Exhibit, Artists for Literature

The voice on the phone sounded vaguely familiar, and wanted to know if we had any books by the late writer Francisco Arcellana or other stuff to lend to an exhibit at the National Commission for Culture and the Arts in Intramuros, featuring the 12 National Artists for Literature.

Okay, we said, give us the weekend or two to rummage through the old house, now all but empty, what with undas then coming up, we’d certainly be able to scratch up a memorabilia and then some. Tour down memory lane had to be postponed by a week, though, as we had to entertain a jetsetting in-law, so voice on the phone had to "wait for awhile."

Theme and title of the exhibit is Louas/Luwas: Cultural Tension and the Works of Our National Artists, a series of shows that began last July with the winners in film, Brocka, Bernal, Romero et al. The present exhibit on writers runs through the third week of November, and maybe the good reader can find time to drop by the NCAA Bldg. along Gen. Luna St. in cobblestoned Intramuros, a stone’s throw away from the university round table of PLM, Letran and other schools in the vicinity.

At the old house on Maginhawa, with the golden shower outside the front gate not that showering golden of late since father died (it was he who planted the tree after all), on the very day of undas while a candle burned atop the grand piano no longer played, we were able to gather a few artifacts which might be of interest to the casual browser if not voyeur of the life and times of writers and other weird beings.

To wit: Three framed artworks that are portraits/caricatures of Arcellana, derpa, I really don’t feel comfortable calling him just Franz. One by another equally late artist, Larry Francia, another by a class of his at the UP Diliman, and finally a souvenir front page from his Collegian staff in the ’60s that included an Inquirer entertainment editor.

Also, a few pages of haphazard journal, written in plain ball pen if not pencil in the writer’s last years on wrappers of news magazines, in bed or on the run, as a sample of his calligraphy.

This we enclosed in a folder given him as birthday gift in 1981 by his kumpare Nick Joaquin (old St. Nick also rightfully in the exhibit), and which derpa himself had labeled as the property of "Parancisco Arselyana."

Retrieved almost moldy from a glass desktop was a picture of the kumpares, Joaquin and derpa, during a visit by the rather unsaintly St. Nick to the old house with raven Andres Cristobal Cruz, which photo was declined by the NCCA rep because they already had enough pictures, or perhaps recognizing the nostalgic value of such photo rep hedged to take responsibility for it, but which the good-natured reader may now gaze at amusedly if the editor and layout artist so oblige us.

I remember one other visit by Nick, an earlier one with fellow writer and former protégé Ding Nolledo, and where as they sat at the dinner table the family dog Igor licked their shoes and haunches from underneath, and to which Nick would remark, "I need passion, not compassion!" Other Christmases he would drop in, and hand the little ones crisp bills of good luck and goodwill, even as his inaanak Joey was by then already a teenager.

Right about these past weeks too what should come in through the mail from Anvil Publishing but a couple of reissued, reprinted "contemporary classics" by Nick Joaquin, the novel Cave and Shadows, and the fiction collection, Tropical Gothic. Both are in student-friendly, affordable editions, not only for those along the round table belt.

I wish I could say I was rereading both books alternately, except that it’s only now that I’ve actually had got hold of a copy of Cave and Shadows, a whodunit in the impeccable Joaquin style that bursts with the life of old Manila, a place fast fading away but for the efforts of the amiable mayor who understands that nostalgia, much less posterity, can never be quantified. Buhayin ang Maynila ni Quijano!

Meanwhile, I’m rereading "Candido’s Apocalypse" from Tropical Gothic, which I recall as having such an impact on me the first time around. Indeed perhaps the best time to read it is when one is a teenager, full of angst fore and aft, a local counterpart of Catcher in the Rye. Imagine my pleasant surprise then during one drinking session on riverside Vergara in Mandaluyong, in the sweaty porch of the poet and sportswriter Recah Trinidad, that one should volunteer that as yet unverified information that the model for Candido was Pepito Aguila, dad of Kap, except that he (Pepito, not Kap) might sue me for libel.

Nick and derpa were together during the first writers workshop in Dumaguete, and this is well chronicled by the elder statesman of that seaside city, Cesar Ruiz Aquino, who has written found fiction of conversations between St. Nick and the old man in North Pole, the historic watering hole on Rizal Blvd. looking out to Isla Siquijor.

A contemporary of Ruiz, Erwin Castillo, had written of his last meeting with his teacher, Arcellana: "The last time I spoke to your father, he hospitably and generously contexted our visit on the premise of his approaching death. Following his lead, together we regarded the event and its presence as if it sat among us in the bright sun of that morning, and smiled at it in shy awe – as if we were Greeks. Only when we were about to leave did he, flushed by wine, begin to speak of his newly acquired concern for certainties. In presumption, I reminded him of what he and the poets he loved had taught us: That uncertainty is our guard and guide. We are sure of nothing – except perhaps the glimmering light on the face of a woman or dear child, heartrending for its fleetingness – least of all ourselves, our circumstances and the very difficult, perhaps inconsequential, stories we try to say. So let the weak-minded be sure, allow the faint-hearted their consolation. We, sadly, are held to a higher standard of care. Indeed, life and art remind us daily how the odds are lopsided against us. What was justification enough, perhaps even some sort of curious glory, for the old Greek – who invented the forlorn ghost of Achilles admitting to Odysseus, ‘I would rather be a swineherd among the living than be a prince among the dead!’ – would have to suffice."

Thanks, Erwin, and I hope we all make it to the exhibit of the 12 National Artists for Literature, more than half of them now with Achilles.