Romance a la New Manila

There’s a hint of nostalgia, a scent of days gone by when things were simpler and far from drowning in the vogue of virtual confusion in the recently launched collection of short fiction from Benjamin Bautista, Stories from Another Time (Ateneo de Manila Press 2008).

Here are 17 stories, brought to light again auspiciously enough on the 17th of last November at the Ateneo Professional Schools at Rockwell Makati, where the liquor flowed and tasty viands filled many a jowl till late in the evening, gathering a motley group of literary lions and aficionados as well as Bautista’s old classmates at the Ateneo, dare we say it, all with the fine taste of the bourgeois.

But wait, there’s more here than meets the eye of plain retrospective and recollection, and even if the fiction writer’s mentor and fellow Atenean Greg Brillantes aptly writes the foreword that itself reads like a short story, par for the course for him and just Greg being Greg, the real deal is in these stories from another time, another place: a young writer speaking from a wrinkle of a spatial conundrum because, anyway, E is not always equal to mc squared.

Or is it? A good number of the stories were published in the 1950s in Heights, the Ateneo publication, when Bautista was still in his teens, and in many ways show a bright-eyed young man coming to terms with the world at large. If the author seems at the outset to be fond of rites of passage tales, then so be it; when we read them we cannot help but be reminded of our own rites of passage and initiation blues, when we realized that the things around us weren’t always what they seemed and the awakening was not so much rude as enlightening, indeed surly epiphanies waiting to be found.

The oldest story in the collection is ‘Sin’, published 1954 when Bautista was 16 years old. It tells of a boy who trades a medallion given by his mother for a toy airplane that easily breaks. Short but sweet, like truth revealing the unkindest cut: how many times have we ourselves fallen prey to lemons and in so doing given up a potential heirloom?

In the late 1950s the author was ready for a bigger stage, and so several of his stories came out in the Philippines Free Press, whose editor Teodoro Locsin had invited him to lunch in the old office building in Sta. Cruz and treated him like a peer.

Among the stories that appeared in Free Press were ‘The Baby in the Bottle’ and ‘Sampaguitas for Tonight’, both notable for their peacetime realism with an undercurrent of social as well as domestic turmoil. The first is about a childless couple whose only failed miscarriage is preserved in a bottle, even as the fetus itself slowly crumbles in the fluid. The second about an old man who gives up his dinner money to buy a garland of sampaguitas from an indigent girl, almost like a folk tale told from an alternative point of view.

In many ways they represent the author coming down from Jesuit hill. Let’s hear from Bautista in his introduction: “More frequently, I wrote dark, tragic stories because I thought they reflected a more serious, more authentic perspective.”

Another magazine from which the stories were culled is Filipino Home Companion, which we surmise to be the predecessor of the Woman’s Home Companion.

Also in the ’60s ‘All the Girls Named Lydia’ was published in Sunday Times Magazine, and bears a recurrent motif in the young writer’s early works. A young man tries but fails to rekindle an old flame who sadly enough has changed after a trip and studies abroad, and in the wide yard where a bienvenida party is held the heartbroken protagonist decides to stumble drunkenly home, saying goodbye to naive romance and all the girls named Lydia, why the setting almost seemed like New Manila, with the colored lights strung high above the garden and the whisky flowed like single malt memories in the gutter of disillusion.

Quite a unique piece in terms of construction is ‘Whatever happened to Nenuca Montilla?’ with its shifting points of view, part society column and part news item, a bit of correspondence and a sampling of yearbook entries. Published in the late 1970s in the Brillantes-edited Manila Review, the story gives evidence of a mature writer willing to experiment with what might be called the first person plural, in the very real sense of plurality because the ‘I’ here is actually many persons.

Also in the ’70s was ‘The Student’ that came out in Focus, and captures well life in the university belt, particularly one scholar newly arrived from the province who, reeling from a kind of culture shock in the big city, decides to steal a microscope from the school laboratory in order to see things - a strand of hair, a sampaguita bud left in the seat of a waitress in a beer garden – up close.

Let’s hear from the author again: “Writing became a frame of mind, a mode of thinking, a way of looking at myself and at the world outside and sorting things out in my head – ideas, feelings, perceptions, dreams – and then recasting and reshaping them on paper. The process became an ongoing experience which was, and remains to be, most gratifying.”

Among the authors Bautista mentions he looks up to are Franz Arcellana, whose interior monologue by narrator is at times echoed in the younger writer’s stories; and Nick Joaquin, who Bautista lightheartedly admits had more influence on his drinking than on his writing.

The curious reader might well ask, where is the young writer of these stories now? One could hazard a guess and not be wide off the mark and say he is very much around, somewhere in New Manila, though thinly disguised as a man of about 70.

Long ago we wondered about the guy and the gatherings he held at his place in one of the numbered streets perpendicular to Gilmore and Hemady, and where the elder generation of writers would come home with t-shirts that read ‘I AM a friend of A NATIONAL ARTIST’ and ‘Palayain si Ben Bautista!’

But perhaps Greg B. said it best when he praised these stories for being none other than short stories as we knew the term to be, no more no less. In their unpretentiousness lies their power. And the writer, long missing in his abode in New Manila (having disappeared into the business of earning a living), the romance not so much having to do with eros as with another time in a distant place, remains in this collection forever young, a lost-and-found link in the history of our fiction in these islands.