Salvadors’ estate, the long roads leading to the haciendas, lined claustrophobically with tall green cane, offer glimpses of the distant sea. When passing a crossroads I turn my head and follow, briefly, until it swings away as we move on, the long green corridor ending in two swatches of different blues.
*
Cristo arrived at the New Year’s party unexpectedly, inciting among his old friends quite a commotion, with several of them abandoning the dancing to come shake his hand. It had been several years—five, to be precise—though he was surprised that his peers had changed only incrementally. Only the styles of their mustaches, beards, and attire altered, keeping with the latest European vogue. After the fanfare of his welcome subsided, his friends returned to their circles, and Cristo stepped outside onto the porch.
The moon has already risen. Every night for forty nights he watched it waning then waxing over the deck of his ship, and now it is becoming whole again. Bigger, fuller, than it had ever been in Madrid. The air here is much cooler than it had been in Manila, as if the walls and streets of the capital retained the warmth of days, or imbibed the heat of the rumors of revolution he’d heard spoken in private places. Here, at home in Bacolod, the eveningseems to breathe more freely. Or perhaps, he considers with a smile, I am just succumbing to the nostalgia of arriving. He lights his pipe.
Only after he has stoked it and it burns well does he realize he is not alone on the porch. In the darkness of the far corner, beside a large potted plant, he sees three figures huddled, whispering emphatically. He considers returning inside before they notice him, but the shadows abruptly adjourn their furtive congress and face him. One, then two, then all three of them call out his name, joyfully. The conspirators emerge from the gloom, large smiles on their faces, and grab and shake his arms and slap him across the back, welcoming him home and wishing him a prosperous 1895. They are his old, dear friends, Aniceto Lacson, Juan Araneta, and Martin Claparols, the three laughing out loud, the way one does when embarrassed suddenly, as if hiding something ignominious.
—from
The Enlightened
(page 122), by Crispin Salvador
*
In any of the predestinations of Fate there exists complex, unexplored dramas. Each of us is born into trouble . . . even freedom resulting from material security creates a vacuum, a Fourth Hunger, that must be filled, by either opportunities taken or ennui, or any combination of distraction, faith, success, neuroses, or social/familial dysfunction. Pity not the elite, but do not condemn them all. It is not in the interest of any progressive-minded citizen . . . Vilification, by its definition, creates an antagonistic struggle, an us-versus-them mentality, that throws us all into a senseless battle-royale. The slaves of today will become the tyrants of tomorrow—the proletariat overthrows the hegemon to become the hegemon itself, only to be eventually overthrown by a proto-hegemon that will in turn lose its position. It is this dizzying cycle that keeps humanity chasing the tail it lost millennia ago . . . The Alienation of the Elite is the unpolitical effect of the political. It concerns the pluto cracy’s own legitimate, and sympathetically human, frustration with this downward-spiraling human condition, and not just the malaise of having.
—from the 1976 essay
“
Socrates Dissatisfied,” by Crispin Salvador
*
The estate, dubbed Swanee by Salvador’s grandparents, Cristo Patricio Salvador and Maria Clara Lupas, lies seven and a half milesfrom Bacolod, the major city on the island split by the provinces of Negros Occidental on the northwest and Negros Oriental on the southeast. The plantation fits snugly between Talisay and Silay and sits at the very beginning of the very first foothill that precedes Mount Mandalagan. For three generations, due to the intermittent reliability of the
*
Cristo arrived at the New Year’s party unexpectedly, inciting among his old friends quite a commotion, with several of them abandoning the dancing to come shake his hand. It had been several years—five, to be precise—though he was surprised that his peers had changed only incrementally. Only the styles of their mustaches, beards, and attire altered, keeping with the latest European vogue. After the fanfare of his welcome subsided, his friends returned to their circles, and Cristo stepped outside onto the porch.
The moon has already risen. Every night for forty nights he watched it waning then waxing over the deck of his ship, and now it is becoming whole again. Bigger, fuller, than it had ever been in Madrid. The air here is much cooler than it had been in Manila, as if the walls and streets of the capital retained the warmth of days, or imbibed the heat of the rumors of revolution he’d heard spoken in private places. Here, at home in Bacolod, the eveningseems to breathe more freely. Or perhaps, he considers with a smile, I am just succumbing to the nostalgia of arriving. He lights his pipe.
Only after he has stoked it and it burns well does he realize he is not alone on the porch. In the darkness of the far corner, beside a large potted plant, he sees three figures huddled, whispering emphatically. He considers returning inside before they notice him, but the shadows abruptly adjourn their furtive congress and face him. One, then two, then all three of them call out his name, joyfully. The conspirators emerge from the gloom, large smiles on their faces, and grab and shake his arms and slap him across the back, welcoming him home and wishing him a prosperous 1895. They are his old, dear friends, Aniceto Lacson, Juan Araneta, and Martin Claparols, the three laughing out loud, the way one does when embarrassed suddenly, as if hiding something ignominious.
—from
The Enlightened
(page 122), by Crispin Salvador
*
In any of the predestinations of Fate there exists complex, unexplored dramas. Each of us is born into trouble . . . even freedom resulting from material security creates a vacuum, a Fourth Hunger, that must be filled, by either opportunities taken or ennui, or any combination of distraction, faith, success, neuroses, or social/familial dysfunction. Pity not the elite, but do not condemn them all. It is not in the interest of any progressive-minded citizen . . . Vilification, by its definition, creates an antagonistic struggle, an us-versus-them mentality, that throws us all into a senseless battle-royale. The slaves of today will become the tyrants of tomorrow—the proletariat overthrows the hegemon to become the hegemon itself, only to be eventually overthrown by a proto-hegemon that will in turn lose its position. It is this dizzying cycle that keeps humanity chasing the tail it lost millennia ago . . . The Alienation of the Elite is the unpolitical effect of the political. It concerns the pluto cracy’s own legitimate, and sympathetically human, frustration with this downward-spiraling human condition, and not just the malaise of having.
—from the 1976 essay
“
Socrates Dissatisfied,” by Crispin Salvador
*
The estate, dubbed Swanee by Salvador’s grandparents, Cristo Patricio Salvador and Maria Clara Lupas, lies seven and a half milesfrom Bacolod, the major city on the island split by the provinces of Negros Occidental on the northwest and Negros Oriental on the southeast. The plantation fits snugly between Talisay and Silay and sits at the very beginning of the very first foothill that precedes Mount Mandalagan. For three generations, due to the intermittent reliability of the
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