Manila Envelope 4: The 699-Peso Patis

I was excited to unbox this rather phony package.

Back in April, one of the writers had a row with Rogue magazine. Whether it was sheer incompetence on the part of publishers, ignorance or plain arrogance on the part of the writer, the online discord aroused my curiosity. The same way our local actors and actresses conjure their controversies: cooked-up love teams or love triangles so they can promote their movies.

It was a couple of months before it landed on the bookstore shelves. When I asked if the staff if they had this title, “Manila Envelope 4…” they kept pointing me to the supplies section. I didn’t know what the cover looked like and nothing on it said it was the Manila Envelope. I suppose I got lucky and stumbled upon it at a Fully Booked.

The damage was 699 bucks. I also bought the last volume and its pictures were pretty, but the binding was poor. The pages got disintegrated. That must be a metaphor.

One can’t help but frown upon the flamboyance of calling it the “best” contemporary Filipino novelists.  “Contemporary Stories by Filipino Novelists” would have been fine, no matter what the “important precautions” say in the introduction. Some of the stories here would pale in comparison to something like Nick Joaquin’s Summer Solstice or Bienvenido Santos’ The Day the Dancers Came. But I bought it anyway, because I like reading supposedly well-crafted stories that with a proximity not only to where I am, but also to my heart.

Remembrance, Dean Francis Alfar. I immediately forgot about the monkey business of phony covers. Reading the first story is like the love I felt when I first swiped an iPhone. These words develop into their own dimensions, and for us here, it is a vehicle to peek at a collective soul. The Philippine president, cute as as a “Despicable Me” minion, recently delivered the fourth State of the Nation. He said, “Ang sarap maging Pilipino ngayon.” But he had all the wrong reasons to substantiate that feeling. It would have been true if he asked everyone to read this story.  And this story is a wake-up call.

Reading next two stories didn’t make me proud to be a Filipino.

The Sky Over Dimas, Vicente Garcia Groyon. A kid from Bacolod masturbates through the EDSA revolution. As it touches upon the theme of apathy, I stir up some more faith in this book.

It was a sleepy ride through the next few stories until I’m snapped back to consciousness, to my annoyance, with how Lakambini Sitoy’s narrator coded her vagina as “my sex.” I was even more vexed with how the characters where christened after airports: Narita, Naia. I loved the stories in Men’s Rea but the new ones sound like the author started running out of material and losing her passions.

“The Terrorists Have Already Won,” Miguel Syjuco. Miguel Syjuco picks up where he left off from his Illustrado. He’s back in New York and he's:

1. Criticizing and stereotyping his fellow writers.
2. Walking fast and snorting coke with his fellow Ateneo Alumnae.
3. Being the writer with a very respectable way with words, an arrogant tone and a seeming lack of advocacy.

I honestly didn’t even bother to finish Katrina Tuvera’s story and I’m glad I wasted no time to get to Bino Realuyo’s With Love, Sandra, Queen of Fish Sauce. It’s one of the stories that make you genuinely proud to be Filipino. It’s about patis as a symbolism for a mother , a daughter, National Identity, as it seasons with the multi-cultural quality of New York. It’s told in the genuine tone of stories you would have read from somewhere like The New Yorker. The first paragraph goes:

“Goya seasoning never works for me. It gets the Puerto Ricans to salsa, but it gives me weak knees a woman my age can’t afford to have. We Filipinos need our own brands. Our bones grow from the nutrients our tongues bring, taste that only fish sauce can kick.”  

Bino Realuyo’s story is worth the price of the cover.

Clear, Jessica Zafra. She still writes like she did in Manananggal Terrorizes Manila: with a funny whininess, like she never grew up. And that is cool, unlike when she becomes a walking advertisement for National Book Store.

On A Visit From The Goon Squad

Unscrupulous Politeness 

He paused at the words, “unscrupulous politeness.” The knife slices his eggs Benedict and it was heavy. His flimsy hands drop the knife and the clacking disturbs the quiet of the empty store. A waiter approaches with a new one wrapped in a napkin. He brings portions of egg, bacon, muffin and hollandiase to his mouth as the chorus of a song from Passion Pit sets in. He washes the food down with strong coffee. He thinks about 2005, writing in a Moleskine notebook in a CBTL in KL. 2009 reading Eric Gamalinda in Ortigas, playing songs in an iPod photo while waiting for lunch with his future wife. He remembers writing about those memories, the same way he is doing now.

 A nice, unfamiliar songs pipes in. He launches the soundhound app, and it registers a song by Sia. Looking out the wide, clear glass window he sees a bright day, sunshine warming up the bay. How many times he’s run along this bay, he wonders. He wonders how we can ever run the weekday mornings again, when the office keeps him. So much beauty brims over this view you’d find no reason to despair. He had the ability to see some clarity through whatever it was that was murky, and his realizations were clear as day. A wave of relief settles in, and he enjoyed the possibility of sustained mirth reading this book (and the resulting remembrance) will bring forth.

Hashtags 

 #StarkSimiliraties #Magnolia #DouglasCoupland #NickHornby #Singles(CameronCrowe) #LoveActually #Sideways #EmpireRecords #JaneAusten

In no particular order or emphasis.

Setting 

 It took you to New York, San Francisco, Naples, a safari in Africa, a country led by a dictator. So you took the first chapter in a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, the slide journal while having mint tea and honey at another coffeeshop near the office, at the dinner table one afternoon at home while having Lipton tea, the bathtub in Bellevue Alabang so the pages got wet, and finally the ending while slurping a pot of Taragon Tea in Tagaytay.

It was a happy day, finishing the book while celebrating the little one's 3rd.

The Proximity of the Greats 

You don't remember it, but you knew you read it from a story. No, it wasn't in Butch Dalisay's Penmanship. You thought it was, and you ended up reading the whole story again for the nth time but the line wasn't there. But it's in your mind. A librarian didn't become a writer because he read the greats and whenever he tried to write, "the proxmity of the greats humbled him." You feel the same way. You're not a writer because you're not good enough. And you don't need to review heavyweights such as this book. You leave that to the Guardian or the New Yorker.

Even your favorite quotes are somewhere in the internet.

But you try, at least to remember. That way you're not beaten by such a stealthy, sneaky goon.

Greetings From Your Kerouac-Quoting Father

"Nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old." -On the Road, Jack Kerouac. But right now, right now Anak, you seem really happy." 

Happy Birthday. Infinite love from Mum and Dad. 

Cuffs

I’ll be wearing cuff links tonight. The bosses from Denver flew in and I’m booked for an hour-long presentation. That calls for the smartest-looking long-sleeved shirt with the crispiest collar. I'll be

slipping on the 5-grand pair of hand-made leather shoes that I've maintained for four years. We saw seven episodes of Madmen’s Season 5 earlier this week and it always convinces you to at least try to dress better. If clothes didn't make a man, clothes certainly made that show.

Its ten thirty and D. is still in a conference call in her Ortigas office – one of the few times her actual presence was required since she turned work-at-home. I’m prettied up and ready to go. My mother will stay with I. until D. arrives in about an hour.

I have to go. I. says bye-bye and I love you and I don’t need any luck. I've already won. That’s all I need tonight. 

The bosses were onsite by midnight. Their plane landed just a few hours earlier. Only a shower at the hotel came between the office and the airport. I’m first to present to K., an E.D., and he is always in a polite, excited disposition but his questions always slice through any sweet or smooth talking so I always keep it honest while trying to be cunning. C., an SVP, walks in to the room to greet us, tells us about her connecting flights. She embraces K., then R., then walks towards me. There I was, awkwardly half-embracing an SVP who several other Directors advised me to stay below her radar. I’m not sure why they say that, as she’s been warm, analytical reasonable to me and I'm not even trying to suck up. Either I'm wrong or I’m lucky I don’t report to her directly. She takes her leave and I proceed with my deck. After a minute or two, C. slips back to the room and tells K. that she qualified for Boston. Now this is about me. And I’m a bottom-of-the-barrel manager who almost made a sub-2 21k.

I go through the rest of my slides, show how we climbed the numbers. It’s steady with good strides here and there. I didn't feel like I had to jump through a lot of difficult hurdles like I was expecting. I suppose it went well.

The most trying part came at the end of the day. Like a heartbreak hill feeling that's about to decimate the knees,  I end up asking, who am I? Like when I read Socrates for the first time, I went through a guilty realization. Only this time I didn't imagine myself as a budding philosopher. And this is why: it dawned on me that I've made a career chasing numbers over dreams.Not even money. Just numbers that justified me to keep my job. 

I drive home. I read a chapter of a good book. One chapter is a story in itself: generation after generation of dreams lost and won, triumph and desperation coinciding in an intelligible complexity as it is written in a lucid work of art. I figured that’s how it happens. Only when I come home can I tell how my own dreams are fascinating. How they are within easy reach and how they reveal who I am.

I take off my cuff links. To be truthful, they barely cost me anything. But if it locks in the dreams and the taste that simply can’t be purchased, they sure won’t look cheap.

Counting to Four

There is no other way to tell it, other than to tell it as is. No embellishments. Nothing fancy. Our first four years of marriage was a honeymoon. We loved each other purely.

It was still drizzling in the morning, as with the night before. When a drizzle turns into rain, he always remembers a Kerima Polotan story, “The Sounds of Sunday.” There’s a line that goes, (and I’m paraphrasing) rain falling on tin roofs like a thousand I-love-yous. Our music played on the empty, pothole-free Skyway to Tagaytay. We were married there four years ago. Running on 100 km/h on our inexpensive car, remembrances flash before our eyes but slowly. It’s as if we are in a space ship, feeling more fortunate than the millionaires in chartered planes. An iPhone connected to the radio played Sigur Ros.

Brosandi
Hendumst í hringi
Höldumst í hendur 

(smiling
spinning in circles
holding hands)

We chose Hoppipolla for our wedding video song.

At the back of the car, the little one sleeps soundly. He wakes up to the sight of Taal Volcano. Around here, the rain has cleared and he sees the volcano in full view.  “A volcano, like in Little Einsteins,” he says. He forms his memories, and discovers himself both through an inherent, curious fascination of the world around him and by imitation. He says things like he really means it: “You’re very pretty, mommy.” “Thanks for cooking, mommy.” Children his age may not always be intelligible, but they are spotlessly sincere.

We stop at a place called Cliff House by the highway. For a Friday, it was desirably empty save for a small Korean tour group, some Europeans with their girlfriends, then another family or two. The little one runs around but he sits with us to have margheritta pizza and salmon asparagus risotto.

We hang out a little bit more before we head to our hotel. We read a little, sit down to rocking chairs, run around some more and have fruits in ice cream for dessert in this perfect, crisp weather.

“You have the lake-view suite,” the concierge announces to us, handing out the key card, breakfast and drink stubs. We notice high school kids in suits and prom dresses at barely four in the afternoon. We learned later on that it was La Salle Canlubang’s junior senior prom night.

The suite was spacious. The little one jumps up and down the king-size bed. They go for a long bubble bath while I go out for beer, cigarettes, chicken pies, beef turnovers, and multi-grain pringles. It's raining cats and dogs outside, which will make it even more cozy inside. Back in Manila, we heard that Edsa on this rainy Friday a night was a huge parking lot.

By the time I'm back they are ready for the playroom. I go for a 10k on a treadmill. Walking around the hotel, we saw the halls and the prom is in full swing, crowning their kings and queens. The fellow who operated the machine let us wear the silly hats and we took souvenir pictures in the prom photo booth.

We order some more room service for dinner, eat the pies while watching baby TV on a 42" LED. We were also instagramming just a few photos from this perfect life. Nowadays, you have to make sure that the pictures were few enough to preserve the spontaneity.

By the time the little one sleeps, D. and I drink our Super Dry lagers on the terrace. The rain has passed, the skies cleared, the lights of stars and the houses below dance in the distance. That's one of the reasons why people come up here: to feel this cold, to be clouded int his fog. We had to wear jackets. I let cigarette smoke drag through my lungs.

Up on the terrace, we saw some of the prom folks far out in the lawn. We suspected and laughed at our assumptions, this is the night they finally became "them" as we saw a couple wrapped in an embrace while staring at the dark horizon. More I love-yous tonight, I'm sure. But it was really cold and I wanted to call out to the guy and tell him to give his girl that coat he's wearing. She'll be a pneumonia victim in that prom dress.

We drink some more. I smoke and we sleep in those thick white sheets. It feels like a thousand threads. The hugs are warm and tight as they could be. We have a perfect life tonight, and you can never instagram this, no.

We wake up and open the curtains to a sunny day with this view.

I read the last few chapters of a Kazuo Ishiguro in the terrace. Golden weather. The sun lands on the perforated, creamy pages of the hard-bound.

This hotel is among the first ones in Tagaytay, and some of the spots look old but it's big enough to take walks with excellent views. Especially after a heavy, buffet breakfast with tapa that's cooked with barako coffee, paninis, fruits and pretty much everything you can think of for breakfast.

Mommy and the little one dip a little in the pool. By the poolside, there's a young couple. The girl is crying, and we suppose it's probably due to an incident in the prom last night. If were that guy, I'd probably quote something from Kerouac's On the Road, "This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion." Mommy remembers the crying she did in her teens, and I'm just glad she won't have to cry like that again.

We'll check out and drive around some more, eat again somewhere.

On the Pursuit of Ideals, Light, Madness, & Humility

(Subtitle: This is how we felt when we gave in and bought you an iPad mini.)

Fathers often wish to have children who follow their footsteps.We want our little ones to eventually fancy movies like Dead Poet’s Society, The Color Trilogy, or the History Boys. We want them to read Nietzsche, Camus, understand some Derrida and Foucault. We want them to listen to Pearl Jam, Phoenix, John Coltrane, and Chopin.

The children grow, and they discover the things we haven’t. Their futures beam even more brilliantly. Our children will not just be improved versions of ourselves. Yes, they will fall and falter, and all over again. But we are right behind, their very own Catcher in the Rye.

They will stand on their own. They will be fresh and crisp. They will be more elegant in their pursuit of their ideals, light, madness, humility. In their attainment of wisdom and resulting peace, they will make their own way, deciphering that fire, (paraphrasing Neruda).

In the meantime, my little one, mommy and I present the world to you. Let's build your core. I would never tell you though that we are now just growing up -- together. There are so many things I have just seen and learned.

Your Top-Shelf Books

The Sunset after our Sunday Ocenarium Scuba Dive

Groupers

You finally found Nemo