headshot of a dark and handsome man in a blue security guard’s uniform. Something in his bearing is exceedingly dignified. Something in his epaulettes and shotgun slung over his shoulder. In his badge polished to a proud shine. In his unruly brush of black hair uncowed by the caps security guards are forced to wear. He looks authoritative. His eyes stare out as if he’s been expecting all his life a chance at something larger than what he has.
“Oh my Lord,” says Gucci girl. “Yum.”
“And what a noble name! Wigberto Lakandula!”
*
Our curious protagonist—eyes closed as the plane takes flight for Bacolod, the thrum of the engines a gruff sedative—bows his head to the persistence of jet lag. In his dream he is typing a passage. Or maybe someone else is typing it. He can’t be sure. It’s only hands that he sees. The letters collect. “You must make a choice. It will be difficult. You have to take sides. You cannot sit on the sidelines. If you do, you are a deserter. No man is an island, isthmus, atoll, continent, or hemisphere. Everything to the west is yours, everything to the east is theirs. Whatever they may say, your story is truly your own. You have a responsibility to it, the way a father has to a child. Damn your detractors, your hurt-faced family. They can’t take it away from you, just because they feature in it. They lay no rightful claim. They’ve already laid claim to their lives. Too late! It’s been done. What’s yours is yours, theirs is theirs. Nothing to be done, Pozzo. You can’t wait for them to die, because the dead must be respected. Truly, what epiphany will force you to a decision? Riches and fame? Fireworks? A great flood? A riot? A river aflame? Yet another death? A choice must be made. Independence or duty. Love or freedom. Poor little rich boy. A father must take credit for his child, but never a child for his father.”
*
Cristo was not alone. His father the Capitan, a devout Catholic, had sired a child outside the marriage in the early 1860s. Though no documentation exists, family mythology shamefully insists that the story is fact. The Capitan’s illegitimate son—Cristo’s half brother—became a Recollect friar, Fray Augustino Salvador, who, it was said, in turn impregnated, in the confessional, the fourteen-year-old Sita Reyes, daughter of Bacolod’s roaming knife sharpener, Joselito, famous for his baritone voice that sang out beautifully as he lugged his whetstone wheel from street to street. Sita was disowned and gave birth in a hospice. When the nuns took the baby from her arms to raise him, out of sin, in Iloilo’s Orphanage of San Lazaro, Sita’s faculties twisted irreversibly. She was damned to wandering the streets of Bacolod, searching for her child and threatening to take any un-watched baby as her own, as if a character from the books of Rizal.Under the tutelage of the nuns, Sita’s son grew to become Respeto Reyes, the powerful Ilonggo politician who would challenge the Capitan’s own grandchild, Junior, at every turn of his career. The legend is generously helped along by Reyes himself, who successfully manufactured a cult of personality as a true Visayan patriot: an orphan, of the people, against the Spanish-descended hegemony, beyond the reach of Americans. Among the Salvadors, however, the story was always avoided and, when mentioned, met with wry and condescending smiles. Junior, however, was more vehement: whenever faced with the gossip, he liked to declare, “The Salvador family would never breed a bastard.”
—from the biography in progress,
Crispin Salvador:
Eight Lives Lived
, by Miguel Syjuco
*
Overheard in the airplane:
“. . . and of course, due to that, they’re in real trouble,” one man says behind me. “You can cover up your environmental sins locally. But as soon as the world media gets involved, the government gets egg on its face.”
“Tell it to the marines!” says the other man. “Nothing will come of it,
“Oh my Lord,” says Gucci girl. “Yum.”
“And what a noble name! Wigberto Lakandula!”
*
Our curious protagonist—eyes closed as the plane takes flight for Bacolod, the thrum of the engines a gruff sedative—bows his head to the persistence of jet lag. In his dream he is typing a passage. Or maybe someone else is typing it. He can’t be sure. It’s only hands that he sees. The letters collect. “You must make a choice. It will be difficult. You have to take sides. You cannot sit on the sidelines. If you do, you are a deserter. No man is an island, isthmus, atoll, continent, or hemisphere. Everything to the west is yours, everything to the east is theirs. Whatever they may say, your story is truly your own. You have a responsibility to it, the way a father has to a child. Damn your detractors, your hurt-faced family. They can’t take it away from you, just because they feature in it. They lay no rightful claim. They’ve already laid claim to their lives. Too late! It’s been done. What’s yours is yours, theirs is theirs. Nothing to be done, Pozzo. You can’t wait for them to die, because the dead must be respected. Truly, what epiphany will force you to a decision? Riches and fame? Fireworks? A great flood? A riot? A river aflame? Yet another death? A choice must be made. Independence or duty. Love or freedom. Poor little rich boy. A father must take credit for his child, but never a child for his father.”
*
Cristo was not alone. His father the Capitan, a devout Catholic, had sired a child outside the marriage in the early 1860s. Though no documentation exists, family mythology shamefully insists that the story is fact. The Capitan’s illegitimate son—Cristo’s half brother—became a Recollect friar, Fray Augustino Salvador, who, it was said, in turn impregnated, in the confessional, the fourteen-year-old Sita Reyes, daughter of Bacolod’s roaming knife sharpener, Joselito, famous for his baritone voice that sang out beautifully as he lugged his whetstone wheel from street to street. Sita was disowned and gave birth in a hospice. When the nuns took the baby from her arms to raise him, out of sin, in Iloilo’s Orphanage of San Lazaro, Sita’s faculties twisted irreversibly. She was damned to wandering the streets of Bacolod, searching for her child and threatening to take any un-watched baby as her own, as if a character from the books of Rizal.Under the tutelage of the nuns, Sita’s son grew to become Respeto Reyes, the powerful Ilonggo politician who would challenge the Capitan’s own grandchild, Junior, at every turn of his career. The legend is generously helped along by Reyes himself, who successfully manufactured a cult of personality as a true Visayan patriot: an orphan, of the people, against the Spanish-descended hegemony, beyond the reach of Americans. Among the Salvadors, however, the story was always avoided and, when mentioned, met with wry and condescending smiles. Junior, however, was more vehement: whenever faced with the gossip, he liked to declare, “The Salvador family would never breed a bastard.”
—from the biography in progress,
Crispin Salvador:
Eight Lives Lived
, by Miguel Syjuco
*
Overheard in the airplane:
“. . . and of course, due to that, they’re in real trouble,” one man says behind me. “You can cover up your environmental sins locally. But as soon as the world media gets involved, the government gets egg on its face.”
“Tell it to the marines!” says the other man. “Nothing will come of it,
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