Speaking of nice old things, I found myself in the middle of an antiques show at the Greenhills tiangge a couple of months ago, while Beng took a friend who was visiting from the States, Julie Hill, to the pearl booths.
Now, Greenhills is a place that people associate more often with the new and the fake (or the “replica,” as it’s more stylishly called) than with the old and the authentic. But many years ago, I’d stumbled on one of my most fabulous vintage pen finds in this same place — a huge mid-1920s Swan Eternal in terrific condition, a steal at P500 — so I was hoping to spot another sleeper in a tin cup or cigar box (in my fantasies, a Parker “snake” or Senior Maxima, for a princely P1,000). As it happened, no collectible pens were about that day — which was just as well, because I could relax and enjoy the objects that were there.
Next to pens and other writing instruments, I’m drawn to what collectors call ephemera — odd bits and pieces of paper that, as the word suggests, may once have served some short-lived purpose: a flyer for a show (say, the July 4, 1964 Beatles show at the Rizal Coliseum), an issue of a bygone publication (A. V. Hartendorp’s pre-war Philippine Magazine, near-mint copies of which can still be found in a book shop in Intramuros), postcards of old Baguio, and the ubiquitous studio shots of Carnival Queens from the 1930s.
I’ve picked up some such pieces from antique shops (the term should arguably be “antiques shops,” since the shops themselves are fairly new, but common usage has gone the other way) and also on eBay, where I chanced upon a 1922 Christmas issue of the Philippine Collegian (which told me, among others, that nothing has changed much in nearly nine decades as far as university funding is concerned).
The charm of ephemera for me lies less in the official record they provide of long-forgotten events, which a historian might look for, than in the way they revivify lost voices and suggest deeply personal stories behind the signatures and faces. When I came out with my first book in 1984 and had to decide on a book cover, I chose to use the photograph of a pretty Filipina, something I’d picked up from a tray in an Ermita antique shop for probably 50 centavos; I knew nothing about her, except that her name was “Charing,” the kind of woman that inspired Paz Marquez Benitez’ Julia in “Dead Stars?”
That afternoon in Greenhills, undistracted by pens and similarly familiar objects, I let my eyes roam among the stalls of old bottles, medallions, chinaware, and ancient textbooks, and they landed on a small collection of what seemed to be legal documents written by hand. I was attracted both by the penmanship and the fine, swirly strokes that only old flexible pen nibs could produce, and by the elaborate documentary seals that harked back to Spanish times. The texts were all in old Tagalog, of the kind I’d found in old almanacs and prayer books, where the k’s were still c’s and the apostrophes still commas.
Again, being no historian, I had little idea of the context behind these documents, which mostly had to do with the sale of land and the settlement of debts. Typically, one of them began thus, with a self-introduction: “Aco,i si Martin Carpio, asauang caisang catauan ni Petrona Roque…” I pause on that phrase, “asauang caisang catauan” — “the spouse of one body with” — and dwell on what marriage might have meant to such people as Martin and Petrona more than a century past. It’s very hard to make out the rest of the script with my untrained eye, but I do spot another phrase, “sa aming caguipitan ay aming ipinagbibiling muli,” “in our hour of need,” leading to the sale of another plot of land for eight pesos.
The historian will do one thing with that bit of knowledge, and the fictionist (or creative nonfictionist) something else. I might imagine the kind of life Martin and Petrona lived — what they had for supper, what he did to amuse himself, what she suffered to keep him beside her, what the view was from the kitchen when she looked up from stirring the pot of guava-laced fish stew he favored. A distant mountain, perhaps, or just another soot-covered wall with an eye-slit for the smoke and the sadness to seep through? What would she have thought that day — the 6th of May, in the year 1885 — when he came home with the eight pesos in his pocket?
She looks him in the eye but he can’t look back, consumed by a restlessness she’s seen before, and now recognizes with a terrible shudder: she will sup alone that evening; he will be out there where the roosters keep the dust down with their own blood, swearing to win it all back with one or two well-studied choices.
My apologies to the real Martin Carpio and Petrona Roque — and to their descendants — for this fevered digression. The reality may well have been much happier and more prosaic, leading to healthy children, a flourishing business, and more land than all of them could live on. But the other possibilities were engaging enough for me to offer the dealer a fair price for the whole lot of hand-lettered deeds. Beng and Julie got their pearls; I got my stories, albeit some yet to be written.
* * *
E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.