Been caught stealing once when I was 10.
The setting is a bookstore in the province (and I won’t say where). I would just march up to the aisles and get books that I fancied. In the school library, I’d drop them into my open knapsack, and march out of there. A book about a kid scientist who presents his findings to the rest of the school: that the earth is flat. A book about the wisdom of Nasreddin Hodja. A book on African folk tales. Two other books Noli and Fili for young readers joined my shelf at home. No sweat. Never got caught. Well, until that fateful moment in the bookstore: my fingers around a comic book, the shopkeeper’s fingers around my arm, the security guard fingering his whistle… all hell breaking loose.
I had to give them my name. A name. I chose “Arthur Andrade.” One of my classmates was named Arthur. Another classmate was surnamed Andrade. “Arthur Andrade, gusto mong ipa-pulis ka namin?”
Decades later, I would find out that when The Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie went into hiding in 1989 after fatwa was declared by the Ayatollah, Rushdie went by the alias “Joseph Anton” named after two of his favorite authors Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov. Both William Burroughs and Ken Kesey also went into hiding at several points in their lives.
After my er “capture,” I’d never steal another book again. Although I would watch my college classmates filch books from the library with envy. And I practically lived between shelves. I would ride with my sister in her car early in the morning to the Escolta bank where she worked, ride a jeepney to UST, go straight to the Humanities section of the library, and read until it’s time for class at 1 p.m. Every day. Meanwhile, the rest of the world moved about its business, fell in love with each other, and hardly cared about Lolita, the Buendias or the man who wakes up one day transformed into a bug.
Some student-librarians were fascistic to a fault. One girl refused to lend me Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Leaf Storm and Other Stories because it was labeled as “Non-Fiction” and, hence, could not be borrowed out by students. I could appreciate the cute irony: Marquez stories may be surreal to Westerners, but in our neck of the woods, men with enormous wings, drowned handsome men and thousand-day rains are not too magical to be realistic. (Just take a trip to Siquijor or the sidestreets of Quiapo.) Thus, the book was filed under “Non-Fiction”? Nah, an ancient librarian with a stamp pad probably labeled the wrong book while ogling the short-skirted female Commerce students. Miss ‘em so much. The books, I mean.
Yet I think I still steal books.
When I got my iPad, all I wanted were digital copies of the books I have at home down to the Vintage or Modern Library book cover). I know, I know, it’s really batty. A quick trip to Virra Mall led me to the alley of the upgraders and downloaders. Danny the Man showed me his Mac with its cache of 4,000 books in epub format. And I didn’t even own 400 books. The man loaded a USB stick and I paid P600 for the digital stash. I went home and dragged everything into my iBook app. Read those epub babies all the Murakamis and the Palahniuks. I downloaded new titles as well. But it’s different: a book, whether hardbound or soft-covered, bears the weight of its history. It is a storehouse of memory.
Do you recall the time you carefully chose that particular book to bring on your flight to wherever? Clutching it dearly as the plane flies through air pockets over the Himalayas, wondering if the last story you’ll ever read is the one about the man who gets his anus stuck to the bottom of a swimming pool, or thinking how would Hunter S. Thompson react to the human phlegm beside you who cackled with mucus from NAIA to Amsterdam. Was it the one you rescued from the invasion of termites in the old Malabon house in 2001? Under the pile of destroyed pages of wastelands, dead souls and your recently crumbled universes of words. Did she accidentally leave it when she visited, and never came back for it when she returned to him? What is that thing, really? With its frayed ends, nicotine stains, dog-ears, and neon Stabilo Boss marks that holds so many stories apart from the ones written on its pages.
Another quirk: after reading a book I downloaded, I head for the bookstore and buy not steal, take note a hardcopy with that evocative smell of book paper and that smooth, smooth dustcover.
Digital books are cool.
But to me they’re avatars.