Also read the author's interview with himself regarding his book of stories Vexed
Also read the backcover blurbs of the book!
Bad Blood
In The Year Of The Tiger
an excerpt from
V.I.S. de Veyra's
novel-in-progress of the same title
for Miguel & Gabo
ELEVEN years ago I was feeling imprisoned by a financial incapacity. Likewise by a nudging ambition lost in a location not cinematically logical for any action. Also by an asphyxiating neighborly culture that turned my self-serving efforts to moves at belonging -- there where I was assigned by the wardens of fate to immerse myself in, as witness and victim to a provincial culture.
The financial inability was due to my having dropped out of provincial college to pursue a hand in art. For years I communed with a local art circle of three others; three, who, unlike me, were quite content with jobs in government, the printing presses, and shop work, respectively, doing posters, invitation layouts and type designs, t-shirt prints of local events and local logos, stage styro-lettering, even canvas work for the stations of the cross scattered around my town during Holy Week. The pleasant business was that my mates took pleasure in their work, acting though merely with the available help of enamels, cheap technical pens, Japanese watercolors, local dyes. I, on the other hand, could not be pulled towards a direction that was not a wee bit part of my system. A culture, I supposed, was to be changed (no, pumped up!) for me to fit in -- in Manila, later, as a member of a scattered social-climbing provincial class, I am to learn of a prim alternative to rebellion, called niche marketing, though I wouldn't have been able to use it in our "nicheless province" had I known it then. . . . I was therefore jobless, except for a fraction of "work" offered me by the top local paper -- doing film and record reviews -- which paid almost nothing. And therefore I was what would be called in the US or London or the dictionary as quite "penniless". My snobbish oil and acrylic tubes, imported from Europe, I ordered directly from my mother, who would frequent the big city for seminars and lectures. My mother had no interest in art. But she had full interest in my future and, instantly, unblinkingly, supplied me her barrage of confidence in the form of expensive art materials, a confidence perhaps to be seen in mothers who might have parented geniuses in previous lifetimes. Brimming with news and gossip directly deriving from my incorrigible mother's supplying me the trendy magazines, I would textually spill these curiosities about foreign people-in-the-arts to abnormal rates in my film and record reviews.
Where did I get this direction, totally alien and alienated? From my dead electrician-father, only son of a cathedral music composer who read the lives of Beethoven and Bach? No. I was in Grade II when I saw my mother in conference in our sala with a man in a long-sleeved white shirt and a tie. He had with him what looked like a sack and a box at the same time. This contained what I would later refer to as my reliable secret friend and ally, along with my Hemingway books and the yearly Almanacs. When she opened the box, I recognized at once the elusive encyclopedia that my mother had to save for in a total length of five years. The first time I saw her talking with this same salesman five years before the box cum sack arrived, I remember seeing her flush at the brochure sight of that volumes-collection in white on the illustration photo simultaneous to her reading the caption below, clarifying the volumes as collectively to be called The New Book of Knowledge. She chose it over the other collections for its being suited to the taste of young minds -- late '60s grade-schoolers and early high-school students, even younger than that with regards certain articles, I heard her say -- being full of the necessary elaborate color/colorful pictures, and on thick near-glossy paper! And although I would later do designs on the margins of the Art and Painting and Cinema sections in their respective volumes, I remember taking care of the collection the way I took care of my dog. Actually, more than I would with my dog, for he would later get run over by a motorcycle -- whose lady driver was injured in the process -- when I forgot to take him back inside the yard fence after his morning poo poo on our gravel road. Admittedly, also, I wasn't much into dogs; didn't like them, for the sole conscious reason that they didn't like me -- even my own seemed to be regularly complaining of an inevitable neglect, especially during meal times. I was reading the Jazz section when Grover got hit, Grover after the Sesame Street irritant, that to this day I remember his effeminate wail everytime a Duke Ellington tune is played in clubs. You'd be correct in saying it was the encyclopedia that turned out to be this boy's best friend.
There is no market for art in our province, if I haven't implied that already. Therefore my time, when I wasn't painting or reading my magazines and books or listening to Voice of America or BBC or Cebu FM broadcasts, would be intermittently spent with "friends" at the nearest corner. Certainly a few of them -- a driver, a gambler, a hotel employee, and some others -- are not deserving of such quotation marks; quite the majority, however, were simply armed with so much ignorance, accompanied by a logic so stupid, that put questions on the reality of my person, sanity, and/or motives, making any unavoidable communion on my part with them intolerable. And generally this was what I felt about my province, getting worse and worse as time progressed and I got older, testing to its limit my equally grown tolerance of a people I've suddenly accepted to be not mine, pressured as I was already by the village, there in my early '30s, to be conventional in my intentions in the soonest possible time -- get a job and a wife, seemed to be everybody's kind word. As though I was not intent on a job for a capitalist who may have value for the alien work that I can do and do good in. As though I was not progressing in my correspondence with a remote Alona, which correspondence I deemed romance enough already to merit someone's appreciative notice. But of course I could neither find the right words, nor find access to any right references, for me to come out eloquent or at least understandable to this mob in regards my motives, my plans, my desires, my objectives, my Alona. Thus my abstract feelings of being under house arrest, amidst inmates of a Bilibid of ignorance and poverty.
But perhaps I should tell you that this hatred for "my people" was not complete as a singular emotion. It was a complex feeling. For, invariably, it had to be complemented by a parallel love that I had for their sorry humanity. Indeed I drank with many of them, joked with a lot of them, shared with them a dirty beach to which a trash can of a river led. And although I would myself be a butt of many a man's candid jokes, I knew I was above many of them, knowing about the political truism of how one simply has to rule the Philippine village to help it at all.
I was not the only one, however, in my age, in my area, carrying this snobbish belief. This sort of forward vision I shared with another circle of close friends, from the provincial capital, eleven kilometers from my hometown. Marcos, Agapito, and Lemuel were fellow armchair Marxists who subscribed to a later-defunct magazine called the National Midweek and circulated their precious copies. Although none of us, not even Marcos, had read any of Marx's articles or books except for a few possibly-misleading quotes in articles or posters, we knew what being left (or even Left) was all about. And because there wasn't much fellowship (or reason) for our holding of protest rallies-and-singing in our city, or at least joining a futile ludicrous one, we took to satisfactory discussions on those that recently happened elsewhere. Marcos was finishing his law, Lemuel was running an eatery, while Agapito had a job at a "non-governmental organization's" inuring office; we were therefore denied access to labor unions with which we weren't found to have any ample reason to be in sympathy, even while students (including rebel sons of conservative politicians) coddled the workers' strikes. That puzzled our young interest in leftist intellection. With such an effect on our persons that we had to believe ourselves outsiders, chancy lefties on erudite benches, forever ignominiously huddled over simplistic tuba and famous Pepsi chasers -- angered were we by both a sympathy for the poor in us and a deadening confusion.
* * *
THUS, may I say now how these all remind me of my father, really?
He doesn't come to mind because of a certain wordiness in his lifestyle -- Father used words sparingly, to the point of inarticulateness. And Mother, though a professor of grammar (and Secretary of the Visayas chapter of the National English Teachers Association), had no problems whatsoever with this sparseness, in fact felt nothing but pride for such a manly mark -- it was the code in their day to expect a man to not talk too much, to be poor in vocabulary even. In my day, on the other hand, language speaks of men who might gather wealth someday by way of bountiful lawyering or liaring. Making them attractive to the new generation's bunch of "material girls" (thank Madonna for that). Need I mention that it's always been somewhat expected of the expanding elements of so-called Culture (read: establishment "intelligentsia", who are not necessarily very intelligent) to be as ironic, sardonic (in gay terms "bitchy"), and lengthily pedantic as possible, at all times? But nowhere more expected than today, when men don't have to be apologetic about being in the arts, except in a few circles. It seems the new decades seem to demand this pedantry already, supposedly towards a display of newly-celebrated "sensitivities", sensitivities which are supposed to be shaped by one's tirades with the enemy -- the racist, the sexist, the fascist-leftist, the neo-Cubist, et al. And replete though this new sensitivity (cum new anger) be with apologies and self-questionings, one's passion for language is yet held highly as the reliable tool in this new manly warfare of the communication age, even while expressing (perhaps ersatz-ly) a suspiciousness towards language itself. After all, words are what make one eat today.
So. As I was saying, Father was a witness-stand kind of talker. Except with me, with whom he'd tell choppy stories about: his childhood in grandpa's farm, his adolescent youth in town and in the neighbor towns, the Second World War in the island, and life in the capital in pre-war '30s and post-war '50s. Unlike me in demeanor, however, his stories were devoid of commentary, faithful were they to their grounds in reality, almost purely visual, action-oriented, as though moral lessons from reality stimuli were quite obvious and ready by one's learned tradition and culture, leery behind the blinds, like monster village instincts jumping into the stage of whatever new description. However, my father, he was not a man of shallow gossip vis a vis the characters of his experience. Rather he was what I may now call an innocent carrier of a prototype, quasi- or pseudo-Taoism in early Philippine Catholic culture, the developed machine of which I claim to carry in me today as my metaphysical support hiding under this stream of wordy consciousness. . . . Now, lest we be carried away by another narrative-rooted judgment on the difference/similarity plain between a father and his son, allow me to wake you to the reason why I need to collect memories of my parents here today:
Mom and Dad have the loveliest togetherness a son can ask for. And although he had to die from getting electrocuted on the job when I was in third year high school, I know I have their relationship assessed right (and not influenced by some parental play-pretend on a growing son). I was already in high school, weren't I? -- a little above average were my perceptions and questions on the world, my misguided answers notwithstanding. No, my Mom and Dad (I called 'em Mom and Dad 'cause we were supposed to be a high-falutin' Americanized family, with an encyclopedia in the house and the town's tenth tv set), Mom and Dad were always joking around; and, during times of tension over a disagreement or two, they'd soon manage to talk about something else, in the process setting aside the intervening touchy subject for a future, more auspicious domestic moment. Haha. Not so between intelligent Alona and intelligent Jake.
Regarding Mother, Mom was Professor of English. Though I didn't learn fiction-writing from her; nor was this ambition in fiction even remotely inspired by her. She'd simply always believed I should grow to discover what I'd want to become, instead of grow around stuff consciously fed on my responses so to mold a future career or predisposition. Her books -- often left around the tables unintentionally -- would be within reach of a reading-prone child, however, and so her Montessori beliefs would become quite questionable. But what I mean to demonstrate here is how my Mom taught me the value of liberty. To such an extent that I would learn to hate the repressed and repressive surround of the Philippine village culture, and -- with this hatred -- lead me to points of the earth usually forbidden to respectable (then not yet necessarily meaning rich) sons of respectable town citizens. E.g., whorehouses, which me and my high-school mates would clamber a hill to get a glimpse of a window, binoculars watching the murkinesses and incomprehensible motions we risked snakebites for. Now, visits to such low-class places would be short-lived. Thanks to the inconspicuous envy of my forgettable sister, Maria Jane.
* * *
NOW, before I give you a brief note on my sister's existence, an existence most in our neighborhood found easy to judge and abhor (as "her life, thank God it wasn't mine"), I would like to insert this meditation I had -- recently completed -- regarding one's hungered-for choice of a Better Life (yep, ladies and gentlemen, a "better life than what we have now," were we all divinely allowed to choose):
For I now recurrently start to ask whether I should really feel sorry for myself. And so therefore my designing the following conclusions. That all lives are perhaps equally presented with a downside. So much so that were I, for example, to be offered a view of a certain age in my life from where -- with some changes -- I could have turned out to be without this disease (or any disease), . . . one would have to ask whether this other available life (other available lives) might be freer of any down situation. Well, perhaps -- and I'm inclined to believe -- not. For I now believe, rather, all lives to be flavored with a disease, in one form or another. And so, sure, one may indeed be able to ask, which life to pick? Whose, for example? But likewise ask whether Route A at age 18 would really lead him to a "better life", though perhaps with him turning out rich and famous in the field of lawyering. For always there would be the question, what -- pray, tell -- would be the downside there, Sir, as it were?
Now, by a downside, ladies and gentlemen, I don't only mean something that is seen in a life while an upside is outstanding. Though that too is included. I believe a downside in a life that happens early in that life, or later, should both be regarded as part of the package that completes that biography. Meaning here that had one the access to the appropriation of that life, whatever life, he would be required by the laws of the fates to take the entire package. So that, again ladies and gentlemen, in the tiring activity of scanning all the available pretty lives along with the sight of their downsides, one might end up choosing finally the one he's leading/living today. And one reason for this retraction, apart from one's fear of the newly-discovered downsides in those lives (some of which his imagination might not even begin to comprehend the real experiencing of), one reason might be one's fear also of losing the very things in his present life that he values -- valuations that may reach a level wherein he wouldn't want to give them up for an extra arm. For it might follow, as per our theory, that any so-called better life might have to ask you to give up something equally "better" in your present possession.
Now, this belief -- or supposition -- has led me to often fear the likelihood of my winning the lotto (a likelihood due to a persistent ticket patronage). For, taking after the above argument, I would certainly only feel nothing but fear for those things that I have today and value very well. In the case of my sudden turning into a millionaire, the millions might soon become things to suffer, if it's not taken away, in order to serve the downside of this new millionaire's biography. This is so because, to reiterate my theory's root belief, for every gain must be a corresponding loss, just as -- perhaps -- every lack may have its own corresponding advantage.
Now, let us quickly consider envy. For it's quite easy to envy somebody who's in a certain advantaged situation, quite easy to fall wanting his life. All this while looking at the upside of it all of course, as viewed from the outside. But a sudden thought about the things you have in your possession today, that you also very well treasure, e.g. your present sensibilities, passions, face, children, wife, or whatever, along with a sudden fear that you might have to give up one of these for the life of him whose life you presently envy, could turn envy itself into a ludicrous vice. Would a poet even begin to sacrifice every present enjoyment he has with birds and plants or the sea in order to gain a shallow, successful neighbor actor's advantage with women, women with whom he may -- with his sensibilities -- be constantly bored with anyway? I don't think so. Let's say you take the fortunes of one who marries quite rich, but -- for one thing -- might you just be bothered by the lack of even puppy dogs for real friends? Or would you be happy with those routine suntan lotion mornings? Again, my friend, a downside is a requisite to every life. Something always has to trouble you. God made sure that even Christ's story should not be exempt from this axiom, especially as this axiom might have been His very point.
Now, as a poet myself, now upper middle-class by accident, I would sometimes feel happy for a poor poet's (or, for that matter, farmer's) ability to enjoy the dewdrops on a shoe, an ability which might be beyond a successful stockbroker's sensual capacities, even as the latter invests thousands for a view on an exclusive beach. The poet would certainly envy the latter, but surely there is something to be envied in the former if only the latter were aware of it. It is all that simple. Very, very simple. Though -- I would hasten to say, anxiety being more professorial than words -- easier said than lived. . . .
Happiness, happiness, happiness. It is usually the object in the choice of lives (again, were choices available to us). Pain, it is usually the fear. The yin/yang of each life, however, dictates that we recognize the upsides within it, even as we struggle through the downsides that accompany them. For it is the curse of humanity to take the pain side in order for it to get a gain one. Like I said, it's invariably all in one goddam package. So, therefore, the moral of our story is: "Listen to your grandmas, people!" One really ought to be grateful for having the things he has today that the other hasn't, be this a sort of material wealth, talent, sense, gift, son/daughter, sex life, view on a window, or what-have-you. This, while taking the downside requisite from a religious angle -- that is to say, yet possessed with gratefulness for having a life at all. As corny, and as real, as that.
Now, having pronounced all the above meditative prosaism and ultimate lecturing, could I now perhaps to continue walking with this my life and disease with a final contentment? Thus, aware as I should already be henceforth of the accompanying ingredients of happiness that were bestowed on me by the little things that had come my way: come into my life, gone on my windowsill, stayed just outside my window, knocked on my door, gone into my house, hopped into my car, went into my possession, gone within my appreciation, and so on, and so forth? And might continue to be bestowed on me? Yes.
But, Reader, . . . be wary, I say, of what may enter your mind as anti-Marxism in this corner. For, allow me speech, it is not within my gist to say that Marxists, activists, or opposition leaders of all stripes, should forthwith strip themselves of their uniform jackets and give up whatever fight, thus since getting a better life would accrue -- still -- disadvantages! No, sir. No, sir! I still believe it is in the pattern of living a life, whatever life! to strive for and pursue a better state. Even Buddhists are guilty of this desire, for Christ's sake. It is a pattern quite inevitable, as even inertia wouldn't be free of even a bit of desire. Isn't the cancellation of desire, as in the case of Buddhist fundamentalists, engrossed by a purpose? Itself, then, a desire? In simpler words, isn't avoiding pain by way of avoiding desire itself a desire? So, no! I am not saying one must stop in one's pursuit of a life. I am only on the level, ladies and gentlemen, of encouraging courage and appreciation for things in a future life one desires; this, even as I also encourage courage and appreciation for things in a life one is yet struggling with today. Therefore. May I now beg to disagree with the notion that says anyone's preaching courage and appreciation for life within poverty preaches contentment (Brecht), and likewise with the notion that says anyone's enumeration of downsides to a rich man's life is tantamount to sour-graping (Filipino critics)! Oh, indeed I hope the above paragraphs give you enough intelligent argument to serve as grounds for this my humble disagreement.
But, anyway. Just for the sake of extending words in the name of friendship, . . . let's pursue on a possible cynicism in some towards my point of view and try to design further grounds that may allay their suspicions. Now. Allow me to just invite them to remember a most painful phase or place in their respective lives. Surely some things there were things they would want to see again? Say, one could be one's mother's support. Another, one's brother in same prison cell. The fucking nationhood? What? Yet how often do we take certain things for granted, under the clouds of martial law? Do we even write odes in our hearts for these things? No? And when we get to a better state, surely what we may be able to get as replacement may not be at par! Couldn't that spell a downside to this better life? And yet who would preach that somebody in prison should have remained there?
Is that a laughable story? Well, if so, then perhaps I can only plead that no, I'm not saying one must stop in one's pursuit of a life. Not at all! Am I, for example, stopping the progress of this novel here? No! For my narrations and recollections, along with their hopes, complaints, and satires, have to go on. They have to, as I live on also in this the Year of the Tiger. But the difference! It is that I should live hereon with a new lease, one under a new light. All this desire for continuance I'm telling myself, . . . myself through my computer screen, . . . while looking at the many pages that are yet to come. . . ..
* * *
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