THE FEET OF JUAN BACNANG
By F. Sionil Jose
Solidaridad Publishing, 264 pages
Available at Powerbooks and National Book Store
It’s a perilous thing for a writer to assign metaphorical attributes to a physical defect: there is, of course, Achilles’ heel to contend with from Greek mythology. But in his latest novel, National Artist F. Sionil Jose takes as his metaphor the peculiar toes of a certain Juan Bacnang de la Cruz, born to a poor but noble barrio and drawn into a picaresque journey toward success and, ultimately, tragedy in The Feet of Juan Bacnang.
Feet as a metaphor can be fairly, er, strong when you think about it. Feet are what we use to make our way forward in the world, to take us from obscurity to some far-off land of opportunity. They are, at the same time, firmly attached to the ground, to the earth. Feet tether us. We don’t dream with our feet, but they might push us toward some unspoken destiny.
In Jose’s latest novel, we move into allegory and possibly fantasy: this allows us to absorb the details of Juan de la Cruz’s somewhat fantastic rise up the ranks with greater appreciation. It’s a fable of sorts, with Juan de la Cruz an allegory for everyman, of course. But this Juan is no ordinary Juan: he’s very bright, very ambitious, and the fact of his sketchy parenthood doesn’t stop him from leaving his home province (with good grades intact) to seek his fortune in Manila.
His feet become his calling card. Yes, it is very big spoiler to reveal that Juan (soon rechristened Sunny Johnny) has special feet; they are not the kind sported by Daffy Duck, but a sort of undifferentiated tissue (medically known as syndactyly) joining the base of the big toes. But after hearing the story of his origins from his poor but honest mother, Johnny heads to the Batasang Pambansa and asks to visit a certain Senator Reyes. After telling him his story, Johnny is asked to take off his shoes.
Now he is going to examine my feet, my horrid toes. The Senator bent down and held Juan Bacnang’s left foot, examined the toes.
“The other foot,” he commanded. Juan Bacnang lifted the other foot and, again, the Senator examined the toes. Then rising, a grin all over his bland mestizo face, he embraced Juan Bacnang tightly, whispering, “My son, my son.” Trembling with emotion. “My son,” he repeated. How exulting were the words, how lifting — the affirmation of his birthright and future!
In the wrong hands, this kind of scene could play for laughs. National Artist Jose fully recognizes the archetypal or fairytale nature of such exchanges — Cinderella comes to mind — but while The Feet of Juan Bacnang has its fair share of rapes and deflowerings and telenovela aspects, it’s all in service of an allegory that lays bare Filipino society, warts and all, as perhaps only Jose can.
We follow Johnny through his ascent to power, as the Senator’s son and as the nephew of someone called The Leader (you may recall him and his physical condition from Jose’s short story “Olvidon”); along the way he takes a wife, a series of mistresses and has children. In short, it’s the story of success, but there is something rotten at the core.
Johnny is one of those guys with an insatiable sexual need, and going at it five or six times a night is nothing unusual, so we’re told. His physical prowess, keen instincts and mind for organization are perhaps intended to recall Marcos at the peak of his powers, though Jose seems to prefer that Sunny Johnny stand in for the pitfalls of Filipino ambition in general. (Shades of Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby in the book’s moral of reinvention and pushing ceaselessly against the tide of the past.)
Though the bare outlines of The Feet of Juan Bacnang may scan like a telenovela, this is Jose’s opportunity to offer his deepest mediations yet on what makes Filipinos succeed, and what sometimes leads them to fail. As our hero progresses, the details and layers of corruption are not laid bare to the light all at once, but rather casually revealed to the reader in glimpses, as one might glimpse an abscess or a scar beneath a sleeve or a skirt. This serves to conceal Johnny’s true transformation until the final section of the novel. Though Johnny is not drawn to the Catholic Church, he uses it as a repository for his accumulated sins. And the nature of sin, for Johnny, is a kind of scab that overtakes the body. As Jose reflects: “Although he admitted the sin, that admission became just one more plate, one more scale on his body armor. Soon came a time when sin or crime became not a moral condition, but just one of those social impediments to be avoided.”
At most, for the ambitious, sin is an inconvenience to be dealt with, concealed, or safely confessed away. And, like many other charming scoundrels in history or literature, patriotism (“For the nation!”) is the last refuge.
Similar to magic realism, The Feet of Juan Bacnang has us believing we’re reading about some mythical, allegorical land, when in fact all the the details are lifted straight from local life, all around us. Political opponents are shot en route to the tarmac; radio broadcasters are eliminated for talking too much; Jose even has Sunny Johnny pay a visit to a pesky but brutally honest journalist, Narciso A. Tured, who has been writing unkind things about The Leader. His goal is to turn Narciso (note the self-regarding name) away from scathing editorials to writing an “honest” biography of The Leader. The scene in a café between the two recalls the Grand Inquisitor segment of The Brothers Karamazov, with Johnny playing the devil’s advocate, trying to tempt Tured to put aside his ego and play on the winning team instead. The fact that Jose has written about such encounters in his own life — those in power trying to co-opt his very industrious pen in the past — doesn’t lessen the impact of the metaphor, especially as the pen itself has its own important cameo in the final pages of The Feet of Juan Bacnang.