In the distance apparently ruminating in one of the aisles, I saw the old writer Mr. Quino, veteran of workshops past in the university. I had never imagined him to be particularly tall, though at that instance he seemed to have the bearing of a basketball player, or is it again because of my idealizing my mentors too much?
I had tried to avoid him or maybe that was unnecessary because I wasn’t sure he would recognize me as one of the writing fellows in last summer’s workshop. But before I could slip into the next aisle after a quick survey of the complexion of the zucchinis on the shelf cooler, he suddenly called out my name in his characteristic booming voice and asked if I wanted to make him happy.
"Do you want to make me happy? Do you want to make me happy?" he said with a six-pack of beer in tow, within earshot of the other shoppers, mostly housewives or else students buying refreshments.
I had no choice but to nod my head, same way I did whenever he sat on the panel and dispensed his nuggets of wisdom to us greenhorn workshoppers, advice like, "You must be alone with your language." Of course I wanted to make this eightysomething-year-old man happy, who looked none the worse for wear even if he had a humongous cane in his other hand like a misbegotten Moses who had lost his way to the promised land, but I also wanted to be alone with my language, and also with my vegetables.
"Then," he said, not a trifle too dramatically, "can you do a painting for me?"
At the time – I believe it was the beginning of a new millennium – I was seriously considering whether I should continue working with acrylic emulsion, as I had developed allergies to certain substances in the material. The symptoms, such as asthma-like shortness of breath, itchiness between the fingers whenever I handled the stuff, could not have been caused by other factors, such that the doctor advised me to perhaps adopt another medium.
But I worked with acrylic emulsion for over two years, and only recently began showing health problems because of it – or so the doctor suspected. I thought I could use gloves while doing a painting for Professor Quino, my last work done in that medium before retiring it and reinventing myself, so to speak, with maybe oils or watercolors, perhaps delve into the letras y figuras!
"Yes," I said to the old man, who seemed anyway to be in a hurry to get home and start on his beer, while I had to pick out more vegetables for the stir-fry concoction that was still germinating in my mind, along with a mental note not to forget the olive oil.
For days and nights I worked on it, and the labor on the yet untitled swan song in acrylic emulsion easily stretched into weeks, thereafter a month. There were occasions when I was so caught up in my work I skipped meals or forgot to eat altogether, and on the last week before the mural’s completion I could go for 48 hours without sleep, and without any drugs at that, only black coffee and adrenalin and the wish to make an old man happy.
In my studio in the hills of Antipolo I practically lived like a hermit for a month, arousing curious queries from my best friend T-bird Cruz and complaints from my suddenly coitus-deprived boyfriend, Stecenoni.
There were just a few more finishing touches to do with the reliable brush when who should come knocking but the conspiring pair, T-bird and Stecenoni, with a bottle of red wine and nachos with dip as apt offertory for an artist hard at work in her lair.
Because the night was young, soon enough we were toasting glasses of wine for the painting or toned down mural which I had decided to call "Curtsey" even if unfinished, my last fling with the medium after using nine pairs of gloves and having brought a handy mini-oxygen tank and breathing mask up to the studio, "for emergency purposes."
We opened the window in the attic that served as my studio, and we had a good view of the hills and the lights in the city below, and was it the drink that caused us to look at "Curtsey" refracted in bits of moonlight that filtered in through the jalousies?
The unveiling of the mural/painting was done on the 81st birthday of Professor Quino, in a reading room named after him on Diliman campus.
I read an essay I had written detailing how "Curtsey" was done and the circumstances of its creation, as well that chance meeting with the old mentor in a grocery along Katipunan, and how one must be alone with one’s language.
As I read and the manangs of the English and Literature department were listening politely if not all too absent-mindedly, I espied out of the corner of my eye the Professor smiling beatifically and twirling something in his ear, was that a cotton bud?
There was the usual applause afterwards, mandatory remarks by the chairman of the department and also the college dean, after which we repaired for some refreshments upstairs, where a crowd of students seemed to materialize out of the darkened Faculty Center corridors to swoop down on the food.
In gatherings like this, there are always more in attendance in the post-activity merienda than at the actual ceremony, because how else but in custom and ceremony are punch and pica-pica born?
Stecenoni and I decided to slip away posthaste to his apartment for something other than stir-fried stuff, but not before introducing the cotton bud-twirling Professor Quino to T-bird, who at any rate invited him for a look-see at the nearby Chocolate Kiss restaurant along with some other colleagues and writing majors, and maybe a truant art critic thrown in to enlighten them on the lambent postmodern qualities of acrylic emulsion without making use of that damned p-word, except to order putanesca, chicken pandanus, or buko pandan.
I understand T-bird took quite a liking for the professor, and vice versa, and the old man was now happier than ever holding fort at the Chocolate Kiss, which was to become their favorite hangout, the hills of Antipolo trapped in a painting in a reading room just a stone’s throw away a distant memory between them.