May Day Eve with Nick and Abe

It seems almost serendipitous, reading Nick Joaquin’s last completed work, Abe, A Frank Sketch of E. Aguilar Cruz, on the second anniversary of his (Nick’s) passing. Published by the Juan Nepomuceno Center for Capampangan Studies of the Holy Angel University, from which province the Aguilar Cruzes hail, it is by all means a handsome book, and the writing vintage Nick. Unlike other unfinished works by the late national artist, which were apparently completed post-humously by a trusted ward or two fill-in-the-blanks style, Abe has the benefit of being Nick-written to the very end. Or at least it reads that way. Joaquin wouldn’t have it any other way when it comes to his dear friend, a kabarkada in the streets of Manila.

Abe Cruz, we learn, was kind of a legendary figure in the newsrooms and art circles, a largely self-made, self-taught man whose gift of gab was well prized, of bohemian temperament but who was devoted to his children just the same. Nick is careful not to sentimentalize his subject, making him appear a regular guy from his humble beginnings in a small town at the foot of Mt. Arayat, to his apprenticeship in the noble and ever loyal city, to early married life and its subsequent dissolution and the inroads he made in the worlds of journalism and art.

Joaquin makes extensive use of interviews with his subject, who died in December 1991 after being in a hospital for a month. The author also employs varied recollections of common writer friends, such as Alfrredo Salanga, Greg Brillantes, and Claude Tayag. The driving force of the biography is of course Abe’s son Lorenzo or Larry of the famous restaurant business, who after all commissioned the work. Abe then comes out not so much as tribute to Cruz per se, as it is a means for Cruz to touch base with things Capampangan again.

A sort of bonus is a pair of folios consisting of photographs taken from Abe Cruz’s life and times, including his boyhood in Pampanga and as editor of the afternoon newspaper The Daily Mirror, to varied art works that embodied a Filipino impressionism to his later days in a studio in Ermita. The text is further spiced by occasional illustrations that Abe Cruz was in the habit of doing, New Yorker-style, which US magazine he admits to being a prime influence not only in drawing but also in writing those short pithy paragraphs, á la talk of the town.

Particularly enlightening are the sections where Abe Cruz talks of the newspapering world both pre- and post-war, how the peacetime period was definitely more laidback if not more humane, as compared to the dog-eat-dog story for a fee milieu after the Pacific War. There is mention of the newsroom being a happy hunting ground which eventually put stress on the Cruz marriage, and of a voracious habitué of the old newspaper row who specialized in fellatio.

There are photos too of newsmen in coat and tie dining in a panciteria, standard attire at the time. Extra-judicial killings might have been a rarity then, so being dressed to the nines might have helped.

It’s quite possible however that Abe Cruz’s true passion was drawing or, in his twilight years, painting. Joaquin repeatedly states the influence of the magic mountain Arayat on the impressionable boy. Cruz would be the spiritual leader of the Dimasalang group, that counted among its members Romulo Galicano, Ibarra dela Rosa, and another of Joaquin’s kumpares, Andres Cristobal Cruz. These guys were post-Amorsolo, a signal group for the moderns and thus, advocates of a return to realism. They were tired of Impressionism which had just about run its rightful course, and were ready and able to take the Philippine art scene into a new direction.

If he was mentor to many of the young artists of the time, Abe Cruz was bohemian brother and man about town to many of his writing contemporaries. He says he never felt comfortable with the Veronicans, an experimental literary group that included the writers Franz Arcellana, Estrella Alfon, Delfin Fresnosa.

Abe Cruz says Arcellana wrote "silly, unforgivable" stories but commends him for having a gift with the language and "really knew how to use it."

Cruz says Jose Garcia Villa was himself guilty of writing "foolish" poems and stopped writing when he felt he had nothing more to say, and for this he should be praised rather than maligned — like the French poets who knew when to call it quits.

Of note too is how Aguilar Cruz in his later years entertained the thought of becoming a poet, only to be good-naturedly resigned with the passing of years that the best he could do was wax poetic once in a while.

Salanga, who had long conversations with Abe well past the post-prandial, said one thing he could not turn down was a lunch invite from his fellow epicurean. Salanga, who died three years before Cruz, rhapsodizes about the goose liver paté on crusty bread during one such culinary outing.

A distinctly memorable episode is Brillantes coming across Abe Cruz in the original Popular Bookstore along Recto Avenue, in search of a theological book in order to clarify a point while writing one of his editorials. Brillantes edited Cruz’s Maynila and Other Explorations, a bestseller in Paris and now a certified collector’s item.

Son Larry Cruz traces his fine touch for the restaurant business to his food trips with the old man down Ongpin Street in Binondo, where the tasty noodle shops and hopia and dim sum houses defy history itself. This probably is the district where gourmets are born.

The end for Abe, artist and writer, came none too quickly as chronicled by his good friend Nick. It came a month after the opening of his retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum, his children by his bedside, as he went quietly into that good night six days before Christmas 1991. The end came not before Abe the reporter filed a dispatch on the Mt. Pinatubo eruption in June that same year, the old newsman in him never really fading away. The report came out on page one of Newsday, the newspaper published by Kit Tatad.

We have no argument with Nick’s pushing for his friend Abe being named National Artist posthumously. There have been lesser artists who have been given the distinction, certainly, and more prominent ones continually ignored. But as artist or writer? We’ll leave that to the cultural eggheads to decide. Award or no, having the great Joaquin write one’s biography is reward enough in itself, almost as satisfying as a full course meal at Cafe Adriatico or Bistro Remedios. Now to look for an old painting of Abe’s, which hung in a corner of the south room in the antique, ancestral home, of a woman sitting, dressed in plain skirt and blouse, looking out impressionistically at the grace of time passing.