a future National Artist—of a much gentler bent than Luna, but certainly no less talented. Mabuhay ang Pilipino!

Penman for Wednesday, July 12, 2006


AM I committing treachery to my kind by confessing to an inveterate urge to shop? We men are often taken to task by our mates for hating shopping, but I believe—I maintain—that it’s another of those myths that can’t stand closer scrutiny. At least in my case, it won’t.

It’s a mystery to us men why women have to buy a new dress and a new pair of shoes every single time they get invited to a wedding or a reception, when they already have racks and shelves full of the same stuff in their cavernous closets. Since the usual excuse is “But I already wore this! I can’t possibly be seen wearing it again!”, our obdurately male minds can’t figure out why no one designs and sells cheap one-time, throwaway wedding-gown-and-shoes ensembles.

On the other hand, it never strikes us as odd to acquire another cellphone, another computer, or another car (and, in some cases, another mate, but that’s another story). We even give it a fancy name like “redundancy”—a fail-safe measure to guarantee the availability of a back-up or alternative device in the event of equipment loss or failure—and convince ourselves that our work and, heck, the world as we know it will surely collapse if we didn’t get our hands on that new 3G Sony Ericsson or that midnight-black MacBook.

Let’s face it: we guys love shopping just as much as anybody else, and it isn’t just for heavy-duty tools and steel-belted radial tires, either. You don’t have to be a moussed-up metrosexual to wander through and appreciate the men’s colognes, neckties, and watches in the duty-free at Changi, or the freshness of the seafood and the vegetables at Farmers Cubao. Putting on my weekend anthropologist’s hat for a minute, I’d propose that shopping has replaced the old hunter’s instinct—except that we no longer hunt mammoths or forage for food so our families can eat (for that, we peck away at computers in the office), but it satisfies a vestigial, primal need to bring home a trophy, and never mind that the trophy’s interesting only to the guy (“Honey, you’ll never believe what I found on sale at the mall—a new 42-inch plasma TV for my den!”) and never includes dubious gadgets like new refrigerators and new dishwashers.

Myself, I like all kinds of things; well, maybe I draw the line at cubic zirconium earrings, but I’ve been seen straying into the women’s lingerie section of department stores, doing a comparative study of, uh, men’s and women’s prices. I like clothes—especially if they fit me and my budget. Given my size (which exists in inverse proportion to my disposable income), I’m often constrained to go shopping in the seediest dives, where I can find the castaway shirts and shoes of former NFL linebackers-turned-alcoholics.

Imagine this: while pawing the other day through the garbage dump that I still like to call my desk drawer, I came across an artifact that just might qualify as one of the world’s most pathetic ID’s—a card denoting me as a full member of an elite circle of shoppers in a special store. That unique boutique just happens to be one of Cubao’s bigger and grottier ukay-ukay emporia, which I was frequenting so often a couple of years ago that I applied for and got a membership card entitling me to a further 10 percent discount in a discount store. That means—let me see—getting a 50-peso Hanes Beefy T-shirt for P45, with the savings going to the bar of soap you’ll need to exorcise its former owner out of the moldy fabric.

It’s the kind of ID that—despite being plastic-laminated and graced with a surprisingly good picture of its possessor (which is perhaps why I can’t bear to throw it away)—probably won’t get me past the guards of any of our gated villages, including those huddles of shoeboxes along the expressway. But if my house, God forbid, ever gets buried under a ton of volcanic ash or a wall of water, and if this ID were to miraculously survive that cataclysm for the exhumation of archaeologists a century hence, it would offer incontrovertible proof that one “Jose Dalisay” lived to shop in the most desperate ways and the most desperate places, in unrelenting search of irresistible bargains. (And bargains they have been—among them, the Balenciaga blazer that drapes my paunch in chi-chi affairs, found in Cubao for P150.)

I wish my tastes were limited to anything below P200, and that this surplus-store ID were the only card in my wallet, in which case I could live on to my retirement in imperturbable modesty. Unfortunately, my wallet bulgeth over with plastic of all persuasions—Visa, MasterCard, Amex—which, lethally combined with a computer hooked up to the Internet and a two-button mouse, invites me to explore digital bazaars half the planet away and leads me to temptations I didn’t even realize existed.

Some days I think that this thing called eBay was invented by the Almighty to simplify the job of sorting out who goes to paradise or to perdition. Once you sign up for it—which I did nine years ago, when most Pinoys didn’t even know what the Internet was, let alone online shopping—you know where you’re going, the heavenly spin of winning an online auction notwithstanding.

At least it’s comforting to know that we men won’t be alone in consumer hell; it’s an easy guess that there are enough women addicted to eBay—and to the ukay-ukay—to make the place warmer than it already is, but also more tolerably interesting.

Penman for Monday, July 10, 2006


I was proud and happy to have been given another award by my university last week—the Concepcion Dadufalza Award for Distinguished Achievement—which required me to deliver a little lecture before I could receive it. So herewith, the full text (only an excerpt appeared in the STAR) of “More Than Words: The Writer as Teacher”:


GOOD AFTERNOON. I’m very grateful to the judges and the sponsors of this award for the great honor they are doing me today.

I don’t mean to sound immodest if I say that I’ve received quite a few awards for my writing, and while this Concepcion Dadufalza Award is for distinguished achievement, I’d like to think—because of the person in whose memory it is being given—that this distinction applies as much to one’s teaching as it does to his or her professional work. If there was anything that Ching Dadufalza did well—indeed, better than most others—it was to teach well, sharing her passion for learning and critical inquiry with generations of young Filipinos.

I came into UP at the wrong time and in a different frame of mind to have become one of the so-called Dadufalza kids—former students who loved her with near-fanatical devotion. But I could see, as an undergraduate and then later as a colleague, how and why she could inspire such deep affection and admiration.

I do have an unusual personal connection to Ching Dadufalza. My family and I now occupy the house on No. 9 Juan Luna Street that she lived in for many years, on this campus, in Area 2. I remember visiting her in that mango-shaded house several times, when I was department chairman, in the vain hope of dissuading her from classroom teaching—this was when she could barely walk—so she could write her memoirs. Fortunately, or otherwise, she has not repaid me those visits, since she passed away a couple of years ago.

But let me offer up these musings to her memory, and to that of the other distinguished professors of English—among them, Nieves and Silvino Epistola, Pacita Fernandez, Francisco Arcellana, Alejandrino Hufana, Alfeo Nudas, and Filonila Tupas—whom I had the pleasure and the privilege of studying with, and who have since passed on.

I speak as a representative of a relatively small but growing and certainly visible element of our academic community: our writers and artists who, not incidentally, also teach and sometimes even assume administrative posts.

It’s not an odd position to be in. Universities—and the University of the Philippines, in particular—have always been a haven for artists and art studies, and not just in a belletristic way. Here in UP—itself an oasis of critical inquiry and academic freedom in an increasingly intolerant if not mindless political culture—the artist has always been free to express himself or herself, to mold young minds as much as national opinion, and to engage in larger political and artistic struggles beyond the campus.

In other words, in terms of a nurturing environment, I don’t think it will be an exaggeration to say that we in UP have been more privileged than most others—with grants and prizes to support and recognize our work, a growing acknowledgment of the parities between critical and creative endeavors, and the presence if not the prominence of artists in the life of our academic community. As for means—such as better salaries, equipment, materials, and supplies—we will always and surely need more of them. But being resourceful Filipinos, we have been able to do much with what little we have.

In a society like ours, which lionizes artists but refuses or is unable to pay them their due, working and teaching in a university may be the best compromise we can hope for. At least, here, kindred spirits know and may even appreciate what one is doing. Teaching exacts a heavy psychic and even physical toll—about which I’ll have more to say, later—but compared to other universities, our working hours here in UP are more than tolerable, and leave us with enough time to produce new work, if we’re not too busy trying to make ends meet in other ways.

In solidarity with other government workers, we can and should continue to press for better working conditions and better pay. Starving artists don’t produce sublime art; mostly they simply wither away and die. But you didn’t come here today to be told the obvious.

To get to my published topic, the writer as teacher—or the teacher of writing—faces several unique problems or situations.

The first is that even within the relatively hospitable environment of academia, there’s a lingering suspicion that writing—particularly creative writing—can’t be taught, and that, therefore, whatever time and money are devoted to it are essentially wasted, and are better devoted to more traditional teaching and scholarship.

I’m not sure where this perception comes from—perhaps the romantic notion that artists are born, and not made.

Curiously enough, this seems to apply only to creative writing. There’s never really been a question, for example, about the necessity for and the place of formal training in music, painting, or dance. Perhaps because of our experience with piano teachers, we have no problems with thinking about music as a discipline requiring rigorous exercises. Similarly, the image of an art teacher guiding a class through an anatomy or portraiture lesson is a familiar one.

But writing? It’s only words. What’s there to teach, and what’s there to learn, that one can’t imbibe directly from one’s own encounters with life and one’s own reading?

Parenthetically, I’ve often observed that—again, curiously enough—music and even math can be intuited, but writing cannot. There have been no real literary prodigies even approaching a Mozart or a Ramanujam. (Well, there was the 18th century poet Thomas Chatterton, whose talent consisted of fooling people into thinking he was a 15th century monk—and who killed himself at the precious young age of 17. But Chatterton was no Shakespeare.)

This suggests to us that writing involves more than a mastery of abstract patterns and concepts. In other words, writing is more than words, more than language. One needs to have lived and to have understood something about life, to have formed an attitude toward that life, and to have found a way of re-expressing it in and through the bold but also the precise indirections that make art out of raw experience.

When we teach writing—and not even creative writing, but composition—to freshmen, we are taking these young people by the hand, helping them make sense out of their lives and their ideas, such as they are. The term “composition” applies as much to the writer as to the text: one composes oneself, drawing out the essentials and leaving out the dross. Creative writing pushes that process one step farther, by turning to the imagination instead of one’s limited experience for material and insight.

The creative writing teacher’s task is not only to encourage but also to guide and to train that imagination, sparing the student from having to re-invent the wheel, but affording him or her the thrill of discovery. Make that “self-discovery”, or finding one’s place in and connection to humanity at large.

It’s an inarguably fine and noble mission. On the other hand, and in economic terms, the teaching of creative writing is brutally inefficient. In a typical workshop class of 20 people, an instructor would be fortunate to find two or three with real talent—an aptitude for language, a maturity of insight, a stylistic flair. In a typical advanced-level workshop—say, the annual Baguio writers workshop—only around five of the chosen 20 will have the discipline and perseverance to still be writing and writing well ten years hence. So why should even persist, or expend public funds merely to produce boatloads of people who will probably never write the kind of line you will mumble in your half-sleep, or will cry out to the heavens in your most painful or most euphoric moment?

For one, because producing good creative writers is like mining for precious stones, where a ton of ore might have to be torn out of the earth and sifted through to produce one small jewel-grade rock, which has yet to be cut and shaped by expert hands.

It may not always happen that a gifted writer like the late John Gardner will find—as he did in his writing class in Chico State University in 1959—an equally if not even more talented student the likes of Raymond Carver. But when it does, then the teacher feels that one’s classroom labors have been more than amply rewarded.

In this case, Gardner did not simply “find” Carver; he molded him. Carver would later write, in his tribute to his teacher, that “He believed in revision, endless revision; it was something very close to his heart and something he felt was vital for writers, at whatever stage of their development. And he never seemed to lose patience reading a student story, even though he might have seen it in five previous incarnations.”

We must also persist in teaching creative writing because the production of new literature reinvigorates and replenishes our imagination as a people, our imagination of ourselves. It is that imagination, however dark, that gives us hope and makes reality tolerable and endurable. The truth of numbers—of GDP and ROI and per capita income and population growth rates—is important (I’ve often remarked what a terribly innumerate society we are); but it is a limited and even sometimes deceptive truth that barely begins to tell our story. History does this, but without much latitude for pure conjecture. As in painting and the other arts, creative writers have often simply done, and done first, what critics and theorists would later describe and systematize. Creative writing is a breath of intuition caught on paper.

But I also teach creative writing in the conviction that every student—no matter the person’s background—has at least one good story to tell, and that it is our task as teachers to release that story, to enable the student to make sense of things through artistic indirection, which, like the mirror of Perseus, is sometimes the only way to deal with the truth. Most of my students may come to my classes merely to pass the time, or fulfill a requirement, or satisfy a craving for some critical attention; many may never write another story in their lives. But I want them to come out appreciating and respecting the liberative and ameliorative power of art—which is a fancy way of saying that, for those of us who will never be mistaken on the street for Brad Pitt or Superman, here we can be and do anything, for as long as we make artistic sense.

As K. Patricia Cross, professor emerita of higher education at Berkeley, reminds us, “The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate ‘apparently ordinary’ people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.”

Anyone can write anything, but not everyone can be a writer. By the same token, not every writer can be a teacher. Creative writing is an intensely private act, while teaching—perhaps only less than politics—is the most public of professions. Time and again we realize that people who have no problems stringing seamless paragraphs of compound-complex sentences can’t give a lecture or an exercise worth an ATM receipt. It takes a different sensibility—and, yes, another set of talents—to teach well and to endure in the classroom.

A big voice helps; but one also needs a whole bunch of P’s—preparation, perseverance, patience, and passion—to move on from week to week without losing one’s wits and one’s humor. I have these P’s in varying quantities, none of them in profusion.

I feel passionate about teaching in this university and in this country, and in giving back to them, through my students, what they have given me. But teaching is not a word I often say in the same breath as love. I cannot honestly say that I love teaching, in the sense of wanting to do it for most of my waking hours, or missing it terribly when I’m doing something else. Most of us in this room know that teaching is one of the most exhausting jobs you can get. The job doesn’t begin or end in the classroom; it just happens there.

Every time I step into a classroom, I pause at the doorway to expel a deep sigh and collect my thoughts, wondering if I have enough to sustain a 90-minute performance. As the American novelist Gail Godwin famously said, “Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theatre.” Indeed I spend the last ten minutes before class writing a script in my head: I will say this; I will do this; I will bring these props and use them at some point; I will ignite an argument; I will leave them with a question that will buzz in their ears for a week. Even bad stories can be turned to great lessons; where’s the teaching point? How can I say it without crushing or diminishing the person?

It doesn’t always work—sometimes I simply collapse into my chair and count away the minutes—but we all attempt some variation of this drill. Basically, we are saying: I will do my best to make this day worth their time and mine. It’s what they expect; it’s what I promised.

It is not love but duty that drives me to teach—although duty, perhaps, can also be a form of love; a love not of the thing itself but of some larger principle. That principle to me is service—service to country, people, university, and service to the great and truly free republic of the imagination.

“How do you know that what you’re doing matters?” I was asked once. “How can you tell if you’re making a difference?” My answer was, I don’t know, I can’t tell. But for a teacher, the only distinguished achievement that counts is the quality of one’s students. You are distinguished by their achievement, and in this sense, I have been distinguished aplenty.

Very recently I lost my temper with a student who was completing an INC. at the very end of the one-year extension period. She could have used that year to get in touch with me for the requirements she had to submit, but instead she waited until the very last few days to try and secure a completion. Her excuse was that she was too poor to see me all the way from Makati. She eventually submitted the requirements and I gave her her completion grade—but not before I sent her out of my room in tears, with an outburst she will likely never forget. In retrospect, I could have been kinder; but having been a poor student myself in a rich man’s elementary school, I felt that the best thing I could do for her was to tell her this: “Never use poverty as an excuse for irresponsibility. If you are poor, be even more responsible, and work harder, because you cannot depend on anyone’s pity or sympathy to see you through.”

In the same way, I don’t think that we artists should ever use our art as an excuse for shortchanging our students in terms of classroom time, or academic standards. Just like writing, teaching is a discipline, a labor one willingly assumes, a choice one consciously makes and answers for. There will be classes we will miss, just like many other teachers; but it cannot be because we feel deserted by the Muse, or, perhaps worse but more interesting, was partying with her all night.

Artists are often—and I think unfairly—held up as the worst exemplars of morality and decorum, as the bad boys of academe. There’s an interesting corner of the Chronicle of Higher Education that I’d like you to Google, which has a mock advice columnist called Ms. Mentor addressing subjects like “A Portrait of an Artist in Academe.” Let me quote a few choice words of advice from Ms. Mentor for those of my ilk:

“Sexual harassment and peculiar behavior are not unique to creative types,’ of course,” Ms. Mentor says, “but artists seeking permanent jobs in academia do need to take a few mundane steps:

“Be aware of the ‘institutional culture’ and what's tolerated. Are there others who dress flamboyantly, use cuss words, or discuss intimate personal experiences in class? If there aren't, don't be the first.

“Read the faculty handbook, especially for the rules about teacher-student interactions, and especially if you're in a church-related school.

“Be aware of others' egos. If your department colleagues are known only locally, they may be embittered souls who won't be pleased if you brag that you've been invited to speak, read, or perform in Japan or Brazil or South Africa. Watch out for envy and revenge.

“Don't whine. It is a sad truth that the world does not really care whether you ever compose a concerto or paint a work of genius. You must generate your own drive and your own supports.”

Advice well taken, and thank you, Ms. Mentor. I already have a permanent job, but premature death by tenure is deserves another advice column and another lecture altogether.

Let me end by noting that in 1981, at the age of 27 and still technically a freshman dropout, I returned to UP to resume my undergraduate studies so I could, as I said, “write, study, and teach for the rest of my life.”

Last week, 25 years later, I launched my fifteenth book, my artistic credo, if you will, titled The Knowing Is in the Writing: Notes on the Practice of Fiction. Next month, I leave with my wife Beng to teach for a semester in the US—a course, believe it or not, on the American short story. These past three months, thanks to a new addiction to badminton, I lost 15 pounds.

Interesting things are happening. I’m writing. I’m teaching. I’m alive. What choice do I have but to persist and to persevere?

Thank you all for your attention.

Penman for Monday, July 3, 2006


HOW CAN you not like anything named “Seeker of Hearts?”

Last Monday, as most other Pinoys were working in their offices, factories, farms, and schools, I found myself mulling over this phrase, on a long Monobloc bench in the company of about a hundred other applicants for drivers’ licenses. We were, of course, at the Land Transportation Office, just about the most unromantic corner of Quezon City, where Reeboks stand toe-to-toe with flip-flops and perfumes commingle with sweat in that unblinking democracy of red tape. I faced a four- to five-hour wait for a piece of plastic, but came prepared.

Every three years, I undergo this routine, and I remembered well enough from the last time I wrote about it in this column (“License renewed”, Jan. 13, 2003) to bring along a book to read, rather than stare at signs on the wall that said “SYSTEM SLOWDOWN.” “Seeker of Hearts” came from that book, which wasn’t a love story—well, yes, it was, but of a different sort. The name referred to a tulip grown by a Turkish woman named Fatma Hatun in the early 1700s—just one of 1,323 varieties of tulip to be found in Istanbul at that time. The book I had chosen to transport me from bureaucratic limbo was The Tulip by Anna Pavord (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), a paperback I’d fished out of the National Bookstore bargain bin about a year earlier and had promptly neglected.

I like flowers just as much as the next fellow (I just haven’t been known to give them)—I have sweet memories from childhood associating roses with the Virgin Mary, and thus my own irretrievable innocence—but I’m no floriculturist; I can’t tell an aster from a zinnia if my life depended on it. I bought the tulip book because I like books devoted to singular passions—whether they be watches, cars, antiques, or computers. As The Tulip’s back cover blurb proclaims, it “promises to do for the tulip what Longitude did for clocks and Fermat’s Last Theorem did for maths.” This is almost criminal for me—as a writer of stories—to say, but I enjoy good nonfiction far more than the kind of novels that make up a semester’s reading list, not just because the events described in them “really happened,” but because they raise reality to a higher order of intensity, in language, through language.

It’s hard to resist a book which begins with a search for a rare tulip on a mountainside in Crete, thus: “Omalos is a bleak town set high on a pancake plain, imprisoned between walls of mountain. The plain was nibbled bare by sheep. It was so quiet you could hear the seedpods of the wild spurges popping in the heat. I quartered the ground like a bloodhound, cheering at finding anemones in all colors…. It seemed likely that where there were anemones, there might also be tulips.”

There were no tulips where I was in that waiting area, its concrete floor speckled only by the occasional curl of candy wrapper. Three crackly microphones barked out people’s names, herding them to Window 2, 5, or 6. A table stood on one side, laden with medical paraphernalia; behind it a nurse sat waiting to give blood-pressure and blood-sugar tests for a small donation.

Earlier that morning, and in keeping with the government’s standing requirements for all drivers’ licensees, I had taken and passed a drug test (P250) and a medical exam (P50), consisting of relieving the remains of the previous night’s beer into a vial, for the former, and reading letters off the same EFPTOZ eye-chart I’d memorized since grade school, for the latter. With time on my hands, some loose change in my pocket, and a desire for the honest truth in my heart, I shut my tulip book, approached the nurse, and surrendered my arm. The suggested donation, she said while pumping up the air, was P35 for the two tests combined; I must have felt relieved to hear that, because my BP came out to what it almost always does, a mysteriously normal 120/80, despite my accounting for a quarter of my barangay’s annual consumption of crispy pata.

But I’m sure my BP shot up when the nurse told me that she needed to prick my finger for a blood sample; as everyone knows, grown men can take hammer blows but cringe at a nurse’s needle. “Will it hurt?” I asked her, but even before I finished asking the deed was done, and a ribbon of bright red blood bubbled at my fingertip, to be mopped up by a small thin spatula that dried out to a certain color, a shade of pink that, matched against a coded strip, the nurse pronounced “Normal!” Given that I drink Coke by the tubful, that again was a surprise—unless, in this utterly corrupted world, she too were complicit in a conspiracy to convince me that all was well.

I heard my name called out on one of the mikes—to Window 2 where, in an innovation worthy of a Ramon Magsaysay Award for public service, the LTO had set up a digital camera (one of those single eyeballs perched Martian-like on a skinny tripod), the better to take people’s pictures with in a trice, without giving them even a minute to comb their hair or fix their makeup. It was about 10:30, and I settled back into my seat to wait to be called again to pay my fee, thinking that I would be home in time for lunch of nilagang baka.

I opened the tulip book and was, again, captivated by the spirit of excess that seemed to trail this flower, leading its besotted fanciers to ruin. I learned, for example, that the reign of Sultan Ahmed of Turkey from 1703-1730 was “generally designated by historians as the lale devri, the Tulip Era. The Sultan was completely ruled by the vagaries of his favorite flower and it was at this stage that the tide turned in the bulb trade between East and West, for Ahmed III imported millions of tulip bulbs from Holland to decorate his garden…. But Ahmed’s passion for tulips led to his downfall. His subjects rose in revolt against him, because of the vast amount of money he spent each year on extravagantly staged tulip festivals. The Dutch, with their own tulipomania of the 1630s firmly behind them, had no compunction in encouraging others down the same prodigal route.”




For all I knew, the Silk Road itself must have stretched between Window 2 (ID picture taking) and Window 6 (cashier, for payment of fees) because a full hour and a century of tulip history passed without hearing my name. I was getting to be an expert in distinguishing between European and Turkish tulip preferences (the former bulbous, the latter dagger-like). Finally, at ten minutes to noon, the lady in Window 6 rose to announce that they were closing up for lunch, and that we could all return at 1 p.m. to resume our vigil.

I took that announcement with a strange equanimity. I was on leave for the day, and hungry, and my mind had been straying from tulips to the food stalls and vendors just outside the gate. Every government office attracts a caravan of merchants, and I can always depend on the bakod business for the kind of snacktime staples I won’t find in Greenbelt: nilagang mais, hard-boiled eggs, banana cue. But I found myself suddenly torn between a craving for fried chicken and chicken mami, and compromised by walking out the LTO gate to the nearest Chow King, where I ordered a quarter-chicken with rice. That turned out to be a mistake, because I had another kind of chicken in mind—either the aromatic, paper-skinned version of Savory, or the starchy but tasty crust of KFC, which my European friends so abhor—and this fourth of a fowl seemed rushed, which should have been no surprise in a fastfood joint.

To console myself, I took a walk to the ukay-ukay store around the block, and flipped through the racks of T-shirts to seek my Holy Grail of the moment, spurred by my current addiction to badminton: Nike Drifit shirts, which cost upwards of P1,000 in the posh boutiques of Eastwood and Makati. I had no luck today (a few days later I would find a newish one in another ukay-ukay in Cubao, for P120), and flirted briefly with a University of Michigan T-shirt that had seen one too many laundromats (better than seeing none), before putting it back.

I enjoy ukay-ukays for about ten minutes, until that cloud of stale, sour air that distinguishes them begins oppressing and depressing me. I have no compunction buying and wearing possibly dead men’s suits or shoes, excluding bloodstains and formaldehyde; surely the owners of all my pens from the ‘20s and ‘30s have long departed. But one’s delight in a bargain can come at the price of a form of spiritual fatigue, which the ukay-ukay exhales by the gray lungful. I stepped out of the place and saw, from the corner of my eye, a sign advertising a Thai-massage spa, and would have gone straight into it for instant rejuvenation, but it was almost one.

I trudged back to the waiting area at the LTO and perched my butt at the end of a long bench, fully expecting to tip the thing over. But I’ve lost around 15 pounds in three months of jogging and badminton, and the seat held. I was about to return to my book when I noticed a crowd building up to my right, milling around some object of curiosity. Pinoys cluster around mirones, adding to their bulk like iron fillings to a magnet, and I was no exception. I stood at the crowd’s edge to see a poor sod taking a driving test right on the premises, starting and braking a jeep in frightful lurches. It can’t be easy passing your driver’s examination in the middle of a virtual Colosseum, with at least half the audience rooting for your demise.

I read some more: “The Turks did not call tulips tulipam. They called them lale, the name coming with the flower from its Iranian heartland. Busbecq evidently confused his interepreter’s description of the flower, made in the shape of a turban (tulband in Turkish), with the flower itself.”

Suddenly my name was called, and I hopped over the benches to Window 6, where I paid P293, including a late-renewal fine, for a three-year license. I sat down again to await another call to Window 6, where I could pick up the new card itself in another hour or so. Over that hour, my imagination traveled from tulips to Thailand, to how good a foot massage would be at the end of a long day’s waiting.

It was close to 3 p.m. when I took possession of my newly minted driver’s license, and while all the driving in the world could not have taken me back to Sultan Ahmed’s gardens or even to Omalos, I had had enough transportation for one day—more than enough, indeed, for a sickeningly normal fellow who can’t tell asters from zinnias.