Ukay-Ukay: Cuentos and Diskuwentos

Ukay-Ukay

Cuentos & Diskuwentos

Short stories and essays by

Menchu Aquino Sarmiento

Ukay-Ukay: Cuentos & Diskuwentos

Short stories and essays by Menchu Aquino Sarmiento

Copyright to this digital edition © 2014 by Maria Carmen Aquino Sarmiento

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any

means without the written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher.

The stories in this collection are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and

incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely

coincidental.

Published and exclusively distributed by

ANVIL PUBLISHING, INC.

7th Floor Quad Alpha Centrum Building

125 Pioneer Street, Mandaluyong City

1550 Philippines

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www.anvilpublishing.com

Book design by Justine Espinueva (cover) and Joshene Bersales (interior)

Cover photo Samu’t Saring Mga Bayani by Maria Alicia Sarmiento

ISBN 9789712729409 (e-book)

Version 1.0.1

For my beloved parents

Chief Justice Ramon C. Aquino (ret) and Associate Justice Carolina C. Griño Aquino (ret) both of the Supreme Court

Contents

A Journeyman’s Tale

Foreword

Introduction

Cuentos

Allos, the Word Thief:

Channeling Carlos Bulosan

To Those for whom English is a Second Language

Vanitas

Four Fugues in a Minor Key

Consider the Lilies

Marita Pangan

Life by the Drop

¡Que Lastima!: Espero Que Tu Se Mejore

Diskuwentos

The Whore as a Filipino Metaphor

The Cancer Chronicles

From Baroque to Barok and Back Again

Two Models of Filipino Society:

An Essay & Activity Sheet

Photo Credits

A Journeyman’s Tale

LESSON 1

It’s a blessing to make a living at what you’re good at.

Our parents are our first teachers, primarily by example, through the lives they lead. Our father Ramon C. Aquino of Lemery, Batangas and our mother Carolina C. Griño Aquino of Leganes, Iloilo, were both Supreme Court justices although not at the same time. That kind of husband-wife pairing was a first in the history of the Philippine Judiciary. Our parents wielded power in the worldly sense, but though they got it, they didn’t flaunt it. They were simply very good at their jobs and that was reward enough. Neither had post-graduate degrees nor the vaunted connections that membership in fraternities or sororities brings. Our mother didn’t even have a law school diploma, but she placed No. 1 in the 1950 Bar Exams. Our dad was the Chief Justice who swore Ferdinand E. Marcos in as president before the first People Power Revolution. They were both of the famed UP College of Law Class of 1939 but our dad was a working student in the evening class so definitely not within Marcos’s social circle. The more privileged daytime students like Marcos and Potenciano Ilusorio respected Ramon C. Aquino’s superior intellect and remembered him. Our father had befriended a cousin of Ilusorio’s, who kindly gave his old magazines and books to our father who could not afford to buy these.

Our parents’ professional and private lives were relatively uncluttered by behind the scenes power brokering and the typical sycophantic puffery that feeds upon the strategically dropped name and the frenetic photo op. After their first New Year’s Eve ball in Malacañan, Mommy and Daddy realized they would not be missed among the glittering hordes of Third World wannabes and arrivistes. They went back to spending New Year’s Eve dining and dancing with their tried and trusted friends. They just made sure they’d be back home in time to watch us youngsters set off fireworks and exchange the year’s first kisses.

LESSON 2

Your children are not you but try to love them just the same.

Because our parents were such outstanding lawyers, people assume that we must be lawyers too, as though that were a matter of heredity, and not of inclination and ability. Our Daddy always warned us, Don’t go to law school. Those failed practitioners who have to teach for a living will take it out on you that your parents were both successful. So not one of their progeny became a lawyer. Not that either parent was ecstatic when I got a BFA majoring in Painting at the UP. Mommy was especially perturbed that I could not be considered a professional since there was no Board Exam for art. My best friend made me mock business cards that said Artistic License.

Don’t you dare accept money for what you make, Daddy further warned, certain it would violate my integrity, and perpetrate a con if I accepted lucre for any of the mystifying Abstract Expressionist or Conceptual conundrums that I produced upon their ping-pong table. However, I could count on him to trudge through Claro M. Recto, searching for acid free Canson paper and other difficult to find art supplies that my course required.

Being blessed or cursed with an artistic temperament, I made certain life-changing decisions that my parents saw me live to regret. They didn’t say We told you so, but I could always be sure that with them, there I was at home.

Menchu Aquino Sarmiento

Foreword

WHENEVER I see a new story by Maria Carmen Menchu Aquino Sarmiento in the magazines, I always read it knowing that I will not be disappointed. She writes with such elegance, precision and wit—it is a pity that she has not yet channeled this felicitous talent into a project more demanding than short fiction—a novel. But I know I will not be disappointed because she is working on one right now. In the meantime, this precious collection of short fiction. In this work, she displays that brilliant reach which makes her such a pleasure to read. The first story is a take-off on that famous Ilokano from Binalonan, Pangasinan, Carlos or Allos Bulosan. It is a delicious morsel, with just about enough spicy humor and élan to make the reader want to read the real Bulosan.

Personally, I think Menchu has written a much better read than any of those stories in that Bulosan collection. The Laughter of my Father. It is, after all, his America is in the Heart which redeems him. Menchu has mastered the portrayal of character; she illustrates this enviable talent in the longer story, Marita Pangan. I am not going to reveal the plot in this blurb—I will leave that unalloyed joy of discovery to the reader. With such deft strokes, her characters are drawn so vividly, their lives imagined so well, it would seem they leap out of the page to confront us and convince us they are, indeed, real. And then, when we think we know how they will act out their fates, they do something unusual yet plausible, thus leaving us not so much in confusion but in wonder. Such is the skill of Menchu Sarmiento, the writer; she brings to our literature a vividness and freshness fructified from profound thinking then translated into bright and most readable prose.

F. Sionil Jose

National Artist for Literature

Introduction

NEW ENGLISH writing by contemporary Filipino authors is at its liveliest in the collected stories and essays of Menchu Aquino Sarmiento whose prose corruscates and scintillates as she pins down characters of the Filipino upper class living out their paltry dreams and aspirations.

The first story in this collection, Allos the Word Thief offers the reader an early introduction to the tone and style of the author. The piece is a take-off from the first part of Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart. Sarmiento positions Bulosan as the young Allos in a cynical moment recounting incidents that went into a narration of his boyhood in Mangusmana in Pangasinan. From the book that saw publication (1946) in the U.S., Sarmiento’s Bulosan snorts at his rendition of the wedding of his elder brother where he claims that a crowd of wedding guests surrounded the hut where the newly-weds were spending their first night together. The crowd was waiting to know whether the bride was a virgin when she lay with then groom, and when it turned out she was not, they tied her to a tree and horse-whipped her before the village. Bulosan denies any such event happened. It was an invention intended to appeal to an American audience.

Sarmiento’s tone coupled with her sophisticated handling of irony gives her stories an air of cultivated indifference that masks a deep concern with human behavior. Such concern accounts for her exceptional skill in bringing to life her characters.

In Vanitas, the story opens with Ruel, a former seminarian now the hen-pecked husband of an upperclass matron, who helplessly faces a bleak morning after there had been break-in at their residence. He goes to his job at a Customs Brokerage, and the reader is introduced to Manang Celia, the most senior clerk in the office, steeped in religious fervor, also known as the Angel of Recycling because she is given to making blinds, vessels, rosaries and what-not out of old newspapers and installing the items all over the office. Before he can head for home after office, Ruel is dragged by his boss to join in entertaining a party of Chinese business guests. Sir Philip is a coarse and crude macho who has no second thoughts about reviling a maître d’hotel in front of his guests and embarrassing Ruel for being timid and deferential. Late that night, Ruel comes home to overhear his wife on the phone, setting a lunch appointment with a man at a hotel. He suspects an adulterous assignation. The following morning, Ruel stations himself at the lobby of the hotel, but neither party shows up. The sad, ridiculous story of Ruel closes with his going to the office in a cab, and listening to the driver’s tall story about a dog that died in a road accident.

More characters are laid out for the reader in Que Lastima! Espero Que Tue Se Mejore. Here we have a gathering at a beach party attended by a scattering of coño characters. Two aging homosexuals (Bart and Melo) and young tricycle drivers who are potential short-time lovers frame the story as though to highlight the decadence of the gathering. The party is for Michelle Alba who is turning sixteen and present is Don, her near-lover cousin. In the party is Valerie Lu who has been invited in spite of herself because her father is a business partner of Mr. Alba. A young-lady-of-the-world, Caritas has come with an alderly American for a date. Bart and Melo press Caritas about the sexual prowess of her date. As the evening progresses, the dates seek the privacy of their special spaces.

Given her deft hand at creating characters, Sarmiento may be expected to turn into a novelist if she is able to develop her narrative inventiveness. Consider the Lilies, a three-narrative account of three women with the same name Lily shows the promise of her novelistic imagination, giving us the separate stories of the women and their respective families.

Combined with the consummate skill with which she has depicted the richly-detailed atmosphere of the cultural setting of the cocktail party in To Those for Whom English Is a Second Language, Sarmiento assures us that when she does write her first novel, we will be treated to an absorbing narrative about the characters that people her stories.

Bienvenido Lumbera

National Artist for Literature

Cuentos

Allos, the Word Thief

Channeling Carlos Bulosan

I HAVE to confess again, or perhaps you may have already guessed: My eldest brother and his wife were never stoned and horsewhipped by an angry mob from our barrio on their wedding night. No one in Barrio Mangusmana owned a horse, much less a whip. Barrio Mangusmana, where I was born, is just another insignificant pocket of humanity and aridity in the equally obscure town of Binalonan, Pangasinan. Its poverty was all too common and made it further indistinguishable from other dusty hells. What possessed me to claim that our wedding customs were unique to this Godforsaken place? But then in art as in the circus, cruelty and absurdity are preferable to the dull and the ordinary.

For the American readers who can afford to buy books, want to see savages with thorns embedded in their foreskins and barbarous customs that just affirmed how very primitive we are after all. They longed for local color and so I obliged. I saw their secret shameful desires in those watery blue eyes that flinched every time I opened my mouth to speak, unless it was just to say Yes, Ma’am or Right away, Sir. Anything more evinced wary embarrassed surprise, even distaste.

—Heavens to Betsy—it speaks English.

—Where did you pick up that vocabulary, you uppity Flip?

—You mean the public library is open to goo-goos?

—You better watch your black tongue, boy.

—You savages better go back where you came from—after you clean the toilets and take out the trash.

At the very least, I was a curiosity: It was almost as amazing as having a talking dog, or better yet, a chimpanzee. After all, we come from a race of monkeys that have no tails. Here was a servant who had aspirations, God forbid, who might not know his place. What a bore! It was the white man’s burden all over again to put him back in it—his place, I mean.

Because like a good servant, I always aimed to please, on my brother’s wedding night, I decreed that our entire barrio would surround the humble grass hut where he and his bride would consummate their marriage. Outside the rough shelter, everyone in Barrio Mangusmana watches and waits. They are so enraptured by the joining of two of their ilk, that they forget everything else. They forego further merry-making, music and dance. They leave the last crisps of steamed rice, softened by the succulent drippings of a vinegary pork stew, untouched at the bottoms of clay pots. They give up such rarely tasted gustatory pleasures for the privilege of standing outside the newlyweds’ hut. They have not grown inured to the couplings of farm animals, or even of their own kith and kin, entangled beneath a thread-bare blanket, on the same banig. I am one of eight children myself, so I know of what I speak. Our nipa hut had only one room and our parents always slept in our midst. Privacy is such a Western concept. Is it only for the faint-of-heart, for the overly cultivated and pallid milquetoasts who cannot look upon the nakedness and naturalness of life without feeling the shame of those who have been cast out of Eden? Fig leaves don’t grow in the Philippines.

And so I have turned these rude wedding guests of Barrio Mangusmana to stone. They stand stock still and strain to catch the faintest sigh of pleasure or of pain, escaping through the flimsy sawali walls. Further, I have ordained that after the first penile thrust, the avid bridegroom must interrupt his conjugal exertions. It is his social obligation, in Barrio Mangusmana alone, to announce to the waiting busybodies outside, the condition of his wife’s hymen.

My brother does this with smoke signals, just like that other kind of Indian. Indio or Indian, we all look alike to the white man anyway—mga tonto, as my Bisayan kababayan would say. Black smoke meant he had deflowered an obscure peasant girl—hurray for him! No smoke meant that she had come without her maidenhead intact, to their marriage mat. For deceiving him, we could return her to her parents, like so much damaged goods. She was doomed thereafter to eternal dishonor and spinsterhood.

In my false memory of things that never were, the stolid neighbors of Barrio Mangusmana storm my brother’s hut. They drag his false bride out and tie her to a guava tree. The sunburned women spit in her eyes and tear off her clothes, calling her shameful names. My father, a feckless bystander, awake long past his bedtime, is knocked down and trampled upon too. My brother, with bloodied face, impassionedly