Farewell to dear Adrian

He held a small red ball in his left hand. It was soft, a squeeze ball, presumably for some kind of therapy as he lay on a cot for an extended dialysis session at Makati Med.

I kidded him that Erwin Castillo said I should ask if he would soon be bequeathing anything to us. Never one to miss a beat or a chance for a quip, Adrian Cristobal replied, “Tell him he can have this ball.”

That was some three weeks ago, when a delegation from PLAC or the Philippine Literary Arts Council, sought to boost the spirits of a premier writer of our time — one whom we all owed some benefit at one time or another.

Seven of us — Jimmy Abad, Ricky de Ungria, Susan Lara, Marj Evasco, RayVi Sunico, Juaniyo Arcellana and I — agreed to meet at Makati Med before noon, and together troop to dear Adrian’s room on the seventh floor. It would be just as UMPIL or Writers Union of the Philippines had done a week earlier. I had also managed to catch up with that group, which had National Artist for Literature Virgilio Almario (like Adrian, an UMPIL chair emeritus), current UMPIL chairman Vim Nadera, Fidel Rillo, Jun Balde and Marne Kilates.

We had all squeezed ourselves into the room that time, where loving wife Techie Cristobal was being assisted in ministering to guests by daughter Celin and granddaughter Erin. Adrian’s namesake son, Che, also showed up with his wife Dina, so that we kept playing musical chairs (and couch), while Adrian showed his appreciation by talking books with everyone, and dispensing hilarious quips on anything and everything.  

By the time PLAC got its act together, on a suggestion from Ricky who was visiting from Davao, Adrian had started having dialysis. We learned upon footing it up the flights of stairs to the seventh floor, and chancing in on Erin alone in Adrian’s room, that his dialysis session had been moved forward, but that we could go down a few floors and still see him.

We had to do it a couple at a time, spend some 10 to 15 minutes with him and Celin by his bedside, in pairs. It must have been poignant when Ricky spoke with him, after long years of absence from a certain ambit Adrian characteristically maintained, or maybe even exuded.

When it was my turn with Juaniyo, Adrian looked up and addressed him as Franz, with a wisp of a smile through the gauze serving as a facemask. And he whispered that he had loved Franz so. In turn did we inform him that Frankie Jose had planned to visit, too, and we were glad peace could still be made all around.

When we dispersed after the visit, a series of SMS was soon traded, concerning the kind of peace we had not looked forward to. Fellow writer Rene Villanueva had expired at the Heart Center. We had known that he was battling for his life, but had hoped that he would still have more years to live, being even younger than most of us.

Weeks earlier, the gentleman poet Sedfrey Ordoñez had also left us. As Pinoy speculation goes, now we wondered if it would be three strikes in a row, and if it would be Adrian to complete the hat trick. Sure, he was in his late 70s, and the biopsy passed on weeks before was far from comforting: lung cancer, fourth stage. Diabetes and old age preempted any major attempt at warding off the Big C. It would likely be just a matter of time, we said sadly to ourselves. This titan among writers may soon leave us, too.

That afternoon, reflection turned into reverie: a retracing of friendship’s steps back to all of four decades ago, when we first came into association with Adrian E. Cristobal. That early, still a dapper young man who seemed intent on polishing up a remarkable image as an elegant rake, he was quick with the mirabile dictu as he was with wads of bills from a pocket.

He was known to be “a Marcos man,” one who wrote speeches and maybe even ideas and entire books for the President. Ever the gentleman cum man-about-town, Adrian treated younger writers to drinks at Cafe Los Indios Bravos on A. Mabini St. in Malate. That was where I must have first met him, in the late 1960s.

Quick poker sessions would be conducted at the mezzanine room, and Adrian would clean us all out, then give it all back by way of free beers and pica-pica, before he joined the center table downstairs where he’d help hold court with the likes of café owner Betsy Romualdez Francia and the poets Virginia R. Moreno, Jose Garcia Villa whenever he deigned to visit Manila, Nick Joaquin, and Hilario M. Francia.    

Those were the salad days in Ermita-Malate, until the Lapiang Malaya massacre on Taft Ave., and our buddy Eman Lacaba swore off the dispensation not too long before it embarked on Martial Law to send us all scampering off from the lovely haze of Abbey Road into separate directions.

Two incidents remain strong in my memory. On a pre-ML night, I ran into Adrian at a concert in Philamlife Theater. I boasted possession of illicit stuff that one snorted for spiritual or sexual enhancement, take your pick. He said he was one to try anything at least a first time. We completed a transaction in the men’s room, standing before parallel urinals. He pulled out a thick wad of bills and handed over more than what was fair. I asked if he always carried such amounts of cash. He said succinctly: “We’re on a reelection campaign, right?” So that must have been in 1969.

Many years later, sipping Irish whiskey together at midnight at Cafe Adriatico, Adrian showed that I had gained his trust, by professing that Marcos’ prime transgression had been to pull the rug from under a generation of fresh, possibly brilliant leaders, the likes of Diokno, Roxas and Aquino. He said this with a slur, which by then I had come to relate to an existentialist stand helped along by great inebriation, with life and his own prized intellect.

Tough after 40 years to establish any sort of chronology to the random associations, but more memories come up that only make me fonder of the man as friend and patron.

By the mid-’70s I was starting out with family in Diliman, QC, lean and hungry and often at my wit’s end for pennies. The poet-prophet Jolico Cuadra came to our apartment in Teachers’ Village, learned of our state of penury, and came back the next day with a check. It was from Adrian Cristobal, SSS chair.

Soon we joined Jolico, Freddie Salanga and a motley group of other struggling writers who’d troop to the SSS Bldg. on Wednesdays for our “novena” — which consisted of lechon, beers and Scotch with our host and godfather.

At the turn of the ’80s, we were offered what we called a sinecure at the PCSS or President’s Center for Special Studies, headed by Adrian. We went to the EastChem Bldg. near Happy Valley off España Ext. once or twice a week, to help edit all kinds of stuff for Cirilo Bautista, who had been given a regular appointment. That was where we met Ricky de Ungria, Cirilo’s former student in De La Salle. Ricky and I concocted something we called a literary calendar, and gained approval from Adrian to publish and distribute it for free among writers and art circles.

Then we presented a plan to edit a quarterly literary anthology to be called José, which would pay contributing writers and artists top rates. When we rationalized in our concept paper why it should be called José, citing Rizal, Villa, David Lapuz, St. Joseph et al., the sheet came back with a one-word note of resounding approval from Adrian: “Eclat!” We came out with four distinguished issues.

Then Ninoy was assassinated, and the poets’ group we had formed by then, with Jimmy Abad as the only non-PCSS satrap among us, bravely set forth with a little pamphlet of our poems on Ninoy’s martyrdom, billed as In Memoriam. It was funded by Jimmy’s good friend, then UP official Noel Soriano. 

When Adrian got hold of a copy, he wrote a memo to Cirilo, Freddie, Ricky and me, informing us that we could no longer render service for the PCSS. It may have offended Cirilo and Ricky, especially when they heard that Adrian had reputedly said something about “biting the hand that feeds you.”

For our part, Freddie and I — maybe because we had been trained by Jesuits — didn’t keep away from the godfather too long. We laughed over the incident, and the next time I ran into Adrian, I posed the sophistry: “But what if the hand is feeding you poison?” He scowled as was his wont, in mock deference to force of habit, but then broke into a smile and broke a bottle open.

And that’s how it’s been over the last two decades, when friendship ripens even more with veneration of the aging process, and together we all see how there will always be younger writers to support and help when they’re still struggling. As I still was, in 1986, when Adrian again became instrumental in having the Philippine Writers Foundation and the Cultural Center of the Philippines provide a grant for the writing of my first novel, Great Philippine Jungle Energy Cafe.

“Thanks, Adrian,” Franz Arcellana had written as one of the pair of “angels” — the other being Nick Joaquin — who would write a report and an introduction, respectively, for the book, “for making the writing of this great, comic novel possible. Please please please pretty please, make its publication possible!”

Yes, thanks, for that and all that came before and would come after. Thanks, Adrian, for teaching us how to share all of the good stuff with the good brethren.

At the wake last week, that was how it was, many writer and artist friends laughing together, and in our laughter paying our respects and giving thanks. Farewell for now, friend and patron. And you may keep scowling. We know that’s the way you smile, at heart, to mask so generous a heart.