Miguel Syjuco - Ilustrado: A Novel

ILUSTRADO

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MIGUEL SYJUCO

FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX NEW YORK

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright 2010 by Miguel Syjuco
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2010

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Syjuco, Miguel, 1976

Ilustrado / Miguel Syjuco.1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-374-17478-1 (alk. paper)

1. Authors, FilipinoFiction. 2. MurderInvestigationFiction. 3. Experimental fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

PR9550.9.S96I55 2010

823'.92dc22

2009043083

Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott

www.fsgbooks.com

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For my siblings: J, C, M, C, and J.
And of course, for Edith

In response to the warnings received while researching this book, the author hereby states that all perceived similarities between characters and people living or dead are either purely coincidental or a skewered nerve in your guilty conscience.

from the extant title page of The Bridges Ablaze, by Crispin Salvador

ILUSTRADO

The Panther lurks no longer in foreign shadowshes come home to rest. Crispin Salvadors fitting epitaph, by his request, is merely his name.

from an unattributed obituary, The Philippine Sun,
February 12, 2002

When the authors life of literature and exile reached its unscheduled terminus that anonymous February morning, he was close to completing the controversial book wed all been waiting for.

His body, floating in the Hudson, had been hooked by a Chinese fisherman. His arms, battered, open to a virginal dawn: Christlike, one blog back home reported, sarcastically. Ratty-banded briefs and Ermenegildo Zegna trousers were pulled around his ankles. Both shoes lost. A crown of blood embellished the high forehead smashed by crowbar or dock pile or chunk of frozen river.

That afternoon, as if in a dream, I stood in the brittle cold, outside the yellow police tape surrounding the entrance of my dead mentors West Village apartment. The rumors were already milling: the NYPD had found the home in disarray; plainclothes detectives filled many evidence bags with strange items; neighbors reported having heard shouts into the night; the old lady next door said her cat had refused to come out from under the bed. The cat, she emphasized, was a black one.

Investigators quickly declared there was no evidence of foul play. You may recall seeing the case in the news, though the coverage was After that, nothing.

At home in the Philippines, however, Salvadors sudden silencing was immediately autopsied by both sides of the political divide. Both The Philippine Gazette and the Sun traded blows with Salvadors own Manila Times, debating the authors literary, and indeed social, significance to our weary country. The Times, of course, declared their dead columnist the waylaid hope of a cultures literary renaissance. The Gazette argued that Salvador was not an authentic Filipino writer, because he wrote mostly in English and was not browned by the same sun as the masses. The Sun said Salvador was too middling to merit murder. Suicide, each of the three papers concluded, was a fitting resolution.

When news emerged of the missing manuscript, every side discarded any remaining equipoise. The legend of the unfinished book had persisted for over two decades, and its loss reverberated more than its authors death. Online, the blogosphere grew gleeful with conjecture as to its whereabouts. The literati, the career journalists foremost among them, abandoned all objectivity. Many doubted the manuscripts existence in the first place. The few who believed it was real dismissed it as both a social and personal poison. Almost everyone agreed that it was tied to Crispins fate. And so, each trivial tidbit dredged up during the death investigation took on significance. Gossip cycloned among the writing community that Salvadors pipe was found by the police, its contents still smoking. A rumor circulated that he long ago fathered and abandoned a child, and hed been maddened by a lifetime of guilt. One reputable blog, in an entry titled Anus Horribilis, claimed extra-virgin olive oil was found leaking out of the corpses rectum. Another blog surmised that Salvador was not dead at all: Dead or alive, wrote Plaridel3000, who would know the difference? None among Salvadors colleagues and acquaintanceshe had real no friendsquestioned the suicide verdict. After two weeks of conjecture, everyone was happy to forget the whole thing.

I was unconvinced. No one knew what I knew. His great comeback was scuppered; the masterpiece that would return him to the pantheon was bafflingly misplaced and the dead weight of controversy buried in his casket. The only remaining certainty was the ritual clutter inherited by those left behindfiles to be boxed, boxes to be filled, a lifes worth of stuff not intended as rubbish to be thrown out for Monday morning pickup. I just about ransacked his apartment searching for the manuscript of The Bridges Ablaze. I knew it was real. I had witnessed him typing away at it at his desk. He had spoken of it, puckishly, on many occasions. The reason for my long exile is so that I could be free to write TBA, Salvador had said, that first time, spitting out the bones of chicken feet we were eating in a subterranean Mott Street restaurant. Dont you think there are things that need to be finally said? I want to lift the veil that conceals the evil. Expose them on the steps of the temple. Truly, all those responsible. The pork-barrel trad-pols. The air-conditioned Forbes Park aristocracy. The aspirational kleptocrats who forget their origins. The bishopricks and their canting church. Even you and me. Lets all eat that cake. But what remained of the manuscript was only crumbs: the title page and a couple of loose leaves scrawled with bullet points, found sandwiched and forgotten in his disintegrating Rogets Thesaurus. Missing was twenty years of worka glacial accretion of research and writingunknotting and unraveling the generations-long ties of the Filipino elite to cronyism, illegal logging, gambling, kidnapping, corruption, along with their related component sins. All of humanitys crimes, Salvador said, spitting a bone atop the pyramidal pile in his bowl, are only degrees of theft.

I, of course, believe the conspicuous lack of clues is stranger than the disarray of the domestic scene from which he was mysteriously absented. Ockhams razor is chipped. Every bone in my body recoils at the notion Salvador killed himself. Walking through his apartment afterward, I saw his viridian Underwood typewriter loaded, cocked, and ready with a fresh blank page; the objects on his desk arranged in anticipation of writing. How could he have brought himself to the river without passing his conscience reflected in that Venetian mirror in the hall? He would have seen there was still so much to do.

To end his own life, Salvador was neither courageous nor cowardly enough. The only explanation is that the Panther of Philippine Letters was murdered in midpounce. But no bloody candelabrum has been found. Only ambiguous hints in what remains of his manuscript. Among the two pages of notes, these names: the industrialist Dingdong Changco, Jr.; the literary critic Marcel Avellaneda; the first Muslim leader of the opposition, Nuredin Bansamoro; the charismatic preacher Reverend Martin; and a certain Dulcinea.

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That you may not remember Salvadors name attests to the degree of his abysmal nadir. Yet during his two-decades-long zenith, his work came to exemplify a national literature even as it unceasingly tried to shudder off the yoke of representation. He set Philippine letters alight and carried its luminescence to the rest of the world. Lewis Jones of