Greg Brillantes for national artist

The story begins in Baguio City, in a bookshop called Mount Cloud, tucked away in a nondescript corner across Brent School and accessible, like anything else in this mountain city, after going through winding, sloping roads. Taxi driver doesn’t know Mt. Cloud, but he knows Brent School.

It was here where we purchased a copy of Gregorio C. Brillantes’ definitive collection of long and short fiction, Collected Stories, published last year by the Ateneo de Manila University Press, gathering under one cover his best stories from more than half a century, from Distance to Andromeda to Apollo Centennial, to his more or less later work of lengthy titles that seemed to be the vogue of the day but has held up well – consider, Janis Joplin, the Revolution, and the Melancholy Widow of Gabriela Silang Street.

At least five of them won first prize at the Palanca awards, which earned for Brillantes a place in its hall of fame, certainly validation that he’s one of the best Filipino writers in whatever language.

Couldn’t make it to the launch at the Ateneo, which required pre-registration as part of security measures post-Covid, also due to a shooting incident that occurred at a recent commencement exercise. You can never be too safe, and Brillantes’ fiction could very well attest to this.

In college his Faith, Love, Time, and Dr. Lazaro was required reading in the syllabus of most literature courses, something to jolt the greenhorn readers in their urban acclimatization, far from their provincial roots that hadn’t changed much based on the story, Brillantes and his love for the Oxford comma in the time of shortcuts and textspeak.

Try to redact him at your own peril, as more than one editor found out when attempting to parse down a published essay on the Feast of the Black Nazarene, for rerun in a broadsheet or magazine with limited space. The title alone would take a good chunk of the page, but the point is not only is poetry lost in translation, the best fiction might be found in the cutting room floor, there to sprout separate stories in themselves while the mother lode goes on sucked of its juices.

First met the man possibly at Midweek magazine in the mid-80s, where he was editorial consultant rearranging the copy of staff writers (yours truly included) and columnists like Norma Japitana, and when editor-in-chief Pete Lacaba, himself another national artist forgotten to be named, showed me a sample of one such copy it was barely decipherable from the original, in fact it looked more like an abstract drawing or a Rorschach, asked me if kaya mo ba ito, can you handle it, cat named Greg B got my tongue.

But to the stories: a number of them I’d read before, particularly those from The Apollo Centennial, a battered copy of which sits at bedside after surviving flood and termites at the old abandoned apartment, so that possession of the new collected stories was mandatory to keep the pages from crumbling in the reader’s hands.

Of particular endearment is The Cries of Children on an April Afternoon in the Year 1957 which shows the fictionist at the peak of his powers, chronicling life in a northern province in the time of Mambo Magsaysay and the interplay of shadows of leaves and louvers on house walls familiar to anyone who grew up middle class but not too comfortable as to not be in thrall of the world at large and its possibilities. The protagonist is a young man who plays basketball, which in Filipino culture could be every man.

In Excerpts from an Autobiography of a Middle-aged Ghostwriter with Insomnia, Brillantes is having fun with words, revels in the narrative with a slew of puns before the heyday of the wordsmith Cesar Ruiz Aquino, you can almost see him dribbling those paragraphs with worthy zigzags and crossovers on the way to basket with a tomahawk dunk. A number of his contemporaries are given parodic names good for a laugh or two, but this doesn’t mean there are no hidden profundities. Besides he is not above self-depreciation, as when he mentions Gorgonio Diamantes and his Distance to Divisoria.

The earlier stories are a revelation, particularly to readers more familiar with the mature Brillantes, mainly because they are sparser, leaner, with a cutting edge that may be the lost link between the fiction of the Veronicans and Ravens with the more modernist, new journalism approach of, say, Wilfrido Nolledo and the aforementioned Cesar Ruiz.

Take for example The Radio and the Green Meadows, which has a young padre de familia hard-put in moving up the career path when he runs into his successful college buddy in, of all places, Quiapo during rush hour, and after a quick merienda and some catching up at an eatery so common in the area, the protagonist goes home to his wife and infant child, where they continue to rack up a list of debts to the neighborhood sari-sari store for a can of sardines or other viand to get them through, and it is the radio and the songs it plays that provide a backdrop of hope however remote for these domestic desperados.

The Young Man recalls a vibrant young man and jack of all trades from the narrator’s childhood who monopolized dances with an elder sister, but she can barely remember the long-lost suitor, disappeared after the Pacific War like so many other young men lost to the follies of battles they weren’t sure who they were fighting for, just following orders and the whims of power.

There’s a story set in Baguio, Lost, which is as good as any to put the writer and fictionist Greg Brillantes in context, and could inspire similar works based in the mountain city you could smell the pine and rosemary in the pages, like the film Kung Mangarap Ka’t Magising, and by this time you may wonder why hasn’t the writer been named national artist for literature, perhaps for lack of a lobbyist?

For a country that prides itself with being the last bastion of Catholicism in Asia, it’s a mystery why the prime literary prize has not been bestowed on its most catholic of writers.

A kingdom for a horse, Shakespeare’s King Richard laments in the midst of battle where his steed has fallen.