Secrets and fears of writers in ‘Makinilyang Altar’

I hardly enjoy reading novels because of the forbidding volume of pages and often my impatience to get to the ending. Sometimes I can settle in guesswork – which character will betray the protagonist, what will be the turning point in the fates of the star-crossed lovers, how will the details fall into one piece, and when everything is said and done, what now, so what? In a graduate school class I was assigned to read and report on a historical novel by a Filipino writer in English whose writing the professor described as "exquisite." Thus I was excited to begin reading the book, only to be soon, and thoroughly, dismayed and distressed as I flipped through its pages. I read the book at least three times, wishing that I would stumble on the exquisiteness that caught the professor; either my brain was not working or my reading skills were inadequate, but the novel to me was a thunderbolt of a sleeper – bland and unremarkable. For sometime I did not read novels, and those highly praised in book reviews that sounded more like press releases seemed suspect to me. I was nonetheless neither immaculate nor incorruptible. The professor said I should give a summary of the novel to the class, and I could not. He insisted sternly that I fulfill my role as reporter – because he himself had not finished the novel, by his own admission. Whoa. Talk of heroes with feet of clay. For the written requirement I tried mightily to sing praises for the book, calculating that it was a way to redeem my grade and my ego. I served the professor his pleasure and he thought I was able to come to terms with the work – I positively gloated when he gave me a 4.0 (the highest grade possible). Now that I recall the incident, what I came to value from wrestling with that assigned novel was my realization of how not to write a novel, and what I know I will spare my students from unless I want to punish them, an idea I don’t relish.

Of all the genres it is poetry that charms me the most. I know the poets I will go back to any time of the year; their books stand on the shelf just right at my back in my little writing corner at home or on my bedside where I can reach them easily because I want to read their poems aloud or silently by myself or with my sister, when reading poetry seems to be the most salvific act that can be done in this age of terrorism and counter-terrorism, with more and more people suffering and dying each day in many parts of the world.

But of all the creative writers, it is the novelist I envy the most, I must concede. How does one gather all that information, how does one relive memory, how does one push to the limits the complexities of people and institutions, and then leave the reader more shaken and at the same time more enthralled with life? Or death? More terrified yet more passionate? Illumined and forgiving both?

The night I read Luna Sicat Cleto’s Makinilyang Altar (2002, UP Press), I thought the novel beckoned me, as a worshipful climber would believe he or she was summoned by Mount Banahaw and its sacred beauty. It was Saturday and I was tossing in bed, my mind swarming with motley ideas from all directions. I got up and headed straight to the bookshelf looking for the book, which I had been planning to read but never had the chance. Until that night. The opening paragraph was a long description of what I just did or was doing – to my surprise. The initial voice was saying something about reading or the dream of reading. Luna’s first paragraph instantly brought me to where I just wanted to be: in the comfort of language, its utter clarity welded with utter mysteriousness.

Dadamputin ko na sana ang librong nakapatong sa pasamano nang mapansin kong dumapo and maraming tarat sa punong sampalok sa bakuran. Saglit kong pinakinggan ang huni ng mga iyon, pagkuwa’y nagtaka kung bakit walang mga letra, walang mga salita, walang teksto sa mga pahina ng librong hawak ko. Sabay-sabay na nilisan ng mga tarat ang puno, at sa pagkampay ng kanilang mga pakpak, kumampay na rin ang pahina ng libro at kusa itong nagsara. At saka ko pa lamang napansin na nagkalat pala ang mga libro sa bawat sulok ng silid – naroon sila sa mahabang pasilyo, sa may terasa, sa balkon, sa bukana. Patong-patong, nakasalansan, paisa-isa. Tuyong dahon ang mga librong waring nakakapasok sa loob ng bahay na iyon na walang mga kasangkapan...

The paragraph would go on to occupy the whole page but I did not skip a syllable. From thereon Luna would bring me to the images of houses and roads, classrooms and fields, everyday characters who have a colorful side to reveal, and most of all the inner minds and paradoxes of the father and daughter she will introduce in the novel: Deo Dipasupil, a temperamental writer whose journal entries are partly taken from those of Luna’s father, the acclaimed novelist Rogelio Sicat, between 1975 and 1976, and Laya, who finds herself treading the same road taken by her father.

Perhaps this is the given enchantment of the book: its boldness to let in a voyeur like me who sought to learn more about the author’s father Rogelio Sicat (a.k.a. Rogelio Sikat), the novelist I never forgot after reading Dugo sa Bukang-liwayway, and his short stories "Impeng Negro" and "Tata Selo." I remember crying and laughing at the same time when I read Luna’s essay, "Mga Alaala ng Aking Ama," published in a short-lived literary journal of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), Mantala, and when I heard she was working on it as a novel, I was one of those who wished she would finish it soon.

Situations and characters have been embellished for sure, but whether one will take the novel as semi-biography or autobiography, doubtless the author’s power lies in the sustained descriptions, the unexpected turn of humor and pathos, the capacity to stare an object in the eye, even what seems to be the invincible facade of the person most near and dear to the narrator. The author unfolds the seasons and changes in Deo Dipasupil’s life and family – how they transferred residences; his anger at Laya’s aunt with a frivolous name, Honeypie, who liked throwing parties while the husband was away for work in Bahrain; his jab at the hypocrisy of fellow faculty and writers in social gatherings; his proud affinity with the farm; his disapproval of Laya’s suitors; the discipline and respect for private space that he demanded from his own children, especially the precocious Laya, who he knew, possessed, too, a certain degree of sensitivity and ponderousness like himself.

Memory and truth, diary and fiction, child and parent, vulnerability and guilt, image and emotion, author and text... the tensions from this onslaught of forces are the book’s constant seduction. The narrative flow is not contained in an hourglass, but is held by the author’s skilled language and breadth of observation. Barely halfway in the novel, Deo Dipasupil suffers from cancer (the same killer disease that struck Rogelio Sicat). When he eventually succumbs to it, Laya is left to seek and uncover his writings. Free from the anguished presence of her father, she is also more aware that while being different as a person, she is certainly not apart from his mold and spirit as a writer.

I love the book because it speaks about the deepest secrets of writers, their fears, their hurts, their rages, their celebrations, their convictions. And as I listen to the father and daughter’s words and silences clash, I find my own writer self joining and alive, and never more sure of what I want and will to do, even on moments when I don’t feel like writing, or poetry seems all of a sudden irrelevant, if not totally meaningless in a self-destructive, desperate world.

I love the book because it takes away the specialness of writers – that we are no less and no more than our neighbor, that we are as mortal, and perhaps unmerciful as cancer, but our gift is that our work can outlast our own enemy, which is ourselves. Long after Deo Dipasupil has died and Laya is overwhelmed with the wealth of revelation that the journal entries of her father will yield, Makinilyang Altar pulls me back to the ground and invites me to look at small graces that might have escaped me because I was too busy nursing my own ambitions and desires. After all, life matters more than the writing, even as they often seem one and the same to the writer. In the second to the last paragraph of the novel, the author writes:

At pinag-aralan niyang magtanim. Nagsimula muna siya sa mga maliliit na paso ng mga halamang ornamental, hanggang sa masubukan niyang makapamulaklak ng orkidyas. Samantala, kinaibigan niya ang kanyang asawa. Tinulung-tulungan niya ito sa pagkukumpuni ng sasakyan, kahit taga-abot lamang ng mga tools. Nagpakuwento siya ng kabataan nito. Tinuklas niya ang nakita niyang dahilan kung bakit pinili niyang makasama ang taong ito, sa dinami-rami ng iba pa.

From midnight to the next day, I did not put the book down, each page a worthy experience of pleasure to the edge, and pain, so beautiful like light. If someday I would try my hand at writing the novel, Makinilyang Altar would have taught me where to begin.