This is an excerpt from my novel, Riverrun, which Anvil will publish next month. The novel is about a young man growing up in the colorful martial-law regime in a tropical country.
Emmanuel was a young man from the windblown island of K, in the Bicol Region. After graduating valedictorian from the provincial high school, where he edited the student organ called The Mighty Pen, he applied for a Journalism scholarship at the Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas. He was accepted.
And so in to the vortex of the city, the young Emmanuel plunged, as if in another world. But soon he grew tired of school – of teachers who constantly asked you to parrot their answers, who ignored his questions in class, who gossiped about their neighbors one moment and stood still as saints in Mass.
Moreover, the scholarship only paid for tuition, miscellaneous fees, and books, and he still had to ask for an allowance from his mother in K. His father had died when he was five, swept downriver by the typhoon on his way home, and his mother, a public school teacher, brought him up on her own. Even if she had only one child to raise, still she felt that every pay day, her pockets were holes into which her salary fell.
The young Emmanuel knew this, and so one day he turned up at the office of the Evening Express, then the country’s top-circulation broadsheet, and asked to see the Editor-in-Chief.
Mr. Nilo Perez was small and brown and rotund. When he looked up from the manuscripts piled on his desk, he reminded Emmanuel of a rat.
In between his words he constantly sniffed: Emmanuel showed him an essay he had written in school, which he scribbled off ten minutes before class began, and which got a flat 1.0 from his teacher, to his great elation and dismay.
Flanked by the photos of the President and the First Lady, the editor read the essay, his fingers flying over the page, then he looked at the young Emmanuel with rapturous eyes: “I like it! You know how to write. You began with a quotation. And ended with one.”
The young Emmanuel fidgeted in his seat (God, the world is full of morons), and smiled his PR smile, the one he had practised every day before the mirror: a wide smile that showed fully his white teeth, a smile without meaning. The grin of a dog.
And so post-haste the young Emmanuel was hired, and the next day began churning up “think pieces” for the Express. “What makes the Filipino tick?” is counterweighed the next day with an incisive essay on “The ungovernability of our race.”
One day, the Information Minister, Gorgonio Balbacua, died. Minister Balbacua had an appetite for sex matched only by his incredible diction. On nationwide TV he was quoted: “We should wage a nationwide campaign against smut and all forms of pornography.” He pronounced smut as “smooth.” His ghost writers, a group of highly paid brats from Manila’s most exclusive universities, had a grand time trawling polysyllables for the Boss. Asterisks became “Asterix,” labyrinthine was lost, and by the time he had reached “anthropomorphism” (delivered before a group of society matrons who raised tiger orchids for a hobby and whose avowed aim was to “Exterminate All Aphids”), the minister’s tongue was gone.
But his ghost writers were children of the Social Register themselves, and thus, could not be fired.
And so he just vented all frustrations on his sex life. His latest gamin was Ylang-ylang Ysmael, the lead star of that monstrous hit called Nympha. Ylang-ylang Ysmael had long black hair that streamed down her body like a caress, and she ruled over the dark movie houses of Manila with her voice. Low and throaty, a voice perfect for purring, for teasing, and for playing….
Furious was how the President was said to be when he heard how the Information Minister had died. The Minister was in Tagaytay City, inside the villa he owned, which had an unforgettable view of Taal Volcano, a volcano within a lake within a volcano within a lake. “Imagine,” the President fumed, “dying while in the middle of sex?”
“At least he died happy,” the wags said, buying their tabloids and horserace guides and listening to the double-entendres from the mad commentators on the AM band.
And so,the vacancy. The shortlisted candidate included Mr. Juan Gabuna, who was Editor-in-Chief of Asia Magazine, the continent’s finest; Professor Justiniani Culiculi, who teaches at the University of the Philippines and whose posh accent never fails to remind you that indeed, he read the Classics in Oxford; and the young Emmanuel, who was the dark horse.
Mr. Gabuna politely turned down the offer, saying he had just signed another contract with Asia Magazine for five years. Pundits proclaimed that Mr. Gabuna, who used to write prize-winning fiction in his youth, would rather edit Asia’s most elegant magazine than write fiction for the regime.
Professor Culiculi also said no, thank you, after the Palace ruled that if he were chosen for the post, he could not bring his pet poodle Fifi into the office.
And so the mantle, as the speakers would say during graduation ceremonies, fell on the young Emmanuel’s shoulders.
He took to it gladly, like a diver plunging into cool, clear depths. He brought dynamism into the office. At least the press releases now spell occasion correctly, the letterhead doesn’t have a leaking pen for a logo, and the secretaries no longer pad around the place in their cheap Baclaran slippers.
And when the President declared martial law, it was the young Emmanuel’s task to become an anti-perspirant and anti-deodorant rolled into one.
“Ehem,” he said in solemn tones over a nationwide radio and TV hook-up, which we watched on the night of 23 September 1972. But he was a letdown. He just repeated President Marcos’ words a day before, his eyes like the eyes of a statue.
And just then, he produced a list. “Here are the names of the undesirable elements in our society. To protect the interests of the State, they had been placed in rehabilitation centers.” And he proceeded to read the names of 10,000 people, deep into the night and early morning, his voice a monotone. Every so often he would bend down and pull up his socks (a tic, someone said, because the Young Emmanuel used to go to school with rubber bands wound round the sagging bands of his socks). And sometimes, one could see a dagger of fear in those big, intelligent eyes – or could it be just sleepiness? – as his voice droned on.
The moment my father fell asleep in the sofa at midnight, I turned off the TV set. Young Emmanuel disappeared into the world of the idiot box, had vanished to the point of a small white dot as my weary countrymen turned off their TV sets one by one and braced themselves for another, longer, night.