Rekindling an old flame

MAYBE I had a case of literature overload. For more than half a century I read and breathed literature. The first 10 years as a student were the best when I curled up with the immortal English novels: “Jane Eyre,” “Vanity Fair,” “Wuthering Heights,” “Pride and Prejudice,” the whole lot of Charles Dickens. I could’ve been English in a previous life, glued to anything on the screen with the English countryside and sorely missing “Midsomer Murders.”

Then throughout a seamless teaching career of 40 years, I “traveled” with literature cross-country and cross-“isms”: the Philippines, Africa, spots in Asia, Italy, Greece, France, Germany, Scandinavia, to the sensitive, violent mystique of Russia, etc; through classicism, romanticism, realism, expressionism, impressionism, and literary fads like the absurd, existentialists, Freudians, etc.

I guess there’s a difference between reading to enjoy and reading to teach. I could have had literary “indigestion.”

This last decade, I “gave up” fiction and shifted to a new “love”: theology. My curiosity was heightened by a trip to Israel and an excellent course, “Biblical Geography and Anthropology.” A cradle Catholic, I became intrigued by Church History, Moral Theology, Ecclesiology. What eye-openers I got as I read “the real stuff” and not our spoon-fed “school stuff.” The scales dropped and before I knew it, I was walking out of the comfortable, insulated religious box I had lived in. Four out of every five of my columns dealt with adult faith and the Institutional Church.

I mentioned my new love to friend Odette. Candid, irrepressible Odette blurted, “But that’s fiction too!” Instinctively my antennae rose to defend the Church, but there is theology and theology and aren’t there times when great fiction speaks truer than theology?

Last July 6, I attended the launch of “Nick,” A Portrait of the Artist Nick Joaquin. Its co-author was Gloria Castro Kismadi, a pre-war classmate at Maryknoll. The other came out to be Tony Joaquin, classmate of my elder brother at the war-torn Ateneo. The coincidence evoked a reminiscing mood that threw me back to the 1950s, when, mesmerized by Joaquin’s works, I considered him the brightest star in our literary firmament (I still do).

Such was my total admiration that I loaded my 1962 “Philippine Contemporary Literature” with Joaquin: “May Day Eve” and “The Legend of the Virgin’s Jewels,” the first scene of “Portrait of the Artist as Filipino” (which I saw first staged within the very ramparts of Intramuros), “New Yorker In Tondo” (rumored to be his) and poem, “Verde, Yo Te Quiro Verde” (anticipating our Green Revolution?). For later editions, I had to pare down my Joaquin “bias” as young writers entered the scene.

National Artist F. Sionil Jose likened Joaquin to Faulkner. But I found Faulkner’s kilometric, sense-defying sentences so unwieldy, I abandoned them in mid-sentence. But the crescendo of Joaquin’s lush “two pages without a period” noted by Krip Yuson, kept me in suspense up to the climax. No one can hold a reader’s breath as long as Joaquin does.

It may have been a PEN meeting. I timidly approached the venerable Nick and told him that I had included his writings in my anthology. “Thank you,” he said, “for making me famous.”

Hah! Me making him famous? The man was a flatterer. When Marra Lanot said that he called everybody “Dahhhling,” then I realized that I was just another nondescript of whom he asked under his breath, “Who the hell is that woman?”

Thank you to Gloria and Tony for a “Portrait” that only one who loves Joaquin as Gloria does and one favored as a nephew as Tony was can write with warmth and intimacy.

Who but such as they can describe Nick before the ruins of Intramurous: “He knew where each building had stood. As he gazed around him and took in the destruction … a deep loud groan escaped from him and his body began to shake all over as sobs rose from the very pit of his stomach.” This was “his Intramurous… The churches, the old buildings and gracious homes built hundreds of years ago … all that was familiar, all that he cherished, all that he held dear … his Manila completely devastated … as was his heart.”

Or back in Manila after St. Albert’s Monastery in Hong Kong, Joaquin could see himself on the ramparts of Intramuros. “His heart ached to have to make a choice knowing his soul was still too tied to his origins and for as long as he felt it was his mission to write about the past, Onching was convinced his true vocation was to do just that.”

And we know he did just that, in ringing, melancholic tones: “Listen to me! By your dust, and by the dust of all the generations, I promise to continue, I promise to preserve!… and this dear city of our affections shall rise again—if only in my song! To remember and to sing: that is my vocation….”

“So, who’s your old flame?” my husband asked.

Now you know. The romance with literature may be coming back.

Asuncion David Maramba is a retired professor, book editor and occasional journalist. Comments to marda_ph@yahoo.com, fax 8284454